How To Work From Home On EBay: Beyond The Basics

You know how to work from home on eBay. You have been doing it for a little while now and you want to take your business beyond the basics. There are other things that you may be ready to do at this point. Lets take a look.

First lets look at your rating on eBay. In order to start getting into the more advanced features you must have a rating of 10 or higher. 20 is required to open an eBay store and 30 is required for certain multiple item auctions. In lieu of a required rating, you can be ID verified by eBay.

Now that you know about ratings, where do you stand? With a rating of 10 or greater you can add a buy it now option to your auction listings. This can really help your sales. A great marketing idea is to price your buy it now so that the shipping is included in the sell price. Be sure to tell your buyers that shipping is free with buy it now. You will attract more customers this way than with almost any other eBay option. It is well worth the small buy it now fee.

A rating of 20 or more allows you to open an eBay store. Consider this long and hard prior to doing this. The basic store is $15.95 a month. Every store listing that is not an auction costs .05 every 30 days plus additional fees for add-ons. This will add up very quickly if the inventory sits there. To consider a store, you should be selling a minimum of $100.00 or 10 items a month consistently for three consecutive months. Then you will have the experience and customer base to support a store.

You can take your store to the next level with ProStores. This is an eBay company that interfaces your eBay store with an online e-merchant store. You will have your own domain name, and they will help promote your website. There are three levels of service. When you are ready to spend $40.00 a month on websites and eBay store promotion then consider ProStores.

Other advanced techniques on how to work from home on eBay that will take you beyond the basics are fixed price auctions with multiple quantities. You need to be an authorized eBay user for at least 14 days, and you must have a rating of 30 or higher. If you have a verified PayPal account the rating requirement drops to 15. This type of auction is for selling items that you keep stock of. For example you have a case of cat toys. You can list a single fixed price auction with a quantity of 144 cat toys at a sale price of $3.00 each. A buyer can order one or more and the listing will not close, the quantity available will be reduced. It is just like ordering from a retail store online. This is much easier than entering the same fixed auction 144 times. It is less expensive this way as well.

There are many tools for you to use once you are selling consistently. Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro are ways to keep track of your inventory and eBay auctions. Turbo Lister is another tool that can help you quickly list items that you have for sale. It is much easier to design your auctions off line and then upload them all at once. This saves a tremendous amount of time and effort. All of these are offered on eBay's website.

You can get many free or low cost tools to help you design auctions. Some of these programs also include a "turbo listing" feature. Once you are listing 10 items a week or more, you will want to start to use software to automate the listing process. When you design your auctions have them all uniform in appearance. After a while, your buyers will know by the auction design if it is you. This will help you establish a look for your work from home business on eBay. It is called branding.

Overall, taking your eBay business beyond the basics is not difficult. You already know how to work from home on eBay, now you need to work smarter.