it has been 4 years since I first started selling on eBay and making YouTube videos about it and I could honestly say that it has completely changed my life if I think back to when I first started there has been so many things that I have learned along the way in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about my early stages of starting out on eBay four years ago uh I also want to talk about three things that I absolutely love about selling on eBay I want to give some words
of encouragement as well some pieces of advice uh that you can take on board to try and help you with your own Journey if you're just getting started um there's obviously going to be some challenges along the way doing this for 4 years so let's talk about those as well um but then some really cool opportunities too that eBay has been able to provide me uh which could be the case for you too if you keep sticking at it so there's going to be a lot of info in this it's a bit of a personal
Journey story that can hopefully Inspire and motivate you to do the same thing yourself um so let's give this thing a go um my journey when I first started out selling on eBay Wow way if you had if you walk out the street right now at your place and you find somebody and you say hey tomorrow you're going to sell on eBay and you're going to make a YouTube channel and start documenting that Journey well that was me that was the person that you were speaking to and I just decided that the very next day
that's just the way it was going to be I signed a contract with myself and I said right get going get to work uh it all kind of stemmed from uh the spicy cough part of the world um that time was just so crazy for everybody I chose not to go back to my full-time job and after four months of deliberating about what to to do next uh I actually decided to jump all in on eBay and YouTube and uh I would not recommend anybody do that it was just that it was at that point
in in time where you could do some pretty crazy outlandish things like that and uh I would 100% encourage that you just do it as a part-time job um just keep you N9 to5 and just start learning the process of selling on eBay um but that wasn't my journey my journey was to go all in learn it as fast as I could and try and build up a paycheck as quick as I could so to do that I needed to get the support of my parents and you got to think you know in their the
middle of their working career they didn't get the opportunity to take a photo of a product on an iPhone and put it up to millions of people and then put it in a mailbag I get that the fact that they would have been really apprehensive uh when I said that that's what I wanted to do for a job um but I I I was able to convince them they're amazing parents and they gave me the support to go upstairs live in my old bedroom that I used to live in at the family home and uh
put my head down and try and learn things and for the next 88 months that's what I did I spent 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week to be honest with you learning how to do it and 40 hours a week actually doing it there were so many hours every single day no days off to try and get myself off the ground I was trying to do full two full-time jobs with zero experience uh both eBay and YouTube um the first few videos were crap the first few sales were crap and uh I
thought that I was really naive actually to the process I thought that I could grow a channel and and sell on eBay um and build a paycheck really fast fast I was just blind to the fact of business related expenses taxation um all these things that comes along with being a a business owner um I was blind to it I just saw my first sale on Facebook Marketplace for some plush toys go from 10 into 30 I saw $2 in profit and I said to myself let's do that 10 times 100 times a th000 times
and surely the numbers will work out and we'll be able to make this a part time sorry a full-time job um wasn't exactly the case I quickly realized that there are a lot of other EXP along with it and it's going to be a bit of a grind to get it to a point where it's going to be a full-time income um but I was going to work really really hard no matter what to make it that way so Facebook Marketplace is where I first started it wasn't eBay it was Facebook Marketplace I was flipping
furniture on Facebook Marketplace let me know if you were there back in the day on YouTube watching those videos I still think that's one of the best side hustles to get into um flipping furniture on Facebook Marketplace so much attention on Facebook around the category of furniture um so definitely look into it if you're trying to make a couple of old but I quickly realized that to make this a full-time thing I needed to convert to eBay purely for the case that there were thousands millions of eyes on the products that you were trying to
sell um at that time it was very much feebay mindset for me the fees Associated to eBay was the big deterrent as to why just didn't want to do it you just got to give them too much money um but really ultimately it's actually an amazing setup because if you were to create a website and try and sell a product and pay for advertising you're going to pay all this money in advertising and maybe not even sell your product with eBay you're putting the item up for grabs and maybe only paying a submission fee um
