The Emarketer Apprentice

If you have any plan to start a small eCommerce business by yourself, before you start investing your time and efforts in something you may be even bigger than you, sign-up a free account on eBay and try to see what selling something on the Internet involve.

eBay.com is a well organized and established website where you can easily learn the difference from selling a product either by auction, or fixed price without having to spend a fortune in time and money to create some traffic and visibility over the products you would like to sell online.

If you plan to sell something you craft yourself in very limited quantities may be you will have to consider eBay not just as part of you short term plan but a crucial and critical milestone on your long-term plan as well.

Before listing a product on eBay.com, spend sometime on the site searching for products similar to the ones you would like to sell.

Keep notes of:

• the categories where the “competitor” products were listed;
• what prices they were listed;
• what type of listing (auction, fixed price, both) the seller decided to use for these products.

You may discover that your products should sell higher/lower than what you were originally planning to list your products for.

When you sign-up your Ebay account I suggest you also sign-up your own account with PayPal.com and this will easily allow you manage all your economic transactions within one very well established and easy-to-use online bank account.

If you plan to sell just few items to start with, you won’t need to immediately sign-up for an online account with UPS or Fedex, but if you see that your business on eBay start growing, I recommend you open your own account with an express courier. At the beginning you can just use the US Post Services.

Next time you visit your local USPS office, do not forget to ask the list of services and things the USPS can provide to a small business especially for a small Internet operation.

That’s it Folks!

The Emarketer Apprentice