Can eBay Make You Rich? 235
adamlazz writes "For 11 years, eBay has been a great resource to buy or sell goods without leaving your computer. And with many stories of people getting rich exclusively from doing business on eBay, NewsFactor has decided to go in depth with these stories, and explore what it takes to really make your million on eBay. From the article: 'A tiered system designed to reward qualified sellers, the PowerSeller program is by invitation only, and has a number of criteria that must be maintained to keep the designation. At the lowest level, Bronze, a PowerSeller must average at least $1,000 in sales per month for three consecutive months; have an account in good standing; and get an overall feedback rating of 100, with at least 98 percent of the comments marked as positive.'"
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:3, Informative)
however, death & taxes catch up (Score:4, Informative)
See an explanation here. [thisismoney.co.uk]
Also, eBay makes UK users fill out an anti-money-laundering form and performs an additional verification once a paypal account receives £4500 (US$8300). This probably goes into the UK Gov anti money laundering and terrorist profiling systems.
Most IT folks who run home businesses should structure them carefully, because they could be subject to higher rate tax of 40% on profits plus 17.5% VAT. If you setup your ebay/paypal account as a limited company then you will only pay 25% tax and VAT can be paid as an offset percentage (agree with tax man) between 9 and 17.5%.
rd
ebay WAS good for me.. (Score:3, Informative)
It was a good business and a good extra income, I sold old items and collectibles that I managed to buy in Portugal for what I believe the stuff ws 'really' worth and then sold it on ebay where I coud get a good profit. The main things that made me quit Ebay were
1) The raise of Euro - When the US Dollar was high it was VERY profitable to sell stuff on the US not only did I made some profit from the Item but the dollar value was good for me.
2) The raise of fees by Ebay.
3) PayPal - more and more peolple want to pay with paypal, and that eats profits BAD.
4) The decline of the market.
I do believe you can get rich by using ebay but, if you live in acountry where the 'money is cheap compare to USD' youll get much better quicker
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Making a living on eBay (Score:5, Informative)
I do it just about every week (make a living off of eBay). I left a shitty office job with a decent chunk of savings in my bank account, deciding to live off of my savings until I needed to find another shitty office job to subsidize my writing and art ambitions.
It's a couple of months later, and with the exception of one week where I had to take a few bucks out of savings, eBay has paid for my gas, groceries, cable, etc. And the week after I had to dip in I was able to replace the money with an eBay surplus.
People complain about eBay and PayPal fees, but don't seem to get that eBay is providing the world's stage for you; it's the best damn advertising you can get. Yes, eBay has some ridiculous policies, but there are ways to work with them, and around them. For example, when I send out a package I include an enclosure with my name and website and an invitation for a future order. As previously stated by other
In fact, that's how the lion's share of my large orders come from. Someone buys one off of eBay, then comes back and spends a couple of hundred bucks with me, off eBay. I guess someone would say that that wasn't really making money off of eBay, but I disagree; I would never have found that customer otherwise.
As to PayPal, you just have to be careful with them. They are HEAVILY slanted toward the buyer, and their fees can be noticable. However, it is so convenient it is worth it for me. I have a PayPal debit card that I use for everything (and get 1% cash back instantly with each purchase, which helps ease the pain) and I never have to bother with money orders and checks and waiting and all that B.S. For orders under twenty bucks I don't worry about it, but I get delivery confirmation on anything above that to protect myself as much as possible.
Now, I completely realize that this could dry up tomorrow, that eBay sales and the follow-up sales won't last forever, but right now it sure is nice to be working no more than 90 minutes a day and making enough to live off of. I get great pleasure in making nice packages for people to recieve as well, and I have time to live my life instead of living in a cubicle. What it takes to make it on eBay is to understand how it works, and to know what will give you the best profits. Selling old clothes for
I guess the moral is don't quit your day job...unless you have the savings to back it up in case it doesn't work out and you have a decent mind for business and a good product to sell.
AE
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo! Auctions.
