Net profits

Posted on 7 May 2009 at 15:51

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We don't have the space to cover every permutation of these selling options here, so we're focusing on casual selling. If you're a trader, or interested in setting up shop to sell online on a more commercial basis, you may want to skip a few paragraphs to the 'Setting up an online shop' section further on in the article.

Is it worth it?

Preparing and listing an item for sale online, not to mention managing the sale process and subsequent completion and fulfilment of the order, takes time and effort.

To begin with, you'll need to photograph the goods (or at least find a photo from somewhere), draft a description and spend time putting these online, before dealing with any questions that buyers may ask. Assuming your item generates interest and goes on to sell, you'll then have to ensure that the payment is collected, package the goods up and arrange delivery. Suddenly, selling that chipped porcelain horse online looks a lot of hassle for the few pounds it might generate.

At this point, you have to ask yourself if the item you're selling is worth the pre- and post-sale effort it'll take to turn into cash. For an item of very low value, such as our ceramic nag, the answer will almost certainly be no. It may instead be better to gather up similar unwanted low-value items and go to a local car boot sale, give them away (try www.freecycle.org or your nearest charity shop) or just throw them out.

Of course, there are lots of low-value items for sale online, but the people who make money selling them are traders who can build economies of scale into their enterprise to make the whole procedure worthwhile. Selling a single china decoration online for a fiver isn't worth anyone's while, but shifting dozens of cheap trinkets can be profitable.

To the sale room

So, let's get practical. To get you started, we've included a simple six-step guide to listing an item for sale on an auction site. However, before getting stuck into that, we'd suggest a bit of preparation.

You will, of course, need something to sell. What you're selling is not too important, because the fundamentals of selling are the same: potential customers need to know what you're offering, how much you want for it and how soon they can have it. For our example, we're going to try selling an old laptop on eBay.

For the offer stage, you'll have to write a clear description of the product and ideally take at least one photograph. Actually, you don't need to do either of these things, and you could just list the product as 'Laptop: £200' - the problem is that such a listing will almost certainly be ignored.

EBay's biggest draw is its huge user base, but that can also be a disadvantage. With so many millions of sellers competing in a global marketplace, you'll have to work hard to get your product noticed. The more photos placed alongside your goods (preferably your own, rather than images lifted from another website) and the clearer your product descriptions, the more likely you are to attract customers.

Fortunately, the mechanics of eBay help a lot here, particularly when it comes to items such as laptops. Following the walkthrough, when you get to Step 5 you may find that the site displays a detailed specifications form. The fields displayed depend on the selected product category. For a laptop sale, eBay will ask you to use drop-down lists to populate key specifications such as the processor type, hard disk capacity and so on. This takes a lot of the worry out of choosing what details to list.