eBay PowerSeller Million Dollar Ideas
We've spent the last few years immersed in a fascinating world. We’ve had an amazing adventure spending so much time among eBay's PowerSellers. You'll agree they are a most extraordinary group of people. They amazed us when we decided to write eBay PowerSeller Secrets. That's what inspired us to write it! But as we researched that book, our admiration and respect for this group of entrepreneurs grew beyond its original borders. The PowerSellers and Top Sellers (Platinum and Titanium-level PowerSellers), are among the most creative, inventive, hardworking, and interesting people we've ever met. In their own way, they truly are the pioneers of the twenty-first century.
Not only have these dedicated business owners forged new lives for themselves, they've learned the essential details of pioneer life: adaptability and creative thinking. Those two abilities make survival possible in an ever-changing landscape that can often prove to be inhospitable at best and downright threatening at its worst. Since the publication of eBay PowerSeller Secrets, selling on eBay has gotten even more complicated and earning your living this way is even harder. The landscape has changed. It’s more competitive, more international in scope, and new types of fraud appear like the dandelions in spring.
Many eBay sellers now also sell in other venues, such as through their own independent webstores, or through other auction sites. What worked well two years ago may no longer be viable. That would be okay if the changes were behind us. Everyone who remained successful and weathered those storms would still be happily moving forward.
But the real challenge is that the changes will never be behind us! It's not enough to weather last year's storms. If you're going to have a lasting presence on eBay, you have to manage your business right now with a sharp eye on what's coming at you next week and next year. The world of e-commerce moves and changes too quickly for you to establish your good practices and leave them as they are while you happily buy and sell and collect the money. That may be fine in other venues, but it won't work on eBay.
Writers are in the idea business. They come to recognize good ideas when they find them. At least they’d better recognize them if they’ve gotten used to the idea of eating! That gives us something in common with eBay's PowerSellers. They are on a constant search for great ideas. The ones who really succeed don't just act like PowerSellers, they also think like PowerSellers. That means they are constantly evaluating everything they do to find the most efficient, cost-effective, sustainable way to run their businesses. They celebrate their successes, but they don't allow those successes to blind them to their vulnerabilities. Good practices and hard work take you a long way on eBay, but they are no guarantee for long-term success.
That brings us back to the idea behind this book of ideas. We were gratified that the sellers who worked with us to research eBay PowerSeller Secrets embraced it so heartily. They said that not only did we describe the issues of making your living on eBay realistically and successfully, but even more importantly, we captured what life was really like for someone who earns a living by being an eBay PowerSeller. They appreciated that we thought it was important to include that flavor of life along with advice about building the life itself. We were very gratified to discover we'd capture the essence of many of their best business practices but also the rhythms and details of their lives. The more we spoke with them and spent time among them, the more we realized that there was a nugget beyond the details of sourcing, listing, payment, and shipping. There is something within the most successful sellers that makes them look at the challenges a little differently.
The most successful eBay sellers view the challenges that come along as just that, challenges and not problems. Every new change can present a new opportunity as well as a new problem, and the success they find is based on the fact that they don't shrink from the problems; they think their way around them! Now, no one starts out on eBay with the experience and knowledge necessary to achieve this. But these sellers didn't start out that way either. They may have brought determined and hardworking personalities with them when they came to eBay, but they gained the knowledge and experience by being out there every day, constantly learning, adapting, changing, and growing. That's the way it is with pioneers.
So, when we thought about ideas for books to follow eBay PowerSeller Secrets we wondered, what else would sellers striving to make successful lives on eBay need to know? We'd already done a book of best practices, so we decided to turn our attention to the results of that pioneer mentality. We decided to share with readers the best ideas PowerSellers are putting into practice every day to survive and thrive in today’s eBay environment. By sharing these ideas with you we hope you’ll learn to think like a PowerSeller and think creatively about the challenges facing you every day as an eBay seller. If you took with you the basis for an eBay business when you finished reading eBay PowerSeller Secrets we hope this time you'll take with you the basis for thinking beyond the ordinary in terms of your eBay business, for never being satisfied with what's there, but instead continuing to make your spot in the world of e-commerce through creativity, imagination, and passion.
In eBay PowerSeller Million Dollar Ideas, you'll find we cover many of the things you need to consider when operating an eBay business. We have chapters about sourcing, listing creation, shipping, fraud, and international sales. But this time around you will also find a lot of information on selling on other venues, plus an entire chapter of ideas on how you can take your eBay experience and use it to make money through related pursuits. This may mean opening your own eBay drop-off store, or working as a trading assistant or eBay education specialist. Some of the PowerSellers we spoke with detailed how they make more money from these “sideline” businesses than they now make from their original eBay businesses. From our discussions with scores of PowerSellers we’ve carefully selected more than 100 individual ideas you can adapt for you own business. To make it into the book the idea had to be either very creative, counter-intuitive, or potentially able to help you earn significantly more money every day. For each of these ideas, we've provided some advice about how you might be able to use the idea in your own situation. Overall, you'll find hundreds of suggestions.
Not all of these ideas will be right for your individual business, and certainly not all of them will result in your earning a million dollars! We are well aware of those products being hawked to unsuspecting dreamers guaranteed to show them how to make it rich, and quickly, on eBay. We're not about to enter those ranks at this stage of the game! But the ideas that we present to you, combined, do represent the creativity and thinking of people who have earned millions of dollars on eBay. Beyond the individual ideas themselves, we hope that by reading this book, you'll come to understand and internalize the thinking behind the ideas. If our first eBay book captured the essence of life as a PowerSeller, we hope this one will capture the essence of thinking like a PowerSeller. Once you've gained that, you'll be on your way to a successful life, both on eBay and off.