Starting up and running an eBay business - #1 Introduction

eBay, the worldwide auction internet portal, has grown at a staggering rate over the past few years. The number of eBay users has doubled in less than a year. On its fifth birthday in October, the UK website had 7.6m users — suggesting it is attracting another 600,000 every month. Although eBay has a presence in many countries, the UK site is second in size only to its American parent.

Everyone from independent car dealers to IBM and Sun Microsystems use eBay to attract new customers in a convenient and low cost way (see Times article).

If you have a product-based business, or are thinking of starting one - eBay provides a very useful method of reaching a massive customer base. Since ebay's client base is so widespread, you can sell pretty much anything on there - As an example, a 12-piece sofa, said to be formerly owned by Blur frontman Damon Albarn, was up for sale in February 2005.

The benefits of using eBay (or other auction sites) are many - low costs, rapid secure transactions, and access to a huge potential market instantly. As with any business however, you are not guaranteed success. You need to find products which are in-demand and sell them at a competitive price.

You need to market the products via the listing pages just as you would anywhere on the web. You also need to understand how the Inland Revenue treat the proceeds of your sales and keep track of all your transactions and tax liabilities. We will address many of these issues in forthcoming articles.

Alongside our series on setting up an ebay business, there are a large number of guides available on Amazon UK. The best probably being "Make Money on eBay UK: The Inside Guide To Getting Started, Buying and Selling Successfully on eBay.co.uk" by Dan Wilson (see the book description here).

You can read Part 2 in this eBay series here.