A startup that wants to sell its products on ebay .. what are the possibilities ?

[etchemin]

What are the possibilities? We can not wait 45 days to sell large quantity of our products ... If this is the case we will have to find other alternatives.

[femmefan1946]

Plan to wait even longer than that.

The restrictions on new and occasional sellers (and sellers with disciplinary problems) are part of eBay's Buyer Protection system.

It's business, Nothing personal.

Restrictions on number and value of listings are applied to all new sellers until they hit various benchmarks.

From one point of view, this is also a protection for naive new sellers, who can't lose 'too much' money to scammers since they can't list 'too much' product.

And another part of the Buyer Protection program is that the customers' cleared payments are Held by Paypal for 21 days against the sellers good performance.

EBay is selling eyeballs. There are lots of cheaper sites online, but few offer the customer base of eBay.

(Amazon would be one, if your product happens to fit one of their categories. And if you don't mind the site owner being your competitor.)

While site shopping, also check how often the site releases customer payments and the fees the sites charge.

You may want to start up your own website at the same time you open your eBay sales. And don't forget local free online classified ads. There is no harm in diversifying.

[satyaloka.shop]

About the other recommendations. If you're small you want to maximize your return on your investment so here are some more tips.

you don't need your own ecommerce website:

- go buy a domain, something unique ($15-$20 a year, compared to $20/month for an ebay store)

- make sure the you can setup url forwarding, and subdomains on your new domain

- setup sub-domains and url forwarding to take you to your online store

- setup another sub-domain for use with a blog

- register for blogspot/blogger and use a self hosted blog using your domain

- create unique content on the blog, with information about your different online shop(s) with links to storefront/listings

- create a 100% inclusive sitemap for the blogger/blogspot running on your domain

- submit sitemap to search engines

- profit

Now what you just got, for far cheaper, is an seo-friendly presence that you're in absolute control over. Not to mention you haven't paid a dime for website hosting.

You can expand your seo gradually, increasing your domain's authority and your store's page authority. This is a far superior solution than trying to start an ecommerce site (although, having your own domain means you can do that, and if done right, you won't lose your pagerank/authority if/when you do).

I hope this helps.

[femmefan1946]

I don't disagree with most of your advice with two exceptions.

- go buy a domain, something unique ($15-$20 a year, compared to $20/month for an ebay store)

EBay Stores are not for new sellers. They are for experienced sellers with a large stock of (often slow-moving) unique products.

Otherwise, listing on eBay is based on the number of items and the type of listing. And eBay offers so many promotions that it is possible to have hundreds of unique listings running for months at no monthly charge.

My other disagreement, based on having our own site for many years, is that it takes a lot of work to get a site noticed and to keep it noticed. We opened our site in 1995 when we had already been in business for nearly 20 years and had a solid steady mail order and local customer list. (At that time of course, not many had personal computers and were on the internet. Less than 20% had personal emails and that barely doubled when we added work emails.)

Even so, over the next 20 years, many months eBay outsold our own site. Even our site plus the other specialist sites we use. And sometimes eBay would be dead.

So yes to your own site, and keep those precious precious email addresses, but don't discount eBay, AZ or the other smaller fixed price and auction sites.

Oh, we should also mention.

While taking Visa and MasterCard directly is helpful, OPwill find that most customers, even the long-term repeat customers, will prefer to use Paypal.

And the rates, surprisingly, are about the same for PP as for a merchant account.

But the merchant account or Square work best for shows, if those are part of the business plan.