Make Money On Ebay

Pros and Cons of Selling on eBay

Are you interested in becoming an eBay seller? If you are, you are definitely not alone, as eBay has become a relatively quick and easy way to make money online. Each day, a large number of individuals use eBay to make extra money from home and a few lucky ones are even able to make enough money to support themselves or their families. Before you jump on the eBay selling bandwagon, you are advised to take a few minutes and examine the pros and cons of selling on eBay.

One of the many pros, or plus sides, to selling on eBay is the fact that is it is relatively easy to do. Once you create an eBay account, you can start listing items that you have in your possession for sale right away. When doing so, it is also easy to do. eBay has a step-by-step process for listing items for sale, in traditional auction formats or buy it now formats. In fact, eBay also has a program that lets you compile your auctions, with pictures and descriptions, when you aren’t even connected to the internet. As soon as you connect to the internet, you can begin to upload your listings and have them start right away.

Another one of the many pros to selling on eBay is that just about anyone can do it. You don’t have to have big fancy, expensive items to sell on eBay. In fact, a large number of those selling on eBay are just selling items that are taking up space in their homes; items they don’t want anymore. If you are interesting in becoming an eBay seller, but you aren’t sure as to how much you can depend on eBay for income, you may want to think about testing the waters. You can do this by listing the items have you have around your home for sale. Items that tend to sell relatively well are lots, or groups, of toys and infant clothing.

While there are a number of pros, or plus sides, to selling on eBay, there are also a number of cons, or downsides, to doing so as well. One of the biggest cons or downsides to selling on eBay is the competition. As it was previously mentioned, a large number of internet users have started using eBay to make extra money or even make a living. This is what leads to multiple auction listings for the exact same items. While this is nice for the eBay buyers, it can hurt you as a seller. When the supplier is higher than the demand, you may not make as much money off of your items as you had originally hoped to, if they even sell at all.

Another downside to selling on eBay is the fees associated with doing so. In recent years, eBay has redone their fee structure, often to raise their fees. Although these fees are still considered relatively low, they could put a damper on your profits, which alone are sometimes hard to come by. Of course, there are ways that you can the most out of eBay fees. For instance, if you have a “hot seller,” you could start your auction out at a low price, as the fees are less for doing so; however, you are taking a gamble, as you never have any guarantees as for how much your items will sell for. Perhaps, the unknown is one of the biggest downsides to selling on eBay; you never really know if you are going to make money or even if you will end up losing money.

As you likely already know, the decision as to whether or not you want to become an eBay seller is yours to make, but, when making your decision, you are advised to keep the above mentioned points in mind. With a relatively equal amount of pros and cons, you may be wondering what your best option is. For more accurate information, you may want to think about testing the eBay seller waters, as you are able to sell whenever you want, with no minimum auction requirements.

Make Money on eBay: How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on eBay

You would have heard of people making a lot of money with eBay, selling various products. These success stories compel us to read about eBay and understand how it works.

It is an auction website that is said to be one of the largest online websites and receives millions of visitors every day. Selling on eBay gives us the opportunity to sell to people from all over the world, unlike a physical store, where only locals are targeted. Earning a full time income from home is no longer a dream!

Your first question would be what to sell and where do you find products to sell? Start by selling the few odds and ends that are lying around the house. The saying that one man’s junk is another’s gold holds so true. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you sell under quality stuff. Below are some of the ways to find products to sell on ebay:

Your Home
A good place to find products to sell in the initial stages is your home. I am sure you have plenty of baby clothes, car seats, toys, monitors, books, china, cards, comics, electronics and a number of other things. As long as they are in good condition, these can be sold easily. Once you make some cash with these, you can venture into buying stuff for selling on eBay.

Second Hand Shops and Garage Sales
With the money that was made from selling things around the house, you can now start buying from second hand shops and garage sales. Look out for things that are in good condition. If you are lucky, you may find things that sell well. Do not venture into selling things that are too heavy and go for lightweight items that are easy to send. You will be amazed at the number of things you will find and the profit that can be made.

Wholesalers
Once you have made enough from the above methods, you can start searching for a good wholesaler, where you can find goods at great wholesale rates.

Finding a good wholesaler is not an easy task. There are so many so-called wholesalers whose prices are not competitive. You will not find much help here if you ask others because nobody wants to share the names of good wholesalers as they don’t want competition. This is the art of survival at it’s best!

First, you will need to look around at what is being sold on ebay and what sells well, and check the pulse of eBay. From my experience, I would say that electronics sell very well and since new ones keep entering the market every day, you will find a lot of buyers. Search for wholesalers in this niche, and settle for one that is the best.

