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Starting An Ebay Business: What To Sell
By Michael Ford.
What do you sell on eBay?

That is the real question isn't it. Once you have cleaned out your garage and attic where do you look? You want to turn eBay into a cash generating machine, but you need to sell something…anything.

That is the trap. You are looking for something, anything to sell and when you find it, you start selling it. Only later do you realize you have wasted your time and because you did not know how to check out your market, you did not know what items make and which ones only sell at break even.
Many people make the mistake of buying at yard sales or flea markets. This is a dead end. You will NEVER make like this. I do not care how many self proclaimed guru's you see on late night TV promoting this system. I guarantee you they never did it as a business!!!!!!!

You will spend all day buying junk for a few dollars, then when you try to sell it for big on eBay, no one will buy. Everyone knows about eBay and most of the stuff sold at yard sales and flea markets is stuff they can't sell on eBay. If they could, they would not bother selling any other way.
Some false prophets tell you to run classified ads offering to buy items that you can resell on eBay. That is another dead end. If you run a classified ad in your hometown free-paper saying you want to buy gold watches, every nit-wit in your area will contact you and try to sell you a $2 gold painted Timex for $200. You will not know what it is until you meet them and then you have wasted your time. Even if you are lucky enough to purchase one good watch, at a good price, every day, you are still losing. If you make $50 per sale you are making less than minimum wage when you total up your expenses and income at the end of the week even if you sell one watch every day! This is not how you make on eBay.

The next place most people turn is to a wholesaler or a drop shipper. Wholesalers sell you items at a discount if you buy a lot of stuff from them. One XYZ model mp3 player may cost $100 but if you buy a case of 100, they may charge you $55 each. Now all you have to do is sell them on eBay for $75 right? WRONG! Take a look at the eBay listings and you will see other people selling the same item for $55 and even less. How is this possible? Simple, the REAL price is not $100. That is a lie told to you by the wholesaler. The real price is the street price, what it is actually selling for, not the MSRP or suggested price.

I fell into this trap with a well known drop shipper. I paid them a $100 signup fee and only then did they let me see their listings where they were claiming a harddrive cost $200 retail and wanted to charge me $120 wholesale. When I checked the web, it was actually selling for $80 all over the Internet. They wanted me to pay $120 for a harddrive, then resell it for $80 or less? How is anyone supposed to build a business like this? You can see that the large wholesaler and drop shipper companies are never going to help you to build your business.

A drop shipper is a wholesaler that ships the items for you. This sounds too good to be true...and it is.

Supposedly you sell an item on eBay and then

have the drop shipper ship the item directly to the customer. The customer pays you $100 and you pay the drop shipper $50 plus shipping costs. It sounds so appealing. It never works out like this. There are no legitimate drop shippers who will deal with small business owners. Wait, I am wrong there. There are dishonest drop shippers who are happy to take your personal information and steal your identity, or take your upfront fee before showing you their inventory. Drop shippers are another dead end and no one is making serious using them on eBay.
There are some legitimate wholesalers but you must know how to tell the difference. For every legitimate wholesaler, there are ten other dishonest or incompetent companies claiming to be wholesalers.

All is not lost!

Now that I have debunked the biggest myths about making on eBay, flea markets, classifieds, drop-shippers and wholesalers, you may be wondering how anyone obtains a product to sell on eBay.

This is how you can do it:

1. Make your own product
2. Find a specialized niche wholesaler
3. Re-sell someone else's information product
4. Modify or combine an existing product to add value

I hope you pay close attention to these 4 items because these are the ones that make you on eBay.

Each of these methods allows you to sell a valuable item with little or no investment. You do not have to pay any upfront charges or membership fees for any of these either because you are in control.

These methods are discussed in detail in my Free eBay Cash Machine mini-course. It is easy to make your own product and you can even make someone else do it for you. Sometimes they will do it for free. You simply need to know who to ask and how to ask the right way. Niche wholesalers are the only way to go if you want to resell someone's product and if you combine this with number four, you can charge more and sell more.

eBay is not so mysterious when you know how it really works. When you know what products are high profit items and which products are only causing you extra work, you can spend your time making and not just packing envelopes, hoping that somehow you will come out ahead for the week.

I am not just blowing smoke when I talk about Wholesalers. I have firsthand experience with them. I have put together a Case Study on Importing from China. This is my personal experience when I imported 1000 game consoles from China. I reveal who I bought from, what went right, what went wrong, and how you can do the same thing. Buying items from China is very inexpensive which means you have a lot of room to mark-up your price. If you would be interested in this case study or in downloading my free wholesaler/drop-shipper list, visit my site to now.

Sign Up for the Free Start Your Own eBay Business mini-course at www.dontbidonit.com/businessclass.htmand find out how to turn eBay into a full time or part time money-making business.Article by Michael Ford, Author of Don't Bid On It,