Yahoo! does not charge ANYTHING to list, sell or buy. When enough people start switching to Yahoo! auctions, it will put eBay out of business. Yahoo! ought to actually start a new site, use the same software to run it, and advertise it on television the way eBay does with their site. eBay also actually has a contest with the US Postal Service - there are actually ads in the Post Office to get people to enter an eBay contest.
Add to that the fact that PayPal (owned by eBay) charges you a fee on the TOTAL price (including shipping & handling) - you end up paying eBay TWICE.
It's time to stop paying eBay and start using services that actually make sense for the seller.
Hopefully Yahoo! will purchase StormPay or any of the other online payment services, keep the fees low there and take down the eBay behemoth.
Re:Making a living on Slashdot. (Score:4, Informative)
LOL, and I see even less about you than that, since you are Anonymous Coward.
No "wonder product" for me, the portion you quoted was simply the distillation of what I've learned, not a singular description of how I'm doing it at the moment. By "a good product to sell", I mean not the modly clothes out of your basement (even if they *DO* still have the tags on them, LOL), no product in particular (at least for me).
As to what products I sell personally, I started with stuff I already had. I've been moving dozens of boxes around since college and finally cleaned them out - from MIB action figures to vintage books, anything I didn't really want any more I got rid of. Then once I started learning how eBay "worked" by exhausting that supply, I looked for products that weren't already deluged with sellers (i.e., don't start trying to sell cell phone accessories...), or that were especially good bargains at retail and resold them.
For instance, I'll go to Ciruit City and find some video game accessory inexplicably marked down to a ridiculous price (like $2.99 for a game shark-type device), and resell it for $20-50 on eBay (many sales like that are reigonal, or when an item is stopping being manufactured, so people in other locations that are already sold out or never had the sale push demand). I go to Circuit City, Best Buy, Staples, stores like that every week or two anyway, so I was already seeing these types of bargains (it's not something I go out intentionally to do).
Lately I've found reselling DVDs, especially to non-US buyers, to be extremely profitable. Multi-standard DVD players and TV's are much more common in other countries, and they have to pay local importer specialty shops tons to get NTSC, or Reigion 1, exclusive titles (especially certain genres of boxed set). They pay huge premiums for the service (sometimes double to triple what they can pay to have it shipped and pay the duties themselves). They'd rather buy off of eBay, especially since places like Amazon won't ship non-reigion local DVDs to them.
Now, if you go to sell a title there are already 36 copies of out there for buy-it-now's of $8.88, then no, you won't make any cash. So it's not fool-proof, you have to actually figure out what is rare, accquire the product here (new or used), and get it up there. And by maintaining a simple list out there via free web hosting, I was able to list the titles available and take direct orders once the eBay contact was made.
That's just one example. One I'm sharing because I've started selling something totally different in the past week or two and I'm winding down with the DVDs for now, I think. That new one I won't share - have to keep some secrets.
It's funny, because I would never define myself as someone who makes a "living" off of eBay, until I read this article and actually realized it's really what is happening. I left my last job expecting to at least take the summer off and wholly live off of my savings, but each week I found myself being able to get by just with eBay. I don't expect it to last forever, and I have no designs of becoming a "power seller", but at the moment it's working for me.
AE
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why couldn't you get rich via EBay? (Score:3, Informative)
No, those comments can't be removed. Ebay claims they can, however they really don't do much about it. I had excellent feedback for the longest time, then I bought an item from one of the mega-sellers. I followed the sellers instructions after winning the auction, paying promptly. The seller claimed he would email me a confirmation when he received payment and would provide me with a UPS tracking number. I waited a week, then emailed the seller requesting the status of my item, to which I didn't receive a response. A few days later I sent another email, and again received no response. Finally about six weeks later (still without receiving any response from the seller, and after sending him numerous additional emails) I received the item I purchased. The item arrived fine, exactly as described and packaged well, however I decided to leave negative feedback because of the seller's failure to respond to my inquiries.
The seller then left me a negative feedback saying "ship next day after receiving pmt buyer leaves neg what a jerk!!!" Ebay calls this retalitory feedback, and after several inquiries (to which I received form-letter responses) eBay told me there was nothing they could do to remove it.