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kiwidownunder

Any one sell on EBAY?

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I was just wondering if anyone out there sells their wares on Ebay? Do you think that it is worth doing? I do not, but it has crossed my mind lately. Your thoughts would be wonderful on the subject please. Also I have looked at Amazon.com.

THANKS.

Kiwi. :coffeecomp:

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i sell on ebay and have been quite happy with the results....but then again i dont sell anywhere else...i dont do markets, take orders or advertise....i just make what i feel like and hope someone wants to buy it...i am lucky in a way as no one else has hand made leather masks for sale on aussie ebay, so no competition or cheap chinese imports.

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Ukray sells on eBay a lot I think he would be the one to ask but there are others to, that having been said I don't like it I think they drain to much out of a sale there was a thread about eBay called eBay feebay you might be interested in that

Happy trails

Josh

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I was just wondering if anyone out there sells their wares on Ebay? Do you think that it is worth doing? I do not, but it has crossed my mind lately. Your thoughts would be wonderful on the subject please. Also I have looked at Amazon.com.

THANKS.

Kiwi. :coffeecomp:

Have you checked out etsy.com?

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Ukray sells on eBay a lot I think he would be the one to ask but there are others to, that having been said I don't like it I think they drain to much out of a sale there was a thread about eBay called eBay feebay you might be interested in that

Happy trails

Josh

Josh is quite right, I do sell quite a bit on eBay and providing you build in sufficient profit margin to make it worthwhile it is a good place to sell. Personally, I don't have any problems and I shift a reasonable amount of stock without trying too hard. What is it you want to know? I'm happy to help in any way I can.

Ray

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Have you checked out etsy.com?

My son & I just started on etsy. It's all handcrafted/handmade stuff.

russ

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I used to sell on Ebay. I haven't sold anything there for a long time. I was browsing it just yesterday though and there seems to be a lot f competition in hand tooled leathergoods. I know I wouldn't sell my cases there because the fees to list at my starting prices would be around $2-5 a listing.

It's probably worth having a store though and running a few auctions a month. Back when I did Ebay a lot I didn't really have enough permanent stuff to have an Ebay store but the fees seemed reasonable back then.

Almost everything I ever listed was listed in true auction style at no reserve and that's pretty risky. Even at that I made it to PowerSeller with what I did have for sale, mostly refurbished cue cases and custom pool cues.

One of the BEST sales I had was the Worthless Pool Cue Sale. I had about 50 cues that had been bought from a new China supplier and they turned out to be junk. Wraps coming off, warped and so on. So I sorted them out and listed them at no reserve and had shipping on each one at $10. I figured if I got $5 for each one then it would be great. They started moving for $15-$25 bucks each and people actually liked them. I was getting freat feedback on these cues as well as good publicity for the title of the auction and the fact that I was advertising them as junk.

All in all I made nearly $800 on these cues.

I tell you what though, I see Ebay as a place where you can reach a huge audience and say what you want to say. You live and die on Ebay with two things, how good your pitch is and how good your pictures are. Doing your auctions the right way and answering any and all possible questions in the auction will gain you repeat customers.

The great thing about Ebay is that you can learn to write your auctions in such a way as to get found in a lot of searches and that get your auction in front of a lot of viewers. I generally opted for the lowest cost insertion but always paid extra for the supersize/highlight option - it was like .75cts more. I believe that my listings were right at $2 per and I almost always did the 10 day listing.

So I guess if you make budget and say that you are going to spend x-amount "advertising" on Ebay then it might turn out really well for you. If you are going to not put some decent effort into your auctions then I'd advise you not to do it because you will get eaten alive by the competition there.

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There's a site in the UK called www.folksy.com that is like etsy but UK based.

I'm seriously thinking of starting back up on ebay hough so if anyone has any good ideas as to how to maximise your chances there I'd be glad of them!

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I sell a lot on eBay. You can do well if you put some effort into it. John is right good pictures and a good but not overly wordy description sells your items. I always run basic auction starting at a dollar. Is it risky? I used to think so but experience has proven that wrong. On the other hand I had very little luck with fixed price listings.

Ask yourself when you do your listings what you would want to see and know if you were a potential buyer. Answer all questions no matter how stupid they appear to be and offer a reasonable return priveledge. It works and you can make money.

eBay has changed a lot since I started selling there in 98. I don't agree with a lot of the changes but it's their site and their rules. I'll stick with them as long as I can still make money.

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My thoughts on Ebay.

Ebay allows you to have a platform that is truly equal where you can be as visible as you want to be depending on how much work you put in. You aren't beat out by the fact that someone has a bigger advertising budget, a bigger store, a better location, is cozy with the market owners, gets preferential treatment (although I am sure some would dispute this), and so on.

