Are you taking your first steps into the world of e-commerce and want to learn how to start selling on eBay? Keep reading because this article is for you.
Dropshipping, print-on-demand, and other alternative business models to traditional office work are becoming excellent options for entrepreneurs. Whether it’s a side hustle or aiming to make it your primary source of income, these models offer greater flexibility without requiring significant investments or extensive experience.
Of course, as with anything, certain factors should be considered when selling online. One of these factors is our selling channel. In this case, we will discuss eBay, one of the best platforms to use as the perfect showcase for your business. Join us!
eBay dropshipping allows sellers to list products without holding inventory.
eBay’s global reach and recognition makes it an attractive platform for entrepreneurs.
Sellers must follow eBay’s policies, such as managing shipping times effectively.
Automation tools like AutoDS improve efficiency and reduce errors.
Learning how to start an eBay dropshipping business is quite simple, even more so if we choose dropshipping as our business model. Let’s review: In dropshipping, we sell products without storing or producing them ourselves. To do this, we partner with a supplier, who is responsible not only for maintaining the inventory but also for packaging and shipping the products.
As dropshippers, we promote the product and reach our target audience, keeping the profit margin between the wholesale price and the price we sell it for.
The process works as follows: our customers make purchases on our site. We forward that order to the supplier, and they ship it to the customer. This dynamic means there’s no need to buy the products before selling them, reducing the initial investment and making it a very low-risk business model.
One of the main components of any dropshipping business is the selling channel: the platform where we build our online store and the audience accesses our products.
There are generally two main types of selling channels: customizable e-commerce sites and marketplaces. The former allows us to take advantage of the customization options available. At the same time, the latter, which includes eBay, allows us to benefit from the immense traffic these sites receive.
In any business, it’s not all smooth sailing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably pitching a get-rich-quick scheme or something similar. Every new venture faces challenges and advantages that balance depending on how you approach them. Here are the main benefits that you need to know before learning how to start selling on eBay:
PROS | CONS |
Free organic traffic. | Selling limits |
Zero upfront investment | Customization limitations |
Easy ways to market | Lack of customer information |
Low overhead costs | |
Easy to start |
As we can see, the disadvantages are minor compared to the benefits. Moreover, for each of these issues, there is an appropriate solution or way to avoid mistakes by making the right decisions and leveraging automation tools.
According to Statista, in the second quarter of 2024, U.S.-based e-commerce platform eBay had approximately 132 million active buyers worldwide. This gives you an idea of how many people trust this site to make their purchases. This number adds to the certainty that eBay provides a competitive space, whether you are experienced or a beginner. The tools it offers are vital to growing in the world of e-commerce.
eBay’s flexible structure and seller protection program make it an attractive option for anyone looking to start a business from scratch without the requirements of a traditional store.
The platform allows us to easily reach international markets, supporting multiple languages and currencies, which helps increase product visibility. This accessibility, combined with eBay’s established brand and vast audience, creates an appealing environment for new sellers aiming to scale quickly. Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t overlook to know how to start selling on eBay:
Now that we have a better understanding of how this marketplace works and a general idea of what eBay dropshipping is, you’re probably wondering how to start selling on eBay, what’s recommended, what’s best to avoid, and everything related to how to start selling on eBay.
Join us as we go over the most critical points:
Although it may sound obvious, we need to understand the selling channel where we’ll develop our online store before making any moves. At this point, to do eBay dropshipping, it’s crucial to understand the platform’s policies.