I would suggest you join Salehoo.com. This is a place where you can find some of the best wholesalers for anything and everything you can think of. They even have a forum where you can meet others and get some ideas on legitimate wholesalers.

Drop Shipping
Drop shipping means selling for someone else. You will not have to buy anything or stock any products. The supplier stocks all products at the warehouse and shipping is done directly to the customers you point out. All you need to do is decide what you want to sell and list it on eBay. Once the item is sold, the customer will send the payment to you, you will then send the payment to the supplier and the supplier will dispatch the item to the customer.

The supplier has his product catalog with wholesale price to each product and you decide what items in the catalog to sell at a retailed price fixed by you. How are you going to fix the price? The price you fix should be based on the supplier’s price, eBay fees and delivery costs.

The advantages of drop shipping is that you don’t need any upfront money nor do you need any stock. There are a few disadvantages too. You will not know whether the supplier has enough stock of the item you are selling. You will need to constantly keep in touch with the supplier and checking out supplies. This is where a good genuine drop shipping company helps. I have compiled a list of drop ship company to help you find a drop ship company that is suitable to your ebay business. Here is the list

1. http://www.doba.com (have good reputation, Supplying a list of retailed products)

2. http://bodysoulelements.com (natural bath and body products)

3. http://www.cwrelectronics.com (electronics wholesale dropshipper)

4. http://www.dragondistributing.com (Car Audio Products, Home Theater Products)

5. http://www.moteng.com/Home (knives, flashlights, security equipment, and outdoor products.)

6. http://www.raxusa.com (skateboard products)

7. http://www.smcorp.com (gifts, collectible toys, novelty items)
8. http://www.dbldistributing.com (electronics and electronics accessories)



Flea Markets
If you are one to frequent flea markets, you would know that it is a place where vendors sell their goods or even trade goods. You will find inexpensive goods from various parts of the country. It is a known fact that the second hand goods found at flea markets are sometimes worth far more than what the buyer pays. If you can lay your hands on something like that, you can make a fortune at eBay.

Discount Stores or Department
A discount store is a retail store where things are sold much cheaper than at a traditional department store. You can find a wide assortment of goods like electronic equipment, jewelry, electrical appliances and many others. Wall-Mart, Target and K-mart are examples of such discount stores that attract price conscious customers. If you are living in the US, this is going to be great for you, as you can make a ton of money just buying here and selling on eBay.

Trade Shows
Trade shows are the place to be for someone who sells on eBay. This is where all the manufacturers meet and you will have a chance to get the information straight out of the horse’s mouth, before actually deciding on buying their goods. Before deciding on going to a trade show, try and find out which manufacturers are going to be there and what the goods are. If it is anything that you are interested in selling, you can meet the supplier.

Just use your imagination to find goods at inexpensive prices. There are some more for the road, which include Government auctions, Liquidators, Newspaper and magazine classifieds and wholesale gift catalogs.

Remember, wherever you choose to get them from, use your judgment in determining the quality and worth of an item and go for it only when you are sure in your mind that this is going to bring in profit after deducting all the other expenses involved.

A lot of people have no idea of what drop shipping is and how drop ship wholesalers can help people make money online. So I think I should explain a little about drop shipping before I go on to the list.

A drop ship wholesaler is a wholesale company allowing you to sell a range of products of the company without even touching the products. You don’t need to pay money to purchase goods in bulk from the drop ship wholesalers. You just place an ad on ebay or display products pictures on your online store. When a customer pays you to order a product, you’ll then pay the drop ship wholesale company at wholesale price for the product and the drop ship company will package and ship the product on your name to your customer.

Drop ship wholesalers have been widely used by ebay sellers. If you plan to start using a drop ship company for your ebay business. You got to make sure that the drop ship company is reliable.

I have compiled a list of drop ship companies that you can use to start making money on ebay. Some of these companies are recommended by ebay sellers, experienced Internet marketer and bloggers. They are real company. But before you start dealing with any of them, you should do some research on the company to find out the company background, their reputation, history record and comments from people who have used the company.

5 Simple Steps to Posting Your First eBay Auction


It's surprisingly simple to get started posting your very first auction on eBay. Here's what you need to do.

Step 1: Open an eBay seller's account
If you've bought things on eBay, then you already have an account - just log in with it and click 'Sell' in the toolbar at the top of the page, then click 'Create a seller's account'. If you've never used eBay before, then you'll need to open an account first using the 'register' link underneath the toolbar, and then click 'Sell' and 'Create a seller's account'. The eBay site will then guide you through the process. For security, this may involve giving card details and bank information.

