So, a couple of years ago we decided to try reselling on eBay. We knew it would take some time for this to be profitable, but I was really looking to get out of retail management that I had been in for over 20 years. So, we watched tons of videos, started going to secondhand stores, and garage sales, and found out about the Goodwill bins in our area.
Now to figure out how to list them on eBay. Well, this turned out to be a journey in and of itself. We thought it would be easy just to take some pictures and put in some information about the product. And you can do that but expect lots of questions if you don’t show measurements in the pictures, especially clothing. If you don’t show all sides of the product. And so on. Then there’s shipping and what is the best package to put an item in, etc. So honestly it was trial by error to figure out what was going to work best for us.
We decided that we weren’t really going to have a specific niche because it can be hard to find specific products to sell sometimes. There are a lot of eBay resellers out there that do have specific niches, say shoes, and do well but it didn’t seem like that was something we wanted to do. We decided to start with items we already owned that we wanted to get rid of to just get started listing. And this is where we found all the things we needed to think about when trying to resell.
There are so many things you need to think about and set up ahead of time before you even start the reselling business. Too many to list here, but see some of our other blogs on those subjects. We weren’t really prepared for everything we needed but we learned as time went on. We have had some setbacks, mainly our move from PA to NV, but we’re starting to get back on track. I’m not saying that we haven’t made any money along the way, but if you really want to make a good profit, you must put a lot of commitment into selling. You can do this part-time and make some money but to make great money it really is a full time job. Using social media is a must, if for no other reason than to drive traffic to your eBay store. Having said that if you want to see some of our adventures so far, please check out our videos at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwhGhIRZo-k6Gb5J1HP9YHg
If you are interested in becoming a reseller, we’ll be posting more blogs on tips for doing this and our adventures to come!