what to sell on Ebay?

integrate inventory with ebay auctions hmmm

[hellraiser1]

hi

i am curoius to see if there is any interest, or if anyone has successfully integrated their inventory from their online store with ebay auctions. With their APIs and such, it seems pheasable, but the listing fees, etc.

My assumption has always been that ebay is great for used in demand items, (like car parts and music instruments, or outright collector items) where people can get them for 1/5 the retail price. HOWEVER, it seems that more and more people actually merchandise wholesale products on ebay for retail prices, and make a business out of it.

I have an ecomm site selling over 3,000 products, some fall in the antique, crafted category, and am wondering if the retail price on theese new products would be too high for the ebay market.

Anyway has anyone been successfull at doing this?

[ispy]

I have been warned by more then a few manufacturers to keep stuff off Ebay. Why, because it ruins the image and perceived quality of their products and brand. Ebay is good for low quality stuff at cheap prices. I guess you can find some Rolex and such at any flea market, the question is: Is it genuine or a cheap counterfeit imitation?

[rocknbil]

I think that only applies if you use the absolute minimum in posting your auctions. Of course, posting a professional-looking auction is nearly impossible now with the stupid Ajax-bloated new "list your item" form, but it can be done. (Hint: eBay is currently the only site I have to disable Javascript on to make it anything close to "usable.")

Generally speaking, an eBay-only business really does fall into the area you're talking about - some of these people aren't serious enough to commit to a genuine business, or are evading taxes or other overhead, or just find it an easier method of generating income without all that legal mumbo-jumbo most of us have to deal with. But quite a few legitimate and reliable businesses have either a "store" or regular postings on eBay as another method of marketing their products. If you investigate these sellers, you will find the trail that leads back to their site and this reveals all the details you need to know about a seller.

My wife's business falls into this last category. We maintain 6 or 8 regular items in our niche, and the interest does indeed bring in serious business referrals and traffic to our site. But I doubt I'd ever commit to a full blown eBay store, we just do it to bring in a little more traffic. :-)

[Beagle]

I don't know if I've stalked rocknbil's wife ;) , but I've followed a few of those trails back to sites of merchants that I now have bookmarked. I've never bought anything on ebay, but there are some product lines I check out occasionally for that very purpose.

ETA: It might make a difference that the things I'm looking for would be produced by the seller, not a manufacturer's products. I'd go along with ispy in that area, as I'd simply buy them elsewhere. But the antique, crafted items the OP talks about sound like the type of things I might follow further (back to the original site) if I were interested.

[edited by: Beagle at 12:45 am (utc) on April 3, 2007]

[ispy]

Tax evasion knowledge = hefty rewards.

[Tastatura]

Tax evasion knowledge = hefty rewards.

- Al Capone's favorite sentence :)

[Quadrille]

Mixing is often a mistake.

Ebay is market-lead, and that can mean rock-bottom prices. Your sales site can sell at decent margins, set by you, even if sales take more than seven days.

I occasionally use an ebay sale of surplus stock, etc., to promote my sales site - but I'd never send folk from my sales site to ebay (except to sell!).