5 Ways to Make Money with eBay

Start with looking around your home

It was one of the first things I did before I went and bought wholesale! The first item I sold on eBay was a broken iPod nano. Yep, I sold it for about £30 and £2 shipping.

Why? Because people buy items that are faulty or broken to salvage parts, or even do them up themselves. Maybe you are a little crafty or good with tech? Look below, you could pick up a broken iPod nano for just a few £. Replace the screen and put it back on eBay for a nice tidy profit!

After you have picked your house clean, it’s time to find a niche

Before you go headlong into buying thousands of small rabbit foot necklaces or hundreds of Light up Dog Collars, it's a good idea to decide on a niche, i.e find something that you love and would enjoy selling items for! Maybe you have a love for pottery, or you really enjoy stamp collecting? Whatever it is, find a niche that you are passionate about, it makes life a lot easier down the road!

Right down all the things that you love or enjoy doing and start to think of products that have helped you with your hobby or passion.

So where do you get the goods?

Picked your niche? Great, it's time to find the right place to buy the 500 heart shaped reusable straws! You have a number of choices here;

Alibaba

The Chinese marketplace for wholesalers, with thousands upon thousands of items, you could spend hours or even days trying to find the right product on here. First search for the item that you want to buy, from here you will be shown a number of different  suppliers, with more information about the product, lead times, current production abilities and more

AliExpress

The sister site to Alibaba, you can buy smaller quantities of items here, with the aim of buying testers (many of the large wholesalers will have listings on AliExpress, so you can buy 1 - 10 of the item of your choice without having to pay high prices

Go local or closer to home!

The other two options come with some difficulties, including items being poor quality, long waiting and shipping times and mass confusion with items (I had to send 2 different shipments back due to errors and problems). You can spend ages Googling for local high-quality wholesalers, or you can go and find reputable suppliers.

If you are still stumped on where to find reputable suppliers, you can read our Salehoo Review.

Buy from other accounts

There are always smaller businesses and companies looking at selling job lots of goods that they have bought or got from other places, it can be an effective way of getting goods quickly, and for a great price. Simply look through the job lot categories on eBay and see what shows up! I used to buy job lots of closed box electronic accessories from shops that where closing, and would find some absolute gems that would pay for the whole job lot alone, without taking into account the other hundreds of items!

Now you have the items, it’s time to create great listings!

The listing is the window into your shop, it's the one time you have to REALLY sell the items you have purchased. By adding useful information, photos and videos to your listings you can show off your item.

There are a number of ways of doing this;

Create HTML Templates or get someone to do it for you

One way of doing this is to create your own HTML template.  The upside to this method is that you get a bit more freedom on how you want your listings to work and what you want to include. You can either do it yourself if you have expertise in HTML, or you can pay for someone to do it for you with sites such as FIVERR.

CrazyLister

The downside to doing it yourself is that uploading the same template to multiple listings can be an absolute ball ache, trust me, I tried. This is where tools such as CrazyLister come into play.

CrazyLister is a Drag & Drop template builder for eBay, allowing you to create brilliant sales pages easily, or use the pre-built templates that they have already. CrazyLister also allows you to apply the same template to ALL your listings instantly.

Let’s wrap this up

Well, that's it for eBay selling, it can take time to get into it, and if you are going to go for the full wholesale - resale listings then you need to ensure you look at competitors, check out how they are showing their listings, what are their faults (do they have awful customer service, are the listings all boring white pages with no information about shipping etc).

eBay became one of my best streams of revenue when I was at University, making anywhere from 20% - 200% profit per item, depending on where it came from or how I acquired it. With well over 1,000 different listings covering a huge proportion of the niche that I chose. By having such a high number of listings, you increase the chance of people finding items that they want, and also allows you to cross-sell or up-sell items by linking them in your listings.