Ebay Traveler! Sell Your Souvenirs At Online Auctions

You have probably heard of the online auction site eBay, "The World's Online Market Place". People from all over the world buy and sell items through eBay's online auctions and through eBay stores. There are people who sell on eBay as a hobby, making the occasional dollar, and there are others who make a very good full time living by selling on eBay.

You see, the biggest problem for most internet marketers is getting visitors to their site. If they get more visitors they sell more products. But with billions of page views a month, eBay already has the visitors. With eBay the internet marketer doesn't need to worry about getting visitors. Just about all she needs to do is put products up for sale.

So what does eBay have to do with travel? eBay can make it possible for you to travel the world while making a killer income, anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. Make eBay your part-time or full-time job and travel anywhere you want. No bosses. Work your own hours. Make thousands of dollars weekly. Travel the world. All you'll need to do is buy rare and unusual items while traveling and put them up for auction on eBay.

How can you get started on eBay and make a good living while traveling? First off, register with eBay http://www.ebay.com as a seller. eBay will take you through all the simple steps. It also has a lot of useful tips on buying and selling, so take a look around. Next, you'll want to sign up for a PayPal http://www.paypal.com account. With PayPal you'll be able to accept payments instantly, which will go into your online PayPal account. Then you can transfer money from your PayPal account to your regular bank account to withdraw funds. If you wish to accept payments through something other than PayPal look up the eBay rules under the help section.

A big key to selling on eBay is high quality photographs. So get yourself a good digital camera.

Take pictures of things in your home and put up a test auction on eBay's "auction test" listings to see how everything looks. At this point don't worry about selling, you just want to test the waters to get everything running smoothly. Also, scan eBay listings to see how other people sell their items, and research which items sell, to improve your own listings.

Once you are familiar with putting auction listings up on eBay on their auction testing pages you will want to focus on getting at least 10 positive feedback reviews. These reviews are what buyers leave sellers on eBay for all eBayers to see. (Sellers can only leave positive feedback for buyers, unfortunately they cannot leave negatives or neutrals anymore). If you have a lot of negatives no one will buy from you. But if you have a lot of positives people will be much more likely to buy from you. So treat your customers well to get those positive feedbacks!

eBay also has a star rating system where buyers can leave sellers up to five stars in these four categories: item as described, communication, shipping time and shipping and handling charges.

An easy way to build positives fast is to buy inexpensive items on eBay. These are a quick way of building up your reputation.

Or you could list several products that you can sell for $0.99. This will generate a lot of page views to your items, and a lot of sales. It will also generate a lot of feedback reviews for you. Once you have 20 positives you can then sell on Dutch Auctions (useful for when you have more than one of the same item for sale) and you can sell items in Feature Auctions. Feature Auctions are the key to making a lot of money on eBay as they generally sell well and can get you extra traffic to your other auctions. With 20 positive feedbacks you'll also be able to open up your eBay Store which allows you to list items in a non-auction format at cheaper listing fees.

You could sell 40 Feature Auction items a week for a $20 profit each. That's $800 a week, $3,200 a month. If you want to make more money, up your profit margin or put up more listings. Just 100 listings a week could easily make you $2,000 a week or more.

You could opt to be a low-volume seller for more travel flexibility as you won't need to have a large inventory. Where high-volume sellers generally sell lots of items for lower profit margins, low-volume sellers sell a few items at higher profit margins.

The key to selling on eBay is to sell items at bargain prices, sell rare and unique items, or to sell unique items at bargain prices. These types of products are easily found while traveling. Imagine what you could buy at a market in India. Unique items at bargain prices. Then turn around and sell them for a nice profit on eBay. (For example: a gemstone could be bought in a cheaper country for a fraction of what it is worth in other countries. You then sell it on eBay for less than the retail value in your target country, but at a hefty profit for yourself).

With internet cafes popping up all over the world you won't even need to bring your computer along with you on your trips. Just buy a unique item and take some good pictures. Go into an internet cafe, download the pics and put up your listing on eBay. When the item sells send it off to the buyer. Money will be put into your PayPal account which will fund your travels.

Selling on eBay to make a living while traveling is something different, but it works. Imagine traveling to exotic destinations with no bosses and no time schedules. Freedom. And all you have to do is buy souvenirs to sell them on eBay!

There are several other auction sites on the internet besides eBay.

If you sell several of the same item you could list it on several different auction sites for more exposure. You don't need to stop at eBay. The more listings you have up, on as many sites as you can, the more visitors you'll receive and the more money you'll make.

Be careful with seller fees though. You want to put up items that sell. If you don't sell you'll end up paying eBay listing fees without making a profit. Find the successes on these auction sites and emulate them.

Use online auctions to make some extra cash or as a full-time business. With the right strategy you could make a lot of money from virtually anywhere in the world.