Lack of skills but wanting to sell on eBay - Where to start?

Not sure if this even the right place to post this. I am new to this and want to start selling on ebay. i was referred to SaleHoo by a friend. What is out there for someone who does not have very much for start up cost? everything i have seen so far wants me to pay to be a member of their site and only sells in bulk or the prices per single item are still just out of my range at the moment. I have spent about $50 on ebay sellers who offer Wholesale list prior to joining SaleHoo and have no luck with any of the info. So my question is how can someone on a limited budget get to a point where they are no longer limited??? Thank You

Link hidden: Login to view
Link hidden: Login to view
Link hidden: Login to view
Link hidden: Login to view

My advise to you is NEVER and I mean NEVER pay to be a member of a dropshipping company. As most of them have high prices and little profit for you. If you cannot setup an account for free then the company is misleading you in some manner.

There are exceptions for companies like DBLdistributing.com as they are the largest electronics distributer in the USA.

I know I've preached on this until people are tired of hearing it, but I still stand by it.

If you have a limited budget, start with things laying around your house. I'm sure that you have stuff that you don't use anymore. Childrens clothting, old video games, dvd movies, tools, toys, and on and on.

Everyone seems to think that you have to start out selling high priced electronics and such. To be perfectly honest, that's probably the biggest mistake you can make just starting out.

Try visiting the yard sales in your local neighborhood and pick up a few cheap items, try the local thrift stores. You can always find cheap items there. Also use your local newpapers want ads, they are always full of things people are selling dirt cheap, for the same reason I mentioned above. They were just laying around the house taking up space..

Spend some time browsing through ebay's completed listing for items that you have an interest in. Then browse the classified ads and see if you find any of those items listed for sale at a cheaper price that they are selling for on ebay. the buy them and resell for a small profit. If you can, invest a couple of buck and buy the 'auction inspector'. You will find it on almost any page on this site. It can save you time and make you some money when it comes to finding what is selling well on ebay...

You need to learn how the ebay systems works before you invest your money into it. If you don't, you will probably end up losing money, get discouraged and give up.

By starting small and slow and learning exactly how everything works will pay dividends in the end. But you have to do the homework first.

I started by selling old, and I mean really old, video games that I had not played in several years. They were actually made for windows 95. I listed them and made a whopping $2 profit on each one. Luckily I had about 10 games. I also sold some old movies that I had. I think my profit for the whole thing was less than 30 dollars for over a weeks work.

I took that money and visited my local game stop store and picked up a couple of more games and repeated the same thing. It took about a month, but I finally started to make a few dollars to where I could buy a few newer items at discount stores, and then finally when I figured out what I was doing, I then invested some money.

Ever hear if Rob Frechette? He started selling used jeans on ebay. He spent his weekends cruising the thrift stores buying up used jeans and selling them on ebay. Just him and his dad.
he was making just a couple of bucks per pair. Never sold anything new, just thrift shop jeans.
He now sells about 50,000 items per month on ebay to the tune of 2.2 million a year. He has a book out called Grand Stage selling. He's nothing special, just an average guy selling used jeans...

My point is, that you don't have to have alot of money to get started. My biggest investment to start was the 10 dollars I spent for ebay's photo manager. And you don't even have to have that now days, you can get hosting for free.

And you surely don't want to pay for any wholesale and drop ship memberships!!
Let me ask you this, would you shop at your local grocery store if they told you that you had to pay a membership fee to shop there and buy their groceries?? Probably not.

True drop shippers are really hard to find. If you feel that you need to use one, then be sure and ask the members on this site, who they recommend, before you buy. 99.9% of the so called dropshippers that you see plastered all over ebay and the web are really just 'middle-men' posing as wholesalers and dropship companies. The people you need to be buying from are the ones that those 'membership' dropshippers are getting their goods from.

They are buying their goods from a distributor or true wholesaler, then marking it up and selling it to you, plus making you pay a fee just to buy it. And don't forget that the person from whom the dropshipper bought it, has already marked it up too. So you are buying an item that has been marked up twice, plus paying a membership fee on top of that.

I don't know who recommended you to this site, but you should give them a call and thank them, because they did you a big favor.

Take advantage of not only the members here, but of the resources too. Do that and you will be successful..If you need any help,wether it be finding a product, need help with creating a auction listing on ebay, or whatever, just let me know. I'll be glad to help you in any way...

I myself actually started by selling off my entire dvd collection. We had close to 500 dvd movies just sitting there not being watched. I think we made about 3500 by selling them. It gave use enough money to further our budget and then we moved into selling clothes online and even further boosted our profits.

We still sell dvd movies on ebay but not as many as we used to as we now have 3 primary ebay selling accounts.
. We have been selling alot of products through newspapers and classified ads as well turning even more profits then we could selling the same items on ebay.

You have more money making items in your house then you think.

Broken Electronics? You can still sell broken items too. I sold several dozen broken xbox units for an average of $160-$180 when they were still selling for $299 new. We actually ran ads to buy them for as much as 50 bucks from people locally. You would be surprised how many people called us when we ran the ad. We listed them all on ebay and sold every one for an average of 100 bucks and more profit per unit. There are many refurbishers on ebay looking for broken items to fix and sell. You can even get into that if you have some broken electronics laying around.

