How to Use eBay to Grow Your Business
Forget the old days – which were less than 10 years ago – when online auctions were only hitech garage sales. Today, eBay (www.ebay.com), the world’s largest online auction site, can offer you several new and better ways to do business. The following information is based on an interview with Jim “Griff” Griffith, eBay’s first customer support representative (there are 500 today), who is the author of The Official eBay Bible. He heads up eBay University and travels the country hosting seminars and providing information about eBay. His show can be heard regularly on eBay Radio (www.wsradio.com) .
Your business and eBay
Whether your business is bricks and mortar, entirely online or a combination of the two, you can use eBay in a number of ways to support your business activities by:
Buying
Inventory. Many businesses today are using eBay to stock their shelves with inventory. While eBay was originally created to sell collectibles and other old or pre-owned items, the site now has new goods and equipment that you can buy for your inventory – name brand clothing, consumer electronics, jewelry or just about anything else you can think of. eBay enables you to buy inventory at wholesale prices.
The great features about buying on eBay:
Register on eBay so that you can buy in wholesale lots.
Supplies.Trips to the office supply company or visits to different online sites for each item you need may become a thing of the past. Now you can buy all the supplies you need at one site – eBay. Shipping and packing supplies, stationary and other paper goods, display booths and trade show accessories are just a few of the things you can find here.
Equipment. Need a new computer, printer or other machine for your office? You may be able to buy it at a low price at eBay and receive immediate delivery. For example, a forklift sells on eBay every four minutes!
Selling
Use eBay to sell items from your business – as a supplement to your other selling activities or as the exclusive venue for reaching the public. You can start small by listing a single item and then expand your online activities.
It has been the experience of a number of successful individuals that as business grows they need to hire employees to handle their online selling. Today, there are an increasing number of small businesses with two to three employees exclusively working on online sales.
Some businesses use eBay to sell the items that haven’t sold in their stores. These remainder items, which might otherwise have been sold for just pennies or junked entirely, now bring in fair prices.
Payments
Most businesses today accept credit cards because of the convenience it offers customers. You pay merchant authorization fees to the bank or other company collecting your charges for you. But you can offer a new payment option for customers – PayPal (www.paypal.com). Over 80% of online eBay listings offer this payment option and you can too.
Give customers the option to pay for your goods or services with a transfer from their PayPal account into yours, expecially for lower-cost items for which payments by credit card may be impractical. As the number of individuals and businesses with PayPal accounts grows, this payment method becomes more common.
You don’t need to sell on eBay to use PayPal as a payment option. You only need to set up a PayPal account at no cost to you.
Using PayPal can be an effective payment tool when the amount of a sale is small (say under $20); it lets you avoid collecting cash without having to accept credit card charges. For example, one entrepreneurial restaurateur delivers boxed lunches to eBay; buyers pay for the lunches through their personal PayPal accounts.
Cost to merchants accepting PayPal: 2.2% to 2.9% of the payment amount plus $.30 (the more volume you do, the lower your rate). Payments form another country entail an additional cross border fee (1% for U.S. dollar payments and 0.5% for Canadian dollar, euro, pound sterling and yen payments). There’s no charge when you transfer funds from your PayPal account to your bank account.
Set up a Business Account, rather than a Personal or Premier Account, so that you can use a corporate name if you want to. You can also accept credit card payments into your Paypal account. There’s an instant notification feature to alert you to payments made to your account.