First and foremost, it’s important to clarify that eBay allows dropshipping, but it prefers cases where the source is a wholesale supplier rather than a retailer. We can’t fulfill orders from another marketplace that ships products to our customers. So, especially if you’re a beginner, we suggest dropshipping from wholesale or private suppliers. There are two other eBay policies you should be aware of:
Understanding a selling channel involves not only being aware of its policies but also its costs. Learning to manage your budget effectively is one of the challenges for any beginner in business. What is our budget? What fixed costs do we have? What additional fees should we consider? In the case of eBay dropshipping, we need to consider the following fees:
Once we have a basic understanding of the costs and policies of the site, we are closer to learning how to start selling on eBay. The first step is to create an account. To do this, we need to go to the official site and register. At this point, the platform will offer us the choice between a personal account and a business account. If you’re a beginner, we recommend opting for the personal account, for which we will need to provide the following information:
It’s very important to emphasize the importance of not rushing. eBay expects new sellers to list 3 items every few days. If we start listing a large number of items non-stop, we risk having our account suspended.
Even though we’re setting up a dropshipping store, it’s strongly recommended to begin by selling an item you already have at home. When manually listing our first product, it’s best if it’s a new item you own and not from the electronics category. Additionally, make sure the item isn’t copyrighted. All you need to do is upload some images, create an engaging title, and write a detailed description for the listing.
Product research is a crucial step for any dropshipping business. Investing in products is pointless if we don’t select the ideal items that connect with our target audience and are trending. This step involves understanding which products are top sellers, what factors drive this demand, and how they relate to our business idea.
To achieve this, we can use various tools, and much depends on the specific niche we’ve chosen for our business. Tools like Google Trends can help us see search statistics for certain products, their related items, and other relevant information.
We can also take advantage of different sites’ “best sellers” sections. In AutoDS, for example, you can take advantage of the benefits of a marketplace offering a wide range of products or use the Hand-Picked Products section, a constantly updated curated list of the items that perform best among customers.
Once we’ve conducted product research and chosen the ideal products and niche to connect with potential customers, it’s time to move on to one of the essential factors in any dropshipping business: our supplier. The suppliers will handle shipping the products, which directly impacts our brand image and how the audience perceives us. We need to take the time to choose a reliable supplier that allows us to thrive in the vast world of e-commerce.
If our supplier ships poor-quality or damaged products, or has long delays, it will negatively affect our business. Therefore, we must ensure we find the ideal supplier. We recommend evaluating them based on the following criteria:
Our profits are undeniably influenced by how effectively we price our products and manage our profit margins. To accurately calculate our profits, we need to consider five key factors:
Given the range of fees involved, pinpointing our exact profit can be challenging. Fortunately, the AutoDS eBay Fees Calculator simplifies this process by automatically accounting for all relevant fees and providing a clear breakdown of our profit margins. This tool removes the hassle of manual calculations, saving us both time and effort.
With the previous steps covered, it’s time to add products to our eBay dropshipping store and take a step further in learning how to start selling on eBay. There are two main methods for importing products: manually and automatically.
While we can always do it manually, this involves searching for each product individually, gathering information, and uploading it to our store. This process can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
Opting for automation allows us to complete tasks much more efficiently, freeing up time and focus to concentrate on other important aspects of our business.
For example, with the AutoDS dropshipping product importer, we can import individual products or bundles with just a few clicks. By simply copying the product URLs, we can upload them to our store and then edit the information as needed.
In an era where technology makes everything almost instantaneous, it’s normal for customers to expect speed and convenience at every step of their purchase. Therefore, fulfilling orders is crucial for the growth of our business.
Similar to the previous point, we can choose to handle this manually, but we risk missing details or overlooking orders while managing multiple at once. In this case, automation can also be a great help. Automated order fulfillment tools ensure that every order is tracked from the moment the customer purchases until they receive the product.
Beginner’s Tip: If you need help managing your orders, automation can be your best ally. Take advantage of features like Fulfilled by AutoDS, and never deliver a late order again!
If you’re looking to start an online business from scratch, you’ve likely already recognized the importance of marketing. Marketing is essentially what connects our store and products with our customers. Having the best product, the best supplier, and a functional store is of no use if our audience doesn’t know we exist.
The same applies to eBay dropshipping. As mentioned earlier, marketplaces like eBay allow us to leverage the massive organic traffic these platforms typically have. Moreover, eBay provides tools such as Promoted Listings Standard and Promoted Listings Advanced to help expand our reach to potential customers.