Step 2: Decide what to sell
For your first little experiment with eBay, it doesn't really matter what you sell. Take a look around the room you're in - I'm sure there's something in there that you're not all that attached to and could put in the post. Small books and CDs are ideal first items.

Step 3: Submit your item.
Click 'Sell', and you're on your way to listing your item.

The first thing you need to do is choose a category - it's best to just type in what the item is and let eBay choose for you. Next, write a title and description. Include key words you think people will search for in the title box, and all the information you have about the item in the description box.

Now set a starting price. $0.01 is the best starting price, as it draws people in to bid who otherwise wouldn't, and items will almost never finish at such a low price. The next thing to set is the duration of the auction: 3, 5, 7 or 10 days. This is up to you: longer sales will usually get more bids, but will also seem to drag on forever. If you've taken a picture, add it now - items with pictures always sell for more. Finally, tick the payment methods you will accept (just PayPal is best for now), and where you will post to (limit yourself to your own country to begin with). Submit and you're done!

Step 4: Wait for it to sell
This is just a matter of sitting back and letting eBay do its thing - buyers will find your item and leave bids on it. Some bidders might email you with questions about the item, and you should do your best to answer these questions as quickly as you can.


Remember that if your item doesn't sell then you can list it again for free.

Step 5: Collect payment and post it
eBay will sent your buyer emails guiding them through the process of sending you payment for the item. Make sure you have the money before you send anything.

Once you've got the payment, all you need to do is pack the item for posting (make sure to use some bubble wrap), take the buyer's address from the confirmation email eBay sent you, and write it on the parcel. Put some stamps on, post it, and you're done!


How to Increase Your E-Bay Response

Only a successful sale generates profits. You can encourage visitors to your auction, you can alsvo get them to read it, but the most important thing is to get them to bid on it. Below are some tips that can help you increase response on your e-bay listing and make more money on each sale:

1) A lot depends upon how you design your auction. You have to attempt to put information on it in a manner that it gives the much required incentive to the casual or interested visitors to actually bid for your item. For example some people do not give enough importance to the accompanying picture they have posted on eBay. A professionally shot picture with proper lighting and un-intrusive background is as vital as the description of your item.

2) Most of the bidders are apprehensive about disputes and the hassles that they might get into after they pay up. To allay such fears the best policy is to sign up at SquareTrade and get permission to display their logo on your auctions which will assure the bidders that they will be not be shortchanged in any eventuality. It gives a professional look to your auction and you will always see it on PowerSellers auctions. To further your professional image and build confidence, put up all business practices in a visible place giving details, including shipping, time schedules, and refunds.

3) Nothing boosts confidence more than good feedback. Include all positive feed back comments prominently and in the event that you have 100% positive feedback, make sure that it is mentioned on all auctions. If you have a reserve price it is likely to discourage bidders. Displaying a NR (no reserve) along with your item’s name should take care of that.

4) Benefits not features: Make sure your description emphasizes on the benefits that your item can give to the customer, not just its features. This is a classic sales technique. If you have trouble with this, remember: 'cheap' is a feature, 'save money' is a benefit.

5) You can never be sure of which payment method a particular bidder might be comfortable with. Try to include unusual payment methods such as checks, which most of the sellers try to avoid. Also keep just two or three auctions going on for an item you have more than one of in stock rather than choosing the Dutch-auction route.

6) Remember that much depends upon the search results when it comes to categories that are crowded. To ensure that your product comes up in the first ten results and you get the maximum hits you need to upgrade regularly. The best upgrades may be expensive but they may be worth the money you spend for them.

Interesting Ideas to Make Money on ebay

1) Sell Used Cell Phones on ebay
The demands for used cell phones with brand names like Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera, Alltel, Ericsson, Sprint, etc in ebay are pretty high. Many of the used cell phones auctions in ebay usually attract bids.

So how to find used cell phones to profit on ebay?
Many people change their cell phones every year. If you are one of them, probably you already have 2 or 3 used cell phones kept at home that can sell on ebay. Your friends may also keep a few of old phones left unused. You can buy from them and resell on ebay.

To get a consistent supply of cell phones, you may think about placing classified ads in newspaper states that you pay money for used cell phone. You shouldn't pay much when buying used cell phones. Do a little research on ebay to find out how much used cell phones are generally selling. If a used cell phone sell at a price of $50 in ebay, you should pay not more than 30% of the price to buy it. If the phone is a recent model you can pay little more and cut a little if it is old and nothing special.

