Ted Corriher, a home, garden and farm
equipment dealer in Newton, North Carolina, didn't know much
about computers or the internet four years ago. He didn't even
have a personal e-mail account. "I am computer
illiterate," he says. "But all my friends were buying on
eBay, and I didn't want to miss [out]." So he asked one of
his employees to find out how he could sell his equipment on eBay.
That was three years ago. Today, he sells about $100,000 worth of
equipment on eBay every month, and his predominantly tractor-sales
business has grown from $4 million to $10 million in annual
sales.
It's almost hard to believe this
$3.27 billion online marketplace with a record 404 million listings
as of the end of 2004 was Corriher's initial foray onto the
internet. The opportunity to expand beyond a 300-mile radius from
the doorstep of Corriher Implement Co., which his grandfather
started in the 1850s, is part of what persuaded this 40-year-old to
join a whopping 147 million registered users on eBay. Operating
under the User ID tractor123, Corriher says eBay has been a
rewarding and enlightening business expansion, much like the era
when his grandfather abandoned the sale of mules in favor of farm
equipment.
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"As soon as I got involved [in
eBay], it opened up a whole new world for me," says Corriher.
His new and used New Holland tractors sell for upwards of $10,000
apiece to buyers all across the United States.
Corriher is a PowerSeller, an official
designation bestowed by eBay upon those sellers who have reached a
certain sales performance and have a high level of total feedback,
with at least a 98 percent positive rating by other eBay users.
It's not impossible for the startup seller to reach this level
of achievement in as short a time as Corriher, if not shorter. Here
are success tactics from eBay experts and PowerSellers that just
might help you succeed alongside one of the 724,000 people in the
U.S. currently making either a full-time or part-time living
selling wares on eBay.
Getting
Started
While Corriher's tractor business
took off on eBay, most sellers don't start out with such
high-ticket items. Whatever you decide to sell, setting up shop on
eBay is fairly easy to do. There are virtually no startup costs,
you can work from home with almost no overhead, and your marketing
can all be done online, right within eBay. An internet connection
is all you need, aside from the most important requirement:
inventory. At any given time, there are approximately 50 million
items available on eBay worldwide, with 5 million new items added
each day. To compete, you must have an item to sell, even if
it's ad space on your forehead, which Omaha resident Andrew
Fischer, 20, sold to highest bidder SnoreStop for $37,375 in
January.
Your best chance at success is to start
out selling something you are fairly knowledgeable about, say
experts, because you're more likely to be on target about the
value of what you're selling. If you do not have expertise with
your items, don't fret. You can get up to speed fairly quickly
by doing research on eBay, says Joseph T. Sinclair, author of eBay
Business the Smart Way. Scan eBay's completed listings archives
to track how much similar items have recently sold for, he says.
Once you know your inventory, you can price it well and move it
quickly.
Marsha Pater, 47, started her $120,000
business on eBay seven years ago with a camera and overstock
inventory her husband, Bill, 56, had earmarked for the scrap yard
from his tool and die business. Many of the items had been sitting
in a warehouse for years because Bill cringed at the idea of
melting down good-condition, unused items simply because his
Midwestern tri-state clients had moved on to other projects that
required different tooling.
Originally, the Plainfield, Illinois,
couple began on eBay by buying pottery for friends who didn't
have a computer. "My husband said if we could do all this
buying, we could do the selling," says Marsha. "We
didn't have a lot of out-of-pocket expenses, and we started on
something we were familiar with."
And expenses were low. Back then, Pater
didn't even own a digital camera. She took photos with her
35mm, developed them at Walgreen's, scanned them into the
computer and uploaded them into a file. "It was extremely
time-consuming," she says. "The pictures would come back
and not be any good, and we'd have to start all over again. Our
first big purchase was a $500 digital camera." Pater and
experts strongly advise sellers to invest in a digital camera. From
there, listing with the easy "Sell Your Item" form on
eBay can help you manage the images and text.
A Picture's
Worth...
Without a photo, or a particularly good
one, you may lose the sale before there's even click-through.
Pater learned that the hard way. The first photo in your item
listing is free, but you must pay for the one that appears on the
search results page. This 35-cent option eBay offers is called
Gallery and allows you to have a thumbnail photo appear next to
your listing title in the search results; larger photos (up to 12)
appear for an additional charge when a potential buyer clicks on
the listing. Pater, looking to save money, opted not to splurge for
Gallery photos of her items. After all, when potential buyers
clicked on the listing titles, they would see her listed photos.
But through a web hit counter on her site, Pater soon discovered
that Pater Industrial Tool Supply was not getting many hits on its
listings because it lacked the initial photo on the search results
page. However, once she uploaded a photo next to the titles, demand
improved, and today Pater sells an average of 250 items a week from
the 3,300-square-foot home she bought with profits from her
business on eBay.
Quality and up-close photographs are
important to making a sale, says Jim "Griff" Griffith,
dean of eBay Education. "People expect to see something
visually. You can't even sell software without showing a
picture of the box or the CD," he says. "People need to
know they are buying something tangible."
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