Are you interested in starting a passive dropshipping business with no capital required? Anyone can start selling online! eBay provides you with the best platform to start dropshipping.
We have come to a day of age where all you need is a computer to start your own business. eBay provides a platform for you to easily list products where you fill in the information and with a few clicks you can have your products live and available for everyone to purchase.
All the information needed to publish your product will be provided by the supplier (also on the computer). Most of the effort to start this business will go towards researching, as competition is high on eBay with over 19 million sellers and 1.7 billion listings. Your product will need to stand out with an irresistible price. As you continue researching and posting more products, your chances of getting a sale increase. Let’s dive into how to start dropshipping on eBay.
*Disclosure: Tasci Finance only recommends products and services I would use myself or are currently using. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.
Why should you dropship on eBay?
185 million active buyers - High-traffic marketplace for your products to sell relatively fast and all sorts of products to offer for any buyer.
Free Traffic - You’re not doing any work for marketing traffic. eBay connects buyers and sellers together so you can sit back and relax for a sale to await you.
Second Leading Marketplace - Based on the 4th quarter of 2018 in the United States, eBay received 19.7% of visits to marketplace websites, trailing behind Amazon at 56.1%.
2 billion daily transactions - eBay is filled with heavy volume and is a hot marketplace for your products to potentially sell.
What You Need to Start an eBay Dropshipping Store
Product Research
We can't go for general boring products when researching. So, we have to look for trending products that are actively selling. Competition is good because it tells us that this product is top quality and sells. What if you're able to find the same product for a cheaper price from other suppliers? Then you can list it cheaper than your peers and rack in sales.
Product research will take the most effort and doing it manually will take a lot of effort. That's why I recommend using software specifically for product research so you can have insights on the best-selling products for you to list.
The best software to use for product research is ecomhunt. You get daily hot selling products and a whole collection of past winning products to sell. Click here to start researching -> ecomhunt.
Product Listing
To list products on eBay all you'll need is to plug-in information and click submit.
Information you need to list a product
Product Title
Product Category
Product Photos
Product Description
Listing Price
Product Quantity
Sales Tax to Charge
Shipping Policy
These are the basic necessary information needed to list products on eBay. There are other small things that won't affect your listings that you will have to fill in.
To rank higher for your product, you will need to have keywords and optimized for SEO in the eBay marketplace. To learn more about eBay SEO check out this article -> sellbrite.
Collecting product images will take lots of time, but there is amazing software that let you click a button and download all the images for you. My personal favorite supplier, Aliexpress, has a google chrome extension and is 100% free to use. Check it out here -> Alisave.
Product descriptions can be lengthy and can take a while to sort the information from the supplier site. Some suppliers don't even have good descriptions and just have general information like what the product is made of.
As mentioned earlier, ecomhunt, for product research can also be used for product description. Not just any type of description, but lengthy, engaging, and informational. You'll save plenty of time and have an amazing product description to sell your products! Click here to start researching -> ecomhunt.
Product Pricing is also very important. You can have your product ranked first and everything's perfect, but if it's the wrong price then no one will buy. You also can't randomly pick a price or else you'll be losing money. To solve the issue you can use my premade automated financial sheet! Just plug in the prices and you'll be able to see which prices make you profit or not.
Use a financial sheet to see which prices will bring in profit for your product. You can use my pre-made financial sheet for FREE with this link -> Sheet
Sit and wait
You don’t need to do marketing because eBay does everything for you, but you could do small marketing on your social media pages. Nothing serious or paid is necessary, but clicks from social media can improve your listing. Customers specifically use eBay to shop so your products are being advertised to an audience looking to purchase something. If it were your own website then you will have to market and attract a cold audience to make it convert over time. So, eBay makes it so much easier!
Fees and Expenses
The greatest part is no-cost listing, eBay offers 250 free products per month to be listed. The rest after being paid.
For every sale, you get you to have to pay a variable fee plus $0.30 per order. That’s the beauty of eBay, you pay after you make a sale not before.
Fees vary depending on the category of the product you’re selling. You can check it out the full list on eBay -> https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4822#section3
Suppliers
Suppliers can make or break your dropshipping business. Working with eBay you have to abide by their rules. That means if a product is experiencing long delivery times then the customer may be subject to a refund and you will not be able to receive back your product. In another case, you can have a supplier that didn’t ship your product or received a broken item for the customer. These all hurt your eBay account and push it closer to being banned from selling.
Aliexpress
When someone starts dropshipping and is looking for a supplier, Aliexpress is always the first answer. Aliexpress is owned by Alibaba Group and operates as an online retail manufacturing store available for everyone to purchase from.
With over 100 million products available for sale, there's plenty to research and find winning products to sell. Sellers provide several different forms of shipping. While most of the suppliers are in China, there are domestic suppliers depending on your location who do offer fast shipping.
You can scale easily with Aliexpress as you have the option to talk with sellers and can receive customer offers and order in bulk to offer better shipping for your customers and make much more money!
Click here to check out Aliexpress -> Aliexpress
Banggood
Banggood isn't as popular as Aliexpress, but it provides higher quality products and faster shipping times. Unlike Aliexpress, Banggood's products are mostly supplied in Canada and also have plenty of products supplied in the USA with 7-day shipping.
Banggood not being popular provides you with an advantage of listing products that not many people list. This will give you a competitive advantage and you can make much more money.
I personally have had a better experience with Banggood than with Aliexpress and the suppliers ship very fast so it's less of a headache than Aliexpress where products have been wrongly shipped or broken.
Click here to check out Banggood -> Banggood
Strategy
Now that you have an understanding of dropshipping on eBay, this is one of the few strategies you can approach with selling products. It’s a very simple strategy and it won’t require any extra effort other than what was mentioned in “What you need to start an eBay dropshipping store”.
You should have an active eye on upcoming events and holidays. You can list products for those certain events. So you’re basically selling seasonal items. For example, during Valentine's Day season you can list flowers. But don’t make the products too general or else they won’t sell. It should be unique and have a wow factor to easily attract customers.
Conclusion
Selling products on eBay is a nice side hustle to start and won’t cost you a dime! You get to learn skills like product researching which you can also monetize and sell as a service for other people! What are you waiting for? All you need is an eBay account to start selling. Good luck on your journey!