Free-Reprint Article Written by: Bill Platt See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== Starting an Ebay Business - An Online Business Model that Works (Revised for 2008) Article Description: ==================== Millions of people are still coming online each year, and many of those people come to the Internet with dreams of making their financial dreams come true. Additional Article Information: =============================== 1063 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2008-01-29 10:24:00 Written By: Bill Platt Copyright: 2003-2008 Contact Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Platt's Picture URL: http://thephantomwriters.com/x-images/bill_platt_80x105b.jpg For more free-reprint articles by Bill Platt, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/bill-platt.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=5632&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/p/online-ebay-business.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Starting an Ebay Business - An Online Business Model that Works (Revised for 2008) Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Bill Platt the Phantom Writers http://www.thePhantomWriters.com THE REALITIES OF AN INTERNET BUSINESS Millions of people are still coming online each year, and many of those people come to the Internet with dreams of making their financial dreams come true. The truth is that building a website to sell products and services is not the easiest way to make a living online. A lot of specific knowledge or money will be required to be successful with a standard website. You must acquire skills - or pay someone who already possesses those skills --- in the following areas: * Graphic design * Copywriting * HTML design * Perl or PHP programming * Database programming * Marketing research * Promotions When this is understood, most people throw their hands up in frustration and walk away from their entrepreneurial desires. Maybe cash is the problem; maybe the desire is just lacking. If you have reached this point yourself let me offer one piece of advice... DON'T THROW AWAY YOUR DREAMS JUST YET More people than I can count are making a successful living online, and none of them own their own website or send a single commercial email to anyone. How is this possible? Two words, "Ebay auctions." EBAY MAKES IT EASY Ebay covers all of the difficult technical issues. And more importantly, Ebay already has floods of visitors eager to purchase your wares. Ebay has provided everything you need to operate a successful business online with three exceptions: 1. Products to sell 2. Time to list the products in the Ebay database 3. Cash to acquire the products CHOOSING THE KINDS OF PRODUCTS Before choosing your products, you should ask yourself what you enjoy the most. You may enjoy cats, NASCAR or even antiques. You should select products consistent with what you enjoy for two reasons. First, you bring to your presentation a real appreciation for the products your are offering. Secondly, a job you hate is one you will quit. A job you enjoy doing will be one that you will want to keep forever. If you are starting your own business, the hope is that you will be doing it for a very long time. I personally know people who have generated a nice living on Ebay selling cat-related items, NASCAR memorabilia and antiques. FINDING THE ACTUAL PRODUCTS TO SELL I recommend against diving in and spending thousands of dollars buying products that you may or may not be able to sell. A drop-shipper is a middleman who is willing to permit you to buy an individual product, and then they will put your business name on the return address of the product package and handle the actual delivery for you. By utilizing a drop-shipper, you can speed product delivery to the client without risking your own cash to keep a product in inventory. If you are at a loss as to how to get started with a drop- shipping company, we have uncovered three different drop-shipping resources in our research that we feel comfortable recommending. All three approach the drop-shipping market from a different perspective, but any one of them could be essential in your quest to start a successful online business or auction business: Through this site, you can get all of the information you need to find drop-shippers, who can supply you with over 500,000 products from over 1,000 brand names: http://www.wholesaletradingclub.com/drop-shipping-directory Through this company, you can gain access to more than 200,000 drop-ship products through an auction control panel or your own storefront website. The company will handle customer care, inventory, shipping and returns, so that you can stay focused on selling products and making money. Their original system has been set up to serve North American sellers, and they have developed a secondary system to serve sellers in the UK. Learn more here: http://www.wholesaletradingclub.com/dropship-biz This company provides access to more than 1,200,000 drop-ship wholesale products to Ebay Power-Sellers. As the only drop- shipping company to be Ebay-Certified, with tools enabling sellers to easily place products into Ebay, they are a strong contender for any person looking to sell drop-ship products through Ebay: http://www.wholesaletradingclub.com/ebay-certified LEARNING TO LIST YOUR PRODUCTS AT EBAY Learning to use Ebay is pretty easy and straightforward. Ebay has put forward a lot of effort to help people to become successful and to help you to be successful using their systems. For example, Ebay has an entire area of their site devoted to the online entrepreneur. To get an overview of all of the services and tools that Ebay provides to sellers, you may visit: http://pages.ebay.com/services/index.html Ebay also delivers courses and strategies to help you to be more successful: http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/index.html THE IMPORTANCE OF CASH FLOW TO YOUR SUCCESS Ebay provides tools for both buyers and sellers to rate one another. The speed of delivery is one of the most important factors that sellers are rated on. By providing quick delivery, your buyers will give you a good rating --- and more shoppers will bid on your products. Ebay recently purchased PayPal.com to help facilitate purchases for their buyers and sellers, and they have integrated the two systems together. Unfortunately, getting the money from your PayPal account to your personal account generally takes four days. Even with a merchant account, the time gap is nearly the same. This time gap expands the turn-around between the transaction and delivery of the product unless you take action to speed the process. If you have attached a credit card to your Paypal account, you can get a Paypal debit card. Using your Paypal debit card, you will be able to process the payment for your customer's purchase, immediately after they have paid for the product you have sold to them. If you were doing high volume, you would want to minimize the handling of a transaction to reduce the chance for a foul-up and to increase your ratings within the Ebay system. But how can this be accomplished? MANAGING CASH FLOW While you could rely upon credit cards to get the job done, it is not something I would recommend. Paying credit card interest rates to process your customer's purchase, is an unnecessary burden. Instead, put a sum of money into a dedicated bank account with a debit card attached to it. When you verify a transaction has been credited to your PayPal account, then use your debit card to immediately process the order with your drop-shipper. But, how can you do it this way on a tight budget? THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO THE RESCUE Let me ask you this. Do you have a 401(k) account? Experts advise that you not touch your retirement savings for anything other than retirement income. That is good advice. Fortunately, it is possible under special circumstances to acquire loans against your 401(k) accounts. Beginning in 2002, even the self-employed small business owner with no employees could open his or her own 401(k), called a solo-owner 401(k), and borrow from it just as employees with big companies can. Weigh this option against the others available to you. It only makes sense to take out a loan rather than to take a hit in heavy taxes and penalties for drawing your retirement money early. Seriously, consider taking advantage of our historically low interest rates to meet your cash flow needs. To learn more about creating and borrowing from a solo-owner 401(k), please visit: http://www.investsafe.com IN CONCLUSION It is wise to choose your new business venture based on a model that has proven itself over the long-term. Ebay has been proving its concept since 1995; helping thousands of people build a successful and very profitable business. The time to act is now. Choose the product line that will give you the most satisfaction and then get busy. Your success awaits you. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Platt is the owner of The Phantom Writers article marketing service (http://thephantomwriters.com). Bill has found a way to reorganize his ghost writing services in order to be able to lower his prices for promotional article ghost writing. His team of ghost writers will create an informational article(s) to help you to promote your business online, and his distribution team will put your article into the hands of ezine publishers and webmasters interesting in publishing good quality content: http://thephantomwriters.com/services/ghost-writing.html --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/p/online-ebay-business.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Bill Platt can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Bill Platt http://www.thePhantomWriters.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------
