Episode #14- Selling on eBay: I made £50,000 In 4 Months (Using These Exact Strategies)

And you'll start to see momentum building. The more products you sell, the more capital you have. And then you'll be able to buy even more products and then you'll get even more sales. And it's like an upward spiral that leads to just generating crazy revenue if you're really consistent, if you're really passionate, and you keep taking tons of action in your ebay business.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? It's Oli here. Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom podcast. So today I want to talk to you about a business that I ran a couple years ago which actually went pretty well for the short amount of time that I was doing it. And I used to run a tiny business on ebay. Now within the span of about four to five months, I think, I can't remember the exact dates, but I generated over £50,000 selling on eBay. And in today's episode I wanted to give you all the insights that I learned throughout that time. Where I found the products, how I managed to scale it up so big, so quickly so you can actually start to build your business on ebay and generate some extra capital doing just that. So before we get into this, I just want to warn you, I wouldn't recommend this as a long term business. There's not much leverage involved. It's a lot of hustle. You have to fulfill the orders yourself and things like that. Go to the post office. It's nothing like fba, but it can be quicker to get going with than Amazon in many ways. And as we go through the steps I'm going to lay out for you today, you'll see why. So let's get into it. And today, in today's episode, I want to give you everything you need to actually list an item for sale on ebay today. In fact, you could listen item on ebay whilst I'm talking to you on this podcast episode. Now you might be thinking how on earth I going to get you to do that? Well, the first place you should be looking to sell products on your ebay account is around your house. I bet you're probably sitting on about two or three grand worth of spare stuff that you can list on ebay right now and actually sell. Imagine what you could do with an extra 2 or 3k. Imagine you could launch a private Label product, import something from China. You could start an Amazon business. You could do tons of stuff with that cash. So let's get this moving, okay? I want you to look around your house and grab absolutely everything. No matter how random it is, absolutely everything that you're not using anymore. Could be old clothes, could be old bits of technology you're not using. Could be toys, could be bits of storage stuff, musical instruments, anything that you're not using. Round it up and put it into a pile. Now, some of that stuff might seem a little bit arbitrary, a little bit like nobody would buy it kind of thing, but you'll be surprised what stuff people buy on ebay and the kind of prices that that they actually will pay for it. So I think that's the first thing you should do. Round up everything in your house that you're not using right now that you could quite frankly get rid of, and let's list it on ebay. This is actually how I got started. I had a joystick and I used to plug into my computer to play. It was flight simulator. Look, I'm a geek, all right? Get over it. And I just wasn't using it anymore. So I thought, you know, I'm going to sell this on ebay. And that was with one of the first things I sold in the beginning of my business. And eventually I started to build up like a pile of stuff, like random wires, toys, old musical instruments, synthesizers, and things like that I just wasn't using. And I started to sell them. I made a few hundred pounds doing this, which at the time was incredible. So that's the first thing I want you to do. Make a pile of stuff that you just aren't using right now. So once you've got this pile, you might be thinking, well, I'm going to stick some of this stuff on ebay. But I have absolutely no idea how much to charge for each one of the items I want to sell. Shall I put it on auction? Should I do buy it now? Which price should I put? Should I put it as high as possible? Should I sell it cheap so it sells really fast? You might just be confused as to what exactly you should do. So here's what I do to decide whether products are gonna sell quickly or not on ebay, whether they're gonna sell for a profit, and to get an idea of what kind of price I should list them for, go to ebay right now. Open up the website. If you're on your phone, do it or do it later, after you've finished listening to the podcast, type something into the search bar. So if you're gonna be selling like a drum kit on ebay, then type drum kit and then go hit search and then go to the left scroll down to where it says sold listings. Click on that sold listings button and what you'll see is all the drum kits in the past few days that were actually sold. Now, let's just pause for a second and think about how valuable this data is. We can see what kind of products have been sold recently, what price they've been sold for, so we will know whether the stuff that you have is going to sell and what to price it at. Okay, so this is very valuable information. Now, obviously it's nothing compared to the data you can get from Amazon about products like bestseller ranks and all that stuff. But for ebay, it will do. For right now, we're not going to buy 500 units of something to sell on ebay. We're just selling odds and ends. So this, this is where you start. So get the pile of stuff, go through every single item in that pile and type it into the search bar. Click Sold listings, find out what it sold for previously, and then that will be your guide to for what to list it for. So let's talk about how to create product listings on ebay that actually pop, that