Anyone running an ebay business

[Decormad38]

If so what do you sell and do you make enough to live off?

I sell jewellery and I now make enough to live off.

It was initially something I collected and raised cash by selling of my extra bits. I sold everything not bolted down at one stage.

It's taken a few years to get properly established and initially attempts at a few different things. I now also sell on Amazon and tentatively my own website (currently on holiday).

I work fairly long hours but have three DC one who is severely disabled and one with moderate additional needs. I never have 5 work days without apointments, school visits or a child at home so working for myself was my only real option.

Just as my jewellery was taking off, I started selling for family/ close friends for 50% of the achieved sale price. Surprisingly popular as people have so much stuff they need to shift but haven't got around to selling. It's also a good way to learn the platform and selling at greater volumes than the odd item. It's not long before you need to think about courier/ post collection, where you'll store things at home, volume packaging purchase, home desk/ office space.

I use a corner of the lounge but also have floor to ceiling Ikea expedit cube storage for packaging and over stock. I now have warehousing for my dispatch.

I started by walking to the post office on the school run, then had to drive as more packages, then had a post collection (saved a lot of time each day). Using warehousing now means I'm not tied to a post collection time at home and can keep the business open when away.

The market is ever changing with new people coming in and undercutting etc Newbies don't have to VAT register so have a price advantage. Being self employed is ever changing too with VAT registration, now digital tax registration, Brexit, German VAT registration, deciding format of business should I now be setting up a limited company.

It's not to difficult to earn a few thousand a year, turning it into a proper business involves a lot of organisation and establishing personal boundaries for hours of work, area of home that will become over run etc.

I used to. But my profit margins went down and down, mainly due to Chinese sellers, so it’s not worth my while anymore.
I didn’t really have a niche area I just searched selling sites for stuff I could re sell at a profit.

The hardest part is finding stock that you can sell lots of and make a profit.
I used to spend hours trawling the web looking for things, then comparing them back to eBay to see if I would make any money. Sometimes you would hit gold, and others you would get a dud and have to sell them on at a loss.

Your main expenses after stock will be postage, eBay and PayPal fees, then you need to factor in a contingency % too.

We do. It does not make us a fortune but is sufficient for our living costs. Like the above poster we do it because i we have ds's with SEN which have made employment outside of the house very tricky,. I spend a lot of time on it and I think you will need to do this to get a reasonable income. The advantage is you can get going with very little investment so the risk is relatively low.

Things to bear in mind though are (I) Where you will source your items. We get most of our stock (old books and china) from auctions. When I started I looked at buying wholesale but couldn't make the numbers work for the items I was looking at as most seemed to be selling on ebay for less than I could get them wholesale. (ii) look at the ebay sold prices to work out what sells and for what price - avoid anything where there are masses of listings but very few sold items otherwise your turnover will be abysmal (iii) be aware how much storage you will need - our ebay shop has taken over our house - packaging materials also take up a lot of storage space as we need to buy in bulk to keep prices low (iv) be aware of the true cost of selling your items and do not dismiss selling fees, postage and packing costs, petrol costs etc so you do not undercharge (v) it is the same amount of work to sell a cheap item as an expensive item but you will make more profit (providing it sells, of course) on the latter whereas you will have to sell an awful lot of £1.00 profit items to make a reasonable living.