Do you have any unused cell phones? Sell them too. Every one has a small treasure just laying around thier houses and they dont even know it. Ever hear the saying 'one mans junk is another mans treasure' ?

This is how myself and thousands of established sellers have established themselves on ebay. You dont even have to worry about the price the item sells for because you already paid for it. And most likely selling them in a garage sale with kill what you can make off of it on ebay.

5 stars (*****) for gulfy for the message above. (you too Jimmy, but you already know your a treasure-trove of useful information).

Gulfy's message was long but WELL WORTH reading. Props to you my friend. People like you are what make salehoo what it is...

There is even a woman on eBay who picks up piles of old magazines at flea markets and elsewhere for pennies and then cuts out pictures and articles on various celebrities and sells the clippings in lots. Researching her past sales, I was astounded to see she sells over $1000 per month - that's profit from junk if ever I saw it. There are lots of ways to make money selling things other people throw out, it's also amazing to me that somebody would actually pay for magazine clippings. As mentioned above, you really should forget about trying to find a supplier for small electronics at a good price. The market is flooded for ipods by wholesalers selling direct. You can never hope to compete with their prices and low profit margins.

Can someone please tell me how to list my products on the newspaper and classified ads? I really want to try this idea as well. Any inputs will be greatly appreciated! =) Thank You!

on projo.com under classifieds
theres a tab thats says projo free classifieds only if the price if under $200..if its over $200 you have to pay
hope this helps

Wow! Thank You! I will give it a try =)

If you are not selling on Craigslist, you are shorting yourself thousands of dollars a week...here is a tip, I get paid an extra $10 per item for delivery charge on my Craigslist sales. Amazing that lazy people will pay me to drop something off to them that they are buying but why not? They would have paid for shipping if they bought it elsewhere.

Just a thought.

Good luck with your sales.

Actually, I do sell on craigslist. All items I have listed for sale on ebay, at the same time, I also list them on craigslist =) Which ever sells first, either on ebay or craigslist, I just delete them once the transaction has been completed =) I just made a sale on craigslist earlier too which is great because I don't have to ship the item and no Final Value Fee nor Merchant Fee =)

How are you two posting your stuff on CL because i havnt had any luck with it in my area.

Still a 'newbie' and researching before selling, I appreciate the information submitted by each of you on this thread. Nothing to add at this point, except 'thank you' for posting.

i need a good 'free' picture host service so that I can have other people help me list items on ebay. listing 150 different items consumes my whole week. i currently use turbolister, and thinking of trying something else. any advice would be appreciated! thanks

in reply to GRB, i don't know how you would have time to list on both sites. Any advice?

in reply to GRB, i don't know how you would have time to list on both sites. Any advice?

Oh Hi! I use turbo lister to list all my items on eBay. On craigslist, I just list them by volume. I do this full time so it takes me about 2-3 days listing all my items for sale. It does take a lot of time to list items but I guess being patient is the key; for me that is =).

Wow, excellent posts especially by Gulfy and Jimmy, I am still a new member but the wealth of information and advice here is priceless. Thanks all for your comments...:)

This is in reply to SGTDWEBER, you can use Link hidden: Login to view they allow to host your pictures for free. First register for free, just link your account to an eBay account.
After that trim your pictures and upload to their hosting server. Later on you can view the http link in the image gallery section for each image and then copy the link whereever you want to post the images, and re-use them elsewhere on the web.
You can also paste the link in the email and sent it to someone to see the items. I use it for all my Atomic Mall listings.

Craigslist works when you get the proper keywords listed on it. Research what keywords apply to the products you have, evaluate, stand back for a moment and then put those out there. You also might want to look into advertising it yourself, on places like searchpost.net so that you can start getting alot more traffic flowing into it.

If you need to host the images, do not go to an ebay image host or some official professional site. For quick and easy image hosting, I always use hostpic.biz for instance or ruid.com and they give away instant results. Since all these services are free, you also slashed the cost of all advertising by over 80% and don't need any of the custom features on ebay either.

You'll have alot of success this way. Do not attempt it on eBay. If you use eBay remember that auctions are auctions, you will want to get rid of rare vintage items and make sure your listing fee is only $1 by not buying any of the extra 'addons' like bold or featured listings or ebay 'stores'.

My advise to you is NEVER and I mean NEVER pay to be a member of a dropshipping company. As most of them have high prices and little profit for you. If you cannot setup an account for free then the company is misleading you in some manner.

There are exceptions for companies like DBLdistributing.com as they are the largest electronics distributer in the USA.

Yes, there are exceptions.

Correct Jimmy and plus the best ones aren't even listed on Salehoo. There are some good wholesalers on salehoo but nearly everything else, I found that on my own through trial & error.


Also the classifieds when they're getting rid of factory returns etc. For instance a giant wholesale marketplace would be blujay.com or dawdle.com, none of you have heard of those. You don't pay anything for these. If they have what you need, you buy their item once the item is sold and ship it to the customer. You have voice to voice contact to make sure they're wholesale.