I love the new world we are living in. Everyone is using online shopping and the eCommerce world is thriving. We changed how we shopped as a nation this year do to all the pandemic legislation. It has been a crazy time, but one thing has thrived when most of the economy crashed, and that was the online selling world. But as millions of people are jumping into selling online there is a lot to know about some of the most basic places to start. Tons of people are heading to eBay to start their company and I think that is a great and super easy choice, but there are things to know. There is also a lot to know about USPS and how you plan on sending your items to your buyers once they make a purchase.
This year is 2020 and eBay has made some fundamental changes to the way things work. They decided to get rid of PayPal as a major way people could pay for items. This was a very sad thing to see, but now it makes the costs of selling on eBay a little more straight forward. What you used to do was to pay a fee to eBay for listing your item online. That allowed people to see how many items you had for sale. Now sometimes they give you a limit of items you can list and they will allow you to it for free and charge you after that limit. But now they are not only charging a listing fee but they charge a seller’s fee. Every time you sell an item they used to charge 10%. That means if you sell an item for 100 dollars you would receive a 10 dollar bill from eBay at the end of the month. This means that you only make 90% of the money you sell on eBay. But there is a little more to it. When someone used to pay with PayPal you would be charged a 3% charge for that transaction. So on each sell, you would actually lose 13% of your money. But now that has changed and eBay cut out PayPal. You now only pay 12.5% directly to eBay.
This is a fee you need to think about when selling any item on eBay because you will be charged no matter what and it will come a month later. So prepare and budget for this cost and remember to charge more for it.
But another area is when you go to send your items to your buyer. You need to make sure you are not losing money on shipping supplies. This means that you have to buy boxes and bags and tape to send those items. Shipping supplies are expensive and you should not buy them directly from USPS. This will cost a ton of money and you will end up having issues. So one thing you need to see is that many people will offer free shipping on eBay. That means that you will be charged to ship the item out of the original selling price. So make sure to add that cost to your selling price. I remember losing money on my first sale because after fees I lost 40% of the profit when I purchased all the stuff to ship and sent the item.
Distribution Concepts 