Creating Your eBay Presence: Why Sell Through eBay?

The world’s largest online market is eBay; the largest market of any kind, really. At any moment
literally millions of items are on sale. Billions of dollars’ worth of property are sold through
eBay not merely every year, but every month.
eBay is an unusual e-commerce site because it doesn’t actually sell anything; it simply provides
a mechanism through which other people can sell online. It’s allowed millions of people to sell
online, and eBay claims that 400,000 of these people make a living by selling through eBay.
Besides the relatively low-dollar individual sales of collectibles and “garage sale” items, many
established merchants sell cars and real estate, computers and antiques, and electronics and jewelry.
And not just in the United States, either. eBay operates around the world, in Western Europe and—
through an investment, MercadoLibre.com—in Latin America, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia,
and India. It’s a vast, international marketplace, in which millions of individuals and merchants sell
millions of products.

Why Sell Through eBay?
Why would you want to sell through eBay? For a number of reasons:
■ Hundreds of thousands of people have made money through eBay, many of them
enough to live on.
■ It’s very easy to get started selling through eBay. You can literally post your first
product in a matter of minutes.
■ eBay provides a number of different ways to sell. You can sell through an auction or
fixed price, through the main listings, or in an eBay store.
■ eBay provides tools to increase the likelihood of safe transactions, such as PayPal
Buyer protection, eBay Standard Purchase Protection, and a feedback mechanism about
buyers and sellers. You get paid, and the buyer can purchase with confidence.
■ eBay makes getting paid easy; you can easily set up a PayPal account within minutes,
allowing you to accept credit-card transactions for sales.
■ You have a vast audience. Millions of people browse and purchase through eBay.
There’s a reason that millions of people have sold through eBay: it’s easy and it works. By
the way, there are other auction sites. Both Yahoo! and Amazon have auction sites at the moment
(auction.yahoo.com and auction.amazon.com), but these sites only have a fraction of the listings
and transactions eBay does. In point of fact, there is nothing to match eBay.

In order to be an eBay merchant, you must be at least 18.