How to Save Time & Make Money on eBay With a Sales Partner
November 3, 2007
Do you ever feel like there’s not enough time in the day? As I juggle my family time, work, and online endeavors I always find myself wishing for extra hours in the day. I’ve been looking for ways to make better use of my time and last night I made some progress!
No Time for Selling
I’ve been selling on eBay for a few years now and it’s been a nice way to earn some extra money on the side. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten busy enough lately that now I have thousands of dollars of eBay merchandise that I’ve purchased but is just waiting to be listed online. I’ve been looking to outsource the work or partner with someone for a while but hadn’t run across the right relationship, until last night.
Spreading the eBay Bug
I managed to get one of my friends and former co-workers hooked on eBay about a year and a half ago. He sat in the cube adjoining mine and after hearing me talk about my success on eBay he asked me to help him get started as well. He’s sense moved onto a different job but we’re still friends and we had his family over for dinner last night.
eBay Partners
During the course of the evening I mentioned my search for an eBay partner and he immediately expressed his interest. Since getting started online he has opened his own eBay store and now sells more than I do. We haven’t figured out all the details yet but we’re going to work together to get my backlog of merchandise listed and sold. He’ll likely list, sell, and ship the products and we’ll split the profits after fees. It’s a pretty good setup, he’s looking for more items to sell and I’m looking for help getting my products sold.
Win/Win eBay Relationship
It feels like a win/win relationship to me. Of course, we’ll decide on the terms up front so there are no misunderstandings, we don’t want to jeopardize our friendship over eBay sales. I’ve been stressing over this for some time now so it’s nice to find a solution. I love it when things like this just fall into place. I really should have thought it up sooner instead of just stumbling across it but I guess that’s the way life works sometimes. I think becoming eBay partners will save me time, free up my cash tied up in merchandise, and him make more money.
All posts by Ben Edwards
This article is great for me because I used to have a partner selling stuff on eBay. He was used to buy items from “warehouse fair sales” or at least that was what he told to me. You know, there are some fair sales at Costco, Sears, Walmart and other warehouses where you can buy items with boxes scratched or with minor details for a very low price. The problem there was that such sales are reserved only to the warehouse’s workers so the name on the invoice is the one of the worker who bought the item. Therefore the winner of the auction would not see his/her name on the shipping label and that would result in an annoying situation.
I would like to find a partner to reinstate the sales on eBay. I will inform my partner where to find the deals and then we will list it on ebay. If someone is interested just visit my website a drop me a note.
Thank you
This website has a great value added tool that can help those selling items online.
http://iown.it/seal.html
Nice work. It is hard to find a good partner, so it is great that he is also a friend of yours.
This is some sort of outsourcing. It is definitely good for you.
Thats a great setup there, you’ve gotten to the point where its almost passive income. I find myself in your same spot because I sell on ebay, sites as well as running my blogs. I don’t have a huge product line at this point so I can still manage it but my inventory grows by the weeks and I find myself in need of more time. The most time consuming part for me is taking pictures, uploading them, editing and making the auctions.
Outsourcing is a great way to free up a lot of your time and putting things on auto pilot. Just last week I hired a freelance writing to pick up the slack on my site. I’ve gotten way too busy as of late.
Good luck with your venture, I think you’ll do fine as long as the expectations and terms are laid out, as with any other partnership.
Hope that works out for you ! I certainly don’t have thousands of dollars of stuff waiting to sell on Ebay but I have found that the few things I do have sit forever in my to do pile… I don’t know if it’s time or what but finding the energy to list on Ebay seems almost impossible at times 🙂