2) Sell Used How-to Books
Used how-to books are quite easy to find and inexpensive to buy. They can be bought at $1.00 or less. You can buy how-to books from thrift shops, estate sales, used book stores, yard sales, etc and sell them in ebay for high profit margin. You can also get how-to books from Book Sale Finder. Here are the type of books you should look for:

Hobbies
Photography, blacksmithing, clock building & repair, woodworking, magic, treasure hunting, iron work, pipe smoking, dog training, antiques, coins, buttons, medals, drawing, painting, craft making, dolls, pottery, etc.

Home and Garden
Home decorating, home remodeling, garden trellis, etc.

Misc
How to repair (watch repair, door repair, pipe repair), how to play, lost treasure, eary aviation, etc.

When you list your books in ebay, you can either list them in the "Book" category of ebay or in the subject specific category of ebay. For instance, If you are selling a book related to home decorating, you may be making more profit if you list the book under the "Home Deco" within the "Home & Garden" category of ebay campare to listing the book under "Book"

3) Sell Gift Cards
Gift card is another profitable market in ebay. There are many people possess gift cards but not everyone of them will use their gift cards. If you can offer to buy these unused gift cards for a price at 20% or less of the value of the gift certificates, they will sell to you. You can advertise your offer in local newspaper, penny shop and trading post. You are looking for gift cards that are still valid (not yet expire). Most gift cards have a toll-free number on the back you can dial to check whether the cards are still valid.

When determining the buy and sell price of a gift card, you should do some research on ebay. Try to look for auction that sell the similar card. See how much the card sells in the auction and set you buying price at 40% to 50% of the selling price of the auction. The starting bid and winning bid of the auction can also give you an idea on how much your card can sell on ebay..

Chapter 3
Affiliate Marketing

An Introduction to the Different Types of Affiliate Programs

Today, affiliate marketing programs is seen as one of the most important methods by online companies and merchants to market their products and services because implementing an affiliate program doesn't cost much money and it helps generate a consistent stream of online profit.

On the other hand, the affiliates see affiliate marketing as a feasible and low cost method to make online online by promoting other people products using a website or without a website (using Google AdWords PPC advertising program).

There are many affiliate programs on the Internet and not all of them are similar. The most basic affiliate programs fall into 3 categories:

* Pay Per Performance
* Pay Per click
* Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs

Pay Per Performance On
Pay per performance (PPP) affiliate programs are what most companies and online merchants likes to use. The companies only need to pay when an affiliate referral translates into an action. The action can be a purchase or a lead. The affiliates will spend their own money to promote the affiliated company's products, This save a lot of money for the company. PPP affiliate programs can be futher classified into 2 sub-categories:

* Pay Per Sale (PPS) The title says it all. The company only pays the affiliate when a visitor referred by the affiliate make a purchase.
* Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL is a little different to PPS. PPL affiliate programs usually used by finance and insurance companies. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate will be paid a fixed commission whenever a visitor referred by him/her to the merchant's website requested a quote or filled up an online application form.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Programs
PPC affiliate programs are most popular. You should have heard them a lot. PPC programs are probably the easiest way for web publishers to make money from their websites and blogs. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount ($0.05 to $0.50 usually) whenever a visitor click a banner or text ad displaying on the affiliate's website. PPC typically used by contextual advertising companies like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Networks and much more.

Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
In this type of programs, the affiliate not only compensated for every customer referred to the merchant's website, the affiliate is also paid whenever the referred customer returns to the site and buy another product.

The different types of affiliate marketing programs would deffinitely work differently for merchants and affiliates, and each would have their own advantages and drawbacks. To find out which types of programs work best for you, you'll have to know which one of them suit your need and characteristic most. And then start testing them.

Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs: Getting Started Guide

Affiliates make money by referring customers to their merchants. There are many companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs to promote their online sales. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given an affiliate link with an unique affiliate ID which will be used to market the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting an affiliate marketing business:

Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate program that interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking for people to promote their e-books and info products. Before you join any affiliate programs, do a little research. Find out which products are most popular, the conversion rate of the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether their sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales. A conversion rate of 5% is reasonably good. This means that for every 100 visitors to the website, 5 visitors will buy.

Step 2 – Promote an affiliate program through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs. Creating a website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use an easy website builder to create a website with little or no technical knowledge. To learn more about how to set up a site with website builder, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right for you.

Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each e-book with an affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book. If you do not wish to write reviews, you can create a product recommendation list on your website (e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).

Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic to your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more likely you’ll generate more sales. There are several ways to drive targeted traffic to your site in short period of time (2 to 5 days). Here’s how……

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising. The two most popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising program works? PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When someone enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged base on your bid amount. To learn more about PPC advertising, please click here.

Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your website in the article’s resource box and submitting it to many article directories can bring some free targeted traffic to your site. To get more and continuous targeted traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to publish a new article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload of free traffic to your website.

Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted by you. Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate marketer.

1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards that are related to your affiliate products and try to join as many forums as you can.

2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited to include your website link within the signature option.

3) Spend a few hours navigating the pages of the forums. You can ask questions and post informative and helpful replies to other peoples’ questions or messages to build your status. The more people trust you, the more likely they will click your link.

Tips for Selecting a Good Affiliate Program to Promote

Your success in affiliate marketing part depend on the kinds of affiliate programs your are marketing.To make your affiliate marketing campaign works, you obviously need to participate in an affiliate program that offers worthy and quality products. Below are some tips that can help you choose an affiliate program that is good for you:

1. Affiliate programs that are associated with many experts in that particular niche usually are in certain level of standard and quality. Joining one of these programs will assure you that the products of the program you will be promoting are in good standard.

2. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Ask question. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.

3. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.

4. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs imposes pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.

5. Ask for program recommendations in the community forum of your niche. The experienced marketers who see your question may recommend you the reliable programs they have success with. Other things you can ask about are like is the program offers a real and viable product? Does the program provide a lot of free tools and resources helpful to affiliate? and any other questions you think are essential.

10 Mistakes in Affiiliate Marketing that Can Stop You to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

Although anyone can start an affiliate marketing business but not everyone can achieve success in affiliate marketing. What is the reason? Well, there are 10 of them, actually. There are 10 affiliate mistakes that deter people from succeeding in affiliate marketing business. To avoid all these mistakes, you first need to study them and understand them thoroughly.

1. Believing that visitors would only click on their affiliate links. Although the task of an affiliate is only restricted to pre-selling, pre-selling isn’t just limited to displaying the affiliate links. It also entails enticing visitors to click on them by listing out the benefits of the affiliate products, giving positive recommendations by writing reviews to encourage readers to check out the products.

2. Promoting too many affiliate programs at the same time. If an affiliate markets 8 affiliate programs at the same time, he or she will have 8 affiliate marketing campaigns to handle. Most probably, the affiliate will find difficult to manage all his campaigns and unable to concentrate on each one of his or her affiliate programs in this situation and ends up losing money.

You should begin with one affiliate program; choose a program that you are passionate about. Then put your best effort to market the product. Test different marketing strategies to see which one works best. Once you are making a steady commission with the product, then maybe you can look for second affiliate product to sell.

3. Believing that using a single method of marketing technique is sufficient. There are people actually think that submitting a few articles to article websites will generate the amount of traffic they expected. But this is wrong. Focusing only one marketing technique will limit the number of potential buyers you can send to your affiliate merchant’s website

4. Failing to improve the performance of your marketing campaign. Many affiliates tend to concern on checking their daily commission only and have no interest on studying and analyzing their marketing campaigns performance. When their campaigns don’t work as expected or don’t generate sales, they will fail to make corresponding adjustments because they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need to be improved. It is essential to learn every aspect of our marketing strategies. Which marketing techniques are attracted most visitors? How many unique and returning visitors generated? How long do they stay in our website? Where they come from? These are the questions that could help us enhance the performance of our affiliate marketing business.

5. Promoting affiliate products that are lacking of demand. Some affiliate programs offer extremely high sale commission to their affiliate. But the products aren’t sellable and thus earning nothing.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction. The trustworthiness of a company relies on how people view it. If the affiliate program has established good relationships with their customers, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service. You will find easier to pre-selling such an affiliate product.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry. There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of internet marketing where everything transpires at a rapid pace. You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge.

8. Failing to invest on knowledge. Knowledge likewise evolves and you have to evolve with it. Buy noteworthy eBooks, special reports and the likes… those which would teach you the latest tactics to help you conquer your field.

9. Resting on your laurels once a semblance of success is achieved. Success is not eternal. You have to sustain it. If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure.
10. Though that affiliate program can help you become rich fast. No, affiliate program isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. You have to put in a lot of effort and time, and some capital before you can make money in affiliate marketing.