Why should you sell on Ebay? A step-by-step guide

With over 150 million active users, Ebay is still one of the biggest marketplaces[1] and the largest auction website. Therefore, it’s also a good place for your offer. In this article, we are going to show you how to start selling on Ebay. We will also provide you with some additional tools that can facilitate this endeavor.

When you take a look at the latest Ebay-related statistics, the decision to start selling on this marketplace seems obvious. After all, Ebay:

• Has 159 million active users
• Offers over 1.5 billion listings
• Generated 10.2 billion USD in revenue in 2020
• Has over 109 million visitors each month
• Is popular on several markets, including the US, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

However, before you decide to enter this marketplace and start selling there, you have to understand how this platform works and what are its strengths and weaknesses. Plus, you need a strategy that will guide you step by step. And that’s what you’re going to get from us. In this article, we will cover all the important aspects related to selling on this platform. Let’s get right to it.

Setting a new account

Although Ebay has over 20 different addresses (depending on the local market), you can use the same login data to enter them all. You can even duplicate auctions and add new translations and additional data for other markets. At first, Ebay will ask you to open a personal or business account. In the latter option, you need to provide your business name, email, password, and location. You can also decide to buy products only (without the selling option).

Ebay’s sales system

In general, Ebay works just like any other auction website. You can add products (or auctions) and promote them with two possible options:

• Promotions Manager: It’s a tool that allows you to make the most of special offers. In search results, you can distinguish your listings, group related items together, and highlight relevant merchandise in promoted categories.
• Promoted Listings Standard: It’s a form of Ebay ads that are settled in the CPA model – you pay only when the customer buys the promoted product.

As always, it’s important to track competitor prices so that you know how to optimize your prices. That’s where our price monitoring offer steps in.

SETTING AN AUCTION

Here, Dewiso.com comes in handy. This tool facilitates setting new listings and auctions even if you don’t know HTML. What’s especially interesting, you can click any auction and select the “Sell it yourself” option if you want to sell the same product. Afterwards, you only have to adjust this new listing to your needs based on a ready example.

If you want your listings to sound relevant to customers in different countries, use Ebay Keyword Tool. It will provide you with related key phrases and keywords used in a specific market, e.g., Germany or the UK.

INTERNATIONAL SALES LIMITS

If you’ve just started, you might face some limitations concerning cross-border sales. Typically, new users can list up to five products below 250 EUR. Every new product costs 0.35 EUR. You can try to work this around by contacting the local customer service team. Read more about international selling policy.

LOGISTICS

If you plan on selling internationally, it’s usually best to work with an international shipping company like Go Global or Hermes Logistics. Such companies provide their clients with a physical address in the specific country, so your customers know where their order comes from and where they can return it. Usually, you have to pay the per-parcel fee that ranges from four to eight EUR, depending on the destination, parcel’s weight, and dimensions.

Once your account is ready and you have published an offer, you can start selling abroad at any given time. You can read more in the linked Ebay’s international selling policy subpage. Suppose that it’s Monday and you’ve just received an order from a customer in Germany. On Tuesday, you ship the parcel to Go Global. The package lands at the customer’s doorstep on Thursday. Therefore, you can inform your customers that the average delivery time is three days. Additionally, Ebay enables you to add a parcel tracking number to a given order. We strongly advise you to use this option. And remember that you have to mark a specific order as “sent” once it leaves your warehouse.

COSTS OF SELLING ON EBAY

Generally speaking, Ebay imposes two types of fees. Sellers have to pay an insertion fee (when they create a listing) and a final value fee (when the item is sold). The first 250 listings each month are free from the insertion fee. The next ones are charged per listing and per category (so if one product lands in two categories, you pay the insertion fee twice). The usual insertion fee is $0.35. However, if you run a store on Ebay, you don’t have to pay this fee.

When it comes to final value fees, they are calculated as a percentage value of the total amount of the sale, plus $0.30 per order. The percentage value ranges between 3% and 15% (e.g., you have to pay 15% in the handbags category if the total amount of the sale is $2,000 or more, calculated per item).

Read more about selling fees.

LEGAL ASPECTS

Of course, you need your account to be GDPR-compliant (if you operate in the European Union), and you need all the necessary legal texts. Here, TrustedShops.com comes in handy. With their help, you can easily create legal texts for 11 different European markets.

And here’s the second issue that you need to remember about – different VAT tax rates. We advise you to read more about the so-called one-stop-shop (OSS) procedure that has been applied across the European Union since 1 July 2021. Here, you will get all the information you need. You might also want to discuss this matter with your accounting firm, as all tax-related documents must be written precisely.

Start selling on Ebay: Summary

To sum up, we encourage you to consider Ebay a worthy place for your offer. It will give you access to a new, vast, international target audience. All you have to do is create an account. Of course, there are other things to think about, including:

• Optimizing auctions and marketing campaigns
• Logistics
• Costs of operation
• Legal aspects

And several other elements, but once you figure it all out, you can turn Ebay into an effective sales channel. You can also find companies that will help you with the whole process, from setting the account to crafting legal documents. And when you need additional information, feel free to look for answers in Ebay’s Help section.

And don’t forget about pricing – your prices have to be optimized. This way, you will ensure sufficient profit and good exposure of your listings. But that’s the role for Dealavo. Check our tools for online stores, especially price monitoring and dynamic pricing. With our dynamic pricing platform, you can set some predefined rules, e.g., for your product to be visible in TOP5 in a specific product category on Ebay. And because our platform uses AI-powered algorithms, it is all automated.

Check the linked websites for details, and start your adventure with Dealavo today!

 

[1] https://www.edesk.com/blog/ebay-statistics/