How To Set Up Dropshipping With eBay

Online buying and selling activities have climbed immensely over the past few years and will continue to do so in the future. You can’t be a successful entrepreneur nowadays by depending wholly on brick-and-mortar stores. But neither do you need a ton of startup capital to start a business online.

One example of an ecommerce business with minimum investment requirements is dropshipping. It lets you sell goods without having to produce them (or order them from a manufacturer) and then store them until you find customers for them.

All you have to do is set up an virtual store containing the products you want to sell, attract customers to your store, take their orders and then pass on these orders to the manufacturer to package and ship directly to the buyers.

It may look like the dropshipper has nothing to do. But their job requires a lot of attention and mainly, a constant presence online.

The dropshipper’s responsibilities are:

• deciding what goods to sell, and at what rate,
• creation of an online store,
• promotion campaign to attract customers,
• communicating with suppliers and delivery companies,
• overseeing order management and fulfillment,
• customer service (communication, resolving issues with products, refunds and returns, checking production and delivery status).

Let’s go through the main steps involved in setting up a dropshipping business with eBay, and its advantages and disadvantages.

Why is eBay good for dropshippers?

In Q2 2022, eBay boasted of 138 million active buyers worldwide. In fact, it was the second most visited marketplace last year. Dropshippers can easily create their online store on this platform.

Running your own store is not for free; you need to pay a subscription fee starting from about $4.95 per month with yearly renewal for a Starter Store account. It offers 250 free listings. The listing fees are 35 cents each once you cross the aforesaid 250 limit.

eBay charges a commission on the goods you sell starting at 13.25% of the sale price plus $0.30 per order for items sold under most categories. Once you’ve sold more than $7500 worth of products, this “final value fee” is lowered up to 0.5%, depending on the category the items in question fall under.

The main advantage of eBay is that it is already a popular ecommerce platform. So you may not need to spend money on advertising campaigns or SEO audits to promote your website.

eBay has an easy interface for creating an online store, provides good support services for sellers, and organizes promotional campaigns on their behalf too.

Unfortunately, eBay is not suitable for dropshippers who cannot source their products from wholesale suppliers. And wholesalers prefer not to get involved with sellers without a suitable track record.

Pros and cons of starting a dropshipping business on eBay

Here are some advantages and disadvantages to dropshipping on eBay that sellers might want to mull over:

Pros ● Quick registration ● Popular marketplace for many product categories ● Wide choice of subscription packages ● Many options for dropshipping business automatization compatible with eBay ● Possibility of creating several online stores ● Possibility to attract new customers with promoted listings ● Low-risk business with eBay

Cons ● Strict registration policy ● eBay prefers dropshippers source from wholesalers only ● Your feedback score is everything ● Customers will not necessarily be loyal to your eBay storefront ● High competition on the platform

 

Main steps involved in dropshipping with EBay

Here are some key tasks you need to complete before you start a dropshipping business on eBay.

1. Creation of an account on EBay – This step requires you to verify all your personal details. eBay may request additional papers (apart from your postal address and ID).  After registration, you will be able to start work via the Seller Hub tab.
2. Build the feedback score – Before purchasing the products, all eBay customers check the seller’s feedback score. The simplest way to obtain a high feedback score to sell low priced, but good items on eBay (at a loss, if necessary) and politely ask for customer feedback AFTER you’ve offered to refund the amount they’ve spent in case they’re not satisfied with the product.
3. Check your monthly limit in items and prices (in the Overview tab) – For new sellers, eBay sets a limit of 10 items per month with a total value of up to $500 per month (different categories will have different limits). This limit will be changed automatically after you start selling more items and receiving positive feedback. If you reach your limit (no matter the price or quantity), you can’t sell anything in that month; you can’t create additional listings or reprice items in your store until the first day of the following calendar month. Unfortunately, if you do not know your winning products, you can’t test your market quickly because of these limits.
4. Thoroughly research eBay to find winning products and niches – As you are going to sell products on eBay, you need to understand what products are the most popular. You also need to make

The Hub has a special research tool – Terepeak (product research and sourcing insights) for searching. You also can start with a learning guide to discover this tool’s possibilities. The utility provides a detailed report about sales of the chosen goods in the select category. Starting with products with steady demand during the last year or two is best.

5. Find suppliers – For your chosen products, you need to find suppliers. Some of your choices include Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, Costco, and other online resources. While checking for suitable suppliers, you need to pay attention to the final price of the goods (including delivery and fees), the stock quantity available, and the delivery terms. Nowadays, most customers want to receive their ordered items within 1-2 days.

6. List products in your store – You can manually create all the item cards, of course. But if you want to speed up and simplify the creation of an online store on eBay, you can use numerous eBay dropshipping tools capable of performing repricing, auto tracking, and auto ordering for you. Some tools can even create a product card by exporting information from the source marketplace. But you still need to check the description and change it based on your dropshipping terms. Sometimes, you will need to add more information to present the a properly detailed description.

After setting up the online store, performing several orders by yourself is strongly recommended to test how the whole system works. During test order fulfillment, you can test the product quality and figure out the real delivery time. Your actual order fulfillment will consist of taking orders from customers, sending them to suppliers, tracking deliveries, and communicating with customers if something goes wrong.

Conclusion

Dropshipping with eBay does not have significant differences from other platforms. It is even easier, as many customers are already there and waiting for you.

Unfortunately, since most dropshippers can make a decent profit only through volume sales, the item limit restrictions on eBay make it challenging to receive considerable revenue in a short period if you are a newcomer.

But the simplicity of store organization, flexible fee rates, and stable customer flow are the main advantages that keep attracting dropshippers to eBay.