Why Open an eBay Store?

Greetings!

The first question someone might ask when they are considering opening up an eBay store might be Why?  Why open up an eBay store versus some other type of business.  The only answer I can give you is from my own personal experience.  My wife and I have been discussing opening up a business for several years now ranging from a brick and mortar 'vintage' or 'antique' store ... to a yogurt shop ... to an out of home daycare ... to realty (the list goes on and on).  About 2 months ago we started to discuss opening up an eBay store.  We started watching youtube videos from people who are turning over clothes and other items from thrift stores and yard sales into relatively big money on eBay, Craigslist, etc.  We started researching what kind of up front costs might be involved with opening up an eBay store and were surprised that it really isn't that much money or work to get going.  You just have to do it!

Check out Will's videos about picking and selling - terminal99

One of the main reasons we wanted to give this a try is because we've recently started a family and would love to be at home more.  We are hoping to build up a large enough store for at least one of us to work from home and be with the kids while the other continues to work a full time job and help with the store when they can.  Ultimately we would love to both work on the eBay store and our other business adventures full time, but baby steps.

First thing we had to decide was do we want to be a regular "user" on eBay that sells occasionally, or actually choose to start up a "store" account and do this more like a professional business than a casual seller.  We chose to set up our business as a store.  There are some benefits to doing this, though, to be perfectly honest I do not know what all of the benefits are at this time.  I believe we are getting discounts on listing fees, and other perks.  We will have to gain more experience before I can really tell you all of our perks.

Read up on opening an eBay store here - Getting Started with eBay Stores

Listen to the Ebay Scavengers show about Getting Started with your Ebay Store here - 

eBay Scavengers Episode 1: Who We Are, How We Started Selling On eBay

But once we decided to open up an eBay store. We had to pick a store name.  At this time we are going to remain anonymous with our store, but I can tell you a bit about picking a store name.  It's really basic marketing and branding 101.  Pick a store name that is consistent with the kinds of items you'd like to sell.  Our advice is to not specialize in one specific item.  Say - model cars - and then you would call your store something like "Bob's Model Cars" ... that is going to be a very thin range of potential customers as well as make it difficult to find that very specific store inventory for cheap.  Unless you have an "in" with some sort of discounted inventory vendor, then maybe specializing would be ok.  For us, we chose a business name that sounded cool, made a great looking logo, and was vague enough for us to sell any item we come across that is interesting, old, unique, well made,  or valuable. 

Once we had our store name figured out, I threw together a logo.  My thoughts from the beginning were if we are going to do this, let's make it as professional as possible.  Once we had our logo (branding) done, we threw that up as our profile picture and were ready to start to dig in to listing items.  

But what do we sell? Stay tuned for more!

The eBay Freshman