How To Start an eBay Business

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Enjoy the thrill of online auctions? Turn it into an exciting (and lucrative) business with Entrepreneur Magazine's start-up guide.

Trade your way to a successful business. eBay is changing the way merchandise is bought and sold all over the world. And this guide shows you how to be a part of this booming business. This guide won't show you how to start an online auction business, but how to use eBay auctions to start and grow your own business. We'll begin with an overview of online auctions, look at the products and services you can sell, and then help you, step-by-step, set up and run you own new venture.

On any given day, millions of items are bought and sold on eBay. Use this step-by-step guide and you could become one of the many mega-successful eBay PowerSellers. The thrilling and lucrative world of selling on eBay is within your reach.

Garriss and Topkins formed Gotham City Online in New York City and started selling on eBay part time in January 1999; Garriss left Wall Street to focus full time on the eBay selling operation in October of the same year, and Topkins followed in January 2000. Today, with a product line focusing on clothing and accessories, Gotham City Online’s sales exceed $1 million annually and are doubling every six months.

Adam Ginsberg spent 11 years in direct sales before opening his own company selling home furnishings and pool tables through a traditional wholesale/retail outlet format. In October 2001, he put a pool table up for auction on eBay “for fun.” It sold at a good price, so he put another one up. By the following summer, he was selling 25 tables a week on eBay. “The average pool table store in the United States sells three to four [tables] a week,” Ginsberg says. Even so, he adds, “I wasn’t taking eBay that seriously. I had my retail location in Los Angeles.” But he concedes that he didn’t particularly enjoy going to that store every day; rather, he much preferred staying home working on his computer. He opened an eBay store and watched his sales continue to climb. A year after that first eBay sale, ZBilliards was selling 150 to 175 pool tables a week on eBay—that’s about $15 million a year in revenue—and Ginsberg finally shut down his retail outlet.

Ginsberg has since opened a second eBay store, ZBilliard Corner, to sell pool table accessories, and a third store that sells home furnishings—and he’s still working from home, although now he shares his basement office with three staffers. “I’m not through yet,” he says. “I see all these vertical markets, related or unrelated to each other, where we can utilize the same philosophy and strategy that we have created to sell our pool tables.”

David Schultz’s path to eBay sales was more purposeful. He was working for a children’s furniture company and given the task of finding ways the company could sell on the Internet. He did the job so well that he eventually left that company and, with partner Matt Brannon, formed IEP Visions, an Orlando, Florida-based company that sells children’s furniture online. About 90 to 95 percent of his sales (at $2 million-plus annually and growing) are on eBay.

Not all successful eBay sellers fall into such high-volume operations. Sue Rudolph is a semiretired antiques dealer in Winter Park, Florida, who started selling on eBay after she closed her retail shop. “I have, as most antiques dealers do, a lot of things that have worth,” says the owner of Sweet Sue’s Antiques and Appraisals. “I thought it would be nice to sell some of those things and have a little extra income.”

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