what's going on everyone welcome to another video my name is Ryan roots and in today's video I'm going to be giving you a full stepbystep guide on how to start and run an eBay store in 2024 I've done a couple of these guides in the past this is an updated one for 2024 some stuff has changed and hopefully this guide helps as many people out as it possibly can I know that starting on eBay can be a little bit daunting and the goal of today's video is hopefully to make that process a little bit less daunting and again this is going to be eBay specific so this really isn't going to apply too much to other platforms like mcari or Amazon or Poshmark anything like that it's it's going to be eBay specific one other thing before I jump into today's video I feel as a seller myself I feel it's important to really only take advice from people who are active on the platform so who are actively selling on eBay and who have a track record of of you know actually making sales and doing things the right way on eBay so just a little bit of background about myself I've been selling full-time on eBay for the past 8 years we've made a minimum of six figures every single year since we went full-time on eBay we've put millions of dollars and thousands tens of thousands of items sold through the platform and again I say that not to brag at all I just want you to know that the person you're listening to the person you're getting advice from today is somebody who has has done this we've sold millions of dollars to the platform and the advice that I'm going to give you in today's video is based on our actual knowledge of using the platform of selling on eBay not hearsay just stuff that we've heard we do this every single day to this day we actually just finished shipping our eBay sales from the weekend and I figured it would be a good time to to make an updated 2024 how to sell an eBay video so if you do pick up any solid information if you learned something from today's video how you can show your support is by subscribing to the channel we put out information on reselling all the time so if you want to subscribe to the channel subscribe to the channel but better yet just hit the thumbs up button on this video and um consider sharing it too if there's anybody who you feel this information could benefit and keep in mind we do offer additional training on how to succeed as a reseller we have a group of hundreds of other resellers from beginners to people doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on these platforms so if you're interested and joining that group just go to Rally roots. com or click the link in the description of today's video all right guys and girls so like I said I've broken this down into nine steps so the first step that I'm going to share with you is really just getting started on how do you create an eBay account where do you go what do you do so back in the day you actually had to create an eBay account and then also go and create a PayPal account well that's changed and a lot of people who you know haven't done the research don't know that eBay and PayPal are now completely separate so eBay has taken all Payment Processing inh house they have their own system everything's all in one location so you actually don't have to have a PayPal account at all anymore you can just have an ebay account so step number one is just to go to ebay. com or whatever eBay platform you're going to be selling on so like there's ebay.
com. au if you're in Australia so just make sure you're going to the correct website and just click on create an account create a seller account and create a seller account one thing I will say as well is if you're going to be taking eBay seriously and you want to sell like a lot of stuff on eBay you might want to consider getting a eBay store subscription you don't have to do it when you first start but I would say if you if you think you're going to be listing 50 things or more a month on eBay it does make sense to at least get that like basic store where that starter store subscription because it gives you access to things like running store sales that could help you sell more stuff you might also want to get some sort of a basic tracking software you can just keep track in like Excel or in you know numbers if you have a Mac or even Google Sheets totally free um but you might want to just keep track of the items that you're buying and how much they're selling for eventually you'll want to get something like like QuickBooks for example and you know go talk to a CPA so you know that the the money that you're making the profit that you're making you know that getting taxed in the correct way and that you're um you're doing things the right way on eBay this isn't tax advice but keep in mind anything that you sell that you make a profit on you have to pay taxes so if I sell this what is this if I sell this for $50 um and I only pay $10 for it I have to pay tax on that $40 profit after eBay fees and all that stuff um just keep that in mind as well so you don't want to go into eBay thinking hey I'm going to make $100,000 and it's just money in my pocket right there are costs associated with doing that which we'll talk a little bit more about in today's video so again step number one is just going to eBay and creating your account step number two or really the second thing that I want you to be aware of is that when you create a new eBay seller account there's going to be seller limits there's going to be restrictions on your account when you first start for most people it's going to look something like you can only sell 10 items this month or up to $500 so you can sell 10 items that equal to about $500 or you can sell one item that's worth $500 and that's going to be your monthly seller limit when you first start on eBay now I've heard of people signing up for accounts and they automatically get like $10,000 in selling limits but most people when you first sign up it's going to be something like that like 10 items and $500 worth of money you can sell on eBay now you can request to have your selling limits increased um I think it's once a month you can go in and hit the request button and eBay will increase usually they'll increase your selling as long as you're being a good eBay seller you're shipping on time uploading tracking you're getting good feedback they will start to increase those selling limits it will also happen automatically sometimes so as you sell more eBay will automatically increase those selling limits we've personally actually never