How to Start Selling on eBay in 2022 Step by Step

How to Start Selling on eBay in 2022: This guide will be helpful to anyone who’s just starting out selling online.

Here are some basic tips for starting your own eCommerce business. You’ll learn some important points in this article.

eBay is an amazing place where people buy and sell products. There are thousands of items for sale on eBay every day.

Whether you’re thinking of starting an eBay business or just want to learn more about it, keep reading.

eBay is a great place to start selling and you can find lots of different resources that can help you get started.1.

Commercial and private sales on eBay

For a seller on eBay, the first question is how to differentiate. Am I selling commercially or privately? In principle, every seller with an account on eBay can make private sales. As a commercial seller, you can use a complete eBay shop with far more professional presentation options. Which option you take is initially up to you alone. However, some criteria have emerged that favor commercial activity. These include the following factors:

• You regularly offer comparable goods or new goods.
• Goods are purchased for resale or sold repeatedly by third parties.
• The number of offers or feedback is noticeably high.
• You are listed as a power seller or run your own eBay shop.

As a result of the above points, private sellers enjoy some advantages over commercial sellers on eBay. Among other things, you can:

• Exclude the warranty for sold items,
• Exclude the right of return and cancellation

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Commercial sellers, on the other hand, have the following obligations, among others:

• A proper imprint must be integrated into your own profile.
• At least for private buyers, a right of withdrawal and return must be granted.
• A guarantee of at least 24 months must be granted for new goods and at least 12 months for used goods.
• The shipping risk lies with the seller.

In order to be able to work as a commercial seller, you need a trade.

Tip!

The business registration should not be a hurdle for you and your sale on eBay. Register with a checklist for business, nothing can go wrong!

New Seller Guide: How to Find Your Way on eBay!

By the way, the portal offers you numerous opportunities to sell something. This little guide will help you to understand the structure and processes on eBay more easily. So that you can also sell successfully.

Open an account on eBay

If you don’t have an eBay account yet, you can set one up very quickly. On the start page, you will find the buttons “Login” and “Sign up” in the upper left corner.

Login or register with eBay

You can either store your personal data with an e-mail address or simply connect to your Facebook account. Once you’ve done that, your eBay account is already active.

List a product for sale

If you are logged in to eBay, you can find the “Sell” button on the home page in the upper left theme bar.

The sell button on eBay

Depending on whether it is your first sale, you must enter additional personal data such as an address, cell phone number, and date of birth. Your identity will then be checked briefly. After the check is complete, you can sell your items on eBay with the “Create offer” button.

What steps do you have to follow?

To sell successfully on eBay and increase your turnover, the following steps are asked for one after the other:

Which item would you like to sell?

Make sure that the information is as precise as possible in order to enable an exact assignment.

Select category, item, and item condition

Ideally, eBay already knows your item and suggests a category and an item with detailed product information. This saves you a lot of time when setting up.

Set acceptable payment methods

Above the entire input mask for your article, you will find the button “Change offer settings” in the upper right corner. If you click on this, you can store the permitted payment options, among other things. Bank transfer, PayPal, and cash on the collection are currently accepted.

Upload item photo

If eBay knows your item, you can use the stored standard photo for your sale. However, you can also upload up to 12 of your own photos of the article. As soon as you have the opportunity to present your product yourself, you should use it. Because with a successful product presentation, a good sale succeeds.

Specify item features and item description

Both serve to describe your item. Some features can be selected from a fixed list, you can sometimes create the description yourself.

Define (starting) price and shipping

You can either set a starting price for a seven-day auction or a fixed selling price. Or even both. When it comes to shipping, you have far-reaching options from certain providers to completely customizable options, including setting the shipping costs.

Different shipping methods on eBay

When you have finally defined all the parameters, click on “Set to specified fees” – and your auction is active.

Tip: If you make a mistake here, you can withdraw from your advertised auction by clicking the “Cancel transaction” button no more than 30 days after the sale. However, this can result in negative reviews for you as a seller.

