eBay Guides - 10 Ways to Reduce Your ebay Store Costs

If you have visited the ebay forums, you can no doubt tell that controlling costs is the most popular subject for anyone running an ebay store. So I have decided to write this guide to help provide some good tips and tricks to keeping your costs as low as possible:

1) Use Paypal to order postage and print shipping labels. There are no additional costs to using this service and you get free delivery confirmation (this will save you plenty of headaches with disputes) and free pick up (saves you gas money and time). To learn more about shipping with PayPal go here

2) Re-use packing materials from shippments you receive. Not only will you help the environment but you will save hundreds of dollars a year on supplies. Ask your family and friends to save their packing materials as well, as it will be tough to accumulate enough on your own. One word of caution... try not to mix and match the packing material as this will cause a bad reflection on your business. You are trying to save a couple of bucks which is smart business but you don't want your customers to think that you are cheap.

3) Use Priority Mail to ship most of your packages. It does cost a little more than regular postage (not by too much) but you can get free boxes from the post office and customers love to get their items fast. Charge a little bit more on shipping to offset the increased shipping cost but not too much where you make the shipping charges seem too high. If your items are a little heavier than usual try looking at UPS ground for shipping. Thy offer 30% off their standard rates for ebay sllers! See the ebay UPS link to sign up!

4) Wait for special ebay discount days for listing in regular auctions.... ebay usually offers at least one discount day per month and can be anything from $0.20 listings to Free upgrades. Auction listings are just too expensive to do at regular price!

5) Don't outsource anything unless you absolutely have to! I see so many people who hire outside companies to handle things like shipping, storage all the way to professional web design of their store pages. None of these things will provide the pay back you need in order to remain profitable... just do it yourself! You will need plenty of time before you will see enough revnues coming in to support the hiring of employees or contractors.

6) Always be sure to carefully pack all of your shippments to ensure no damage. Too many returns or refunds will surely hurt your bottom line the most! Another way to reduce your exposure to damaged goods liability is to offer shipping insurance. This will pass along the responsibility of the damaged product to the post office.

7) DOUBLE & TRIPLE CHECK the ship to address to make sure you get it right the first time! Shipping to the wrong address will ocst you big time!

8) Offer combined shipping discounts! This encourages buyers to purchase more than one item, reducing your listing costs and lowering your cost per acquisition. For 1 or two items I would recommend using the post office but for larger multi item orders go with UPS ground to keep the costs as low as possible.

9) Do lots of word of mouth advertising... the best advertising is free advertising! Tell all your family and friends about your ebay store and ask them to pass the info along to their friends. Believe me it works and it will bring in sales!

10) Use the free Turbo lister program, it saves you so much time (time is money right). To learn more about this free program go to the ebay page Turbo Lister