requested to have our selling limits increased it just happens organically so as you sell more stuff as you ship and get good feedback eBay will automatically look at your account and go okay this person can now sell more stuff the one thing that I will say having an eBay store so going and signing up for a store subscription will not increase your selling limits so even if you go into eBay and you you sign up for an an anchor eBay store and pay a large monthly fee to do that doing that at the beginning doesn't make sense because it's not going to increase your selling limits you're still going to be limited with the amount of items and the dollar amount that you're allowed to sell so really just focus on when you first start on eBay you don't need to get a store subscription just focus on listing your items getting them sold shipping on time and getting good feedback so step number three and this probably is a very important step once you have your account established once you know you're selling limits now it's well what do I sell and we tell people the best way to start on eBay is to just go around your house like look around your house for something that you're not using anymore that is desirable so something that people want to purchase look out for items that you know are going to sell quick so types of items examples like that would be um like old electronics if you have a GoPro that you're not using anymore that's probably going to sell really fast on eBay video games if you have video games that you're not playing anymore those sell really really fast on eBay what we tell people too is when you first start out shipping can be a little bit hard to manage when you first you know start selling on eBay so try to look out for smaller items that are easier to ship Not Fragile stuff I wouldn't you know suggest listing a plate like a a China plate for your first item on eBay cuz it might break and you'll get discouraged so look out for items that are going to sell quickly um but that also are easy easy to ship and that's usually small lightweight items like those little Electronics or video games but most important by far is you want desirable items so there's a way to check to see if something is actually selling on eBay it's called the sell through rate so on eBay I'll try to pop up and show you an example of this but on eBay in the app download the app to your phone by the way just download the app to the phone um you can do this on on desktop as well but it's really easy on the app so in the eBay app you can type in what you're looking for and then on the right hand side there's a little drop down and you can sort by sold so what that does is it will show you the items that have sold on eBay the exact item that you're looking for what items have sold on eBay within the last 90 days the color will switch from like blue to green and the green ones are items that have actually sold now the easy way to look at this is if you look at what's active so the blue ones if you look at what is active on eBay not what's sold if you look at what's active and let's say there's a 100 items that are active and then you click on sold you make them turn green right you click on sold and let's say there's only two now that are showing as sold 100 listed and only two sales in the last 90 days take two and divide it by 100 and that is not a very good but that's called is the sell through rate so if there's 100 items listed in only two sales that means that that item is probably not in very high demand and but now let's reverse that let's say there's two active on eBay and when you look at the sales the 90-day sales there's 100 sold that is an extremely high sell through rate that means that that item is in very very high demand and the likelihood of you selling that item is very very good even if you have zero feedback if you have a zero feedback score because a lot of buyers will look at your feedback score and they might look at you and go okay this is a new seller with zero feedback I'm not buying from them but if you have a design desirable item and you price it at a fair price it will still sell even if you're brand new on eBay if you have desirable items they will still sell and then as you ship on time you get the right item to the right buyer they will leave you positive feedback and then that'll boost that feedback number up and then you just become a better and better eBay seller and the likelihood of someone purchasing items from you just increases more and more and more and more that's how you build your eBay account so the next thing I want to share is how should you list your items there's many different ways to list stuff on eBay so you know back in the day auctions used to be the best that was actually the only way you could sell stuff on eBay it had to be an auction um auctions right now not so great anymore are they are they still a viable way to sell stuff on eBay sure but if I list something for you know a 99 cent auction and it sells for 99 cents then you know it's it might not be the best way to listed but if I take the item and I list it as a Buy It Now for $5 and it sells for $5 that's more money that's better and 99% of the items that we're currently listing on eBay we're listing as buy it now with best offer so there's an option for people to make an offer on your item that's how we like to list stuff on eBay do you have to do that turn best offer on no you can just list the item as is and let it sit and eventually it might sell or it might not sell but best offer allows people to send offers in on your items which again being a new seller it's probably a good idea to have that kind of an interaction so you can negotiate a little bit now with all that being said where auctions do come in handy for people that are brand new eBay sellers if you list a bunch of auctions and they all sell it's a guaranteed sale which means that you don't have to wait for the buyer potential buyer to come and find your item you can just list the auction when it sells you ship it out it's a sale at least and the potential of getting feedback and increasing your feedback score is good so if you want to guarantee a sale then you can run an auction list the price really low get the s and just kind of use that as cost of doing business to build up your eBay account you can do that it will build it up quickly that way but again keep in mind you're going to have limitations anyway so maybe it's better to instead of running 10 auctions and maxing out the number of items you're