Are You Working For Yourself, Or For Ebay?
March 30, 2011It’s easy enough for just about anyone to start selling on eBay, and it only takes a few minutes for you to get your first listing up and potentially making you money. It’s this, apparently very easy way to make money that attracts millions of people to the idea of starting their own online shop on eBay.
After all, doesn’t everyone dream of working for themselves, from home, making a very good living working the hours that suit them? But does eBay really offer this earning potential and freedom, or does the amount of control the world’s biggest auction site has over your business mean you are really just swopping one employer for another?
Build your business, their way
One of the biggest benefits of starting and running your own business, is the feeling that you’re in control. You can make the decisions about how you want to market your business, how you want to grow it, and how you brand your online business. However, if you have an online shop on eBay, you will soon find out that you are able to do all these things – as long as they fit in with eBay’s strict, extensive, and ever-changing rules and regulations.
With a variety of restrictions on how you can use the auction site to sell your items, how you can send traffic to it, and collect customers from it, it might not be quite the experience of freedom you thought your own online shop would be.
Who really benefits from all your effort?
Once you’ve set up your online shop on eBay, added your products and created great looking listings that buyers will find attractive, and then started to drive visitors and traffic to your products, surely that’s all you need to do to ensure your success? Even with all your hard work, you might not be the one who ultimately benefits.
Attracting buyers to your listings doesn’t guarantee that they will buy from you, but it does increase the chances that they will buy from someone with an online shop on eBay. With so many sellers actively promoting their eBay listings, the business that will always benefit, is going to be eBay – more buyers will attract more sellers, meaning more sales and revenue for the auction site. All your effort is effectively doing eBay’s marketing for them!
Paying for the privilege
As well as helping out with their marketing, eBay also gets you to pay them for the privilege – by giving them aalmost 20% of anything you earn! With listing and final value fees, as well as your online shop’s PayPal costs, you might find that you need to be making at least 20% margin on anything you sell before you see any profit. And unless you are making margins of 30-40% (which is going to be pretty difficult in such a competitive trading environment), your online shop might be making more money for eBay, than it is for you!
If your dream is to start your own online shop, and build a business that rewards you rather than someone else, there may be better ways to go about it than selling on eBay. With a huge variety of more flexible and cost-effective alternatives available, from sites as big as Amazon, to online shop platforms like Weebly and eCrater that are actually free, you can be sure that everything you’re doing will be for your benefit – and isn’t that what running your own business is all about?
Inspiration
- Challenges of Dropshipping on Amazon: Pitfalls, Alternatives, and Strategies for Success
- Shoppers Trust Amazon.com, Should You Sell At Amazon?
- The Future For Ebay & Online Shops
- An Online Shop Could Be A Better Alternative To Ebay
- 5 Reasons Why It’s Getting Harder To Be Successful On Ebay
- Why It Can Be Hard To Build A Business With Ebay
- Why Some Sellers Are Leaving Ebay
- Alternatives To Ebay That Could Be Better For Your Business
