My ebay career of about 13 sales over ten years has pretty much come to a screeching halt after my last round of listings. Someone bought a Snugli from me for pennies, then complained I didn’t wash it well enough. This, after I spent half the day listing the product and half a day packaging it, plus I spent extra money on shipping. I think I actually lost money on the deal, certainly I did if you include my valuable time.
I do find it interesting, though, the types of things people sell on ebay. For example, I see thousands of coupons are sold daily. This is interesting to me, considering many coupons have clauses which say they can’t be sold. Hmm, maybe auctions don't count as selling? I wonder why ebay allows this. These coupons, though, are going for big bucks, sometimes full coupon value.
Another amazing product on ebay is sales of UPC codes and soup labels. It’s so popular, ebay’s even given them their own category. When I was a kid my mom would always save soup labels for the school fundraising campaigns. I would be in the doghouse if I accidentally threw one away back then. Now I see these are worth up to ten bucks for a hundred. Not bad.
It’s very easy to go into business on ebay – the barrier to entry is basically nonexistent. Ebay’s even purchased the site prostores.com to make it easy to set up your own company. Prostores offers five reasons to list your product through them:
- easy setup – just takes minutes
- no additional work
- you can sell more
- attract new customers with free submissions to Google and other marketing tools
- they give you your own web address
With my past Ebay selling history, I can’t say it’s a business I will be starting anytime soon, maybe this will be helpful to someone out there!
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