Since you are new to ebay I would suggest taking the selling tutitorial that ebay has available. Just log into ebay, then click on 'sitemap'. Once you are on the sitemap page, look at the second heading listing in the center column. It's called 'selling resources'. Scroll down about the center of that column and you will see a title called 'seller education'. Click on that and it will take you to a page that will walk you step by step on how to sell. Ebay has lots of free tips and classes on how to sell. I would use them before starting to sell....
As far as dropshipping, you will hear both positive and negitive comments..I my self have been selling online for about 10 years and am firmly against dropshipping..My main reasons are that firstly you have no control over your product. You also have no control over the packaging of the item or the shipping time. These can be real business killers, especially for someone new..
One bad thing that alot of people who use dropshipping often run into is that often a dropshipper runs out of stock of an item and they do not inform you. Then you sell the item and get the dreaded 'on backorder' message. So you can't ship the item and the customer blames you, not the dropshipper...The result is normally negitive feedback...
Too, you must keep in mind that you need to be able to make a profit after your cost of the item, your listing and final value fees, and of course your paypal fees...Most all dropshippers are simply a middleman who is buying the product from a wholesaler, selling it to you, and then you sell it to your customer..
This means that you are already paying 2 mark-ups for the item before you mark it up a third time to sell it..The original wholesaler has marked up the item before he sells it to the dropshipper. The dropshipper marks it up before he sells it to you....In the end there is very little profit left in the item and often no profit at all....
Too, keep in mind that when using dropshippers, you have thousands of other sellers trying to sell the exact same items as you, who are getting their items from the same dropshipper, so the market is flooded with the same items that you are trying to sell...
My advise would be to stay away from dropshipping until you gain some experience about how the online market works...
Also try to stay away from electronics and designer goods. These markets are saturated and the profit margin is very very low. Naturally you will see these items selling for big bucks on ebay and be tempted to try and sell them. However the people who are selling these types of products are buying in very very large quantities and making only a couple of dollars profit per unit/item. They make their overall profit by selling large amount per day/week/month.
You should probably start by selling the things you have stashed around your house, attic and garage and don't use anymore. Even if you don't make much profit on these items, you will gain some experience about listing your auctions, shipping and so on..I myself started out by selling my used video games. Even though they were very very old, I actually made some decent profits on them. You will be surprised at what people will pay for things that you think are not worth anything...
Next I sold all my old movies that I no longer watched. Then took the profits and went to walmart and bought more video games that were on sale and repeated the process...By doing that I learned what I needed to do to start really selling and what to do and not to do...
One more thing. Once you decide to start selling, before you actually go out and buy products to sell, always pay a visit to ebays 'completed listings' pages...You will find that heading on the 'sitemap' page also. It's in the first column...You can click on that heading and it will show you listings for every item that sold or did not sell that was listed for that day on ebay...So let's say you are interested in selling a 'call of duty' video game..You can look up the category for video games, call of duty, and it will show you how many sold and for what price, and how many did not sell, etc..All the info will be there for you, you will be looking at the actual auction listings...The successful ones will show the selling price in the color green, the unsuccessful ones in red....By looking at those listings you will know ahead of time what kind of price you can ask for yours...Most importantly you will know what price you should be willing to purchase yours for BEFORE you acutally buy it....If it's selling for a higher price than you can aquire it for, then it has potential for making a profit....
Also by looking at the successful listings, you can study the things that made the auction listing sucessful..Things like the title, the discription, color of the fonts they used, duration of the auction listing. All these things you will need to know when you get ready to list yours....Keep in mind that you cannot copy another sellers auction listing. However you can learn from it, and be way ahead of the game before you list your item....Good luck
