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What a great set up! I joined the eBay community a few months ago when I came home from the service. In no time I was able to see what all the fuss was about. I was finding some old hard to find war / military genre movies among other things. I have been browsing through eBay for months now and I haven't even seen one tenth of categories to choose from. I Must admit that I spend most of my time in the movies.

I started out just buying a hard to find movie now and then. As time went on I started to see that there was potential money to be made selling on eBay. I thought why not give it a shot? While I was gone serving the country good old Governor Davis took my state job away, so I had some time on my hands. I started looking for movie distributors, wholesalers, producers, drop-shippers and anything else I could find on buying movies at a discounted price. Once I found some of these outlets I started Listing them on E-Bay one at a time. I have never been a salesman but have some web and HTML experience. Now that I had some movies on hand I needed to build a good template and snazz up my eBay Store Front a bit. eBay also offers some very helpful tools to their sellers. One tool they offer is called a Turbo Lister. This Turbo Lister is an excellent tool for sellers! You can save all your basic information as well as the entire sale. In other words once I fill out all the information on a sale and upload it to eBay I can save it for future use. It comes in very handy when you are selling the same 100 movies over and over! I only have to do the work on each movie once. Keep in mind that I deal in movies but you can use this method selling anything.

Setting Up An eBay Account

Setting up an eBay account is very easy and their site is very user friendly. Basically you just need an e-mail address and mailing address. Set up a buyers account if you are just looking to buy products found on eBay. Buyers accounts are very easy to get working and you can pay for most products with a check or money order (this information is listed with each sale). Setting up a sellers account is a bit more complex. The reason being the more methods of payment you will accept, the more sales you will pull in. So you will spend some time setting up other accounts with places like Pay-Pal or Billpay. The amount of effort and time you can spend setting up a sellers account may depend on just how often you want to sell. If you get serious there are programs (Sellers Assistant - Turbo Lister) available to help you with your sales. These are for the more serious sellers with many things to sell.

Buying On eBay

Buying on eBay is fairly simple and straight forward. After setting up an account and finding something that you can't live with out just buy it, right? Not necessarily, you need to have a look at the party selling this item. You need to look at their shipping prices and weather they offer insurance on expensive items. You also need to look at the location and weather or not they will ship to you. Lastly one needs to look at what sorts of payments they accept.

OK, walking through a sale. I am browsing through the movies and find Citizen Kane. Now I would like to bid on this old movie. In no certain order this is what you should do. Look at the shipping, check out their feedback. Be very careful with newcomers selling anything. Be very careful bidding when the seller has a feedback rating less than 96%. Look at the person's feedback and see what other buyers and sellers are saying about this person! Assuming the shipping and feedback are reasonable, I'd have a look at this persons methods of payment accepted. Like most other auctions this seller will accept Pay-Pal or Money Orders. Now I am willing to pay $9.00 total for Citizen Kane. The shipping & Handling is listed as $3.50, so I'll place a bid of $5.50 and submit. Now eBay will bid for me in small increments up to my high of $5.50

Once the sale is over eBay will notify you, win or lose. If you are the winning bidder the seller will usually send an invoice as well. I won this auction for Citizen Kane so I was sent an invoice from the seller.

$5.50 (Movie - Citizen Kane)
$3.50 (shipping & handling)
$1.30 (optional Insurance)
----------------------------
$9.00

Now I would make the payment via one of this sellers methods. After ten days I receive Citizen Kane. Now I go into my eBay account and leave feedback for this seller.
You may leave positive - neutral or the dreaded negative feedback. That is it, that's a typical sale using eBay.

Selling On eBay

Selling on eBay is more complex. It's not to hard to keep up with if you are selling a few items at a time. On the other hand, if you intend on selling hundreds of items at a time things get a lot more complex. You will need a program, software or some sort of system to keep track of all the sales. Have they have paid and shipping. You also have to get a good program to list all of these items (I use eBay's free Turbo lister). You also spend a lot of time with e-mails and feedbacks. There are lots of tools out their for sellers and eBay offers several of them. The most important thing to consider when selling are the fee's involved.

eBay has a listing fee that starts at 0.30 and it gets higher depending on how much you want to start your auction out at. For instance, if you list something to sell for $9.99 you will be charged 0.30 as the listing fee. If you list and item starting out at 199.00 you would be charged around a $2.20 listing fee. The more you make the more eBay makes. Their stock didn't just split for nothing, these guys make big money! Now the listing fee's you pay to eBay no matter if the item sells or not. If the item sells you will pay an additional final value fee.

If your item sold for $25 or less, your Final Value Fee is 5.25% of the final sale price. Take the additional amount from $25.01 to $1,000, and calculate 2.75% out of that amount.

People have wrote books on how to sell on eBay. There is much to learn about sales no matter where you are selling. There are also many tricks and things to learn at eBay.

Opening an eBay Store

It is very easy to open an eBay store. It takes about ten minutes. There are pros & cons to eBays stores. One of the pros are that you only pay 0.05 a month for each item in your store. When compared to 0.30 a week when the same item is listed as an auction. This is a very good deal alright but you do not get the exposure. The only way someone will find anything in your store is if they come to one of your auctions and find their way to your store. I Personaly have not had much success with my store. I am just starting to get a decent inventory though. I believe that when I have several hundred movies listed in my store things will pick up a bit. I will also have to keep my name out in the weekly auctions or no one will know my store exists. You can get a basic store for $10.00 a month. The more exspensive Featured stores run $50.00 a month. The Featured store gets a lot more exposure!! I believe it's be worth it if you had a very large inventory. Listing items in the store are just the same as listing for an auction.

Research

Reseach is very important when dealing with eBay. Sometimes people buy things in eBay for way too much!! The reason is that they failed to search eBay for the same item. I have seen people buy a movie for $14.00 there were four more of them listed the same week that wouldn't sell for just $2.99 Once a person starts using that neat little search box you can find the best deals! Just do a bit of research before you buy something for 10X it's value. This would really apply in other areas like stamps, money old bottles, dolls and so fourth.

Your eBay Page & Navigating

When one conciders the awesome size and shear amount of pages of millions of items for sale it's mind boggeling. eBay has an awesome search engine and has everything catigorized as well. So if you want to find an 1897 United States postage Stamp you just go to Stamps, then American, then pre-1900 and so on and so fourth. It is like this in every catigory. It is the same way for sellers. You list it where it should be and potential buyers will find it. Lets talk about youe eBay page.

• Your eBay page

Search Box [__________] {search the eBay database}

your user name (Your feedback rating)
{Tabs}
{{Bidding/Watching}}_{{Selling}}_{{Favorites}}_{{Accounts}}_{{Feedback}}
Go to Pay-Pal ---- Need Help?

The bidding / watching page list everything that you have bid on as well as the auctions that you have won. The selling page lists everything that you are selling as well as what has sold and what didn't. The favorites lists all your favorite eBay stores as well as you favorite searches. The accounts tab deals with how much you owe eBay. This provides a very detailed list of all your fees. Finally there is a feedback tab. This is where you deal with all of your feedback. You leave people feedback. You can also respond to feedback that people have left you.

Conclusion

I enjoy eBay as a buyer and a seller for many reasons. If I want to find something, I can find it on eBay. I started out just selling some movies for some extra money. Once I realized how simple this was I knew I could do this part-time and make extra money. I have nothing but good things to say about eBay! In just three months I have been able to set up my very own Internet Movie store!

McMaster Movie World
www.stores.ebay.com/mcmastersmovieworld

Company Information
eBay Inc.
2145 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, California 95125

www.ebay.com
Nasdaq: EBAY

Thanks for the read!

~Mac