My eBay Business Part 3 – The eBay Account and Marketing Strategy

Setting things up (for success?)

After our initial work in setting up our eBay business (Part 1, Part 2) We needed to set a few things up to get started. First things first, an eBay account.

Initially we wanted to start an account with some ‘direct to the retailer’ sort of theme. We chose ‘Directshop’ and still trade as that company today (although our branding strategy is a little different)

Our first account (which we don’t often use any more because of our shift in marketing focus for our products) was ‘direct-shop-auctions‘. We have done a lot trading with that account! So how did we go about selling?

Our whole model was (and mostly still is) 99c no reserve auctions.

Our focus in summary:

• No reserve listings
• Great quality pics (5 or 6 of each item)
• Clean, neat, professional & orderly listing templates
• Clear shipping and returns policy

Thinking back, we really were using only basic tools. We used eBay Selling Manager (not even Selling Manager Pro to begin with!). We didn’t even use Turbolister, not that it turned out to be much better.

I still have some old images of products that we sold using this account.

Getting started

We identified that we would need a certain number of feedbacks to gain some credibility in the marketplace. Preferably all positive feedbacks.

Admittedly we weren’t too sure how many positive feedbacks would give us ‘enough’ crediblity but we needed to grow. Selling fishing reels probably wouldn’t get us there fast enough so we looked for some smaller, cheaper products to give us a kick start.

We settled on LED torches in a variety of styles and got to selling them. We found a few suppliers, ordered a small lot (about 300 I think from memory) and got some feedbacks. With 10 or so feedbacks we could open an eBay store, and start selling using different strategies (1 day auctions as an example, which weren’t available to low feedback users)

We also sold some bottle openers, fishing reels (testing a few different styles) to see what they were like. Some of the bottle openers went ok, and we eventually ordered some more but by then the market was flooded with the things!

Torches didn’t go great and the quality wasn’t so good but we got our feedbacks going.

Some basic marketing starts to work

We expected the fishing reels to start selling well, and they did.

Initially our thoughts were along these lines : If we can sell 5 per day of each product range, and expand our product ranges then we could get up to 100 items per day eventually and make some reasonable profit.

Little did we know then that we could easily do this just with 2 different products, fishing reels and fishing rods.

As we started selling our items we noticed that there was a real market demand for them. We noticed that althoug the fishing category in Australia was relatively small, we were selling a lot of product at very healthy prices. And a good proportion of our sales were from the USA eBay site (Australian items were automatically shown in the relative categories over there) being purchased by Australians.

So why were Australians buying our reels from eBay.com, and not eBay.com.au?

Simple! They wanted fishing gear, and we could supply it!

The next step

We had pretty quickly worked out that we could expand the fishing range. A few more emails and we started to look at

• Expanding the product range into more SKUs
• Setting up our office a little better to handle the stock
• Looking at technology to help us streamline our operation.

Next time I will get into more detail about how we expanded, and some of the troubles we faced.