Saving Important Pennies Selling On eBay

It’s true, eBay is a great website for making extra money. Even if you’re only someone who uses it on a casual basis, to shift some of the clutter out of your house, or to make a bit of spare cash on the side when you really need some, you know just how powerful this listing website can be! It’s why so many people take to flipping items on the internet on a regular basis; one man’s trash is another man’s treasure! 

But if you want to get into the eBay flipping business full time, and you’ve got some ideas on how to set up an account that has plenty to sell (and makes plenty of profit at the same time!), let’s take it step by step. Before you dive in at the deep end, it’s important to realise that eBay can be a hard place to make money if you aren’t aware of the dangers and general no-nos of the online auction world. 

Without further ado, here are just a few things to keep in mind about selling on eBay, especially if you want to save as much as you can on the costs as you do so!  

Know What Sells

You need to know what sells long before you create a business account to flip items through eBay with. You need to know what people are after, and what they will pay top dollar for, in comparison to the rest of the listings on the site. And there are millions of those, so you’ll have your work cut out for you for a while yet! 

Some of the most popular items on eBay include old tech, home decor items, cheap fitness gear, luxury looking clothing, well looked after shoes, as well as niche collectables and rare books. And these items all fall under the accessible category, so there’s a good chance you’ve got a back catalogue of sellable items in your attic already! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a clear out, just in general, and then make a bit of money off the ordeal as well? 

But once you put these items on eBay, watch for how fast they sell; you want to be buying more of the same, after all, and you need to know which ones are akin to hotcakes. Because once you find the average rate of sale, as well as the average price that nets you a tidy profit, you’ll know you’ve found your eBay selling niche. For the time being, you’re going to want to focus on that and that alone, and then move into more branching categories if those sales slow or the prices drop. 

Word Things Just Right

You’re also going to need a good command over language, because you’ve got millions of other sellers to beat out of the park! You’re going to need to know what words catch a person’s attention, and what phrases are most likely to draw a person in over someone selling the exact same thing just underneath your listing on the results page. 

You’ve got to word things right to make sure your items are caught by the algorithm as well. You want people to find what you’re selling, and that means you need to be very obvious and overstated about what you’ve got to sell. Otherwise, there’s a chance you won’t even appear on the second page of results when someone looks for the item you’ve got on display – most eBay users don’t look beyond here! 

Make Sure Your Delivery Options Are Right

A lot of people who take to selling on eBay full time have one piece of advice for you: know your delivery costs! Because if you don’t, and you budget wrong and don’t take the time to research and fix your prices, you could lose a lot of profit here. After all, delivery can be quite expensive, especially if you’re factoring in international delivery as well, so you’ll definitely need to know your way around the shipping depot. 

So, before you get started with your eBay account, look into your delivery options. First of all, who are you going to be able to ship to, based on your current limited budget? Domestic delivery and returns only, or could you ship to other countries around the world? Of course, you don’t have to ship to them all if you can’t afford to send something from America to Asia, but you could send to some places within the same continent. 

Then you need to work out what the average weight and height of your items are; if you’re going to be selling in one category and one category only, what average cost are you looking at, based on kg and cm? Will you be needing regular heavy parcel delivery options? Or could you use light packages and envelopes most of the time? Because one of these two shipping options is going to be a lot cheaper than the other! 

Are You Ready to Sell on eBay?

If you are, make sure you’ve got your niche set out in front of you, and an average price and delivery cost that you’re comfortable with. You’re also going to need to find a sustainable and reliable way to source other things you can put on your listings, to make sure you’re never running out of products to flip. You’ve got to make at least a couple hundred on the side every month to make this a worthy side hustle to go on with! 

But all in all, selling on eBay can be quite easy. It’s much easier than organizing a garage sale every weekend, and there’s far more people out there who want to take a look at what you’re offering than there lives in your neighbourhood! Take advantage of this, and get your items online and ready to be bought.

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