Why It Can Be Hard To Build A Business With Ebay

April 22, 2011

There are any number of books, articles and websites that tell you how easy it can be to sell things on eBay, and for the most part they tend to be true – selling on eBay is quite simple. However, selling enough items on eBay, and making enough of a profit so that you can develop it into a business, might not be as easy as you think. Starting, and growing any business has its challenges, but why is building your online shop into an eBay business getting to be a lot harder than it used to be?

There’s no loyalty

Even though eBay offers the functionality to keep in touch with buyers who spend money in your online shop, hopefully encouraging them to spend more with you in the future, for a lot of sellers this is becoming less and less effective as a marketing tool. You would have thought that when a customer has a positive buying experience on eBay, they would be more likely to go back to the same seller and buy from them again. However, there is very little loyalty on the world’s biggest auction site, and many buyers are only interested in which seller is the cheapest – and a good business will find it hard to survive if they are only selling on price.

It’s even harder to make a profit

With so much focus on price, many sellers are finding their margins are getting smaller and smaller. Combine this with the relatively high fees across many of eBay’s main categories, and it can be hard to make a consistent profit – low prices and high costs don’t usually make for a very profitable long term business. Many sellers are switching to the some of the alternatives to eBay, including Amazon and even their own online shop, so they are able to focus on the value they can provide their customers, and benefit from the better profits that usually come with that.

You’re not the one in control

Another big factor that can make it hard to be successful on eBay, is that you aren’t really the one in charge of what happens to your online shop. Not only do you have to operate within the rules and guidelines that are strictly enforced by eBay, but those rules could be liable to change at any time – with little or no warning. You really have no control over where your eBay business is going, and you could find that one significant change in policy could have a serious impact on the business you’ve worked so hard to build up.

So whether it’s the low prices, demanding customers, all the rules and regulations, or even a combination of all three, it can certainly feel like an uphill struggle trying to get established, and make a good living on eBay. This is one of the main reasons why sellers who are serious about growing their business, building a h2 and profitable relationship with there customers, and also being in control of the success of their enterprise, are choosing to develop their own online shop away from eBay. With a number of excellent, and very affordable options available, this solution not only makes good business sense, it also puts a bit of the enjoyment back into selling online.

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Why It Can Be Hard To Build A Business With Ebay

There’s no loyalty

It’s even harder to make a profit

You’re not the one in control

Inspiration

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