First, let me say that I’ve been doing ebay for a while now and I would like to share my experiences.

• If you’re a new seller to ebay. Do not go out and spend a ton of money buying bulk items and sell individual units to profit. Instead start with what you have lying around the house, or items that your friends and neighbor give to you for free. Sell those instead of spending money. This to get the hang of it, start out small, don’t spend money, just sell what you have, don’t expect high profit at the beginnings, because there are a lot of fees associated. Paypal Fee, Ebay listing Fee, and the Shipping Fee.
• Once you get the hang of it, experience a few items sold, getting feedback, communicate with the buyers and so on. Now you can go out and purchase garage sale items at rock bottom price and sell it back on ebay for cheap. However please do research first on how much the value on ebay. Don’t pay $10 and ebay selling it for $14, even with $4, not much profit after the fees. Always check ebay lowest price w/ shipping for the items for comparison.
• Now you’re ready for buy bulk and sell individual units. First let consider a few options. Try to get ebay monthly fee for the ebay store, this will give you cheaper fees and lots of free listing. Buy a shipping label printer, this will save time and effort getting the merchandise shipped. Buy shipping envelope bubble wrap, if not then go to usps.com and get some free boxes and supplies. Buy shipping tapes, cheap kind. and off course a scale up to 50lbs or higher is good.
• Lastly do your match. Use ms excel or something similar to calculate your profit. Let say you purchase $1 item, shipping with tracking # will cost $1.93, ebay and paypal fees probably 30 cent for the $1 item. So the cost now is $1.93+$1+$0.30 = $3.23 that’s your cost. So now if you want to profit 50 cent you must add 50 cent to the $3.23, so you get the point. However getting price higher will have less customer buying, but you profit more. If you price lower, you profit less but get more customers but more work shipping constantly. So maybe consider bundle up, instead of individual quantity, maybe do a set of 2, 5, 10, ect … So it’s really up to you.

Final thought, you might have questions how come those other sellers selling stuff so cheap, how do they profit? well the answer is they don’t profit. They loss money on those cheap items. However they gain other benefit such as good feedback and reviews, and make their ebay store looks good for selling future products. If you sell gold and silver, you will run greater risk of being scammed, so don’t sell it to new buyers, however it’s ok to sell to buyer if they agreed to pick up from a local jewelry store certified and pay some fees. Do not list items description that are not true or you’re not sure about, for instant a cell phone work sometime and you said it’s used, might need to include sometime it work sometime it doesn’t, be honest, your ebay will be in good standing.