Saturday, January 21, 2012

Why Credit is Important When Starting An Ebay Business

When starting an online business, including an Ebay business, it is important to have an established line of credit available for your use. This line could be in the form of a credit card, a personal loan, cash or a home equity loan. You will need the funds to be able to purchase items from a wholesale vendor if you want to make the most money on Ebay.

Selling stuff from around your house can be a great start, but it is just that. . . a start. Once you run out of items to sell from your house, your Ebay business will slow to a screeching halt. That's when you can start selling stuff from family and friends, however, that is extremely time consuming compared to actually trying to figure out a product that you can buy in bulk from a wholesaler and resell. When you run out of their stuff, then it's time to evaluate where your interests lie and find a wholesaler who can help you achieve your dream.

Once you have a product (or products) in mind, you will need to contact a wholesaler or distributor to buy your items at the lowest costs. In order to do that though, you will need to make sure that you have good credit. You can get a free credit score and a credit report very quickly online. It's always a wise idea to know up front what type of credit you have simply because most vendors are going to be concerned about whether or not you have the ability to pay.

When dealing with a distributor or wholesaler, you will need to fill out an application and provide references as well as bank account information. If you already have good credit, even if you have never done business online or don't have any vendor references, the distributors will more than likely give you a starting line of credit. Sometimes they ask you to pay via cash, check, or credit card for a few months to make sure you are legitimate. When they see that you are paying them regularly, they will then establish a line of credit with you.

If you already have vendors you have been dealing with, you can use those vendors as references to establish a line of credit. It doesn't hurt to keep up with your credit score by getting a credit report periodically to make sure all is well and no one else has accessed any of your information.

Once you have worked with your first vendor online, it's much easier to find other wholesale products and get decent lines of credit for future sales and earnings on Ebay.

2 comments:

buy and sell on ebay said...

As far as eBay buying in general goes:

If you send the seller a question about an item, find another of their listings, and send the question from that item page, rather than from the one that you actually want. This will add a little bit of work for the seller, if they want to add the question/answer to the item description page that you are actually interested in.

If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. May be telling them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It'll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.

Use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You'd get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Especially good for "Buy It Now"s priced right.

If the item that you are looking for is difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might never see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller and offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. They may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.

EncoreLogo said...

As a buyer and a seller on Ebay I know that your credit is important. There have been times where I follow the sellers link and do not purchase from that seller soley based on the fact that there is one negitive opinon about how they are doing business. That one opinion could be me next time, I could be the one person who gets the shaft from this seller. Although it is very hard to find a seller with 100% rating I try to find a seller that has not had any bad ratings within the last 6 months and a seller that has been selling items for that time period.

I personally have sold many many logo designs on Ebay and it has worked great so far. I have a 100% rating from my customers they always appreciate my great logo design services and I am sure my credit rating has a lot to do with that. I still enjoy a good auction. Ebay auctions keep my blood flowing.