to have an account and then from there the actual fee comes out once the item goes on to sale so you can list up a thousand items and not pay a cent until that item actually goes on to sell and yet a million millions of people are able to actually view your listing as well so um once I got my head around that I realized pretty quickly that eBay was a really really risk-free way of going about selling online um so the next thing I needed to work out was obviously what to sell that it
was trial and error but I realized that DVDs in the end did quite well for me and they are still to this day a staple of what I sell on eBay um I'm basically media I've got video games behind me I sell a few shoes theyve always been around and DVDs they've just been the three biggest selling categories for me and still to this day they do really really well um so that was my early stages it was really quite tricky um YouTube is always a part of the plan I always thought that I could
make some YouTube videos and make some money from that and I thought that I could obviously sell a few goods on eBay and together they are a full-time income today half my money comes on eBay half my money comes on YouTube and that was always the plan um but together while they are both part-time incomes they make a full-time income um why I love selling on eBay why do I enjoy it well the biggest one is the easiest one it provides the ultimate freedom and I can give you a really good example of this is
I go for a run every single morning well not every single morning but maybe every couple of days I'm running three to four days a week and I'll will always get a coffee at the coffee shop after I go for my run and I always try and give myself a moment of gratitude for what for what it is you know I don't need to go home I don't need to have a shower quickly get in the car and race off to sit in traffic and and clock in for a 905 job I can come home
whenever I want I can come home at lunchtime if I choose to and I'm working from home so that's the other thing I love the fact that you can work from home in your pjs with this job these are all little things that aren't putting money in your pocket but they are really boosting up that happy meter to being at its all-time high and I really do think that happiness is stemmed from Freedom you know Freedom comes from Freedom gives you happiness and that's one of the biggest things for me um is to is to
be happy with what you're doing every single day you spend a lot of time in the job that you do you may as well have a bit of fun doing it and I absolutely have fun doing this um equal to YouTube equal to eBay I love both so to be able to combine the both and make a full-time income from it is the dream and I'm trying to just make it the dream and and have it continue um you know for many more years to come but uh there are two very big ones the other
one as well is that like I touched on earlier we just couldn't do this 20 to 25 years ago the concept of picking up an iPhone taking a photo of a good and then having it send off um to a customer anywhere around the world what an opportunity to even just say that I gave it a go it might have not worked out for you but at least you gave it a go and in that time of uh you know the world being in a really difficult spot a few years ago I just thought that
was was my moment to at least say I tried and then I could get back into the footy industry that I was working in or I could go into Real Estate another sort of ninet to-5 based profession um but how how silly would it be not to have given it a go at that point is what I thought to myself um and it might be the same case for you to right now you know you might be looking at other ways to get a pay rise at your job or you could just say to yourself
why don't I just start selling on eBay and just give that a go um who knows what can come from it if I just simply started um so that's another thing as to why I love day we just get the opportunity to use it in this day and age and there are millions of buyers out there ready to buy our items um some advice let's let's give you guys some advice for the newbies out there well I would say guys like I touched on just start just make the first account create your first account it
takes I would say 4 and a half minutes to create an account you can do that today you could start your eBay journey today you could list up the first item at free cost by an item that you find lying around the house um I'm sure you've got a phone that's got a camera on it take a photo of the item and post it up for sale eBay as a bit of a power tip they love at least six photos for your listing so take six photos of that item and then post it up for
sale with a title that accurately represents what you've got to sell you could do all of that in 15 minutes today right now and you're an eBay seller you've got an item up for grabs so I do recommend that you do that just make a start um I would also say that don't look at it from an hourly rate persp perspective you've got to remember you know first year Matt is doing 40 hours of learning 40 hours of work that's 80 hours and trust me I was I was rent free at M and Dad's place
but I wasn't able to afford too much more than a couple of pieces of food with friends on a on an afternoon out um you know there wasn't a lot of money coming in and I was working a lot of hours and that that Runway to try and get yourself into the position that you need to be in uh is not going to be a pretty picture if you try and break things down on an hourly rate perspective also remember you're a business you if you're selling on eBay that is a business transaction you are
