5 VALUABLE LESSONS LEARNED WHILE RUNNING AN EBAY STORE
For many years I have found myself never content just working my full time job. In fact I have almost always had at least one other side job or money making hobby going. Previously I owned and ran an eBay store selling mainly collectibles and antiques. My Ebay store was actually the reason I decided to earn my degree in business management. While in college and working at my full time job at the hospital I discovered my love for collectibles and antiques and understanding their value. I found it to be easy and fun discovering collectibles at garage sales, estate sales and thrift stores.
Today I just wanted to share some key things I learned running my eBay store a few years back which I called Vintage collectibles and treasures. These are just a few of the things that I discovered and I believed would be helpful for someone considering running an eBay store
1. Hallmark ornaments can be worth a lot..... Selling collectibles taught me so much about the value of specific items. Hallmark ornaments quickly became one of my best and easiest sales. I could buy hallmark ornaments in their boxes in good to excellent condition and resell them for a great profit. I would occasionally strike gold with a garage sale as I did on one memorable occasion buying up a huge lot of old hallmark ornaments that were worth a way more than I paid. A woman at one estate sale had passed away and her family was selling her collection priced at $1.00 a piece. Some of these ornaments ended up being worth $50 -$150. I would make nearly that much selling each of them almost immediately after buying them. The more I studied up on these ornaments, the more I discovered which ones had the highest value. The highest value were the older collections from the 80's and 90's, the baby's first Christmas, specific series ornaments and limited editions. These are the ornaments I found hold the best value and that would pay significantly well on eBay. A few specific ornaments from these 80's and 90's collections, were worth $500-$900 in good to excellent condition. Ornaments such as the Frosty Friends first in the series ornament from 1980, that sold for as much as $900 on eBay previously.
2. Make sure your items are packaged well.... Packaging ornaments, collectibles and other breakable objects is extremely important for shipping. So what does this mean? Make sure to buy quality mailers or boxes, bubble wraps or packing peanuts to ship these things in. You are responsible to do this as the seller and if your customer is unhappy this can mean negative feedback which as a seller is so important to avoid.
3. Why it's important to avoid negative feedback as a seller.... This can actually be harder than you can imagine and quite a stressful situation for an eBay seller. The reason that it can be so stressful and hard to manage is to be honest some customers are hard to please, dishonest and just unpleasant to deal with. As a customer you are protected by a lot of rules put in place to bring customers back but sellers sometimes end up eating costs to maintain their reputation and prevent negative feedback.
4. The library and the Internet are great resources for researching....Libraries typically have a great selection of books on antiques and collectibles. This often saved me a lot of money, not needing to purchase these books myself to research items. It is great to know in advance the value of specific items before selling them. This can be discovered through many books at the Library or even doing a search on the Internet. If you are searching the Internet, try to make sure you are finding reputable websites that really can accurately provide this information. One of my favorite books was called Miller's collectibles and they have a great website also.
5. Stamps.com is a great investment..... I feel that stamps.com although not entirely necessary, was a great investment for me. It saved me so much time and so much hassle when I was running my eBay store. In saving me time it freed up more time for al the other business aspects and it kept my packages arriving on time and my customers happier.
6. Make sure it is worth the hassle before selling an item... Before listing and selling an item make sure that you weigh all the different aspects of selling it. Is it worth the time invested, packaging costs, listing fees, etc. You will most likely find that there are a lot of things you could make a guaranteed sale on that are not worth the hassle.I really hope you found this post helpful. I created this post to get you considering something in your own home, that could be sold for some extra cash. This can be accomplished even without running an eBay store. You can always consider just selling on eBay without a storefront or on other sites like eBay. This can potentially be a great way to bring in some extra money on things you already own. My advice is start looking into the value of some of the things you already have lying around your house collecting dust. I will be back in the future with a post on some great items that you can make some decent cash reselling online. Please remember that this is not a guarantee of the success of these sales or of money to be made. This post will be created to inspire you, to consider what might sell for you. To remind you to think of what might be lying around your home, that could be worthwhile to consider parting with in the future for some extra cash.