sell, that get traction in the search results that will get your products selling quickly and making you a bit of cash. So when you put together a listing on ebay, the tempting thing to do is just to rush it, do as quickly as possible, and just get it moving. Now, from one perspective, it's better to do that than to do nothing. It's better to create a listing and get something selling than to not even bother. However, if we just spend a little bit of time making a really great listing, you'll have more chances that your product will sell. You'll be able to make more profit from your product, and it's just going to make everything better. So let's spend a couple seconds thinking about your products listing so you can kick off your ebay career with a bang. So ebay isn't like Amazon. On Amazon, if you want to sell the same product to somebody else, you'll actually share the listing with them. So usually it's a competition of who can sell it the cheapest to get the customer to buy it from you on that listing. Right? You want to battle for the buy box and all that stuff. With ebay, this isn't an issue. Everybody has their own listing for a specific product. So this is really, really powerful opportunity if you create a good enough product listing. Because think about it like this, if you get customers looking at your listing, then they're going to see only your product and your price. Now, if you can attract the right customers to look at your listing, they're not going to see the other listings on ebay. So you could charge quite a significant amount of money as long as it's within reason and the customer will still pay it. And I actually had this experience a lot when I was selling on ebay. You can price very, very high if you've optimized your listing well and it appears high up in the search results. So let' make sure that's the case. Okay? Now there's a few elements to your product listing that you want to make sure you are optimizing. The first one is the title. So when you're creating your product listing, make sure the titles full of keywords that customers would actually type in to the search results. Okay? Not like product numbers or anything like that stuff that customers would actually type in. Make sure you take photos of the stuff you're selling. Don't just copy and paste photos from the Internet. Take photos with your phone of the thing you're selling. Because customers want to see the actual product that they're going to buy. So that will actually get you more sales. Make your product sell faster. If you take photos, make sure you write a really good description. Put loads of relevant keywords in that description to describe what your product is, the condition and all that stuff. And those are the three main elements to really optimize your listing. So you got your pile of stuff, you've used these tricks to list it on ebay. Get that stuff to sell and within a few days or maybe a couple weeks, sooner or later, most of those products will sell. Not all of them, but most of them. Right? So make sure you deliver those orders on time. Use track shipping, get the stuff delivered to the customers, and within a couple weeks you'll have a little bit of spare cash now to actually start building your business. And this is an awesome place to be. You've gone from having, you know, no ebay business to actually generating some revenue. Like even if it's a tiny bit, few hundred dollars, few hundred pounds, this feels really. So what do you do next? Well, if you want to take things even further, then obviously at some point you're going to run out of spare stuff lying around your house. You're not going to have any other things to actually sell. So where do you go to find more stuff to sell on ebay. Well, ebay isn't like Amazon. You don't have to sell brand new products, you can source secondhand stuff. You can look anywhere to source products to sell on ebay. So you can go to yard sales, charity shops, you can go to second hand stores, you can have a look on Craigslist. Look absolutely everywhere for bargains. And whilst you're around hunting, you can always be referencing those sold listings on ebay to see if the product's going to sell for a profit. Now like with any product research, whether it's Amazon or ebay or any e commerce product research, the key here is consistent consistency. So you want to do maybe an hour or two of product research every single day. Keep this stuff going consistently and you will find those hidden gems that are really, really profitable, that are going to sell really fast bargains that you can flip on ebay. But you have to be consistent. Like with any product research, it's going to be random. One day you're going to be looking around craigslist, yard sales and stuff, you're not going to find anything the next day you just keep finding products. Like that's the nature of product research. So be super, super consistent and that will be how you can find a bunch of stock to sell. Sooner or later you'll start to develop like an eye for the right type of products to sell on your account. You'll start to get a good idea of which brands to look out for, which products in which categories. You'll be very, very quick at deciding what price to list your eb items for. And if you're consistent, you can really start to build up some revenue. Like this is a really good way of turning what tiny little cash you have from your pile into more money. I think the way I made this really, really successful was by taking as much terrible action as physically possible. So what do I mean by that? Well, instead of being like a perfectionist, looking for items that are going to, you know, generate me a ton of profit, try and spe hours and hours and hours perfecting my listings, trying to keep everything really neat and tidy in Excel spreadsheets, I just went at it