Little Knows Facts About Owning an EBay Store

Many people have asked my eBay partner and I if we have plans of opening an eBay store. We have not decided yet. As pervious power sellers, we both have owned stores and ultimately decided to close them. There's a lot of things about eBay stores that many people don't know.

To begin, an eBay store costs money each month. Expect to pay about $16 a month just to list your items in your store. This means that you have to sell at least $16.01 of products just to make a penny profit for that month. For many mass quantity powerseller sellers of normal, every day items, this is a simple task. These sellers usually buy items in massive bulk and have the ability to have the item relist its self as soon as it sells, thus leaving little work for the seller. But if you are like my partner and I, you sell unique items that are often things you all ready owned or maybe pick up at the sotre on a clearance sale or closeout. Therefore every listing is created in a unique matter with unique photographs and is ver time consuming.

The second little known fact about eBay stores is that sellers don't really get much of a break on fees. A normal seller pays .15 cents or more just to list one item. A store owner pays only .05 cents, but only if the item is going to be inside of the sellers store. On the other hand, a normal seller pays about 10% of the total winning bid in closing fees. A store owner pays substantially more. So in the end, there's really not much of a break, if any, on owning a store.

Store owners only pay .05 cents when an item is "store inventory". And what most people don't know is that if you read through the eBay fine print, eBay admits that store inventory doesn't appear in results at all, however, I have found a handful of listings over the past 5 years that did indeed have inventory in them. A very small handful. Which means that unless you get traffic into your store through auctions or Buy it Now listings, you'll NEVER sell your store inventory! Once again, the store option is excellent for people who buy in massive bulk. They can list numerous items in auctions then place a thousand items in their store and make 50, 75 or 100+ sales a day! At the same time, a store is not necessarily practical to someone who sells individual items without many (if any) duplicates.

So for now we are sticking to the good 'ol auction format. But if you are interested in creating a store, please read it through first. You'll find that it's fast, affordable and easy to cancel. It's definitely worth trying out because you don't have to sign any contracts or deal with the costs and upkeep of a personal website.