eBay Seller Tips

During the time we have been selling on eBay we have seen at least a dozen platforms come and go.  Every time something new comes along everyone that isn’t doing so hot on eBay claims that the new platform is the savior of the reselling community and encourages others to jump ship.  Here’s the truth though…if you can’t make it on eBay, you probably can’t make it as a reseller anywhere.  For all it’s issues, eBay has the largest audience, the best support, and the lowest fees.  However, other platforms have a valuable place if your reselling arsenal.  So let’s talk about what is (in my opinion) is the best of all of the alternatives to eBay…Mercari! Mercari is a Japanese company that is currently available in Japan and the U.S.  It has exploded in popularity recently and most resellers have started using it a way to bring in a little extra income or move …

Read moreWhat are the Fastest-Selling Items on Mercari in 2020?

Last July I hit the wall…again.  This was the third business model I had tried on eBay and it was not working like I had hoped.  Sure, I was making money.  We were averaging $3-400 a day in sales, but wanted more.  Much more.  Like 10x that.  Digging through thrift stores all day, every day and then listing into the night had left me feeling like a grubby, burned-out bottom-feeder.  I was always hoping that the very next thing we tried would be the big break that we needed, and our reselling business would start spiraling upward and making us the money we hoped for.  But it wasn’t to be.  It would take several more changes in our structure and business models before we finally started to figure out how to really scale our business.  Now, there are several ways to go about this, and I don’t claim that the way we use is the perfect …

Read moreHow to Scale an eBay Business (The Only 4 Ways)

If there is one thing that will assure the quick demise of your career on eBay, it will be getting stuck at thrift stores.  I get it, I love thrift stores too.  The thrill of the hunt, the occasional home-run, and the potential to find amazing stuff for yourself (that you desperately need, right?) all work together to keep people running around thrift stores for years trying to build their business.  I’ve said it so many times and I’ll say it again: Hoping to find better items at thrift stores is not a business plan.  Unless you have a large team to help you thrift, list, and ship, you need to find additional inventory sources if you want to make serious money on eBay.  Don’t worry though, there are plenty of ways to start small. Let’s talk about some of them: YARD SALES Yard sales are a great way to find amazing goods at rock bottom …

Read moreGet Over the Thrift Store – Sourcing Alternatives for eBay Sellers

If I could choose one of my major character flaws, it would be that I read too many books.  Not that reading is a bad thing…but I tend to gather dozens of self-help books on my nightstand and my bookshelf.  When I am in a funk or am solving a problem, I am much more likely to go and read a nebulous self-help book looking for a “cure” rather than just dealing with my crap.  Not only that, but I have the added fun foible of foisting all of books off on my wife, insisting that she read them, and double-insisting that she listens to my crack-brained ideas that I’m now sure will fix all of our problems. The main reason for this is probably that, when it comes down to it, very few self-help books stimulate more than very temporary change and almost none of them will change your life/business/relationship/etc. for the better.  The …

Read moreThe 3 Books That Every eBay Seller Should Read

During our first year on eBay, we had 1,048 sales.   eBay quickly evolved from a way to get rid of a few things around the house to a part- time business which makes us more than my full time job.  The road hasn’t been smooth, however – during the past year we’ve had huge sales, slow times, some returns, and even a suspension.  Through it all, we’ve learned from our mistakes and bounced back to push profits higher than ever!  Here are the 5 most important lessons we’ve learned from selling on eBay:  1. DON’T BE AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES A  lot of people are paralyzed with fear and so have never really taken off on eBay.  You can see this type of person on forums or Facebook pages, constantly asking questions and providing little value in return; “How much should I list this for?  How do I pack this? Why haven’t I sold …

Read moreWhat we learned from our first 1,000 eBay sales

For the past year or so, our blog post on How To Refresh Your RSS Feed on eBay has been one of our most popular articles.  It was a super easy way to give your posts a quick boost in search results and increase your sales through exposure.  That is, until the 24th of June 2018.  We have known for awhile that the RSS Feed function was going to die “sometime in late June” since the release of the 2018 Seller’s Update but it was still a blow when it finally disappeared.  We say “disappeared”, but the reality is, the only thing that disappeared is the ability of seller’s to see and manually refresh their feed.  According the the Seller Update, RSS Feeds are either outdated or will automatically be taken care of for sellers.  So what to do?  Our vote is to not worry about it!  There are other things you can do that will have …

Read moreWhat happened to the eBay RSS Feed Reset?!

If you have been around the business world for any length of time (or read many self help books), you’ve likely heard of the Pareto Principle.  More commonly known as the 80/20 Principle (also, The Law of the Vital Few or the Principle of Factor Sparsity, depending on what circle you run in), the Pareto Principle started as a simple observation by a French Economist named (surprise!) Vilfredo Pareto.  He noted that, in most situations, 80 percent of the effects were a result of only 20% of the causes – or, in other words, you get 80% of the output from only 20% of the input. Now that you’ve heard of it, you’ll start noticing the Pareto Principle in every facet of your life.  (In other news, the experience of first learning a new word or some bit of information and then seeing it everywhere is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon).  For example, in a classroom or …

Read moreUsing the Pareto Principle to Make More Money in Less Time