Quitting Your Day Job

Greetings!

Quitting Your Day Job.  

Don’t quit your day job just yet.  If you have bills to pay, then they have to be paid.  And unfortunately eBay isn’t a get rich quick scheme.  It is a business that you have to slowly build with triumphs and failures along the way.  Start working on your business during the evenings and on weekends or whenever your off time is.  If you are looking to get into this line of business you probably already have a passion for digging, searching, thrifting, etc., so it will be fun to get started and shouldn’t feel like too much “work”.  If it feels like work right away, maybe this isn’t right for you.  But if you get a buzz off of finding that treasure or unique item, enjoy researching it and taking photos of it and pricing it.  This really is a blast.  If you are only selling a few items a week (like we are right now) it’s a great hobby - but it’s not going to pay the bills.  

Get started listing items as fast (and as accurately) as you can.  Build up your store with items that are Buy it Now with Best Offer (Good ‘til cancelled).  You might not sell a ton of stuff right away, but it’s a good way to start to feel like you are building up an inventory.  Once you have your inventory built up a bit you can start to adjust your prices to reflect what is selling and what no one is paying attention to.  But be patient, just cause Billy doesn’t buy your motorcycle boots this week for $200 doesn’t mean that Jim won’t buy them next week for $190.  Don’t undersell your stuff - you worked hard to get it and getting rid of it for pennies isn’t doing anything for you.  

It takes a certain level of drive and skill to get to the level that my friends over on the eBay Scavengers Podcast are at, so don’t be discouraged if your store isn’t huge right away.  They have been working diligently and adjusting their lifestyles to allow them to do this full time.  It won’t happen over night, but it can happen for you too if you have the skill and drive to find the good stuff and keep on going!

We currently have 162 items in our store and have sold 26 items. We started our store in June. So in less than 3 months we've listed around 188 items. That's an average of around 62 items a month. So at this rate (not counting stuff we've sold) by the end of December we should have listed around 500 items.  Our personal store goal is to reach 500 items in our store inventory.  Granted, we will probably sell somewhere around half of that 50 items by the end of Christmas selling season ... so it's a very slow climb to get up to 500 items!

We are hoping that once we have 500 items in our store inventory we will be selling enough for my wife to quit her day job and raise the kid at home while working on the store full time. The road to both of us working on the store full time is going to be a long one, but I will keep you up to speed every step of the way!

Wish us luck as we continue our journey and we will wish you the same!

The eBay Freshman