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50 Shades of eBay

How to "dominate" your competitors on eBay

Skip McGrath

50 Shades of eBay

How to "dominate" your competitors on eBay By: Skip McGrath

Notice to Copy/Print Shops: The holder of this book may print one copy for their personal use and reading. Printing of multiple copies not allowed without the permission

of the author.

Copyright January 2014, Vision-One Press and Skip McGrath. All rights reserved. Short quotes with attribution are permitted.

Introduction

The title of this book may be a little tongue in cheek humor, but I assure you the contents are not. My 50 Shades of eBay are actually 50 specific tips, techniques and strategies to help small and medium sellers dominate the eBay marketplace for your product line.

Over the years I have published several compendium of tips, but eBay has made so many changes over the years, that many of them are out of date. So I have kept some of the evergreen tips and tactics that I use but added many more that reflect the new eBay.

I have an eclectic collection or readers. Some of you have been selling on eBay for years and yet I get new readers who find me all the time. So I have tried to aim this at both groups. Even if you are an experienced eBay seller, I guarantee you will find some useful information in here. And the fact that some of it may seem a bit basic should not disturb you. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen listings on eBay by sellers with large feedback scores and obvious plenty of experience, but they are making mistakes with some very basic things that any seller should know.

And for new sellers, you will learn these basic strategies and can start putting them to good use.

With that ?-Let's get started.

1. Buy on eBay - If you are new to eBay, become a buyer before you start to sell. Buying does two things. You earn feedback even when you buy and that feedback shows up in your total when you start selling. So buying a few inexpensive items can help you get at least a small feedback score to start, so when you sell, folks will not worry that this is your first day on eBay.

The other reason for buying is so you can learn the process. Be sure to purchase some things both in the auction and fixed price format. Read the emails you get from eBay and the seller to see what sort of things your customers will be seeing. When you see those emails, look to see if anything strikes you as really good, or if anything worries or unsettles you. Essentially what I am saying is try and walk in your customer's shoes for a little while.

You don't have to spend a lot of money doing this. There are things for sale on eBay that you would buy from your local store anyway such as razor blades, shampoo and socks and so on. Before you try and sell your first item on eBay, I would suggest you make at least ten purchases from ten different sellers to get the full experience. Believe me, you will be amazed at how much you learn from other sellers and you see how other sellers treat you.

2. Learn what are the best products to sell - Everyone wants to sell the latest consumer product, but the truth is there is a lot of competition from established sellers and even big online companies that have special deals with eBay. The best item to sell on eBay is something used or a very specialized (niche) product that few others are selling.

You can buy virtually anything used: clothing, books, computers, DVDs, Stereo equipment, and so on. If you are going to sell new goods, make sure you can buy them cheaply enough to sell and make a profit. One source is closeout and liquidation companies that sell overstocks and seasonal items returned by department stores.

The most inexpensive information product on my website is called My Top 99 Wholesale Sources for eBay Sellers. This is a great place to find good wholesale sources that will work with eBay sellers. These are not perfect or complete resources--they are just a place to start. Be a little careful with the many Wholesale Search Engines you find on the web. They are just search engines and you can't control what shows up there. Just because a company comes up in a search as a wholesaler, that doesn't mean it's a good company.

Another great product area is consumables. The idea here is to get repeat business via your website from customers who buy from you on eBay. One of my best selling training manuals is the Wholesale Buying System (WBS).1 The WBS tells you how, what, and where to buy products to sell on eBay. It also comes with access to a members-only website where you can access thousands of wholesale companies directly. I update the website monthly to add new sources.

3. If you are going to start your eBay business, you have to start your eBay business ? I see this all the time. People who keep buying books about how to sell on eBay. They plan and think about it forever, and never seem to get around to selling something. There is an old saying: "Perfect is the enemy of good." You will never be perfect at this. I have been doing it for 14 years now and I still make mistakes and so will you. If you want to start your business ?you have to start your business ?Stop procrastinating. Jump in, make some mistakes so you can learn and start generating some cash you can use to buy more products.

4. Master niche marketing and specialize for success ? Niche Marketing is home plate for your success strategy. Find your own niche. Define your market. Then you can know the type of person you're going to be selling to and the types of product you want to sell. You will also have less competition.

1 OK? I am plugging a couple of my products. Don't worry; the whole book is not full of these. I assure you, you will get your money's worth.

Forget trying to sell computers, Coach handbags, Nikon cameras, iPhones, Plasma TVs, Rolex Watches and famous name designer fashions. There is no way you can compete with the big guys unless you have tons of money. And those drop ship web sites and programs that claim to have those products are mostly scams. Find a small niche --or several small niches that you can dominate.

Along with being in a superior position to take advantage of repeat business, the benefits from becoming specialized are endless. If you know more about your product area, you will be able to buy at better prices and people who sense you specialize in something will be more comfortable buying from you.

5. Forget About Drop Shipping ? The days of drop shipping as a profitable business model are pretty much over. eBay has new policies that make it very difficult for you to be successful dropshipping. I still do it with a few products, but I work directly with the actual manufacturers who drop shipping for me. I have a long-standing business relationship with them and they understand my business as well. So it does work for me, but unlike the old days on eBay its just really hard to do these days and very few people actually make a profit at it.

Most importantly, forget all those general drop-shipping companies. As I said above, many of them are scams ?and all of them are what you call "virtual dropshippers." They don't actually have any merchandise in their warehouse. When you buy from a virtual dropshipper, you are dealing with a wholesale middleman. They buy the product from the manufacturer and ship it to your customer. So they have to make a markup on that transaction. It is very hard to make a profit once you add in their margins and fees. In fact, I have looked at prices on several of the larger drop ship companies and then looked on eBay and seen the same product actually selling on eBay for less than the drop shipper's so-called wholesale price.

There are some manufacturers out there who are reliable, and will drop ship, but in all honesty they are very hard to find. So when you see those websites that say they have millions of brand name products and if you pay a monthly fee, they will list them on eBay for you and even give you a website ?forget it! They don't work!

6. Increase sales with Free Shipping ? eBay has claimed for years that you get more sales with free shipping ?and it's true. I did a test last year. And I used the slowest months of the year to do the test. In July I listed 32 different SKUs2 with fixed price listing and fixed rate shipping. Then in August I raised the prices to include shipping and offered the exact same items (but now at a higher price) with

2 SKU stands for stock keeping unit. It's a number you make up and assign to each of your products for nothing more than the purpose of record keeping. In the industry when someone says they have 60 SKUs on eBay, it means they have 60 different products selling on eBay. A SKU has no relation to a UPC code (bar code), which is an industry code that is unique to each product. Manufacturers assign UPC codes and you make up SKUs. If you look on Wikipedia, you will see a ton of free information about SKUs and UPC codes.

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