Expanding Your Empire
You may hope to create a full-time, online auction business that keeps expanding and bringing in more money. Or, you may desire to keep your enterprise small and maintain it as a part-time source of secondary income. In either case, you will face challenges and constantly changing markets along the way.
Expanding your auction empire may entail:
Finding, listing, selling, and shipping more items at a much faster pace
Offering more payment and shipment choices
Holding auctions in more categories
Using more auction sites
Using more of the seller's convenience features on each auction site
Improving the quality of your auction items' photographs
Posting photographs offline at other Web sites so they can be given bigger, clearer, and cheaper display than the auction sites offer
Opening a Web store independently or using the Web store services available at major auction sites
Moving your business from your house to a warehouse
Getting serious about business insurance
Installing a security system to protect your stored merchandise
Hiring and training employees
Hiring outside contractors such as an accountant to handle your books and a janitor to keep the packing and shipping area and your company's offices clean
If you desire to keep your business small and secondary to your career, focus on selling in just a few auction areas. Even then, you will still have to try new auction categories periodically, and you should keep track of new features offered by the auction site.
For example, you may have a few hard-to-categorize or semi-shabby items taking up space in your merchandise storage closet. You haven't been enthusiastic about trying to sell them, so they keep getting pushed back and buried under better items. Yet, you can't throw them away, because you know they might have value to someone and bring a fair price.
You may be able to find buyers for some of them if you use one of eBay's newer features, Want It Now. The link to Want It Now, a reverse auction, is found on the eBay home page. The Want It Now page lets buyers post free want ads for items they are seeking. The ads are posted in the same major categories that sellers and buyers use to post or search auction listings, and the notices can stay visible for sixty days. For example, a buyer would use the Art category to post his desire to buy a certain lithograph by a particular artist. If you happen to have a copy of the lithograph in your closet, you could create a Sell listing for it and then use the Respond button to send the item's listing link to the buyer. The buyer could check it out and decide whether to bid. If you already have the lithograph listed, you can use the Respond button to send the buyer the link.
Do not make direct sales offers to buyers when using eBay's Want It Now feature. Only send them links to listed auction items that
Many outside forces and events will help shape the near-term and long-term future of online auctions. But so will you and so will those who buy from you or sell to you. Any choices you make to expand your business or keep it small will also have an influence. As will any decisions you make to move away from major online retailers and start buying more of your goods and business supplies from online auction sellers.
In the online auction world,
