10 Steps to Becoming a Success on eBay

10 Steps to Becoming a Success on eBay

So you have decided that you want to have your own successful eBay business, Here’s a simple and basic, ten-step plan which you can follow to become a successful seller on eBay, firstly on a part time basis while you are learning and eventually being able to turn your new venture into a full time business.

Step 1:

Firstly, you need to identify your market. Do some research to find out what sells and what doesn’t from the items you’re interested in. The market research which you must carry out will become very useful for you in the future. You’ll soon see what the ‘top items’ are quite quickly – those particular items that always seem to sell for a fairly good price.

Step 2:

Take note of the competition and monitor their progress. Before you even think about investing your own money, have a look to see what the other eBay sellers in your chosen category are actually up to, and identify what selling strategies they are using. You need to pay special attention to any flaws their online auctions might have, because by doing this you can look at improving the situation and succeed from the mistakes they have made.

Step 3:

Decide on a product: Locate a supplier of the items you have decided to sell, and find out the best prices you can get for the particular products you have decided to sell – don’t be afraid to ring round a number of these suppliers in order for you to get the best deal. If the eBay prices for these products you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you’re all set and ready to make a profit.

Step 4:

Always start small: Remember to never invest lots of your own money in your chosen idea straight away – you should always start slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly just learn step by step as you go, just like when a house is built, one brick at a time. Remember that it’s very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and for all you know, your idea might just work and become a great success!

Step 5:

Test and repeat. It’s a good idea to try different selling strategies until you eventually find something that works for you, and never feel ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are you have more than likely just found yourself a very good niche market.

Step 6:

Work out your business plan: Your business plan won’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that details the market opportunity you’ve discovered, what your selling strategy will be, the strengths and weaknesses of your plan and your budget. It will definitely help with your success more than anyone else’s.

Step 7:

Invest and expand: Very soon you will be at a stage where you will need to invest more money in your business. You will need to buy more products for your customers, and to start investing more time on continuing success of your business. Without doubt you must set yourself a sales target each week as something to work towards, and once you have successfully reached your sales target, you should then increase your sales target again every time you have succeeded. This way it will provide you with a real focus for success.

Step 8:

Make your business official: Once you’ve finally made a few thousand in sales, this is the time when you really need to register yourself as a business. But please don’t worry, this is not expensive or hard to do – but I suggest it is probably best to seek the advice of a business professional to help and guide you through the process for registering yourself legally as a business.

Step 9:

Automate your Business: there will come a time when you will start to find that you’re writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. Once you begin to notice this it is probably best to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software which will do all the hard manual work such as create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.

Step 10:

Never give up on your dream: This is the most important step regarding your success or failure, because even at times when you think it looks like it’s not going to plan as you would have hoped, never stop trying because you will succeed as time goes on, everyone has to start somewhere so just take each part of the process step by step. If you keep working at it then you will find that you can make a real breakthrough, especially at a time when you thought things were starting to look desperate, but please remember that most of the top successful business people learned more from their failures than their successes. So on that note just keep your dream alive and in time success will be yours.