Powerseller Guide to Making Money on eBay

I've being doing eBay for a few months now and I'm starting to make some good money with profits of around $850 to $1100 on a good week. Not enough yet to quit the day job yet, but pretty damn good.

Over time I will be sharing the secrets of my success, as I progress upward. What I can't tell you is the products I sell though as it's highly competitive.  But I can save you from the pitfalls I have already encountered, and get you earning money today. I will assume you already have an eBay account and have a general idea of how it works.

STEP 1 > This is the biggest step and most powerful secret !

Most of those guides or Ebooks you may have seen will tell you to find out whats a popular niche before you start Blah blah. WRONG!! The first step you should do is find wholesalers or Dropshippers and most of the good ones will tell you whats hot selling. All you need to know about a product is if it sells well! Right?? Even if you don't know anything about the product or you find it un-interesting, you will soon develop an active interest when it starts making you stacks of cash! You then find a hot selling item that looks good, then search for the same item on eBay in the COMPLETED LISTINGS SEARCH, that way you know if it sells or not, and how much money it goes for, giving you a "Retail" Benchmark price.

It doesn't matter if you have competition as you always will, it comes down to how well you market the item and how much you can undercut your competitors.

Step 2 > Where to find good wholesalers

Be very careful here, there are millions of wholesale leads out there, the largest being Alibaba.com although 90% of leads on there are SCAMS however, there are genuine merchants, but who wants to spend time sorting through them all and almost inevitably getting ripped off. Another site of interest is exporters.sg , they are similar to Alibaba with the exception that the merchant has to pay fees to advertise, this is suppose to keep the scammers out. Alibaba.com also has some flimsy scheme called GOLD PASS or some such rubbish, This can also be paid for by scum bags.  Through experience, I'm of the opinion they are both as bad as each other with the volume of scammers, I'm sorry to say but true.  If you want to go through Alibaba or Exporters.sg do not pay via western union, you may as well burn your money, this goes for any transfer of funds. ONLY EVER USE PAYPAL OR ESCOW.COM and make sure the transactions are linked to a credit card, not a debit card OK!! That all you need to know!!

So Where do you find legit wholesalers and dropshippers?? You pay for pre-checked suppliers that's how. You must have some start up costs for eBay success just like any other business. Its unreasonable to think you can start with absolutely no capital outlay. It can be done, but this is about shortcuts, not lots of time wasted. The only two Wholesale directories you will ever need to subscribe to are listed below.

Salehoo For Pre-screened Wholesale Suppliers for USA, Canada, Australia, France, UK, Hong Kong and AUSTRALIA. It will take you weeks if not months of searching for Wholesalers that these guys  have already compiled and indexed.The forum support alone that Salehoo provide is worth gold. they are a community of experts with limitless resources in the online retail field including and beyond Ebay.

Worldwide Brands Real drop shippers. Qualified wholesale suppliers.No middlemen.
"Wordwide brands may seem to be rather expensive , but when you sign up you instantly know where that money is going , it is essential for anyone serious about an eBay business. Furthermore they are the only eBay ceritified wholesale supplier. If you know what you are doing, you will make the sign up fee back in a couple of days. And even if you don't know what your doing they will soon guide you!  
I highly recommend watching the video on the the right for more info. >>

Step 3 > Educate yourself in your spare time to hone your selling skills

I have read just about every Ebook and watched every video on money making with eBay and the only program I found worth its money is eBay Millionaire Secrets . Honestly don't waste your time on anything else. The author is the real deal and covers every trick in the book with no fluff and filler. Like I said its all about finding shortcuts.

Step 4> Get Turbo lister

Just go to eBay and download it, spend a bit of time to learn it. Turbolister is a great time saver, but the program is not without quirks.

Step 5 > Start making money

When you find a product that sells, sell the hell out of it.What I mean by this "and I hate the word" but basically SPAM eBay, its like fishing with a net as opposed to a hook.  List it many times and across a few different categories, and look after your customers. eBay positive feedback is everything so provide good service and give good feedback even if some customers are complete idiots that ask stupid questions all the time, give them good feedback first and 99.9% of people will be compelled to give you good feedback. You don't need to sell many different items, just maybe 5 good ones and you will be on your way to easy money and a better lifestyle. I only spend about 1-2 hours a day on it which is just brilliant.
Some more free advise > When getting started, dropshipping is fine, but there is a better way with more benefits, its just a little more work for you. Let me explain
Say it costs $100 + $20 shipping to dropship an item to a customer, that will cost you $120 right ? but lets say you bought 10 of those items delivered to yourself, you get both a discount on wholesale goods + a discount on your freight. so you get the items for $90 each and $5 each for freight totaling $95. that gives you $25 in your pocket right away, the only trick is you then have to go to the post office and post your items for around $5 each, this still gives you $20 per item every time you ship something. Keep in mind you will be sending 5-10 items every time you go to the post office, giving you $200 profit just for doing a bit of extra
work.

Dropshipping Warning >

Dropshipping failed for me and here's why. As I live in a Country where there are no real dropshipping sources, I was forced to import from overseas. This has many problems associated with it.

1) It could take anywhere up to 6-10 days for the customer to get their goods. This is not a real problem if you have access to local suppliers.

2) You have no control over inventory, just because your dropshipper has stock at the start of your eBay Auction, does not mean that its in stock when your auction ends. You will look very silly when you can't come up with the goods, or delays until stock is available.

3) You can't claim your goods are located at your address, our sales skyrocketed (like 500%)when we changed the location to our local address. Even if you lie about your items location, the customer is going to know when the parcel turns up from China or Hong Kong or something and give you bad feedback in eBay.
Anyway that's enough free information for now, go and make some money!

Update 4 September 09

We have tried some new products this week and our profits so far for the week have averaged $200 per day. I'm going to dedicate all my updates, success's and pitfalls here as I go, so it would be wise for you to follow this blog if you want to have success in Ebay. I'm very committed to going big time with this.

Update 16 September 09

I've learned a valuable lesson today ! Don't always trust Paypal to get your money back on a transaction gone wrong . In order to step some things up I invested $5k on some new Items . The merchant procrastinated and mucked about giving me false tracking numbers and I'm sure they didn't have the goods . Before I made the transaction I called paypal to verify the merchant and they assured me its all legit . After a month of dispute paypal closed the investigation and managed to re-claim $35 and closed the case !!! After an angry phone call , they tell me they can only 100% guarantee transactions generated from eBay. Great!!
The moral of the story is always pay by credit card as my bank didn't take too kindly to it and got the money back in one week ! I'm pretty impressed with that .
BTW this merchant was a scammer on DHgate and I made the bad decision I dealing outside of them as an Escrow provider. I should have listened to my own advise .

Update 22 September 09

Became a Silver Powerseller Today!! This is a really good sign that things are going well, it just goes to show when making money eBay is still a viable option. A lot of online marketers have abandoned eBay due to the unfair fee structure. I think you just have to "Model" your business plan around this.

I am at a point where I can ramp this business up but I'm a bit jaded about nearly losing $5K on a wholesale deal. I just don't know who to trust, so I am seriously thinking of jumping on a flight to Hong Kong and meeting wholesalers in person and writing off the cost in tax. To date my only reliable wholesale sources come from Salehoo and WWB, however they can only provide so many resources for my particular demographic.
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