Make Money on E-trading

There are two main ways of selling goods through third party sites (i.e., not having your own web site) – selling via an established retail site or one of the auction sites.

Established Retail Sites

By far the most popular and well known is Amazon.com. This site has three options for E-traders, depending on the level you see yourself starting at (although you can trade up if business is booming!). For most people starting out as an E-trader, listing the article for sale free of charge and then paying Amazon $0.99 when the item is sold is most appealing. Once you are selling in excess of 40 articles per month, the option of paying a monthly subscription of $39.99 will save you money. Once business really takes off, Amazon.com can offer a “webstore” facility with a 30 day free trial to ensure it is working for you.

Other sites which offer a similar service, but are not so well known are Sell.com and AtOncer.com.

Sell.com charges a small listing fee ($0 – $6) and takes no commission or selling fee.

AtOncer.com works in reverse and charges nothing for listing, and then 5% when the product is sold.

The major advantage about using these sites is the web profile that they have and that they handle all payments from the purchaser. You simply ship the item and receive payment.

There are other online retail stores that may be of interest to the E-trader which have far more stringent criteria for listing your product(s). An example of such a web site would be Overstock.com, through which you have to submit a request to have your product listed and await their decision.

Easier (and free) alternatives would include many of the classified ad web sites, such as Oodle.com or CraigsList.org, but here you handle all the payment processing and transaction completion yourself.

Auction Web Sites

Again there is one web site which is head and shoulders above the competition and this is eBay.com, which is free to join and charges a listing fee and sales fee when a product is listed and sold. This may mean you lose up to 15% of your revenue from the sale, but eBay.com has nearly ten times more auctions running at any one time than its closest competitor.

Of the other foremost auction web sites, eBid.net is cheaper to run, OnlineAuction.com charges $8 per month with neither listing fee nor sales fee, and WeBidz.com only charges a $5 joining fee, after which all its standard services are free of charge. Although these latter option may seem to appear as the best value for money, a snapshot of auctions currently running on these sites showed the following results:-

eBay.com – almost 15 million auctions in progress

eBid.net – 1.5 million auctions in progress

OnlineAuction.com – just under 1.2 million auctions in progress

WeBidz.com – 82.000 auctions in progress.

Therefore, although it may save you money to go to these sites which are cheaper to maintain, you best hope of selling your product is eBay.com due to the larger market presence it has.