allowed to list maybe it's better to list 10 highly desirable Buy It Now items and get those sold at a good price and build your account that way I think that's better to wait and do it the right way than to just run a whole bunch of auctions but again that's my opinion the next thing I want to talk about step number five is how do you know how much to price something for so now we know you're not going to be running auctions let's price something as a Buy It Now how do we know how much to price that item for so now we go back to looking at those sold comps comps stands for comparable items that have sold just comps in the marketplace so again you go back to the sold items on eBay and look at how much those items are selling for a couple little things here if you're selling something that's used you want to turn that filter on as well and look at the the used items that have sold if you're selling something that's brand new then click on new and look at the new ones that have sold cuz that price will change from used to new I'm assuming most people watching this video are going to be selling used items so probably click on that used one to see what the the sold prices are now when you're looking at sold comps on eBay you don't want to sort buy highest price first because it might show you know it might show an extreme of an item selling for a whole lot more than it's actually worth so you want to look at recent sales you can sort by most recent sold on eBay and look at how much those items are selling for recently you know did something sell in the past day and how much did it sell for did it sell in the past week how much did it sell for so look at those numbers and try to get like an average amount of how much the the items are selling for so if one sold for $100 one sold for $90 one sold for $80 another one sold for $100 another one sold for $80 you kind of want to go okay this is probably because I'm a new seller you want to price competitively so you probably wouldn't want to price at that $100 you might want to price at something like $90 kind of in the middle there or maybe even $85 or $80 on the lower end to get that item to sell quickly once you've established your account more then maybe you can price on the higher end towards that $100 Mark and maybe it'll sell because you have good feedback and you're able to command a higher price point at that point but when you're just starting out look at those average solds sort by ended recently and make sure you're kind of going in that in that middle range of how much those items are selling for one other cool thing about eBay is once you're ready to list you can list from those sold items so let's say I'm researching an item that I want to sell on eBay and I find one that's sold the exact same item that I'm selling and I'm ready to list that same item well under solds there's a little section called sell one like this as eBay resellers we call that the sell similar option so you click on sell one like this directly from that sold research tool click on sell one like this and eBay will automatically propagate that listing up for you and then you just tweak it to make it your own you know change the title up a little bit make sure all the item specifics are you know match the item that you're selling you don't want to just use that exact same listing you want to upload your own pictures you want to make sure the title matches exactly what you're selling and put a little description in there and make make the listing yours make the listing specific to the exact item that you're selling but that little sell one like this option is that's typically the way that you want to list stuff on eBay so you want to look at an item that has a already sold and go okay this one sold for a reason why not just kind of copy this listing over sell one like this and use that as my template to now sell the item that I have hopefully this isn't too overwhelming I'm trying to simplify it as much as I possibly can four more Steps step six seven 8 and nine that I want to share with you and again if you are enjoying the video hit the Thumbs Up Button that'll help share it to more to more people out there um but let's jump into step number six which is a very important step I've talked about it a a little bit so far but step number six is going to be feedback so like I said before all new sellers are going to start with zero seller feedback and your ultimate goal is to keep your feedback score as close to 100% as possible so when you sell something how do you make sure you get positive feedback from that buyer well step number one is make sure you're taking clear pictures take good quality pictures of your items make sure your description your title and your description make sure they're accurate make sure you're taking pictures and describing any flaws if you're listing a video game for example and there's a big scratch down the middle of the disc or something you don't want to say this is in perfect condition you want to clearly show that and describe it as accurately as you possibly can the other thing is you want to ship as fast as you can so after someone buys something from you and they pay for it make sure that make sure one you wait for payments don't ship something unless the item has actually been paid for which eBay will tell you but once the item has been paid for ship as fast fast as you can even if it's like same day if you have time to pack something up and ship it out the same day do that if you don't ship the next day don't wait a week to ship something because that will get you negative feedback ship very quickly on eBay and that's how you get positive feedback the other thing that's helped us in the past is every single package even to this day every single package that we ship out that we've sold on eBay we include a thank you note now when we first started selling on eBay it would literally be a handwritten thank you note so that when people get the item they know that you know it's not like they're just buying from a big company like Amazon right online they're buying something on eBay and we'll write that out you know we'll say hey thank you so much for supporting a small business we're just starting out if you wouldn't mind if you've had a good experience please please leave us a positive review on eBay once you start selling a whole bunch of stuff you can actually get like you know thank you cards printed out we have fourx six little thank you postcards now that we print out and that goes in every package just