a business trying to sell a good to a consumer um so treat it like that you're not a 95 worker on an hourly wage anymore um you've got yourself little business and that comes with different responsibilities and different time commitments and over time you will become a hell of a lot more efficient with your processes and maybe in 3 to four years down the line you could look at it if you wanted to from an alley rate perspective but gez I wouldn't do it when you first start out because it's going to demotivate you it's
going to make you not want to continue and I really really highly recommend that you don't do it um keep track of your finances is the other one as well um really keep track of it because it's going to motivate you to keep going when you see how much money that you're going to be able to be making from this and it's also going to give you a realistic look at actually how much money you're making because revenue is the the C is is the top number that looks flashy we put it all into our
YouTube titles to try and get people to click um but true profit true net profit that bottom line um you need to have an understanding of it you need to know how much you're spending on Postage and cost of goods and all the different business elements Associated um you need it for tax time to be able to put in your numbers and and pay the right amount of tax so you know do that from the beginning and you won't give your head s a headache down the line um and then finally just just because it's
cheap doesn't mean you should buy it that's another piece of advice I've got for you guys when I first started I used to buy items based on price alone oh it's two bucks I'll be able to make money on it I'll buy it but then what happens is you get cluttered up in your household with a lot of stock that isn't rate it's not going to go on to sell horrible sell through rate uh and then you start to get overwhelmed at the fact that you've got so much volume of stock and nothing selling and
you wonder why you're having low sales it's because you're not buying the right products um so just because it's cheap don't buy it the best sales that I've ever had on eBay I've paid up for to get my hands on the item you get your holy Grails where you get those big high priced items for $2 at a yard sale but ultimately you should be paying a lot more to get your hands on it more commonly and more regularly um so I would highly enage you guys use two apps one would be the EIT app
it breaks down all of your business related expenses when it comes to eBay for the purchase and the sale of that good and it will'll let you know what your true profit is and then eBay will let you know how many of those items are actually going on to sell so you're going to get a sell through rate and those two metrics right there will allow every single purchase that you make uh to be a good a good buyer you won't have any bad buyers if you were to do it the issue is Nobody Does
It Nobody Does it even when they're you know long to the game game because they're lazy everyone just loves to buy things so that would be another one um you know keep track of your finances and just don't buy stuff just because it's cheap some opportunities that I've had selling on eBay guys I have been on breakfast TV what just so crazy crazy to think that somebody would want to put me on their Network and have me speak about getting somebody to sell on eBay I pinch myself every time I've done four or five breakfast
TV stints National breakfast TV live TV I've been nervous every single time that I've done it but I also look at it from a gratitude perspective of just how cool creating content on social media is selling goods online working for yourself speaking to the Nation about what you do crazy you know four years ago would not have thought about that as a possibility and here we are um we've also got overseas trips I've gone on two America trips over the last couple of years uh to to to boost and benefit my YouTube channel and my
eBay business um bringing stock home to and sell to viewers of the channel and to the eBay customers um has been a thrill and um it's obviously a business related trip that I've never had I've never had the opportunity to go on an overseas business trip before and here eBay is providing that opportunity which is um yeah pretty mindblowing um the other one as well is probably the biggest one the biggest opportunity that I've had is to be able to make enough money to be able to hire Courtney I've never been a manager before never
been a boss never gone through that process of managing a staff member and it was so daunting to had that responsibility not only from a managerial perspective but from a cash flow perspective I now had somebody that I had to rely on or I had to she had to rely on me to make sure that I could give her the funds that she needed to pay her bills that's so much pressure and it was so daunting when I first did it but I I remember some really strong piece of business advice and it was if
you're a business owner consider yourself a chief recruitment officer you really want to try and bring good people into your business and anyone that you bring in you really want to try and obviously have them help you better things um so if you can hire great people that believe in what you're trying to do and can work really hard for you to get to where you want to be um that that's what's going to build a successful business you can't do it all I can't do it all with the goals that I've got for myself
