Desty Online presents my personal experience in selling on eBay.  These articles will go over what I did with my eBay business where I was making $1200 in sales per month.  Anyone can sell stuff on eBay.  What we’re going to talk about today is actually finding products to sell on eBay, researching that product to establish a starting sales price and to determine if that product can be sold on eBay for a profit.

Getting Started Selling on eBay

Most people think that you actually have to own a product to sell it on eBay.  That’s what is “supposed” to happen, but the big sellers don’t actually own the majority of what they sell; instead, they are using a process know as drop shipping.  Drop shipping is a process where after you sell a product online, you then place an order with a wholeseller for the product and have it directly shipped to your customer.

Yes, this is an “oh my god!” type of process that is a very good thing for you.  However there is a very big vulnerability to drop shipping.  As you expect, you need to check and make sure the product you’re selling is in stock before you post it for bid.  Once sold, you hope that the product is still in stock.  It’s always smart to have secondary suppliers in mind.  You need to have others you can buy from incase your primary supplier is out of stock on your sold product.  I have had this happen to me several times, but with careful planning, I’ve never lost money when this happens; I’ve always atleast broken even.

Now that you have the over-all strategy of your sales program down, it’s time to get to business.

eBay!

It’s time to register on eBay for free. EBay makes their money everytime you sell something.  They charge various fees, on a sliding scale depending on the amount charged, to the seller.  It is generally accepted practice to pass on these fees to the customer.  When you buy something on eBay, you are charged nothing beyond the cost of the product and shipping for said product.

To even beging to research our product, you must be a registered user of eBay.  The first tool we’ll use is the advanced search.  Since I used to sell iPods on eBay over a year ago, that’s what product we’re going to research.

The important parts on the search are, of course, keywords “iPod” and catagory “consumer electronics.”  The other part is the make sure that “Completed Listings Only” is selected.  What this does is show only listings that are completed (duh).  This way you can see, not only how many product have sold in the last few days, but also how much they sold for and how many didn’t sell and what their asking price was.

In working on this article, I came across 44975 items in the MP3 catagory on the keyword “iPod.”  Clean that up alittle bit by narrowing down to the Apple brand.  If you want to narrow further down to type of iPod such as an iPod Nano, be my guest.

Looking at the results, there’s alot you need to learn about your product.  What’s the difference between the different generations of iPods, and what is the most current iPod generation?  To find out, you’ll have to check out part 2 of this article where we go into products, drop shippers, sales prices, and customer relations.

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