Transcripts

Jim Griffith:
Now there's close to 7 million items available at any given time and over 3 million items are added every day.

Jim Griffith, author of the book, The Official eBay Bible says still a lot of people have never bought anything on Ebay. Why?

I know that there's a lot of people who I run into who say, " Oh, I would never go to eBay because it's only people's junk." Which is not true, there's an amazing selection of used and new items. Another misconception is I'm going to get ripped off, which is not the case. If you know how to conduct yourself off-line safely, you can do it on-line as well. Probably the third misconception is that it's really difficult and expensive but it's actually really easy to buy on eBay.

There are a lot more buyers than sellers on eBay, partly because selling on eBay for the first time does take some effort. I did it recently and it took well over a half an hour to set everything up, but it is fun and it's kind of addicting - but you do have to be careful.

With a lot of folks who are interested in starting a business on eBay, they'll make an enormous investment in inventory and maybe they'll take a lot of classes and they'll get all geared up for it. And it's not the way to start on eBay. The best way is to take something that you own and sell it so that you get some familiarity. It's like learning to ride a bicycle; you get the feel of how the transaction model on eBay works.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.