Opening a eBay Account

The world’s biggest online market is eBay; in fact the largest market of any type. At any second literally millions of items are on sale. Billions of dollars’ worth of goods are sold throughout eBay not only every year, but each month.

eBay is an bizarre e-commerce site because it doesn’t actually sell anything; it basically provides a system through which other people can sell online. It’s allowed millions of people to sell online, and eBay claims that more than 400,000 of these people make a living by selling with eBay.

Moreover the relatively low-dollar individual sales of collectibles and “garage sale” items, many established merchants sell cars and real estate, computers and electronics, and antiques and jewelry. And not just in the United States. eBay works around the world, in Western Europe and through an investment, MercadoLibre.com—in Latin America, Australia,Hong Kong, Malaysia, and India. It’s a gigantic, international marketplace, in which millions of people and merchants sell millions of products.

Why Sell With eBay?

Why would you want to sell with eBay? For countless reasons:

■ Millions of people have made money through eBay, many of them

enough to live on.

■ It’s incredibly easy to get started selling with eBay. You can factually post your first

product within minutes.

■ eBay offers several different ways to sell. You can sell through an auction or

fixed price, within the main listings, or in an eBay store.

■ eBay provides tools to boost the possibility of safe transactions, such as PayPal

Buyer protection, eBay Standard Purchase Protection, and a feedback method about

buyers and sellers. You get paid, and the shopper can buy with confidence.

■ eBay makes getting paid trouble-free; you can easily set up a PayPal account within minutes,

allowing you to accept credit-card transactions for sales.

■ You have a immeasurable audience. Hundreds of thousands of people browse and purchase through eBay.

Registering With eBay

Let’s start with registering eBay.It doesn’t matter buying or selling, the primary process is the same.

1. On the eBay home page, click the Register link by the top of the page. You can visit the eBay Learning Center for audio tours and tutorials regarding selling through eBay. Check http://pages.ebay.com/education/.

2. You will see the registration form. Enter all your information, and then click the Continue at the bottom of the page.

3. Now Choose ID & Password page is appeared. eBay suggests the User ID is likely to be a combination of your name and a number. It won’t be mainly memorable or characteristic, so we suggest you choose something better.

4. eBay will suggest a number of IDs from which you can choose, but i advise you click the Create your own ID option button and type the user ID of your pick.

5. Type a password; make sure you use something you can remember (write it down somewhere safe, or use a password-protection program). Don’t use anything obvious that someone can discover.

6. Select something from the secret question list box. This will be a question that eBay’s organization may ask in order to identify you.

7. Type the answer to the secret question in the Secret answer box.

8. Then Click the Continue button.

9. You receive e-mail message from eBay to confirm the account; doing so make sure that the e-mail address you provided was valid and accessible by you. (If you entered a wrong e-mail address, click the Change your email link to correct it.) You can check your e-mail within a few moments since the confirmation should arrive pretty quickly.

10. Click the Complete eBay Registration link in the e-mail message. (If the link doesn’t work, as it may not in some e-mail programs, use the link and the confirmation code eBay provided below the button.)

11. You’ve just created a basic account. You can now buy, but with the purpose of selling you need to continue. Click the Start selling link.

12. On the page that next shows, click the Create Seller’s Account button to see the Enter Credit or Debit Card page.

13. Enter your credit-card information into the page, and then click the Continue button. The Enter Checking Account screen appears.

14. Enter your Bank name, Checking-account number and Bank-routing number. Be cautious to enter the routing number and account number into the correct fields.

15. With the next page, you choose which account you want to use in order to pay your selling fees, either the bank account or the credit-card checking account. Select the appropriate option button, and click the Continue button.

16. If you choosed to pay from the bank account, you’ll see a Direct Pay Authorization form, giving eBay permission to access your bank account. Click the Authorize Checking Account button once you’ve read the information.

Viola!!! That’s it. You’ve created your account. You’re now accepted to sell on eBay. You can continue to set up an item for sale, if you wish, or build an eBay store, but there’s no need to do so at the moment. Actually, you’ll probably want to set up a PayPal account.