I need to ultimately over time bring people in and for a first ever hire Courtney has been the best person I could have ever imagined to come and work for me she's so hardworking she's great for the YouTube videos across the board I just I've been blown away with how lucky I've been being able to hire Corney for a first ever hire and hopefully she's enjoyed the 18 months that she's worked for me so far I think the fact that she's still here is a good Telltale sign to let me know that I'm on the
right foot with doing the right things for her as a manager um so we'll just keep going but it's been a massive learning curve no doubt about it um but I've enjoyed every single second of that process there has definitely been some challenges though there's no doubt about it I think probably the biggest one would be the case that it's just been long working hours I think when you're first starting out with anything new you're going to always invest a lot more time than you think you would um so you know that what I touched
on 40 hours a week learning 40 hours a week doing over time you definitely get more efficient but in those early stages unfortunately the challenge of just having to give up and sacrifice other elements of your life to Triple down on what you're trying to develop is just a necessary frustration I guess that you're going to have to put up with and I certainly did that for a large chunk it was a good 18 months of just putting my head down and just nothing but work for every single day um but it's allowed me to
be in the position that I'm in now and to sit at that coffee shop you know after a run and have that freedom to be able to get back into my day whenever I choose to um the isolation element has definitely been a real frustration for me as well this uh last you know four years having caught me on board for a few hours a week has obviously been great but every other moment in time it's just me sitting here at home in my garage chipping away I think my personality type has slowly shifted over
the last four years from being a complete extrovert to being a 50% extrovert 50% introvert I've actually started to enjoy the isolation and just the the time with your own self um so that that has definitely been an adjustment period over the last four years it wasn't easy at the beginning um but it has become more comfortable as time's gone on so if you are an extrovert and you're quite an outgoing person just have a think about that if you're trying to take eBay seriously from a a full-time perspective because that will be for a
large chunk of your early days very much a reality um but probably the biggest challenge that I've experienced over the last four years I'm sure you can guess it has definitely been the financial struggles um you know I was working at six figer job when I was working in the sporting industry um you know I've been fighting tooth and Nile to try and get myself to just even a a job that pays the bills with what we're doing here so I am still plugging away obviously bringing Courtney in it pulls even more out of my
pocket um you know you're balancing cash flow you're paying Courtney's tax super um all of these things that go into it and then obviously you're trying to um you know fight with the the postage costs increasing with Australia Post all the time and then you've got um your thrift stores raising their prices there's a lot of frustration that comes with these price Rises across the board um and then trying to manage your cash flow as well with the money that you do get trying to strategically put that money in its best possible place to continue
to grow and to keep your head above water um really really daunting really quite stressful and that is why I truly think that the best way to go about eBay is to keep it a very strong side hustle make great money from it you could do a grand two grand a month in profit and then have a 9 to-5 job for the true security for all of your bills and then play with the fun stuff of the profits that you make out of eBay that's how I think I would do it um if I didn't
have YouTube I would play I would play eBay as a part-time game I wouldn't do it full-time um it is so so stressful and um the return that you get from it isn't worth the struggle um hopefully YouTube progresses and we can make a few more there on YouTube um to cover the costs even more so uh to bring Courtney into more hours cuz that's definitely an aim but um that's definitely being one of the tougher Parts those three elements um to selling on eBay but I would give all of that struggle a go again
and again and again if it meant that I could keep doing what I'm doing because overall I'm absolutely loving being a full-time eBay seller there's no doubt about it but look guys it's it's been four years it doesn't feel like it's been four years it's provided me with so many opportuni and learnings along the way I'm very much looking forward to the next four years these YouTube videos aren't going anywhere I'm going to still keep pumping them out helping as many people as I possibly can uh and I'm going to keep trying to you know
sell as much as we can on eBay as well um if if you're trying to learn how to get started and you're thinking after this video yep I'm actually going to make my first listing today I've made a video right here which is an exact beginner's guide of how to sell on eBay um so hopefully it gets you off on the right foot that's what this video has been designed to do is to give you a bit of insight as to what to expect hopefully you've enjoyed it guys look forward to seeing you soon
