Looking to start your first side hustle? I get the question all the time, “I need to make some extra money, what is the easiest way to make money?”. Depending on the situation my answer can vary but often I’ll recommend starting an eBay business. There are a couple reasons for this.
First, starting an eBay business can be easy with zero dollars out of pocket. Opening an account is free for anyone. There are charges for using an eBay store but not needed when first starting out. eBay will also waive insertion fees for the for your first 50 listings using their Zero Insertion Listing program.
Where you will pay money is once you make a sale of an item. eBay will charge a Final Value Fee. I have included a screen shot of their chart but in most cases, they get 10% of the sale price. The next fee will be from either PayPal or eBay payments which processes the payment from the buyer to you. With a PayPal account they collect the payment so the buyer can use their own PayPal account or pay via a credit card. You can then transfer the money from PayPal to your bank account. PayPal like all credit card processors charges a fee to process the payment. Their fees start at 2.9% of the sale plus $.30 cents per transaction.
Let us say you sold an item for $50 with shipping. It would breakdown as follows
Sale $50
eBay Fees $5
PayPal Fees $1.75
Take Home $43.25
Now for inventory this is where eBay is great. You can pretty much sell anything. I would recommend going through your junk or older things at home to start selling. This will server to purposes. First, it will help you get rid of your junk and second it will help you practice listing items. When listing you want to take good pictures of the item showing various angles. Think of what you would want to see of that item if you were looking to buy it. Next you want to use a good description that describes the item accurately.
Pro Tip: Check other listing using the SOLD ITEMS check box to see what other listings like your have sold for. This will give you a good idea of what you can expect.
Auction or Fixed Price? This will depend on the item you are selling. I prefer the fixed price method offering a buy It now option. If you run an auction it could sell for less than you expected. You can add a reserve which means it would have to hit that dollar amount for the auction to count but that costs money. If I run an auction, I will start the bidding usually at the lowest price I would ever take for that item in case I only get one bid.
Once you have sold everything you can from your house you can now look for more inventory by visiting Thrift Stores, Garage Sales, or retail outlets. Using the eBay app, you can look for deals that you can then flip by selling on eBay. Just remember to keep in my mind what the cost of the item is plus all fees to determine if that item will be profitable.
That does it for getting up and running. Stay tuned for some more advanced articles and videos on growing your eBay business.
If you are looking to start your first side hustle with eBay, check out our article on What to Know Before You Sell on eBay
