If you want to sell tons of items on Ebay........

[Anthony1]

Let's say that you were going to run a full fledged business of selling games on Ebay to try to make a living.

You are going to want to have tons of auctions running all the time.

Can you pay some type of monthly fee to have unlimited auctions or anything like that?


I mean, if you want to sell mass quanities of stuff on Ebay, how would you go about it?

[Gamereviewgod]

E-Bay stores would be the cheapest route. There should be a FAQ somewhere on thr site.

[v1rich]

Ebay stores is nice.

To have a store you pay 15.95 per month (was 9.95)
Costs about .03 per month to list an item with a single picture and gallery.
Comissions are like 8% or so (see ebay, was same as auction comissions but were recently raised).
BIN only for stores.
You can get a 50% final value fee reimbursement for successful advertising of your store, ie you have a link to your store somewhere and add a query string to the url, ie http://stores.ebay.com/Retro-Gaming-...s?&refid=store Everything from the ? mark on. If someone goes to your store from that link and buys something in that session you get the final value credit (only for store items).
Ebay stores have sales reports available in multiple formats (quickbooks, csv) that list all of the costs associated with the sales as well as the final prices etc. Helpful for accounting for all your costs.

You can list a bunch of desireable items in your store for a moderately high sale price and use auctions to "advertise". Selling something highly desireable gets a lot of attention and if you are lucky some of the traffic will spill over into your store.

One of the biggest criticisms of ebay by the major corporations is that they have to pay the same comissions as everyone else, sort of a level playing field in ebay's eyes. They do not give reduced comissions.

If you are going to do something like this you will definitely need some kind of database system or record tracking system to keep track of all your costs etc or else you could be losing money and not even know it. Also I think that starting out big is going to be a major headache. You are definitely going to feel some anguish when an auction you are running gets overlooked, the buyer does not pay, or you are not able to get what you want for your items. For me ebay stores helps me a lot to get what I want for my items as they are listed very infrequently and many people give up waiting and just buy it for the price I have set which is higher than the price it would get at auction at any given time.

Ebay is the best place to buy shipping supplies. Paypal offers a deal where you can print shipping labels for US addresses for a reduced price. A scale for weighing the stuff and printing labels is essential for saving time at the post office. Don't skimp on the packaging or you will regret it. I personnally get tracking on almost every item I sell for that piece of mind.

Good luck. I thought about doing this myself but I did not want to start a company so that i can get stuff wholesale, get tax breaks, etc.

[WanganRunner]

I'm just starting with my ebay store, but it seems like a pretty decent idea.

You just have to make sure you've got enough desirable inventory to make having the store worthwhile.

If you're only going to have a couple of items here and there, it probably isn't worth it to fork over $15/month for an ebay store.

Getting the Tax ID and all that crap for wholesale is only sorta useful anyway, as you can't make a huge ton of money on new items. If anyone has good ideas about how to build up serious quantites of USED inventory, without having to buy it on ebay in the first place, I'm all ears.

[Lost Monkey]

Ebay stores are useless as they don't generate any traffic...

If there are 5 or more similar items on all of eBay, your store items will not show up in searches... You will have to bring almost all of the traffic you get yourself.

With the impending fee increases I decided to close mine.. I had an average of 500 items in the store and I sold about 5 items per week out of it...