Seven tips for opening an eBay drop-off store
30 August 2006If you’re like me, you’ve thought about opening up an eBay drop-off site of some sort. Most people think a storefront when they think drop-off site and that is probably the best form as it gives the impression of being a professional.
Michael Banks gave some really great advice to Ina Steiner in a article on Auction Bytes. In it he points out seven great tips for opening an eBay drop-off store.
One: Get eBay Experience
This is probably the best of the tips. Michael argues that getting some experience with eBay before opening a drop-off store is crucial in learning how to not take in items that you shouldn’t and how eBay works in general. I completely agree. While eBay selling is moderately easy, jumping into something like a drop-off store with moderate volume would bring a pretty hefty learning curve along with it.
Two: Choose your location wisely.
Michael argues here that you should think “warehouse not retail”. His reasons are simple. Lower rent and usually, lower lease commitments. This makes more sense the more you think about it. Anyone with any eBay experience knows that often, your inventory is stacked up in boxes or cluttered on shelves and really isn’t conducive to a retail setting.
Three: Get Help!
Michael suggests hiring help. Preferrably help with eBay experience. This is one point I can’t get completely behind. He argues that a business owner promotes the business and isn’t always available to run the business. While that is mostly true, I think that most people will most likely want to keep their overhead as low as possible and scale up as time goes on. It also might be smarter to wait to hire until you get a good feel for how much business you will be getting.
Four: Promote your business
This is unarguable. Promotion is always necessary. As an eBay seller or someone with eBay experience, you probably have already noticed that the more you promote your auctions the better they end up.
Five: Move up the Foodchain
Michael makes the point here to move from overstocks at retailers to actually buying inventory from a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor. He also makes a good point that the entire pallet load need not sell on eBay.
Six: Don’t limit yourself to eBay
This is a pretty simple rule of business. Diversify your exposure. Just because you do most of your business on eBay does not mean that you need to do all of your business on eBay. Try selling items on other auction sites or even on other retail sites. Banks suggest liquidation.com
Seven: Don’t take junk
Michael suggests a flat listing/consignment fee whether the items sell or not. This goes back to the first tip as well. Most sellers with some eBay experience learn to know junk from the diamonds and can filter through a lot of the things that would come through your doors.
That makes for seven really good tips to take into consideration before opening an eBay drop-off store. I would add that doing a fair amount of market research would also benefit you. I’m not talking the fancy market research, but the simple stuff. Bring up eBay in conversation with people you know, meet, run into. Often times, you’ll get one of two responses. The person will either say “I use eBay all the time” or “I wish I knew more about selling my stuff on there.” In either case you can get an opening, but it also tells you how many people are knowledgable about eBay and would be potential clients to a drop-off store if there were one.
[tags]ebay, drop-off, retail store, wholesale, retail ebay, inventory[/tags]
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Seven tips for opening an eBay drop-off store