With an eBay account, the world truly is your oyster.
When you start your online business and you begin listing on eBay, you can reach more customers by specifying international postage on the Sell Your Item form and paying a little extra for International Site Visibility, so your listing appears on other eBay sites. But there's another exciting way to do business worldwide - and that's by listing your items directly on international eBay sites.
Registering an eBay account is the first the on the list, but just registering only gives you access to purchases on eBay. In order to sell anything you need to create an eBay Seller account. This requires a bit more information including putting a bank account and credit card on file with eBay/PayPal in order to satisfy their Buyer Protection Plan. This Plan is part of eBay's ongoing efforts to protect its customer base from fraudulent sellers.
Now that you have a brandy new Seller account, where do we go from here? Being that feedback is extremely important in the eBay community, you will want to build yours up a little before you start selling. It is definitely not impossible to sell on eBay with zero feedback, but you are limiting your customer base. Feedback is basically eBay's scoring system. There are three types of feedback a customer can give a seller: positive, neutral, and negative, along with a short comment section. Seller's however are limited to only positive feedback, with eBay's thought being that once a buyer has paid for an item, they have fulfilled their end of the transaction. The more positives you rack up, the more trust and confidence you project to potential buyers.
The quickest way to build positive feedback is by purchasing items from other sellers on eBay. Buying and selling feedback are logged as separate entities, but this can only be seen if a buyer clicks your actual feedback number. They are not separated from your total feedback score, so a potential buyer that sees a feedback score of 10 (100% positive) is going to be more likely to buy than one that sees zero feedback. So have some fun, bid on some auctions, or buy some things you may need for your home office. You will be saving money and building your eBay reputation at the same time!
As a new eBay seller, you will have limits placed on the amount of items you can sell, and the total dollar amount they are sold for. These limits are reviewed each month, and can be raised at eBay's discretion. After a 90 day trial period your selling limits are automatically raised to 100 items and/or $5,000 sold (whichever comes first). Limits can subsequently be raised on a month to month basis by simply placing a call to eBay and discussing your selling goals with a sales representative. They are extremely friendly and willing to work with you to increase your sales limits. After all, the more you make, the more they make.
This brings us to the cost of doing business on eBay. eBay and PayPal each charge both flat rate fees and percentages for the privilege of selling on the world's largest auction site. Insertion fees vary upon the dollar cost of the product listed, and final value fees are based on a percentage of what your item sells for. These fees also depend on what type of product you are selling (what category you list it in on eBay). Sound confusing? It can be at first, but if you use 13 ½% of the total sale amount as a general commission for fees, you will be OK.
These are just some of the basics to selling on eBay. In future articles I will go over product and pricing research, shipping made easy, customer interaction and much more. If you have specific questions or would like something gone over in depth in a future article, please feel free to leave a comment.
Article Source: How to Sell Internationally on eBay