Sell ​​and ship a product

Once you’ve advertised your product, all you have to do is wait for the auction to end and your item to sell. The buyer will then automatically receive the payment details you have stored. However, you should definitely wait until you have verified that the customer has received the money. Only then send the article out to the customer according to your specified delivery options.

Receive money and rate buyers

If you encounter a customer who doesn’t pay, you can turn on eBay after a few days (“Open an unpaid item case”). If you still don’t receive your money within the next four days, you can close the case. You get your sales commission back and can sell the item again.

You also have the opportunity to rate the buyer after completion. To do this, you can click on “My eBay” – “Sell – Overview” – “Sold” to view the transaction.

Here you can now “submit a review”. Although you can only select positive for buyers, you also have the option of entering an individual comment.

My eBay: your overview of all transactions

Basically, here (see image above) you can find all your activity on eBay, both your sales and purchases. The best thing to do is to deal intensively with this control center by taking a look at it at your leisure. Among other things, you can see the following points in the sales portal:

• What items are you currently selling?
• Who is watching your article?
• What bids have you already received on your items?
• Have (potential) buyers sent you questions or other messages about an auction?
• Did you receive (deviating) price suggestions for an immediate purchase?

You can also mark here for individual transactions whether you have received the payment and shipped the item. So your buyer is always up to date.

Which tools support me as a seller on eBay?

There are a few programs you can use to help sell on eBay, including the following three:

Basically, Seller Cockpit Pro is an eBay mask that is specially tailored for sellers. Here, all conceivable sales opportunities on eBay come together in one tool. In addition to pure offer management, you benefit from a detailed reporting system with which you can analyze your activities on eBay in detail.

Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro

In principle, the sales manager is part of the seller’s cockpit, but can also be used separately from it. Basically, it offers you slimmed-down options for creating and editing offers. Among other things, you can use it to create bundled offers, call up different views of your transactions and specifically handle the post-processing of your sales.

The eBay app

The eBay app in the Google Playstore

With the eBay app, you can also do all sales activities tailored to mobile devices. It is compatible with the Android and iOS operating systems.

What are the fees for a sale on eBay?

Private sellers

Posting auctions is usually free of charge. Only if you post more than 300 auctions per month can a fee of USD 0.50 be incurred for posting an offer under certain circumstances. The sales commission is a uniform 10 percent of the sales value excluding shipping costs, up to a maximum of 199 euros per auction.

Commercial Sellers

Commercial sellers have a basic monthly subscription with a certain number of auctions that can be set up free of charge (four variants), a fixed price for additional auctions, and a sales commission. This essentially makes up the total costs for commercial sellers.

The sales commission for commercial sellers is usually 8.5 percent plus a one-time fee of 0.05 euros. If the service status is below average, the commission increases to 12.5 percent.

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What are the advantages of selling on eBay?

Many eCommerce operators use eBay as both a distribution and sales platform. This offers some advantages. Among other things, you don’t have to create your own online shop, for example. Further advantages are:

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Access to a large, diverse group of customers

• Customer acquisition and retention through professional shop presentation
• The low effort of creating the auction
• Direct start possibility without website and marketing
• Can also be used as an addition to your own online shop
• The differences between selling on Amazon
• At Amazon…
• you reach significantly more buyers,
• Is there more competition from sellers?
• it is more difficult to achieve high-profit margins,
• three times more orders are processed on average than on eBay.

At eBay…

• In addition to selling at fixed prices, auction sales are also possible,
• sellers find it much easier to navigate,
• the competition of the sellers is not as tight as at Amazon,
• positive ratings have a much greater influence on the qualitative classification as a shop,
• the sales commission is usually lower.

Conclusion

eBay is an excellent sales platform for a wide variety of occasions. Although eBay has to make concessions to Amazon in terms of reach, it still offers enormous sales potential with around 17 million users (as of 2022). Especially private sellers and newcomers to commercial online sales can use the platform very easily. Selling on eBay can also be used as a useful supplement or preliminary step to your own online shop. The flexibility with which the sales platform can be used is correspondingly high.