Need more ebay info? Make sure to check out our posts on How To Set Up an Ebay User Account, Disadvantages of Selling on Ebay, How to Research Prices to List Your Products for on eBay and How To List Your First Item on Ebay .
If you are not familiar with eBay (and obviously currently living under a rock), it is a website where consumers can buy and sell just about anything in either an auction or immediate purchase format.
In its almost 15 years of existence eBay has become a $41.49 billion dollar (in assets) company. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay)
With that said, it may be easier to understand that eBay is not just a marketplace for selling collector’s stamps or pez dispensers. Just about anything you can imagine can be bought or sold on eBay (with a few exceptions).
If you are currently selling products through your own website or even just a local brick and mortar store, you may want to consider what selling on eBay can do for your business. Here are a few benefits for selling via eBay:
Pro’s for selling on eBay
Worldwide Marketplace. eBay has been open to international use for quite some time. However, we all know that shipping internationally is not very convenient and turns many sellers off from doing so. eBay saw this and developed their new Global Shipping Program a couple of years ago. Sellers who use this program will just ship off their sold item to eBays warehouse in Kentucky where eBay does the rest of the work to ship that package out to whatever country it is destined for. Sellers do not even have to fill out international forms and such. There is one extra step in using this program versus selling to someone within the country and it takes less than a minute to verify the item you are shipping and fill in the country it was manufactured in, if you know. I personally have sold several items globally through this program and always include as a purchasing option when listing an item for sale.
eBay has great Search Engine Optimization. If you currently sell online, you know that it is hard to get your products seen via online searches. There is a good chance that your small website is not optimized to its best ability for search engine use. (There is also a good chance that you do not even understand what I just said in the previous sentence.) eBay has teams of employees dedicated to improving their SEO on an ongoing basis. If you are familiar with Alexa rankings then eBay’s global ranking of 23 and US ranking of 7 will surely impress you. In fact, the #1 site that people visited before clicking onto eBay is Google. Guess who is ranked #1 on Alex in both the US and Internationally? Yes, Google. According to Alexa.com, 16.1% of eBay users visited Google before clicking on to eBay.
You can choose to sell via Auction or Fixed Price Listing. With eBay you have the option to list your items for sale via online auction or a fixed price listing. eBay became well-know for its online auctions but now has a large presence in online sales with the fixed price listings as well. As we continue to increase our “I want it now” way of living, being able to purchase an item the minute we want it is crucial. Today, auctions are best used for highly sought after items that are hard to find. The demand for these products is what drives the auction prices to rise. If you are selling an item that is not rare, your best bet is to list it with a fixed price. If you price it competitively enough, your item will sell to someone who wants it now, without the hassle or wait that an auction can incur.
eBay offers discounted shipping for Sellers. When you list an item for sale, you can choose to offer free shipping or actual shipping costs. There are pro’s and con’s for each option, which I will go into in a future article, but either way, when you are ready to ship a sold item, you can do so via eBay at a discounted rate. This discount is for sellers shipping via the USPS and is usually between 10-20% off of the original price. Using this shipping program is also more convenient than travelling out to the Post Office, waiting in line and then paying full price. Now you can purchase your shipping at a discounted rate, from your home, in your pajamas. You then just have to print out your label, attach it to your package and then stick it in your mailbox with your outgoing mail. If you have a large item, or several items to ship out, you can even request (via the USPS website) that your mail carrier come pick them up from your porch or office, at no cost.
Do you currently sell on eBay? Have you always wanted to give it a try?
Come back soon to see what the disadvantages for selling on eBay are.
Check out! How to Run a Sale in Your eBay Store and 5 FREE Selling on eBay eBooks.
I’ve tried to sell sort of yard sale type items on ebay and I haven’t made many sales; I’ve always been afraid to sell my new products on ebay for fear that it would somehow make my brand seem less classy, but maybe that’s just silly. It does seem like everyone sells on ebay now. Maybe I should give it a try. 😀