Most people start selling on eBay by listing used stuff from around their house. This is an excellent way to get familiar with how eBay works. But you can’t make a sustainable business doing that – eventually you’ll have nothing left to sell! Many people take this a step further and actively seek out stuff to sell on eBay at carboot sales, jumble sales, pound stores, charity shops, auctions, pawnbrokers, etc.

Many people make a living selling antiques and collectibles on eBay – but you really need to know what you are doing to do this successfully. If you are a specialist dealer or collector, you will already have the knowledge of where to get items in your niche and what they are worth. If you are NOT a specialist dealer or collector, I recommend that you forget the idea of making a living selling used items on eBay.

Scouring markets, charity shops, carboot sales, conventional auctions and online auctions for used items to buy at a bargain and sell at a profit on eBay is very time consuming and not very efficient. It takes a lot of time to find the products and do your research on eBay to ensure that you can sell it at a profit before you buy it.

And as each item is a one-off, you will have to take unique photos, compile a unique listing, obtain unique packaging and calculate the correct postage, etc for each listing. And there is no guaranteed source of repeat products to sell.

Unless you are an antiques/collectibles dealer, it’s going to be VERY difficult for you to make a decent living selling used goods. When you aren’t finding new products and listing them, you aren’t selling anything, so you aren’t making any money. Your earnings will be dependent on the time you spend working and you will be tied to your eBay business. You can’t automate your business and it’s virtually impossible to scale up your business. Instead of maximizing your income while minimizing your effort, you will be maximizing your effort but minimizing your income!

Also, one of the best things about eBay, and one of the reasons why you can start an eBay business with very low risk, is it’s easy to TEST everything at little or no cost and make adjustments until you are MAXIMIZING YOUR INCOME whilst MINIMIZING YOUR EFFORT. You can’t test a one-off single item so you may end up making a mistake that you can’t rectify next time because there won’t be a “next time”.

Ideally, you need to be selling the same item over and over again so that you can AUTOMATE the process and so MAXIMIZE YOUR INCOME whilst MINIMIZING YOUR EFFORT. One of the easiest ways to do this is to secure a regular, dependable supply of new products.

Martyn Boaden

This post is based on an extract taken from The Lazy Way To Wealth On eBay