Those who have decent eBay businesses and aren't interested in making more money should just ignore this article
. For everyone else who wants to grow their business and increase profit margins, here are a few simple tips that you can put into practice immediately.
1) Building a list of past customers. If they purchased from you in the past there's a good chance they will buy from you again. Send them emails of special offers, new inventory, or rare items in stock. All you need to do is get their emails out of PayPal and into an autoresponder.
2) eBay's Publisher Network. eBay will send you money if someone buys an item on eBay after clicking through your link. Use this with tip #1 and you can really see some great results.
3) Staying on top of pricing. Check your listing prices every week or so to stay on top of what the market is doing and raise or lower your prices accordingly. Successful businesses rely on inventory turnover and you can make more money by selling inventory faster by just lowering your prices a little bit.
4) Clearing out old inventory. Sometimes I hold on to inventory for too long by not budging on my profit margins or lowering pricing. This inventory takes up shelf space, ties up capital, and hinders cash flow. Get it out, get your cash back, and get some new stock.
5) Watching your pennies. With a few simple tricks we have reduced our listing fees by 60-80% because of eBay's new policies. We can get the same amount of sales by putting many items in one listing and optimizing that listing for 'Best Match'. We also have found that using 30 day or good till canceled listing durations help in lowering fees. With just those few changes we have lowered our eBay fee invoices from over $1500 to under $300.