eBay

REVIEWING AND IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN; ACHIEVING THE GOAL INTRODUCTION At this point in the proceedings you have spent all your time planning your project; you have still not set out on the journey. It is not an exaggeration to say that the ... [full story]

The Silver Bullet In 1987, along with most of the rest of the software industry, I read Fred Brooks' famous article No Silver Bullet (1987). (For those of you who don't know – it must be my age because there was ... [full story]

Financial Statements You measure all your financial activity via a series of numerical reports that we call, in general, financial statements. There are two key financial statements for any business: the income statement and the balance sheet. Income Statement An income statement is ... [full story]

Assets and Liabilities Revenues, expenses, and profits are used to describe what your business does; assets and liabilities describe what your business owns and owes. Here's how they're defined: Assets. Assets are those items that you own. Assets can be in the ... [full story]

Revenues, Expenses, and Profits Three related concepts are key to the running of any business: Revenues. Revenues (also called sales) are the dollars you generate by selling your products. There are two types of revenues: gross revenues and net revenues. Gross revenues ... [full story]

Managing Your Time The whole point of hiring employees is to help you better manage your personal time. What's the point of making a lot of money from an eBay business if you have to work 20 hours a day to ... [full story]

How Big Is Too Big? As you can see, it costs more (in both time and money) to run a bigger business than it does to run a smaller one. At some point you'll need to ask yourself just how big ... [full story]

Hiring Additional Employees Space isn't the last of your problems. The more items you sell, the more physical work you have to do. As your weekly sales increase from 10 items to 100 to 1,000, how do you handle all the ... [full story]

Finding More Space Naturally, the more inventory you buy, the more space you need to store it. If you're running your eBay business out of your house, there will come a time when you simply run out of room. Short of ... [full story]

Locating More Merchandise to Sell As you grow your business, you have to feed more merchandise into the pipeline. That means somehow obtaining more inventory to sell; you don't want to be constrained by product availability. How do you beef up your ... [full story]

Analyzing Your Business As your eBay business grows, it's increasingly important for you to analyze your business's performance. That's because lots of sales don't always translate into lots of profits. Let's take the example of a businessperson I know who had grown ... [full story]

Other Selling Sites If you want to skip the auction format, there are a few sites let you sell your merchandise at a fixed pricekind of like selling an item with a Buy It Now price or in an eBay Store. Amazon ... [full story]

Other Online Auction Sites While eBay is far and away the largest online auction site today, it's not the only one. You can use several other online auctions, many of which feature lower fees than you pay to eBay. (Some even ... [full story]

Utilizing a Prepackaged Storefront The easiest way to create an online store-front is to let somebody else do it for you. Several of the big auction services' sites offer prepackaged web storefronts you can use to sell both auction and nonauction merchandise. ... [full story]

Building Your Own Merchant Site from Scratch Prepackaged storefronts are fine, but if you want a truly full-featured web storefront, independent of stock layouts and generic checkout systems, you'll need to build your own e-commerce website from scratch. This is a ... [full story]

Earn Referral Fees There's an added incentive for spreading your eBay Store URL around to as many websites as possible. That's because you earn eBay credit when you refer people from other sites to your eBay Store. Earning credit is as simple ... [full story]

Promoting Your eBay Store One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don't promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for ... [full story]

Promoting Your eBay Store One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don't promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for ... [full story]

How to Set Up an eBay Store Opening your own eBay Store is as easy as clicking through eBay's setup pages. There's nothing overly complex involved; you'll need to create your store, customize your pages (otherwise known as your virtual storefront), ... [full story]

The Costs of Running an eBay Store Naturally, opening an eBay Store costs money. (eBay isn't in this for the betterment of mankind, after all.) You pay a monthly fee to be an eBay Store merchant, choosing from three subscription levels, ... [full story]

Do You Qualify? Just about any seller can open his or her own eBay Store. All you have to do is meet the following criteria: Be a registered eBay seller, with credit card on file Have a feedback rating of 20 or more, ... [full story]

Benefits of Opening Your Own eBay Store Why would you want to open your own eBay Store? Well, it certainly isn't for casual sellers; you have to set up your own web page and keep the store filled with merchandise, both ... [full story]

What Is an eBay Store? An eBay Store, like the one shown in Figure 27.1, is a web page where you can sell fixed-price items that are not currently up for auction on eBay. Your eBay Store also contains all the ... [full story]

Offering Books, CDs, and DVDs on Half.com As if there weren't enough selling options already, eBay also owns a site called Half.com (half.ebay.com). Half.com lets anyone sell certain types of merchandise in a fixed-price format. List your items for sale, wait ... [full story]

Obtaining Additional Exposure with eBay Express eBay Express (express.ebay.com) is an odd bird. As you can see in Figure 26.1, eBay Express is eBay's attempt to provide a fixed-priced marketplace for buyers intimidated or otherwise put off by the online auction ... [full story]

Ten Tips for Achieving PowerSeller Statusor Just Increasing Your Day-to-Day Sales The key to becoming a PowerSeller is to increase the number of auctions you closeand to increase your final selling prices. To that end, anything you can do to make ... [full story]

How to Become a PowerSeller The main eBay PowerSellers page (pages.ebay.com/services/buyandsell/welcome.html) offers more information about the PowerSellers program. This is also where you go if want to become a PowerSeller. But the thing is, you can't become a PowerSeller just by asking. ... [full story]

PowerSeller Benefits There are reasons to become a PowerSeller, beyond the obvious one of making lots of money. eBay offers PowerSellers better support, more information, and a few other decent perks. In fact, each level in the PowerSeller program comes with ... [full story]

Do You Qualify? To become a PowerSeller, you must meet the following requirements: Average a minimum of $1,000 in sales per month, for three consecutive months Maintain a minimum of four average monthly total item listings for three straight months Have been an active ... [full story]

What Is a PowerSeller? PowerSellers are the most profitable sellers on the eBay site; that is, they generate the most profits for eBay. They don't necessarily sell the most merchandise; instead, they generate the most revenue, which is how eBay generates ... [full story]

Using eBay's Seller Resources When it comes to promoting your auctions, the eBay site itself offers a lot of resources for sellers. Most of this help is informational in nature, and almost all of it is free. A good place to start ... [full story]

Other Ways to Advertise Your Auctions Where else can you advertise the items you have for auction on eBay? Here are some ideas you might want to explore: Send emails to previous customers when you have new items for auction that they ... [full story]