Question by been there got the t-shirt: Who has experience with operating an eBay business?
My husband and I are seriously looking into starting up our own eBay business. We have been researching on the internet a lot and are getting ready to head to the bookstore to buy some eBay books for further insight.

For a little background information: My husband has made his career in the automotive field as a professional mechanic for high performance cars. He is also a driving instructor part time during the summer at the race track. He is looking to get away from actual mechanic labor… last week, his boss lost all the toes on one of his feet due to a heavy equipment accident and it really shook us both up. Since we want a family in the relatively near future, his health is a priority and we both want him away from an environment where serious life-altering accidents are common and cancer-causing chemicals are used daily. But his very high knowledge of cars and their components is something that his new career needs to be focused around. He has always wanted to own his own business, and has the ambitious but realistic attitude to do it.

We’ve used eBay a lot before. If we need extra cash, we’ll find a few unneeded car parts kicking around in our garage and list them and make a surprising profit. Likewise, he has also been able to purchase broken cars for very cheap, easily and quickly fix what’s wrong with them, and flip them for usually double what he paid for them OR part them out and make several times more off the individual parts than what he paid for it as a whole. We were thinking about doing this with more frequency and making a business out of it on eBay, and track the costs and profits. I think we would make a great team doing this because he has his expertise in the area we will focus on, and I love doing all of the organizing and administrative tasks involved with something like this.

We’ve considered costs, such as all the regular office supplies and packing materials. A basic eBay store, we learned, is only $ 15.95 per month. The best part we think about this is the overhead is very minimal – we can work from home.

Neither one of us plans to quit our day job right away or anything drastic. Our goal is to start small and work our way up, hopefully to the point where we can quit our boring 9-5′s and operate this way full time [[with the exception that he would still instruct professional driving]].

Has anyone ever been able to do something like this successfully? Sure, I’ve read the testimonials on the internet – but all those are just advertisements.

What some fore warnings that you can give us that we may be overlooking? What are some common mistakes? What are some little success secrets you discovered? And very importantly, do you operate a business with your spouse, and how did it effect your relationship?

Thank you for your input. We just want to do this right, and want to hear from someone who has done it before.

Best answer:

Answer by imisidro
Your first stop should be eBay’s Guide to Seller Services http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/services.html

eBay’s Seller Central has all the resources you need to learn about the basics of selling on eBay http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/index.html

The key to a successful eBay selling is simple — Sell products that people actually want.

If you want to earn serious money from eBay, you need to have a well-thought out business model. Selling on ebay is getting tougher — just look at the number of auctions that closes without a bid. Go to the boards on ebay and you will hear even oldtimers complaining about how stiffer competition plus higher fees make it so much harder to sell on ebay.

One success model of ebay is the couple Jay and Marie Senese (username jayandmarie) of the 1-cent CD fame. They have the highest positive feedback number of all sellers on eBay. Their business model is to buy very low cost CDs in bulk (those that CD stores sell in their discount bins) and offer them on ebay at a starting price of 1 cent http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_23/b3886080.htm Their success is based on the fact that they stumbled on a sustainable business model with products that people really want.

eBay has several ways for you to determine exactly what the hot items to sell on their marketplace:

Items In Demand = the most popular items currently within that particular category. To see the In Demand page, go to http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/sellbycategory.html

Hot Items by Category Report = a monthly report that lists the fastest growing categories on eBay for the previous month. Go to http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html and select “Hot Items by Category” from the menu on the left.

eBay Pulse = “a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay”. Go to http://pulse.ebay.com/ to see eBay Pulse in action.

Merchandising Calendar = eBay promotes specific categories on its home page each month. Savvy eBayers know that this home page exposure results in more interest in such categories. Go to http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/calendar.html to view the current Merchandising Calendar.

As for items to sell, you can:

1. Buy bulk liquidation items such as those at Liquidation.com. The capitalization may be big, but the idea is to sell the items individually and profit from it.

2. Find manufacturers of items you want to sell and buy discounted items from them

3. Make deals with retailers in your area, and offer to buy their unwanted items for deep discounts. jayandmarie – the most successful ebay sellers – made deals with music stores where they will buy the entire inventory in the discounted bins, and then sold the items on ebay for 1-cent starting bid.

4. Look for possible partners on the Web, preferably outside of the US. Import items from them and sell them on ebay. There’s huge profits to gain from this approach.

5. Check out deals from outlet stores. Focus on brand names, which you will find to be easier to sell.

What do you think? Answer below!