How To Set Up a PayPal Account

One way or another, you have to get paid. The greatest way for new merchants to collect money is through PayPal. PayPal, an Internet startup in 1998, created a simple payment system that allowed persons to e-mail money to each other. Members could “load” their account with currency, and then tell PayPal to, say, “pay this e-mail address $10.” PayPal would look up the e-mail address, and if it belonged to someone with an account, it would transfer the money to that account.

If the owner of the receiver e-mail address didn’t have an account, PayPal would send an e-mail message saying, basically, “Come to PayPal and set up an account, and we’ll give you $10.” The great “viral marketing” tool! Who, on being told by a friend or associate that he’d be “PayPalling” money, and on receiving this message, wouldn’t set up an account?

Of course there are fees related with PayPal transactions, which vary from 30 cents plus 2.9 percent to 30 cents plus 1.9 percent, depending on your sales amount. PayPal has a much simpler fee formation than the credit-card merchant accounts, though the base rate is a little higher than for credit cards (however if you do more than $3,000 in transactions a month, the rate is comparable or lower).

While money transfers were not part of the company’s main business plan, PayPal found that people on eBay had discovered the system, and were recommending it to each other. It finally became so popular that eBay actually bought PayPal. These days, PayPal has 65 million account holders in 45 countries around the world; one in three U.S. online buyers has a PayPal account, and more than 90 percent of eBay sellers accept PayPal. An even higher proportion of regular merchants use it. And, obviously, it’s easy to set up your own account.

1. At the top of the page Click the My eBay tab.

2. At the bottom left of the page Click the PayPal link in the Related Links box.

Accepting PayPal means you can accept credit cards, as well. If a purchaser doesn’t have a PayPal account, he can pay PayPal with a credit card, and the money is placed into your PayPal account.

3. Click the Sign Up for a PayPal Account button.

4. Create an account Password, click the check box at the bottom of the page, and then at the bottom of the page click the Register link.

5. A new page telling you that your account has been set up. You haven’t finished yet, though. For a confirmation message check your e-mail, and then click the activation link. A page opens in which you must enter your password to log in. After doing this, the Enter Security questions page opens.

6. Very similar to setting up your eBay account, you also have to provide Security Questions. Choose the two questions from the drop-down, and then type the answers into the Answer boxes.

7. Once you click the Submit button, you’ll be placed into your account page (see Figure 2-1).

8. Your account is now unverified. You can validate the account by adding bank-account information; you might want to add credit-card information, too. You’ll be able to transfer money between PayPal and your accounts.

9. To do this Click the Add bank account link to see the page in Figure 2-2.

10. Once more, add your bank-account information: the Bank Name, Account Type, Routing Number, and Account Number. Then click the Add Bank Account button at the bottom of the page.

11. While the process will appear complete, in fact it isn’t. It still has a couple days to go since PayPal will place a couple of small deposits into your bank account basically only a few cents. When you see the deposits in a statement, online, log back into your PayPal account and click the Confirm Bank Account link that appears, and then enter the amounts deposited (therefore proving you have access to the account).

12. To link a credit card to your account, follow a similar process, beginning with clicking the Add credit card link. This procedure only takes a few moments with eBay contacting the credit-card network to verify the card.

PayPal offers a number of services to help out and protect eBay traders, including the following:

• Automatic PayPal logo placing once you create an eBay listing and select PayPal as a payment method, the logo appears automatically.
• Offer PayPal Buyer Credit PayPal pays you, and the buyer pays PayPal over time.
• Seller Protection Policy PayPal guarantees you won’t be hit with a chargeback caused by fraudulent use of an account; as long as you follow certain steps (require a delivery signature for goods over $250, keep proof of delivery, etc.).
• Invoicing you can send customers invoices, which are paid through PayPal.
• Shipping Center Calculate costs, pay for shipping (UPS and the post office), and print packing slips.
• ATM/Debit Card You can get a free debit card that allows you to take money out of your PayPal account at any ATM machine, or at any store that takes MasterCard. In addition, if you use PayPal Preferred in your eBay listings, you will earn 1 percent back on your purchases.

There are other helpful services, too. See the PayPal site for more information.

From now on you can sell or buy everything on eBay or eBay Store.

But there are vital tips about making money on eBay.

I will try to give some hints about it my next post.