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When you think about how many people are making a living on eBay do you find yourself asking the following questions:

1. How can I start selling without much feedback?

2. Where can I find hot-selling products for my eBay business?

3. How on earth can eBay powersellers offer such ridiculously low prices… and still make a profit?

It would take a long time to find all the answers by yourself, but with the information below you will be able to take some shortcuts to success.

Starting Your eBay Business  – Building  Up Your Feedback

How can you quickly build up fantastic feedback for your eBay business?

1. Firstly you can purchase some inexpensive items and get your first few feedbacks from sellers.  Look for cheap music CD’s for only a few dollars each and place bids on them. You can get 10 or more feedbacks without selling anything at all.

2. Next, find some very low-ticket priced items that are small and light eg cheap jewelry, sunglasses, playing cards, etc.  You could also re-sell some of the items you bought in step 1- if you buy carefully you can make a profit.  If you have unwanted items in the house selling those can also get you started.

3. Launch a lot of items as low-ticket auctions with no reserve.  You just want to sell as many items as you can in the shortest time.  You can sell large amounts of small items regardless of how much feedback you have.  Bigger, more expensive products usually require more feedback to gain an eBay buyer’s trust.

4. Repeat the above process until you have at least 50 positive feedback ratings on your eBay account.  Be sure to provide fast shipping and courteous customer service to ensure only positive feedback. You will also now have gained experience of using eBay which will help you build your business.

It doesn’t matter what you intend to sell in the long run – this method will get you started and that is the important thing.

Where Can You Find Hot Products?

Once you have made a start on eBay you will need to buy larger amounts of stock.

eBay itself can be a source for many products. Look for wholesale lots that can be re-sold as individual items.

The best batch of items I ever bought on eBay was found by coincidence. I was checking out the competition for some batteries I was selling and spotted an auction with no bids with a start price of .01 for 100s of items.

I then looked at the sellers other items and found a lot more auctions with very few bids all for large batches of batteries.  I bid last minute and won nearly all of them for low prices.  Okay, so it took me a year to sell it all (there were several thousand items) BUT I got ten times my money back even after allowing for shipping and ebay fees.

There are many other sources of products from wholesalers to buying directly from China and I go into more detail of all these in Sourcing Secrets Revealed.

How Do Other Sellers Make A Profit?

Here’s one of my top tips – Buy from your competitors!

That may sound a crazy thing to do but when I added up the costs involved in what one of my competitors was selling I found that even if they got the item free they would be making a loss!

So what are they doing? It must be one of the following:

1. They haven’t added up their expenses and are making a loss!
This is something you must get right – allow for listings fees, final valuation fees, shipping and product cost.

2. They are using eBay for traffic and/or using upsells
They may be adding people to their mailing list, or sending them to their website. They could be selling people additional items eg eBooks or other products that are complimentary in some way.

Either way if they are selling a lot the best thing to do is to buy one of their items and see what happens. What emails do you receive? Do they include an offers sheet with the item etc ?

You may want to buy from each of the biggest sellers in your chosen niche and copy the best ideas.

NB If you are just starting out this will help build your feedback, and you can also re-sell the products you bought to test out your listing skills.

If other people are selling a lot then they have done some of the hard work for you – finding out what sells.

There are many methods for obtaining information from other eBayers and you can read about all of these with  detailed steps and screenshots  in Sourcing Secrets Revealed

I hope you all do well with your eBay businesses, and if anyone hasn’t started yet perhaps this blog post will encourage you to take the first steps.

Keith Purkiss

This is a guest blog post exclusively written for my blog readers by Keith Purkiss

If you want to be considered for a guest blog post please contact me