eBay™ Strategies: 10 Proven Methods to Maximize Your eBay Business [Paperback]

There are businesses earning $1 million a year selling products on eBay, and, according to Wingo, who consults for the Web site’s sellers through his firm ChannelAdvisor, the Darwinian rule of eBay is that your business must grow or die. As Wingo makes clear, this is not a primer for beginners: it’s for experienced sellers who want to take their business to the next level. Most of the book elaborates on Wingo’s five P’s for eBay success: product (choosing product, understanding its life cycle), price (the price/velocity curve), promotion (e.g., using the eBay search engine to your advantage), placement (choosing the right category for your products) and performance (how to measure it). There’s lots of eBay and business terminology, but concise chapter summaries review key terms and concepts and provide exercises. For experienced eBay sellers who want to grow their business, this is a clear, concise and useful tool.
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Over a million people actively sell on eBay. Of those over million sellers, eBay recently reported that over 400,000 make a full-time living from their eBay business. These numbers are increasing rapidly every month. eBay drop off centers, like AuctionDrop, are opening at an incredible pace. There are now late-nite infomercials about selling on eBay that show people jumping off their giant yacht purchased with massive eBay profits!

The number of buyers on eBay is increasing as well with over 105 million registered global users, 45 million of which are "active," having bid, bought or sold in the last 12 months.

Even with the increasing number of buyers, sellers are finding selling on eBay is increasingly more competitive. Average selling prices across eBay are decreasing, each category has sellers that sell over $50,000 a month and capture large portions of marketshare which allows them to buy at cheaper prices, pricing those savings on to buyers thus creating a continuing price war amongst other sellers.

While sellers compete primarily on price, other factors such as feedback, branding, promotion and merchandising in addition to price determine who buyers find on eBay and ultimately buy from.

Get Big Fast...Given the competitive environment on eBay, many sellers are going out of business because they are simply being out sold by their competitors. eBay's stated goal is to make inefficient markets efficient. Unfortunately the more efficient the various markets, or categories become, the fewer competitive advantages sellers have. In fact in many categories the only competitive advantage left is size and the ability to source products less expensively than competitors.

With this in mind, if you are selling on eBay and want to survive, I believe you have to grow your business rapidly to stay competitive with the rest of your peer group. If you do not, you will not survive the Darwinian nature of eBay. Unfortunately, until this book, there was no guide for what to do after you mastered the "basics" of selling on eBay. This book provides you with two tools that have been proven to generate rapidly growing eBay businesses:

1. Ten very specific strategies, or methods, that you can begin using immediately to scale your business are provided with details.
2. A framework for thinking strategically about your eBay business is presented called the Five Ps. The Five Ps are: Price, Product, Promotion, Placement and Performance.

By using both of these tools, you will be able to not only take your business to the level, but quite possibly grow your business to be a million dollar a year business.

Where Do the Strategies Come From?I'm the founder of a company called ChannelAdvisor. At ChannelAdvisor for the last five years we have helped businesses of all sizes sell on eBay. From the smallest individuals to the large home-grown eBay business like GlacierBayDVD (the largest DVD seller on eBay) to enterprises such as BestBuy, IBM and The Sharper Image we provide the software and services that power these businesses.In the course of working with over 3000 eBay businesses, we have developed the strategies and the Five P framework and tested them over and over improving them along the way. In fact the strategies in this book drive most of the $1,000,000/month sellers on eBay and a large percentage of all the $1,000,000/yr eBay businesses.

We decided that these strategies are too important to just share with a closed group of sellers, but the whole community should benefit from them and decided to publish the best, most proven strategies in this book.

In fact, you will find throughout the book, I prefer to use the pronoun "we" versus "I" because I can not take credit for the creation of these strategies and feel the we more accurately represents that the content of this book was basically created by a team of over sixty folks working very hard for the last five years. I'm fortunate enough to be the person that has gathered all of the "best practices" here in a format that I hope you feel is easy to understand, digest and come back to again and again as you try the different strategies.

Is This Book for You?If you want to take your eBay business to the next level, this book will give you the foundation for doing so. If you want to build a million dollar a year eBay business, this book will save you a great deal of time and effort getting there.

Based on the competitive nature of eBay, if you're a seller and don't want to grow your business, then most likely you will be forced out of business or best case have to change categories every year or so. Fortunately, even if you don't want to scale your business, this book will help you carve out a niche that will be more sustainable than without the strategies outlined here.

PrerequisitesSo that we can focus on more advanced topics, this book assumes that you have a general knowledge of selling on eBay. For example, you won't find any screen shots of the "Sell Your Item" (commonly known as SYI) part of eBay. You should understand the basic way that the eBay auction process, the different listing options, and the after sales process.

If you don't have a general knowledge of selling on eBay In addition to the excellent on-site help and tools provided by eBay, we recommend one of the many "how to" eBay books such as The eBay Bible, eBay Selling for Dummies, and eBay Hacks.

If you do have general selling knowledge, the book does recap some of the areas you may be rusty in or don't remember off the top of your head such as the various eBay listing upgrade options and fee table.

This book was designed to be the book you read after you have read the "how to" books to figure out how to grow your business from the basics.

Book FeaturesThe book is designed to not only be read from cover-to-cover, but also as a useful reference. Starting with Chapter 4, each chapter ends in a real-world case study that not only introduces you to an interesting eBay business, but also illustrates the concepts of the chapter and how that eBay seller has leveraged the strategy.

Each chapter ends in a detailed chapter summary so that 3, 6, 9, 12 months after you have read the book and you want to brush up on a topic such as Pricing, covered in Chapter 4, you can read the two to three page summary for a refresher. Think of it as Cliff Notes for eBay strategies.

The book also introduces a good bit of terminology that may be new to you that you will need along the journey of scaling your eBay business. All of the terminology is defined in-line in the chapters, as well as summarized in the chapter summaries and all gathered together in the TODO appendix. If you can't remember a specific term, there are three places where you can find it.

Beyond the BookAs you know, selling on eBay is a fluid, ever-changing business. That is part of the fun. With this in mind, two supplemental web-based resources are provided to readers of the book.