My Internet Business Review: Where To Sell On The Internet

February 14th, 2009 by Trisha Frauenhofer

by Trisha Frauenhofer

Before you start your own site, selling things, it’s worth your while to take a look at the established selling services out there. They can be a good place to “get your feet wet” as it were, and start selling things before investing a lot of time and effort into your own site. A lot of businesses never “graduate past them”, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to do so with your business.

My internet business recommends that you start out small. There are three major venues for selling things on the internet before you take the plunge on your own web shop: eBay, Amazon Shops and Cafe Press. We’re going to explore all three to give you a baseline for comparison.

eBay is the second most widely known sales site on the Internet, after Amazon.com. It has millions of visitors each and every day, and uses the “auction” mechanism to keep people coming back. From the perspective of someone selling products on the internet, it has an easy setup procedure, and you can start or stop at any time. If you don’t like it, you haven’t sunk a lot of money into it to get it running.

The next step up from Cafe Press is Amazon Shops. Amazon Shops lets you print books on their Booksurge service, or just sell used books online. My internet business is not limited solely to books – we’ve sold tee shirts, cookware and electronics on ours. Amazon Shops charges $40 per month as a listing fee and takes anywhere from 10% to 25% of the sale price of the item. The advantage is that it’s a natural destination for selling things online. Millions of customers go to Amazon every day. The setup is more involved than Caf Press is, but the reduced fees probably make it worthwhile once your business grows.

Once you figure out what you want to buy, make sure it is selling and check out the competition. You can research similar products that are on eBay and read the customer reviews. These customer reviews are also another advantage to using eBay as a precursor to your own webpage. You can later state your rating and quote some customer reviews that you received from eBay.

So, now that you’ve picked a sales venue, what next? First, save any item descriptions for things you’ll regularly have in stock in a text file or word processing file. It allows you to cut and paste whenever a new item shows up. Next is to figure out what you’re going to sell – the most common choice is to buy items at wholesale (or as remaindered goods) and sell lots on eBay. You’ll need to do some research to find a supplier (and a good price) and to research what your sales niche is.

Deciding what to sell is the next step – you’ll want something that’s distinctive, and that you can get at a reasonable price, and can sell for a reasonable markup. Again, Amazon and eBay are good places to do the research. Any time you think of something you might sell, do a search for it on eBay or Amazon and see how many other people are selling it. Also look at how they’re selling it; the mistakes of your competition are how you propel yourself in this business.

Finally, keep your options open. Never ever sign an exclusive deal, and always be on the lookout for new products you can sell; not all products have to be made of atoms, Informational products are also a natural product for the Internet, and may be the product type that catapults you into doing your own web shop.

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