It’s always a good idea to offer discounts, coupons, and strategies that attract customers to our store. Additionally, focusing on creating organic content that helps us reach our buyers is crucial.
In any eCommerce business, handling cases and returns is an inevitable part of operations. To enhance customer satisfaction and differentiate ourselves from the competition, it’s crucial to offer fair and clear return policies.
To manage cases and returns effectively, we should regularly check our messages and cases to respond in a timely manner. It’s important to be helpful, knowledgeable, and respectful in our communications to prevent buyers from needing eBay’s intervention. Additionally, providing a return label for eligible cases can simplify the process.
Delivering a positive customer experience in these scenarios can significantly benefit our business. By improving their shopping experience, we have the opportunity to turn one-time buyers into loyal, returning customers.
Following the previous steps, starting to sell on eBay should become a bit more practical for you. However, as we promised in the title, we’re going to give you some tips that we believe can help ensure your sales increase and everything in your business runs smoothly.
As you’ve seen throughout this article, we’ve mentioned various automation tools more than once. That’s because eBay dropshipping allows us to automatically handle many tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time and effort. In addition to saving time and reducing stress, the entire sales process becomes more efficient, and errors throughout the steps are minimized.
AutoDS is a comprehensive tool that offers a range of features to assist you with different aspects of your business. We highlighted some of the most useful ones to help you on how to start selling on eBay, but we also recommend checking out a few others:
To start experiencing the benefits of automation, you can always take advantage of our 14-day trial for just $1.
To learn how to start selling on eBay, we need to be aware of what “Flagged Accounts” are. Accounts that are flagged will appear lower in eBay’s search results, which leads to fewer sales. If our account is flagged, we’ll notice a decrease in traffic. It’s important to understand that once an account is flagged, it cannot be unflagged.
Listing more products can mitigate the impact of this type of flagging since it increases overall store traffic. Nonetheless, it’s best to avoid having our account flagged in the first place. To prevent this, we recommend paying attention to the following points:
In a competitive marketplace like this, achieving a high eBay seller status allows us to gain more visibility and display more of our store’s products in the search results. This is why maintaining a strong eBay seller rating becomes essential.
To do so, it’s in our best interest to keep transaction defects to a minimum while maintaining a low rate of delayed shipments by working with trusted suppliers who can offer reliable service.
Moreover, we should handle and resolve all customer cases internally, preventing the need for eBay intervention. Ideally, the percentage of cases closed without a seller resolution should stay under 2%. To align with a high eBay seller status, we should also keep return rates below 8%, which is why offering high-quality products is essential.
Finding a supplier that meets these criteria will define the success of our venture. Before partnering, it’s advisable to request sample products to assess quality, shipping time, and other factors mentioned above. Once we find the right supplier for our business, we will have completed a significant portion of this “how to start selling on eBay” class.
We suggest reviewing our supported and private suppliers and partnering with someone whose trustworthiness and quality are guaranteed.
We offer various types of suppliers to help dropshippers source products efficiently. You can find:
There are essential factors to consider when choosing the best supplier for your eBay dropshipping business, including shipping times, return policies, customer service, and product quality.
Automation is one of the best options if you are looking for speed and efficiency in eBay dropshipping. Tools like AutoDS free up your time so you can focus on priority tasks.
Yes, eBay dropshipping is profitable and will continue to be, according to various statistics and studies.
In summary, if you’re looking for a business model that offers greater flexibility and scalability than a traditional business, you shouldn’t overlook learning how to start selling on eBay. The characteristics of dropshipping, combined with the advantages of a well-known and massive marketplace like eBay, can help you achieve high sales volumes.
Of course, even though the conditions are favorable, we still need to focus on several key points to succeed. However, they are all practical and intuitive, and there’s almost nothing that our friend automation can’t help us solve!
Remember, if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us or check out our marketing blog for more information. In the meantime, we suggest continuing with the following articles:
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