To be perfectly honest selling on eBay is as easy as 123 or ABC. The primary skill or quality that you need is perseverance. Oh, and momentum, you definitely need to build up a good head of steam. My wife is very good at selling on eBay – she perseveres and has built up quite a nice business thank you very much. I on the other hand have not been able to persevere to quite the same extent. However, this is changing, as following the Christmas period, I have attained Power Seller status. Now, before you (I) go slapping me on the back, can I just make a little confession? I can, good. I managed this at the same period last year but managed to let things go to such an extent that by the end of February I was ‘back in the pack’, so to speak.

Last time around, my elevation to Power Seller status was based upon a jolly fat man with a big beard in a red suit. Lots of suits to be precise. I sold around 500 Santa suits in the period October to December rose to Bronze Power Seller status, but then I didn’t find anything else to sell and it all fell away. My wife, on the other hand, took my achievement and used it as her own spur – as I lost Power Seller status, she gained it and hasn’t looked back since. I was flailing around looking for ‘cool’ things to sell, whereas she looked around for things that people wanted to buy.

So why is it going to be different for me this year? Well, during the Christmas just gone, we suffered from a shortage of Santa suits. I think that I sold no more than 250 of the things and around 30 of them were sold at a loss to a charity. So the items that I sold to get to Power Seller status were not just Santa suits. An awful lot of what my wife sells is given to us. Yes, given to us. Friends & Family just give us things because they don’t want to throw them away or whatever, and ‘ah, Mr & Mrs Cosmicjellybaby, you sell on eBay don’t you? Here’s a big bundle of clothes that I no longer fit into etc etc blah blah BLAH’.

Another great source of stock is the humble car boot sale. The phrase, ‘don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it’ must surely apply to this little secret. People will get up at ridiculous times on a Sunday morning to entice you into giving them pennies for things that they no longer want. What they should do is spend an extra couple of hours, get up at a more sociable hour, maybe even have some breakfast and then settle down to listing those self same items on eBay. It’s true that one of us has to get up to go to the car boot to hand over these pennies, but it’s no great hardship when you realise just what value hides in items bought from car boot sales.

So, I have started to sell some of these things. And the thing that I have realised is a truism – YOU CAN SELL ANYTHING ON EBAY. It’s amazing. I can only think that it’s the size of the market.  It seems that there is someone out there who will buy almost anything – the Universal eBayer if you like. I say almost anything because I have one particular line that I thought was a sure fire winner, spent a good £150 on stock and in 12 months plus, I have sold precisely two units. But then again, I bought them when I was trying to sell cool and trendy stuff – my mistake eh?

Anyway, if you wanted to take a peek at what we, collectively, have for sale, you could do worse than pop along to my eBay shop at cosmicjellybaby’s Emporium of Things and my wife’s at Cabbagegreens.