Auction Informer

EBay is still a great place to start a home-based business. Yes, their fees have gone up and there are many policy changes in eBay that alienate many of the old sellers. That is why you hear so many people talking: eBay is trying to get rid of the small sellers.

But that is simply not the case. You see, with every change in the marketplace come new opportunities. And the same is true for eBay. But in this article I don’t want to look too much at the eBay changes and what the upcoming opportunities are, but I want to look at a common way to start an eBay business, and that is the drop shipping.

Drop shipping seems like the perfect way to get started, because you don’t need to purchase thousands of dollars of merchandise, yet you get “wholesale prices” that allow you to sell the products for a profit.

And you won’t have to deal with shipping and handling, which can become a real pain in the behind very quickly if you start selling in bulk on eBay. Because the drop shipping company is going to do all of that for you.

But there are downsides to drop shipping too. For example, you need to register a business, because every drop shipper wants to see your tax ID and your business number. Of course it’s not that expensive or difficult to incorporate any more, so that shouldn’t be too big of an obstacle if you are serious about your online business.

Another downside is that there are many scammers who pretend to be drop shippers, but they are really just looking for victims for their schemes.

If you do a Google search for drop shippers, most often the “companies” that show up are not legitimate businesses in my opinion.

Another downside of selling through drop shippers is that your reputation totally relies and depends on another business. If the drop shipper doesn’t deliver the merchandise, or delivers the merchandise in bad condition, or ships out the merchandise to late  you will have to deal with upset buyers and negative feedback. And your customers won’t be very compassionate if you tell them: “But it’s not my mistake, the drop shippers promised me they would send all the items in mint condition to you immediately when the order comes in.”

If you’re thinking about using drop shippers, you should make absolutely sure that the drop shipping company that you choose is legitimate. That means you want to call them up on the phone and talk to them. And you want to check their reputation. You want to see testimonials and recommendations from previous customers. You want to see what kinds of reviews they got on the Internet.

Now don’t be scared off if everything seems okay, but you find some negative reviews online about that drop shipper. That’s just the nature of the Internet. There is no product that will only have positive reviews. But you can see the overall tone of how that drop shipper is talked about in the online community.

I also suggest that if you have the names of people who gave testimonials for that drop shipping company, you call these people up. Talk with them to see their real people, and whether they still think highly of the drop shipping company they gave the testimonial for.

For more free advice on finding the right suppliers and drop shippers sign up for the Auction Informer newsletter. It’s totally free, packed with information that helps you to make more money faster and if you have any questions you can always contact me and I or one of my team members will get back to you with an answer.

Back in 1995 when eBay just started out it was really a small auction house, almost like a virtual garage sales.  And it remained that way for many years.  But now it has all changed.  And you hear many sellers whining and complaining about that.

It was a great way to find a real bargain, something that we would have to pay $150 for in your store bought on eBay you found it for 110.

Nowadays, it has gotten a lot more difficult to find a real bargain.  But in this article I just want to share some simple tricks that help you to spot these are games that still pop up in the thousands every day on eBay.

One of the most common ways to find bargains on eBay is to make use of the many free websites that help you to find misspelled auctions.

And the way that works is that you go to one of these sites and enter the item that you are looking for on eBay.  You click on search and the website is going to search for misspelled items for you.  It will then bring you to the eBay site and show you all the results.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are looking for a digital camera.  What you can then do is that you just type in camera into the misspellings finder, and it will come up for you with all the misspelled auctions on eBay.  I in fact did that and some of the results that showed up are: “CANON POWERSHOT PRO1 BLACK 8.0 MEGAPIXEL DIGITAL CAMER”, “DIGITAL CAMMERA CASIO EXILM EX-Z75 7.2 MEGAPIXELS”, and “Kodak easyshare md853 digital camrea nikon cannon” - you see, instead of camera they wrote camrea, camer or cammera.  That is why less people find them and that these auctions get less bids, and often go for a lower price.

Another way to find bargains is to look for the item you are interested in on eBay.  Look for how much it sells normally.  Write that number down.

Then go back to the ebay homepage and click on “advanced search”.

There, you enter the item you are interested in. (Example: Apple iPhone 8GB AT&T)

Then you click on “Show items priced for” and enter the amount that you are willing to pay for it.

Now you click on search. At the results page, you click on “Save this search” and activate “Email me daily when new items match my search” and select the time period that you want to be notified for (I always chose 6 months, and just switch it off once I found the item).

Now, if you do exactly this way there is a high chance that you will be bombarded with too many irrelevant auctions.  That is simply because every time somebody puts in an auction with a starting price is below what you are willing to pay you will get notified, but since the auction has not yet ended it is very likely that the price will go up a lot more.  That is why there are some other options in the advanced eBay search function that you want to use in order to make sure that only real bargains show up in your e-mail box.

This article is quite long already so I have to come to an end here.  But you can learn about these methods in the AuctionInformer newsletter. Just put your name and email address in the box, click on “Yes, send me my Auction Informer Reports” and you’ll be on your way to ebay mastery. I promise to never spam, bother or annoy you, and if for any reason whatsoever you decide the AuctionInformer isn’t right for you, you can just click on the link at the bottom of every email and your email address will be deleted from my database forever immediately and you won’t receive another email from me.