3 Things I Learned About Business While Reselling On eBay
I learned a lot from this, and some of these things could help you
There are so many people out there that are aspiring business owners, but there are so many things that come up when starting a business that you don’t expect.
I started my first business back in 2017, and I was not prepared. Since then I have tried many business models by eBay reselling became the main one for me.
I learned a lot while setting up and running my eBay reselling business, and a lot of these lessons can be applied to any business whether it is a digital business or a physical business.
In this article, I am going to tell you some things that I have learned from my eBay reselling business. Some of these things could help you out if you are starting a business!
DISCLAIMER: Nothing in this article is legal or financial advice.
1. Not Everything Will Sell
When you are starting a business, you are probably selling something or promoting someone else's product, and you may assume that everything will sell fast. This is far from the truth and in fact, a lot of things won’t sell at all.
In eBay reselling you have to find products that are going to sell well from stores that sell things for really cheap. There are many ways to know if a product is likely to sell or not, but no matter how well you research the product, there is still a chance that it won’t sell.
An example of this was a CD set that I bought for around £3 and it was selling for over £20 consistently, I listed it and it hasn't sold since. I then looked it up a while after because I was confused as to why it wasn’t selling, and it was because the demand was gone just after I bought it.
There are many things that you may want to sell, but looking at the market is the most important thing. If I had looked more carefully, I would have realized that the CD set was on a downward trend, as were the sales.
There are many free tools out there that you can use like Google Trends to see the trends of different products and Etsy to see what is selling well for certain types of items.
2. You Need To Have A Starting Budget
With almost any business model there is a free of getting started, but this will take so much more time and effort. Having a starting budget will help you out so much because it will take a lot less time and you will have less to worry about.
I started my eBay reselling business with no money because I thought I could just list some of my old stuff on eBay and start making money. The problem was that it was taking so long for anything to sell, and just having a little money could have allowed me to run eBay ads.
Another example of this was a WordPress blog that I tried starting with no money and it was terrible. There were WordPress ads everywhere, it was slow, I couldn’t install plugins and the overall user experience was awful.
This same principle applies to almost every business model, and even if there is a free way to start, there is most certainly a way to speed up your growth by having a starting budget.
I recommend that you at least have $50 to start for most business models, but some require a lot more like Print on demand, the more starting money that you have the easier things will be for you.
3. Keep track Of Your Finances
At the start of all my businesses that I have tried, I used the same debit card that I used for my personal life and I didn’t keep track of what money was personal and what was business.
This made everything really confusing, and I didn’t actually know how much my business was making and how much of that was profit. I recommend that you not only get a business Paypal, but you also get a business bank account so that you can keep everything separate.
Another thing is that you need to keep track of all your income and expenses, I currently do this in Google Sheets but you can use a paid tool like Quickbooks.
You should also keep all receipts whether they are physical or digital because this can be really useful in the future. You may be asked to show proof of purchase or you could use it to get tax write-offs.
You should be tracking all money that comes in and out include the pennies because this can offer you security in case something goes wrong.
You will also be able to keep track of your revenue and how much profit you are making. You then will be able to work out if you are making money and the rate that your business is growing at.
Conclusion
There are so many things that you don’t realize will come up during your business adventures. There are lessons to be learned and there will still be things that come up that you don’t expect no matter what because there are so many business models that you can choose from.
Try to take all of these things into consideration when starting a business as I guarantee that these things will help you out a lot. You can save a lot of time and stress if you keep these tips in mind.
