Ebay

For the uninitiated, Ebay is the world’s biggest online auction site, spanning across America, Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Switzerland, Thailand and Turkey, to name but a few! If you haven’t already registered for a personal Ebay account, now is the time to do so- the company has grown into a well established hive of auctions, forums, communities, blogs and businesses since it’s conception in the mid nineties and there is a lot to learn.

If you have a business which relies on online sales, Ebay could be a very profitable feather in your bow, providing another platform from which you can retail your products, and attract more traffic to your website.

The best way to learn about Ebay is to open a personal account and begin by selling some bric-a-brac from around your home, that way you can pick up some new internet skills, finally clear the spare bedroom and make a little cash too.

Sign up and Start Trading



To sign up for an account, you will need your own personal details, which can be changed to reflect your business at a later date, and a debit or credit card. The most popular way to purchase goods through Ebay is by using a site called Paypal, which is owned by the auction site and operates by registering your card details and making deductions to pay for your purchases.

When you have registered for both Ebay and Paypal, you can then begin to take part in the auctions. Each Ebay user is rated through a star system, which reveals how many transactions they’ve completed. This includes both purchases from other users and sales from yourself.

Each transaction is rated individually- after you purchase an item, you have to leave the seller feedback, answering questions such as ‘how accurate was the item’s description?’, ‘How reasonable were the P&P charges?’ and so on. There are five questions in total, and equally, if you are the person selling goods, your services will be reviewed too, so it’s in your interests to provide a high standard of customer service.

It’s also worth noting that in the case of the rating system, due to a small minority of dubious people in the Ebay community, some sellers will not sell to anyone with a rating below a certain number. The best way to raise your number is to buy smaller items, or email the seller directly and explain that you’re new to Ebay and don’t intend to let them down.

There’s a lot to see now on Ebay, including an extensive community consisting of forums and blogs. If you have already begun writing a blog for your business and updating it via Twitter, it might also be worth duplicating it on the Ebay site once you begin to retail your own products.

Adapt as Your Business Grows



Once you get to this stage, it would be a good idea to change your account details to suit your business, and not just yourself as an individual, and upgrade your account to become a business. You will find the links to do this on the homepage.

Ebay is very price focused- people generally use Ebay to find something cheaper than what they'd pay anywhere else, so it's worth bearing that in mind, and perhaps only selling reduced price products. It's also worth bearing in mind that you shouldn't dilute your brand- if you sell expensive products, by all means use EBay to sell them, but sell them as 'surplus stock' under a different brand name. Then, on each auction, you can provide lots of tasty links back to the product on your original website.

I would advise that, when formulating a presence for your business on Ebay, you spend some time researching the options available to you and your products in the user forums. Obviously product descriptions and images play a large part of your sales technique, but so do page templates and links back to your own website. Looking through the various businesses operating on Ebay is great for seeing what options are available to you and how to use them. And if you get stuck, there’s a wealth of FAQs and help available from the EBay staff.