Reselling stuff on eBay has been a great way to make some extra cash for a long time now. But it’s getting more competitive and eBay’s been cracking down on weak sellers, causing concern about what the future holds. After consulting a handful of top sellers on eBay, here’s what you can do to survive the eBay apocalypse. Or, maybe after reading this, you decide it’s not worth it. Maybe you jump ship, go sell on Mercari or Poshmark or Etsy, or do something else entirely.
Note, if you’re making more than five sales a day on eBay, and doing a good job and keeping your customers happy, you’re probably safe. But if that’s not the case, if you’re just thinking about getting started reselling on eBay, this is how to keep your account safe and make maximum money. First and foremost, don’t treat this like a gig economy job. You’re not driving for DoorDash here, you’re building a business. And that’s a big big difference, isn’t it?
See, it’s easy to watch a YouTube video, see some dude killing it on eBay, doing a hundred and seventy-five grand a year reselling, I dunno, vintage video games and men’s clothes, right? And you have this entrepreneurial seizure and you go around your house and you start listing anything that’s not bolted down and you make four, five hundred bucks, right? And you go, “Wow, what if I could make this much every day? I should really just quit my job and sell stuff on eBay full-time.”
But you’re not considering the fact that you bought all those items in the past, right? So it cost you basically no time and no money to make that four or five hundred bucks. It’s a whole different ballgame when you have to go source stuff to resell on eBay. Which is gonna require your time and energy and business savvy (to get the right items at the right price) and capital, right, because these items aren’t gonna buy themselves.
The key then, to go from side hustle income to MD money, is to go all-in on eBay and treat it like a professional. Stop dipping your toes in; it’s cannonball time. You need to master your niche, find out where all the good deals and contracts are, so you can get items in bulk at the absolute lowest price per unit. Then you gotta be able to make a high level listing, with the right title and description and photos and so on, in about twelve minutes or less. Boom, that’s five listings an hour, right?
Next, your shipping system can take no more than an hour a day. So you gotta be organized, you have to have a process in place so that when sales come in, you can quickly and easily find those items, package them, label them, and ship ’em out, even do your bookkeeping, all in under an hour a day. And then, back to the hardest and most important part, you have to relentlessly pursue better and better sourcing.
So what haven’t you investigated yet? Have you been thrifting; have you looked online at places like Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Rakuten; are you networking and building relationships directly with manufacturers, establishing trust and credibility to maybe do some bigger, juicier deals? Last, are you taking care of your customers, fast shipping, prompt support, adding in the little touches, getting lots of positive reviews? As you can see, surviving the eBay apocalypse is gonna take some serious work.
