When was the last time you were proactive? If you want a successful eBay business that continuously evolves and moves forward with you, you need to embrace uncertainty and change.
It doesn’t matter how long you have been selling online for, you will find that there are times when it can be a rather unpredictable business.
Sometimes a product that you have sold successfully day in and day out for ages will simply fizzle out with no warning as it loses its popularity, whilst other times a competing seller may undercut your prices, significantly reducing your customer base, your product may be discontinued by a supplier or it might simply be a case of a higher spec, better product emerging into the market making your product pretty much obsolete.
But, that’s the nature of business wherever and whatever you are selling. That’s why, ideally, as an online seller, there are four main things that you should constantly be doing.
- You should be continually researching and sourcing new products. Ensuring you always have ideas for hot new products lined up means you can always keep adding to your inventory as other products decrease in popularity.
- You should sell a range of products within one niche and that have some relevance to each other. This gives you the opportunity to cross sell and up sell when you can and will help you avoid a dry spell should one of your products encounter a dip in sales or reach a point where the market is completely saturated.
- You should sell from multiple venues – eBay, Amazon and ideally from your own website. The more you put yourself out there, the more buyers’ you will reach and the more sales you will make. What’s more, this is by far the easiest way to safeguard your online income.
- You should consider branding your own products. This allows you complete control over your competition and your pricing.
Remember that eBay is just the beginning of your journey. There comes a point when you must diversify in some form to maintain a successful eBay business.
I’ve always sold multiple products on multiple platforms – eBay, Amazon and from my own niche web stores – because I learnt a long time ago that to really protect your online income, this is what you need to do to avoid your business going under should disaster strike.
Imagine if you only have one best selling product listed on just one venue. All is rosy in the garden when that product is selling in multiple quantities every day, but what happens if the venue ceases to exist or your supplier discontinues the product, or it loses its popularity. That’s the end of your business with no Plan B. And that’s scary.
Don’t get me wrong, eBay is and will continue to be an excellent selling venue for start ups because of it’s ease of set up and the fact that you can list your first product in a matter of hours, but you should also establish yourself using other venues so that you will never suffer from a decrease in income and you are reaching different markets with multiple products all the time.
Let’s say you are currently selling one product within the baby niche successfully on eBay. Look at your product. What other products could you add to your inventory that have relevance to that product or the overall niche and that might tempt buyers?
What about selling elsewhere?
Have you tried listing your eBay product on Amazon? Once you have more than one product, what about setting up a niche web store for your products and building a list of customers that you can mail on a weekly or monthly basis with special promotions and news?
I’m sure when you first started to consider setting up a successful eBay business, other things like expanding into selling on Amazon or creating your own web store were probably the last things on your mind, simply because you weren’t thinking that far ahead.
And that’s fair enough – one thing at a time after all. But it is important to have goals and once you have a successful eBay business running like clockwork then this is the time when you should be considering branching out further.
In simple terms, what I’m saying is ‘don’t just sell in one place’. What you should absolutely not do is be lulled into a false sense of security in thinking that by having one successful listing this is enough to keep a successful eBay business going.
You need to continually build on what you’ve got in order to grow. This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned during more than 10 years of selling online. So please don’t be afraid to expand, investigate new routes and source new products.
I know as well as you do that it’s very easy to let things slip into a routine and tick over nicely whilst you do what needs doing and not much else on top of that – we’re all guilty of that when things are going well! However, things tend to get stale this way and you never actually move onwards and upwards.
So instead of letting things run their course, be proactive in your successful eBay business. Learn new things, work on new ideas, new strategies, new research and new products – after all, you are the one that will ultimately reap the rewards.