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Generate an Income from eBay
Making Money from Auctions

eBay has to be one of the great success stories of the Internet. From its very humble beginnings in San Jose, California on September 4 1995 (it started out as part of a large personal website belonging to founder Pierre Omidyar) it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 1997 the company officially changed its name to eBay and by direct investments into new markets and acquisitions it has grown into a global empire.

Page Map
How eBay Works	eBay Affiliates
Making an Income from eBay	Conclusion
Selling on eBay	Join the Mailing List

How eBay Works

eBay acts as a large marketplace where quite literally millions of collectibles, appliances, computers, items of furniture, electronic documents, vehicles and antiques are listed, bought and sold on a daily basis. Some of these items are rare and valuable; whilst others are simply dusty items that would otherwise have been discarded were it not for the thousands of eager bidders worldwide. Which simply goes to prove that f one has a big enough market, one will find someone willing to buy anything. Literally anything can be sold, as long as it s not illegal or does not violate the eBay Prohibited and Restricted Items policy. eBay then generates revenues by levying a range of fees. There are fees to list a product and fees when the product sells. The eBay fee system is quite complex and takes $0.25 to $80 per listing and 2-8% of the final price. In addition, eBay now owns the PayPal payment system which has fees of its own. The company's current business strategy includes increasing revenue by increasing international trade within the eBay system. eBay has already expanded to almost two dozen countries including China and India. The only places where expansion failed was Japan and Hong Kong where Yahoo had a head start.

Making an Income from eBay:

As you can see, eBay is a huge and very lucrative marketplace, if only you can break into it; to gain a slice of the pie for oneself. The truth is that there are several approaches to making money via eBay: some obvious and some much less well known. I'll take you through these various strategies below:

Selling on eBay

The most obvious way to make money on eBay is to use it to sell things. In attempting this you're in very good company as large international companies, such as IBM, sell their newest products and offer services on eBay using competitive auctions and fixed-priced storefronts. Obviously, to make money from this you need a product that you can obtain cheaply and that you can sell for a profit. There are a few ways to do this. One is to buy discounted products from police auctions, bankruptcy or house clearances and the like and then to sell these for a profit. Another method is to buy collectible items such as memorabilia and to add value to them (such as adding a case or a frame); again so that these can be sold on for a profit.

You can also create your own products to sell. These could be e-books (such as ones on how to make a profit from eBay, or PC repair). Something that can be sold in large volumes at a reasonable price. Alternatively if you have craft skills then it could be a product that you've designed and created yourself.

The key here is (like all market strategies) to buy as cheaply and sell as expensively as possible. This is where buying misspelled items can be a real boon. Even a cursory search of any of the English-based eBay sites (USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India) that many items on eBay are listed under misspellings of what the actual name should be. For example, take an e-bay search for the a 'camera'. This also occurs under the misspellings 'camers', 'camer', 'camrea', 'amera', 'camra', 'camara', 'kamera' and 'kamra'. A normal eBay search for the term 'camera' would never actually find these items. As a result very few of the visitors to eBay will actually ever see these ads. For this reason they will sell for a far cheaper price that they normally would. There are many web pages out there that allow you to perform eBay searches based on databases of known or likely typographic errors. However, I've designed my own system that allows various international eBay sites to be searched based on a novel algorithm that uses both likely and unlikely alternate spellings. With this system you will find misspellings that even the other misspelling systems won't detect. Even better you can actually snap-up one of these misspelled items cheaply, immediately put it back for sale on eBay and within 24 hours of putting it up have it sold for a profit! Even better you can tell the original lister that you've bought it for a third party and have them ship it to the person who's actually bought it from you. So you even save on the postal rates. Do this several times a week and you have an eBay business.

A further way of making additional money on eBay is to 'pad out' your postal costs. Work out exactly what your postage costs are going to be then add maybe $2 on top of this. As a result the postage doesn't look excessive, but you will make additional money on each successful eBay sale.

eBay Affiliates

This will probably be far more familiar territory to most of you that what I've already talked about. eBay's affiliate programme is actually a rather good one. Not only do you make money from every eBay sign-up that you direct to your site (and if you're not already a member of eBay you should sign-up here. Next you will need to sign-up for the main eBay affiliate partner Commission Junction; which handles almost all the eBay sites. After sign-up you will earn a commission for each new person who signs up for eBay. You will then earn more if that person actually makes a sale or a purchase on the eBay network.

Once you have your affiliate ID then you can do far more clever things with your eBay listings. By joining the eBay developers' program you gain access to eBay's API. This allows you to build your own applications based around eBay content where you can embed your own affiliate ID into each and every eBay auction result that you show. Each time someone makes a purchase from one of these links you get a percentage of the commission that eBay gets. This may not be much on an individual sale, but it soon mounts up into a very worthwhile income. This is why sites such as my eBay search site is worth all the coding effort required in engineering it into being.

Conclusion:

As you can see, there are many approaches to gaining an income from eBay. These range from the obvious real-world methods of obtaining or generating a product and then selling this; to the more virtual and value-added techniques of generating software on top of eBay that gives the customer a new way of doing things and which then allows them to better perform eBay searches and purchases. Each sale made through these systems results in commissions with boost your on-line income.

The method that best suits you will depend on your personal skills and aptitudes. Decide what you want to do, approach the problem in a professional fashion and GO FOR IT!

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