Getting Your Part-Time eBay Business Going: You can do it! {very long}

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while as hopefully a motivator for those newer people to the forum that are looking to either start or grow a part-time eBay business. Obviously Jay and Ryanne’s wonderful podcast and forum often focuses on what they do: which is run a big full-time business with 1000s of items. And of course then much of the discussion here on the forum revolves around full-time eBayers, which can be intimidating to smaller, newer sellers. But remember everyone started small also, everyone was new to this game once, and everyone makes mistakes. So don’t let those things stop you from pushing forward with a part-time store if that is your goal. There is so much information here in the forum and elsewhere that can help you be successful!

Maybe you have a job that you actually like and just want some extra income, maybe you have a job you don’t like but can’t quit it for various reasons and you need more money, or maybe you have a job you do want to quit and start an ebay store but don’t want to go cold turkey. A part-time side eBay gig is the way to go for all of these!

How to do it? Well Jay and Ryanne spell it out with their Manifesto here: https://www.scavengerlife.com/manifesto/ and generally you should follow their advice. However, for a part-time store you will need also ask yourself a few questions:

1) How much time a week do I have to spare to source, photograph, list, and ship items?
2) How big of a store do I want?
3) And related to 2) how much money to I want to make a month?

Let’s look at these point by point. 1) How much time per week? If you can only spare 5 hours a week it’ll be hard to get traction. My suggestion is commit to at least 10-12 hours. This is enough to find and list items and slowly build your store but only at rate of 1.5-2 hours a day. You will still have time for other things in your life. If weekly, you spend 2-3 hours sourcing, 5-7 hours photographing and listing, and 2-3 hours packing and shipping, you might be able to add 20+ items a week to your store. At first you will be slow, photographing and listing only a few items an hour, but your processes will improve and your rate will go up.

This brings us to 2) How big of a store? and 3) How much extra money do I want to make a month? I assume if you’ve read this far you don’t want to keep using your free listings and want to get an eBay Store. My suggestion is to jump past the Starter store and go to the Basic store which is up to 250 listings. If you want to go past 250, the next store is a big jump (1000) and it probably doesn’t make sense financially to go to that level until you are over 400-450 listings a month. Also at the Basic store you get a $25 credit on ebay shipping supplies and better discounts on final value fees which will offset the extra monthly cost.

If you are looking for $400-500/mo in actual profit (minus all costs), you probably need at least 300 items in your store with an average net per item of $25 and sell about 40 items a month. If you could list 25 new items a week, you could have that size store in about 4 to 5 months, and then only have to list 10 items a week or so to maintain it. If you want something closer to $1000/mo in true profit, using those same numbers you’ll probably need 600-700 items in your store and list 15-20 new items each week.

I can give an example of what my growth was like to see how these numbers work. I had about 50-100 items in my store using free listings initially in April 2017. It took about a month to get my store to 200-250 listings. Those first 3 months I averaged $850/mo gross (probably $450 net taking everything into account). Next 3 months I had 300-320 listings and averaged $900/mo gross. Last 3 months of 2017 I had 320-350 in my store and averaged $1100/mo ( that includes xmas holiday season). Fast forward to now and I’ve got 650-750 items in my store and am averaging about $1700/month gross, which probably is about $1000/mo profit. It took me 16 months to have that growth at an average of 15-20 hours a week. But it has been worth it!

With the extra money I’ve:
-paid off one credit card and working on the last one
-paid for two vacations
-paid for my house exterior being completely painted (Note in pure trash elf fashion, I did cut a deal with the painter to work 15-20 hours a week with him and saved a couple grand off his bid!)
-paid for a birthday bash for my wife’s 50th

I still have a full time job that I like a lot and don’t plan on leaving soon, and I get to scavenge around for treasures which I consider a bunch of fun!

So a few last tips to leave Part-Time Hopefuls with:

1) Try to make at least $20 an item. If you buy something for $3 sell it for $23 or more, buy something for $10 get at least $30 for it (and of course hunt for those bigger scores always!) If you sell a lot of $5-10 profit items usually your hourly rate to process them isn’t usually worth your time unless you are buying things in bulk.

2) Make sure you keep good records and write off what you can. Jay interviewed Mark Tew, CPA at https://notyourdadscpa.com/ and his e-books may be of help especially if you haven’t done taxes for eBay before. Go to the taxes part of the forum for lots of help as well.

3) Take breaks to avoid burnout. The nice thing once you put the hard work in to building up your store is you can take a little break from sourcing and listing. Don’t worry if you want to take a weekend off now and then, do it! Listen to Jay and Ryanne’s advice about changing your handling time when you are on vacation, you can still make money while you are gone.

4) Listen to all the podcasts, then read and ask questions in the forum. Even dumb ones, people here are generally nice and willing to help!

Before you know it you will be using your extra money for debt, retirement, vacation, or whatever. And you never know maybe you’ll love it so much you will take the plunge and become a full-time seller!

I hope at least one person has found this helpful, motivating, or at least interesting. If other successful part-time sellers want to reply and chime in their helpful tips (or disagree with mine) we can give newbies even more solid advice.

Lastly, thanks to Jay and Ryanne, who have been so generous with their time and information so people like me can go from an occasional ebay seller to a successful part-time business owner!