5 Reasons Why It’s Getting Harder To Be Successful On Ebay

April 25, 2011

There was a time when successfully making money on eBay seemed quite easy. You simply found good quality products that people would buy from your online store, marketed them effectively, at a price that meant you would make a decent profit, and then waited for a genuine buyer to come along and pay for the item you were selling.

Okay, so this may be quite a simplistic view of running a successful eBay business, but the fact remains, it used to be a lot easier than it is today. Selling successful on eBay has become a lot more difficult for a number of reasons.

More effort for less reward

The competition and demanding buyers mean that prices seem to be getting lower and lower. This of course means less profit, but it also means that it is getting harder to find products to sell on eBay that will actually make any money. All this extra time spent sourcing cheaper products to sell, the extra effort required to attract buyers, and the lower prices you end up getting, all means that you’re actually doing more work for less reward!

Unscrupulous buyers

eBay’s feedback rules were recently changed so that buyers were no longer able to leave negative feedback for dishonest buyers who might be trying to scam sellers, or those bidders who were simply unreliable. Without this important indication how how genuine a bidder is, anyone selling items on eBay might end up wasting a lot of time and effort on a buyer who has no intention of paying.

No place for quality products

It seems eBay has become the place where buyers go when they want to find a bargain, which means that anyone who is trying to sell any high value or quality products is going to struggle to stand out against the thousands of listing for cheap and second hand items. Even when they do, all the buyer is likely to be interested in is how much the item costs, as eBay tends to reduce the value of any product to the one thing buyers really care about – price.

Difficult customers

While feedback may no longer be an issue for buyers, it certainly is for anyone who wants to keep selling on eBay. The problem with this is that customers who only care about price seem to be more difficult and demanding to deal with. Even though they are paying less on eBay, it seems that few actually appreciate this fact, and the negative feedback of one or two unreasonable buyers will be a serious threat to your success.

Hard to build a customer base

Most business owners know that once you have a customer, you should try and maximize the business you get from them. Building a base of loyal and happy customers who are willing to keep coming back to spend more with you, is a sure fire way to success. This can be hard to achieve on eBay, with restrictions on what you can and can’t do with customers, all designed to keep them spending within the site, so you have to keep paying your eBay fees. eBay doesn’t really provide the opportunity to build a good relationship with your customers that your own online store might.

It’s fair to say that because of these, as well as a number of other factors, it seems to be getting harder and harder to build a successful eBay business – which could be one of the reasons why even well-established eBayers are now looking at alternative ways to sell their products online. With the opportunity to sell quality products, at decent prices, on sites like 24homeshop even their own ecommerce sites, many sellers are finding easier, and more profitable ways to be successful.

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