- A properly outfitted home office. No serious eBay seller tries to
operate without a separate space somewhere in which to do research, create
listings, handle customer service issues, and package/ship items. If you're
serious about selling on eBay, you'll
set aside and outfit a home office.
- An eBay selling "emergency kit." eBay sellers that plan
to rely on their eBay selling for income know very well that it's not a good
idea to be without a backup plan. If you're planning to be a serious eBay
seller, you'll want to start building a
serious set of backups for all of your major selling needs right from
the very beginning.
- An accounting system. The more you sell on eBay, the more serious
an issue accounting becomes, not just for tax purposes, but to be able to
simply manage and control income and expenditures and to understand what
your margins need to be and how to minimize operating costs. Some sellers
prefer to do this themselves but automate the process by
downloading data directly from PayPal, sometimes for use with other
software, but many sellers rely on
automated accounting providers like Outright.
- Metrics goals to help them progress. Sellers without goals tend
to have no direction; they sell for a while and then fizzle out, often with
vague complains about things just not working out. Sellers that make a
serious go at eBay selling know what they want to achieve and this causes
them to strive to make it. Becoming a
Power Seller is one goal; getting the
top-rated seller discount is another. The most important thing is to
know the
sorts of things you can strive for and then reach for them.
- An selling manager or auction manager (for larger or multiplatform sellers). Sellers that grow also need to know when to go past the do-it-yourself ethos and join the group of bigger independent sellers that rely on selling managers or auction managers for their eBay business. Many of these also help sellers to transition into multiple selling platforms (one set of tools to sell on eBay, Amazon, and other places as well).
Getting it All Into Place
Don't feel as though you have to have everything on this list in place to begin—but it's a list that you should be familiar with, enough to know decisively what items on it you need and don't need at any given moment in order to operate successfully.