saying thank you please leave us positive feedback but that little Personal Touch of a thank you note humanizes yourself as not just eBay a big company but a small business that should be supported and how they can support you is by leaving positive feedback so consider including the thank you note in every single package that you sell so number seven which actually this probably should have been like step five but that's okay you can go back or you can put it in whatever order you want um the seventh thing that I want to talk about is is pictures you know pictures sell listings pictures sell products on eBay you want to make sure you're taking good pictures now the cool thing about living in 2024 is you can take high quality pictures most people can take high quality pictures right here on their phone and you can list off your phone too if you want but at this point in 2024 we use iPhones for every single picture that we take on eBay go to your picture app switch it into square mode into one by one aspect ratio mode that's what eBay likes right now switch it into that aspect ratio mode take pictures take as many pictures as you want we tell people to take a minimum of four pictures on eBay but I mean really the more you can take the better showing all aspects of the item again zooming in on any flaws if there are flaws but high quality good pictures if you don't have like a photography background to take your pictures on you can literally go to like the Dollar Tree or the dollar store and get a white poster board and just set that up as your background put your item on there shine some light on it you can even use like natural light out of a window set the poster board up in front of a window and you know just make sure that you're getting good lighting high quality pictures using a phone is totally fine just make sure they're they're not blurry you know you don't want to take a you don't want to take pictures with like a flip phone make sure that the pictures are high quality and people can zoom in and see everything about the item good lighting and at least four pictures for eBay now the next step I'm going to share is very very important all right you have your items you've taken your pictures you've listed your items for a good price price you've done your research you've listed it for a good price your item is sold to a buyer on eBay now you have to ship it you must ship your items out okay now when it comes to shipping for the sake of this video you know there's so many different shipping options when it comes to eBay but for the sake of this video I'm going to keep it I'm going to try to keep it simple like I said earlier it's good to focus on smaller items to start most of the time you're going to be shipping if it's a smaller item you're going to be shipping on eBay what's called Ground Advantage so USPS ground Advantage it used to be called first class mail um but now it's just USPS ground Advantage it's good to kind of get like some shipping supplies before you start listing your items on Ebay so you have those available to ship you can get things like um like poly bags are good for shipping in you can get bubble wrap you can get Shipping paper it kind of depends on what you're shipping um but for example let's say I'm shipping a a t-shirt I sell a t-shirt it's totally fine to fold up this t-shirt put it in a poly bag put that poly bag inside of another poly bag so in case it gets wet or something um it it makes it through the mail get yourself like a little shipping scale to weigh the item after it's packaged weigh the item out and get the exact weight and then eBay is very simple you want to buy your shipping label through eBay shipping so when an item sells you can print your label through eBay don't use a third party shipping app until you know what you're doing buy the shipping labels through eBay most of the time your uh shipping discount is actually going to be better through eBay anyway the worst thing you can do is take your item item and package it up and go into the post office and buy shipping at the post office that is going to be the most expensive shipping it's probably going to be like 70% or more than what eBay is going to charge because you get a discount for shipping your stuff through eBay so package your item up weigh it get the correct weight buy your shipping label on eBay and then print the label out so you are going to need a printer you don't need a fancy thermal label printer when you first start out you can get to that point you can just use like a ink printer just make sure you have some tape so once you print out the label cut out the label this is the way that we did this for like a year by the way we we shipped thousands of packages this way before we got a thermal label printer with like the nice sticky labels we would print out the label on just like a regular inkjet printer and then cut the label out and then tape it tape it to the package okay so you can do that that's definitely a way that you can do it once you're ready to upgrade to a thermal label printer there's cheap ones out there now you can get one for like $70 on Amazon get your labels and then it just prints it out like a sticky label you peel it off slap it on the package and ship it out if you're going to be selling heavier items like shoes for example you you probably want to go to um USPS. com and Order yourself some shoe boxes or some like USPS Priority Mail shipping boxes those are free to order you can see there's some behind me right there um they're free to order off that website you can place an order and order them that way just make sure you're not using those USPS boxes to ship FedEx for example or UPS you want to make sure you're using USPS Priority Mail if you're using those boxes you can also do stuff like uh like dumpster dive for boxes if you need extra just you know regular brown boxes as long as they're clean and nice you can do that you can ask your friends and family we get the Amazon boxes the stuff that Amazon ships the the you know the boxes they use to ship we get Amazon boxes from our friends and family all the time they just give us all their empty boxes and we use them for shipping you can go to like a grocery store or or Walmart when they're restocking items and ask if you can have the the empty leftover boxes and most of the time they'll give them to you poly bags are a little bit harder but we buy our poly bags by the thousands on eBay and it works out to like8 cents a bag or something like that so you can you can definitely