like a rhino. I've put as much time as I possibly could into finding products to sell and I got as many products listed as quickly as possible. And I think that's the key to success on ebay. It's not necessarily about trying to be a perfectionist, it's just taking as much action you possibly can. So go out on these product hauls, look for second hand stock to sell on your account and you'll start to see momentum building. The more products you sell, the more capital you have. And then you'll be able to buy even more products and then you'll get even more sales. And it's like an upward spiral that leads to just generating crazy revenue. If you're really consistent, if you're really passionate, and you keep taking tons of action in your ebay business. And to be honest with you, like, this was my secret, taking as much action as possible. But there's a couple of other tips and tricks I want to give you to help you on your way before we wrap up the episode. I wouldn't want to leave you empty handed without some of those really amazing tricks that helped me boost my ebay sales. So I want to introduce you to how ebay's search algorithm works. And this stuff is relatively complicated. But the good thing is you don't really need to know this to any technical level. You just need to have a very broad understanding of how it works so you can take advantage of it and really get your listings visible to customers to make sales as quickly as possible. So ebay's search algorithm is called Cassini. And what Cassini does is it tries to display the most relevant products to the customer who is searching for them. Now there's a bunch of criteria that Cassini looks through for each product to tell whether it's going to be relevant to the person performing a search. So if I was to go to ebay right now, type in the Words headphones for MP3 player, eBay would look through all the products in the database very, very quickly and pull up a list of results that are really relevant to me. Now there would be products with those specific keywords in the title and the Description. So headphones, mp3 player, four keywords kind of give you the list of search results that are most relevant to what you're looking for. And then Cassini actually orders the products by how good quality the ebay sellers account is. So if they've got loads of bad feedback, their listings will get pushed to the bottom of the search results. Also, the price, like the cheapest items will usually be nearer to the top. And also there's a few other things that come into play when Cassini is ordering the search results. So you want to do everything you can to get your products as high up in those search results as physically possible. A couple of tricks for you. The faster shipping you can offer, the better, because Cassini will push your listings way up the top. The cheaper you can offer your products for, the better. Although you obviously want to be making a profit, so be careful for that. The more kind of outside keywords from the obvious that you could include in your listing, the better as well. Because if you can attract a customer who's typed in a really, really random keyword that's kind of loosely related to your product, your product might be the only one of its kind that displays in the search results. So then you can charge whatever you want for it. So cheap shipping, cheap price, loosely related keywords that are kind of outside the normal keywords associated with your product. Also, the more activity there is on your account, the higher your products are going to be pushed up the search rankings. So, for example, if you're running your product as an auction, then that auction listing is going to get tons of bids. People are going to keep bidding on it. So every bid is an action. So the more actions happening on your account, the better it is for your products. So the more products you can list as auction, the better. And you can also put a buy it now price. You can put an offer price because remember, offers also count as activity. Also, if you keep tweaking your listings, changing the description, the title once a week, this actually resets their position in the search rankings and pushes them up closer to the top of the results. So take these tips down, write them down, and as you're building your store, these are the tips and tricks that can actually set you apart from the other ebay sellers. Obviously, it's important to get a pile of stock first and focus on the product research element first. And then these come in to play when you really want to optimize and make the most of your ebay store. So as always, when I'm delivering content to you, I want to make sure it's actionable. So your task for today is just to find one product you can sell on ebay. I want you to get the ball rolling. So right now, stop what you're doing, have a look around your house, find one thing and list it on ebay using the tips and tricks I've talked to you about today. And look, if you really want to make some money doing this stuff, if you want to start building an income and selling on ebay, then go to ecommercefreedom.com 14, that's 14 ecommercefreedom.com 14 and you can grab the show notes for this episode. And I've also got a bonus ebay training video for you that I shot a few months ago, which actually walks you through a load of the really advanced techniques I used to use to find products and to get them listed and to get them selling. It's totally free for you as a thank you for listening to this episode, so go to ecommercefreedom.com 14 to grab that video Training. Can't wait to help you build an ebay business so you can raise capital to sell some more stuff on Amazon or just to have a little bit of spare cash side income over the next few months. Thanks so much for listening and I can't wait to catch you on next week's episode.