My eBay Business Plan Phase I: Selling Personal Items

I realized this morning that last night I dove into the details of my eBay exploits (or lack thereof) so quickly that I neglected to tell you about my master plan. So, I thought I would dedicate this post to describing how I plan to grow my eBay empire from a source of occasional pocket change into a good complement to my existing income.

First things first, though. Here are my stats.

Success in business is often grounded in your ability to set short and long term goals for yourself, and the same goes for eBay. However, I need to figure out how I'm currently doing so I can set a realistic short term goal for myself. Let's get started.

Income Statement

As of now, my eBay sales grand total is close to $143. I have sold 16 items since January 31st, which means my average selling price per item is just under $9.

Gross Revenue: $142.90

Average Sale Price: $8.90

From that $143, I have also paid $16 in sales fees to eBay and $10.70 to Paypal. Now, assuming I've broken even on shipping (which I haven't, but let's assume for simplicity's sake), that would make my total profit $116.20.

Operating Cost: $26.70

Operating Profit: $116.20

Operating Margin: 81%

Profit per Item: $7.26

So, in the last 45 days I have sold 16 items for an average of $9 per item and made a profit of 81% on each one of those. The other thing I need to tell you is that not every item I list sells. In addition to the 16 items I sold, I have listed 6 other items that did NOT sell, meaning that my conversion rate on listings right now is 72%.

That means that ceteris paribus (hee hee - paribus), if I list roughly sixteen items in a month, I will make $77 that month.

Goals

Given what I've learned and the stats we've just gone through, my goal before I move on to Phase II of my eBay Business Plan (eBay arbitrage) is to increase my eBay profit from $77 per month to $250 per month within the next 4 months.

How am I going to do that you ask? Stay tuned! Now that we have this hygiene out of the way, I promise my entries will get more interesting. Our next installment: Unsold items - the root causes of listing failure.