Want to know the POWER of EBAY?

This is why EBAY works, it is one of the only places where a seller can buy an item from one person at one price from another seller and sell the EXACT SAME item to another person at a higher price in the same "place".

Except that unlike the real world these cyber-stores do not exist side by side UNLESS the viewer positions them that way. These stores all EXIST in same space stacked like a deck of cards that the user shuffles through using searches to find what they want. Change the search criteria a little bit and viola you have a whole new set of shops to look at.

So Ebay is PERFECT for the small dealer to compete with the big dealer because (given certain rules) you can say just about anything you want to say about your product, you can compare it to anyone else's, you can put up as many pictures and go as in-depth as you like. And chances are that if you put the effort in that you will get the buyers who like what you have to say and what you do. This is because when someone on Ebay types in "custom leather belt" they are "just looking" and how well you do your job determines what chance you have to get that business. You can also see where the majority of your competition is at on price and this includes not only those who sell imported goods but also those who sell goods that they themselves make domestically.

Here you can make a decision to be a follower or a leader. You can fall in-line with what everyone else charges or you can value your work at a higher level. The thing is that you will need to justify in a non-defensive and positive way why your prices are higher. This is the magic in the whole thing. IF you can connect with people's sense of value then you will find that Ebay can be productive for you. In essence your goods are right there right beside everyone else's, the customer comes to you and it's your job to hold them there. At that moment when they are reading your advertisement/auction they are yours with no interuption. Ebay brought them to you and what you do with them is up to you.

Some people will ONLY buy on price. No biggie, they aren't your target unless you have the lowest price in which case you need do nothing except post your prices. Other people are looking for a bargain, which is something good for a lower than it would normally cost. Some people (surely the minority on Ebay) are looking for the best no matter what the price. Your job is to make the bargain hunters believe that your goods are a bargain at twice the price and to speak to those who are looking for quality.

The last thing is that on Ebay you will get incidental business. This business comes from people who were looking for something else and somehow ended up at your space. They didn't intend to buy a new leather purse but dammit your design is so compelling and $400 is so much better than $1000 for a new Coach purse. This happens frequently because Ebay makes it's best guesses when someone is looking for something and often your ads will show up beside something completely unrelated.

So, for all of it's fees and rules Ebay is still the world's largest electronic marketplace and is still the place many people start when looking to buy something.

I use ebay for research for example when I want to look for things - sellers are motivated to provide good descriptions and historical information so I can often find out things about things that I didn't find elsewhere on the web. In the course of that research I often end up buying something :-( (usually something I don't need)

So treat Ebay as you would any other marketplace and balance the fees against the benefits of being there.

One HUGE adantage you have over people who sell premade goods is that you can pad your pricing to make up for the fees much easier than they can. Above I mentioned that on Ebay you can buy from one seller and sell at a higher price to another person all on Ebay. While that is true it's also true that everyone has access to the first seller as well which means that often the price on any given item will settle to a certain level due to competition. Since just about everyone here makes what they sell there is no competition for EXACTLY what you sell. Thus if so-and-so's hand made purse is $100 and yours is $110 then no one will care about the difference in price because both purses are different and each is unique. So you built in $10 to cover the extra fees and no one is the wiser, nor do they care.

And BE HAPPY when you pay Ebay and PayPal's fees. Why? Because it means you SOLD something!!!!

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P.S. Don't be dependent just on Ebay. Use ETSY, Amazon, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, and whatever other free or nearly free places that there are too advertise what you do. Think of the web as the sky with people drifting by on clouds who happen to drfit past one of your billboards or shops and say "gee, I want to look at this person's stuff a little more".

It's a lot of work but it's worth it and if you set it up right then your MySpace etc..... places can be practically timeless as far as the information presented is concerned.

I don't have any of that yet since I am so specialized in pool cue cases. I have plenty of business from the billiard world. But I plan to have a presence in those places down the road and if I were in the general leathergoods business then I would have them right now.

Unless of course we were so good that that we were swamped with orders. :-)

Some cue makers I know don't even have email and they have year's worth of orders. They earned their rep networking the old fashioned way, by putting a lot of rubber to the road until they got established.

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I Guys,

Thank you for all your great feed. I have just looked at all your replies. I have not been in the site for couple of days. I will also look at the Etsy.com. id not know that site. Sounds like it is good idea to look at doing an ebay site. So Thank you all so much.

I will let you know what I think once I get into it.

Happy Carving everyone.

Kiwi. :coffeecomp:

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