Avenues of Online Selling
You found this article probably either because you want to sell online and you want
to know your options, or you're already selling online and you want more or alternative options. Maybe you have a product that you buy at wholesale, or you use a dropshipping service, or you simply want to resell things you don't use anymore or things you snagged used at bargain prices.Option A: Start your own business. Register your business name, get a domain name and web space, get your e-commerce website created, then market it and wait til you get enough customers that your sales exceed your expenses... if indeed they ever do. This option is high risk; a lot of time and money must be invested, and unless you're a pro at building successful businesses, the odds are stacked against you.
Option B: There are services which provide virtual stores to anyone who signs up for one, relieving sellers of the risk of doing it on their own. They are to online selling what Blogger is to blogging, except that most of them charge monthly fees. They're a good solution if Option A is not for you but you're wanting a shopping cart feature.
Option C: Post your stuff on member-to-member marketplace sites. This encompasses classified ads (fixed-price) and auction format, local and (inter)national, free and fee-based sites.
Many of these have a "View all ads by this member" feature which is as good as having a virtual store, minus the shopping cart.
In the classifieds arena, you've got a slew of, mostly free, local classifieds sites to choose from. These are the online equivalent of your newspaper classifieds, as they're only for selling in person.
Then there are those which give you the ability to accept online payments and ship your items out to buyers, thus expanding your selling area across your country or across the inhabited world. A few of these sites are free, while most have at least some unavoidable fees (as opposed to fees only for optional features), even while advertising that they're free in many cases (the notorious bait and switch). Normally the more popular the site, the higher the fees.
One of the most popular among the fee-based selling sites is eBay. Because their fees are post-billed, a lot of people go into it not realizing how much of their profit will be lost to fees. First there's the "insertion fee" to post any item with a starting price of more than 99 cents, charged even when the item doesn't sell, and then if it does sell, a percentage of the selling price is taken as a "final value fee", and finally, upon receiving a buyer's payment, a seller's profit is further diminished when another cut is taken by the payment service, whether PayPal or another, based on the total sale price including shipping. To top it off, there's still the cost to ship the item. For many, it's impossible to keep their prices competitive and still make a decent, or any, profit while subjected to these fees. For many others, it works out well enough for them to keep them coming back.
As free selling sites gain in popularity, with so many seeking reprieve from selling fees, they may become the next best way to earn an easy living on the internet. But regardless of what's popular or not at the moment, it's smart to diversify. Whether you're currently selling on a fee basis, for free, a combination of the two, or haven't yet started to sell online at all, if you're looking to increase your income, a simple solution to doing that is to utilize a few different selling sites. Current or former eBay sellers can even choose to have their eBay feedback rating displayed with their ads on a number of other e-commerce/classifieds sites.
Whichever road(s) you choose, may your online selling venture be rewarding!
Avenues of Online Selling
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