get some poly bags on eBay if you want to you know want to buy it that way um or if you're strapped for cash on buying you know in bulk like that you can literally go to like Walmart and you can get poly bags that way or um we've even gone to the dollar store and they sell like the the padded envelopes they're expensive it's like a dollar for three of them but if you just need some like quick basic shipping supplies you can go to the the Dollar Tree and pick some stuff up but again wrapping up shipping uh focus on smaller items to begin with it's easier to ship them look for items that are you know under 2 pounds is typically going to be best and right now in 2024 things change with shipping a lot um but right now the best way to ship is going to be USPS ground advantage that's uh that's the best way to ship those smaller items out through eBay buyer shipping through eBay so that was step number eight and now step number nine in this eBay for beginners video step number nine is just continuing to build your business so once you have a an idea of how to sell on eBay um You Want To Source more stuff right so you've kind of gone through everything around your house and you've sold some stuff and you've built up your account maybe now you have um you have higher limits on your accounts and maybe now you can sell 100 things a month and up to $1,000 a month or you know whatever it is so now you want to start taking it a little more seriously how do you Source more items to sell on eBay and turn it into you know a little side hustle business and maybe even eventually a a bigger business so the best ways that we found to Source items when you first start out how we started ourselves was with $200 and going to garage sales to look for stuff to flip on eBay that's how we started just by going to garage sales we started our whole business with $200 and we just rolled that money into where we are now so go to garage sales garage sales I still think you can get some of the craziest best flips at garage sales even even now like we've been doing this for eight years and reselling definitely caught on more and there's more places for people to sell and sometimes you know people want to sell on eBay themselves but there's still garage sales out there and believe it or not every single weekend that we go out we're still able to find stuff to flip on eBay at garage sales next would be thrift stores like Goodwill Salvation Army Sav Arc Thrift there's there's a family thrift there's a lot of thrift stores you can go to just look in your local area go on Google Maps type in thrift store and just make out a little map of thrift stores you want to go to some thrift stores the prices are going to be higher than others you know there might be some mom and pop type thrift stores that you can get lower prices at um it's all regional so like our Goodwills are very very high priced but sometimes when we travel we can go to Goodwills and the items will be priced much lower so just keep that in mind and go back to your knowledge base now that you know this go back to your knowledge base of looking at sold comps on eBay and how much they're selling for so if Goodwill has something listed for $20 and you look at the sold comps and the sold comps are telling you this item sells between $20 and $30 you probably don't want to buy that item because there's fees associated with selling an item on eBay like eBay fees which are I think 12.
9% plus 30 cents transaction fee so you have to pay eBay a fee to sell on the platform when an item sells and then you also have fees like the the money that you're paying for shipping supplies internet labels like all those little things add up and you have to you know make sure you're keeping track of them and the biggest thing is honestly your time so if you're going out you know the time to go and find something the time to photograph the item list the item ship the item out all that is time so if it takes you an hour of time to sell to actually sell one thing and you're only making a $2 profit on that item item then you're making $2 an hour you want to make sure you're making enough net revenue to make it worthwhile as a as a side hust or as a job for you otherwise it just makes more sense to focus on your your current work or to go and get a you know a side job making 20 bucks an hour you know what I mean so just make sure you're keeping track of your time your time is the most valuable element of this business and a lot of people a lot of resellers eBay sellers they forget to take that into account because it's fun it's fun to go and search for stuff and sell stuff on eBay but if you're not making enough money to Warrant the time that you're spending on doing this then it doesn't really make sense unless again unless it's just a fun side hustle thing for you to do and you don't care about the money then go for it so garage sales thrift stores estate sales there's a website that we use called estat sales. net you can look for estate sales in your local area those are good and then in-person auctions not storage unit auctions I don't suggest doing that when you first start out but in-person physical auctions that you can go to to the auction house research the items look them up on eBay and then bid on them those in-person auctions can be very very fruitful if you're able to look up the items and see you know that you're going to be able to make a profit there's a website called AuctionZip did I say that one no I did estate sales. net I'm sorry estat sales.
net is where we find estat sales auctionzip. com is where we find those in-person auctions so there's two websites that you guys can use to go and source to your heart's content garage sales we literally just drive around and look for garage sales the best are community sales so if you can find when like a neighborhood community does a whole bunch of sales at once those are those are a gold mine sometimes for us and I think that is going to be about it guys and girls beginner's guide to selling on eBay in 2024 hopefully this helps you out I really appreciate you taking the time to watch it feel free to share this video anywhere you want um feel free to ask questions leave comments on this video I'll try my best to answer the questions um we're obviously very busy running our own business so I'll do my best to answer questions on this video but also again keep in mind that we do have that group of resellers where we answer every question in the group and if you want to join that group just go to Rally roots.
