What it Means to be an Ebay Reseller and Have a Reselling Business

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What it Means to be an Ebay Reseller and Have a Reselling Business

When I first started looking into different ways I could make money online, selling things on ebay wasn’t even in my radar. It wasn’t until I saw a course on Udemy about this concept of reselling on ebay. Until that moment, I thought that people only bought collectibles like video games or rare antiques on there, but it turns out that people buy clothes, shoes, toys and more! And if people are buying them that means people can sell them.
So what does it mean to be a reseller on ebay and how do they make money?

An ebay reseller is someone that buys items (typically used ones from places like thrift stores and yard sales) and sells them for a profit on ebay.

While anyone can sell old items they’re getting rid of for some extra cash, the big difference is that ebay resellers intentionally go out and buy (aka source) items with the intention of reselling them.

But this still didn’t answer the question of how someone would make this a business.

What does it look like to have a reselling business?

When you have an ebay business, you have taken your ebay selling beyond that of hobby selling (i.e. putting items for sale randomly as you come across them). This means you are:

1. Setting Revenue Goals

Just like with any other business, as an ebay business owner you should have a revenue goal (i.e. how much money do you want to bring in each month?)

You might be wondering how you’d even begin to know how many items you’d sell. I mean it’s dependent on someone out there in the world needing or wanting to buy your item. How can you predict that?

The general rule I’ve found is that after your store has at least 100 items in it, you will sell as many as you list. So if you list 10 items in a week, you’ll sell about 10 items that week give or take some.

This comes in handy when you’re trying to figure out your revenue goals. Once you have an idea of the average selling price of your items, then you can use that to predict the approximate revenue you can expect when you sell a certain number of items.

Let’s break that down a bit. So if you’re wanting to sell approximately $5000 a month, then the first thing you’d do is look at your average sales price. If yours is $25, then you can take $5000 / $25 and that will give you the number of items you need to sell in a month. In this case, it would be 200. Divide that up by 4 weeks to give you 50, which is the number of items you should list each week.

Of course there are a lot of factors that go into this, such as the quality of items you’re listing, your listing quality, etc, but in general, this has been a general concept that I’ve found to be true. As with anything, you should test it out for yourself. That’s part of being a business owner, right? See which system works for you and creates predictable sales. Bottom line with this one: as a business owner, you will set revenue goals which encompasses listing goals.

2.  Running an ebay store

Technically, to sell on ebay, you don’t have to open an ebay store, but if you’re a serious seller (aka you’ve got a business), then having an ebay store makes a lot of sense. There are multiple tiers of ebay store subscriptions so you can choose the one that’s right for you. I started with the basic store and then went to premium as my store grew.

While having an ebay store does cost money, it will likely cost you more to pay the listing fees outside of having a store. It all depends on how many items you have listed. See their chart to help you decide which store subscription makes sense and when you should upgrade.

Other perks of having an ebay store that I find really useful are: markdown manager (i.e. allows you to create sales) and quarterly ebay shipping supplies voucher.

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