A Comparison of Different Earning Strategies on eBay

Generally there is only one earning strategy employed by eBay sellers. Buy low and sell for a profit. Sellers may be cruising yard sales on a weekend, op shops, or bargain bins in department stores, or they may have access to suppliers of wholesale goods (including dropshippers). But the strategy is still the same. This is the easiest and most direct method to make money on eBay as it involves listing an item for sale and then within days or weeks seeing a return on the investment.Sellers may be able to repeat the sales that they have achieved, as in the case of goods obtained in bulk from a wholesale supplier or dropshipper, or they may have different items to sell in each listing.

There are many people making excellent money on eBay from this strategy by all accounts and so it obviously works. I do it myself.There is another strategy, hardly employed on eBay by sellers, which can also earn money for the account holder. That is using eBay as a vehicle for generating traffic to a seller’s other items, located off eBay, or for the seller to create affiliate sales of other peoples’ products. I will endeavour to explain the workings of these two strategies in more detail below.There’s definitely nothing new about this. It has been the backbone of trading since time began and essentially eBay is just an extension of any shopping mall or market place where trading goes on - the only difference is that a lot of eBay sales are conducted by auction, which is somewhat unconventional in a traditional commercial sense.

There are a number of ways that eBay sellers utilise this method of selling and trading on eBay. As mentioned, the auction format is perhaps the most used, or at least the most commonly noticed method of trading on eBay. This may be used predominantly for items that are personal possessions being sold off on eBay, such as old DVDs and clothes, where the seller would be happy to accept any value for the goods seeing they have already used up their value by using them themselves.It is also used where an item is rare and this is where eBay has built its global reputation as being the place of choice for selling such items so that sellers can attract a global audience to fight over the product.

Sellers often also utilise a fixed price format, or include a buy-it-now price on their listing to encourage quick sales or to set a reserve price on an item in categories in which this option is not available using the auction format. Fixed price format sales are also used for eBay store owners where the listings are generally listed for a month at a time rather than for a week or 10 days or less.There are advantages and disadvantages to owning a store for different sellers and different items, but as regards the benefits of a store for listings I’m not going to go into that here.The costs of listing and selling items on eBay, apart from the purchase costs of the items that are being offered for sale are:* the listing fees payable to eBay calculated as a small percentage of the listing price upfront and the sales price in arrears* the cost of promoting your listing through use of pictures, highlighting and a premium for promoting your listing on search results or on eBay’s featured listings pages* a percentage of the total sale amount (including postage) for buyers who use PayPal