I’ve been an eBay seller for many years. I started out with just a small store and no idea what I was doing. I now have 7 eBay stores across 7 different countries. I did not get to that level without making a ton of mistakes and learning a ton of tools to make my life easier.

My goal is to always help others with their online sales. I know what works and what doesn’t and I wish when I had started there had been someone to guide me.

Here’s my simple guide to managing an eBay store. I will talk about automation tools, eBay plans and how to maximize your time while running an online store.

What eBay plan should you use?

The simple answer to that is whichever one fits your current needs. I meet lots of people that buy a plan up thinking they will grow into it. For me, that doesn’t make sense. Why spend money before you have to? I changed plans as I grew. I started with a starter plan and once I was listing 100 auctions a month, I moved up. Money is usually tight for start up businesses so why spend more than you have to?

Here is a brief list of the eBay plans. You can check them out further here. As you can see there is a lot of room for growth with eBay and the plans range quite a bit.

Starter
$4.95 per month with an annual subscription
Discounts and tools for occasional sellers.
The final value fee — most categories is 10%
Free 100 fixed-price listings per month, also these listings can be used for fixed price or auction.
All listings above the free allocation will be $0.3

Basic
$21.95 per month with an annual subscription
Tools and lower fees for growing businesses
The final value fee — most categories is 10%
Free 250 fixed-price listings per month
All listings above the free allocation will be $0.25

Premium
$59.95 per month with an annual subscription
Bigger discounts designed for larger businesses
The final value fee — most categories is 10%
Free 1,000 fixed-price listings per month
All listings above the free allocation will be $0.10

Anchor
$299.95 per month with an annual subscription
Lower fees and dedicated support for volume sellers
The final value fee — most categories is 10%
Free 10,000 fixed-price listings per month
All listings above the free allocation will be $0.05

Enterprise
$2,999.95 per month with an annual subscription
The lowest fees and dedicated support for the largest retailers
The final value fee — most categories is 10%.
Free 100,000 fixed-price listings per month
All listings above the free allocation will be $0.05

My next big challenge was finding a faster way to list my auctions.

Listings took me between 10 to 15 minutes each when I was doing them manually. That is a lot of time when you get into listing hundreds of products a month. I started selling on eBay before a lot of the automated processes were being used which made it a long job listing lots of items.

I am a software engineer by trade so I developed a product information parsing solution. With this tool, I was able to scrape all the necessary information about the products we were selling from our partner website. This automated it a fair bit and saved me a lot of time. I also created another tool that created product listings and populated the CSV file with all of the relevant information, and upload listings in bulk to eBay with eBay “File Exchange Center” tool.

The last issue was this: There is a limit on how many records you can upload to the system with a “Files Exchange Center” like I was using. If you reach your daily upload limit, fear not. eBay will solve this for you. You can send an email to this address draex@ebay.com and ask them to increase your daily limit. You also need to include your eBay user name, the number of upload records that you want to increase your daily limit to. Usually eBay support replies within 24 hours.

Here is a sample of my email:

Hello Draex,
Can you please increase our file exchange daily limits to 200k, we start adding a lot of new products to our eBay store with many vehicle compatibilities for each listing.
Our eBay ID is user-name
Thank you!
Regards,
Bohdan

Simple, right? eBay wants you to list as much as possible, after all. They make it easy.

I am always searching for programs to make my online selling easier.

I’ve used many tools over the years. Some have worked and some have not. Here is my short list of must-have tools for running an eBay store.

WEBINTERPRET
Webinterpret is a new tool for me to use. In the beginning of 2019, we were contacted by Webinterpret. They are an official eBay partner. We received an email telling us we can use their tool for one year free of charge since we had been an established eBay seller for many years.

Webinterpret duplicates and translates your listings across every eBay platform in other countries you want to sell. For example, if your primary listing is in English but you want to sell in Japan, Germany, France, and Spain as well, this tool will take all of your listings and sync and translate them to the eBay platforms in other countries and languages native to each platform. All you have to do to use it is set up your account and tell it what platforms you wish to sell on and it will sync the original listing to all the other countries platforms in the native language. You don’t need to login to each platform separately to work with listings or to see what items were sold. You can work from your regular eBay Seller Hub. It has a drop-down menu so you can easily access the other listings and see how your products are performing, and manage them. Also, it will convert the price to the local currency. You can accept payments by the same PayPal account. You just need to make some changes in the settings and allow the system to accept payments in other currencies.

SHIPSTATION
I love Shipstation. I was looking for something like this for years before I found it. It’s very useful and makes shipping products a lot smoother by automating the process. It allows you to merge your selling platforms with your shipping options.

Their website states: “Compare real-time rates and delivery times for all carriers and automatically select the best carrier for each shipment based on cost and delivery time.”

It checks the best-priced carrier for each listing and then you print the automated shipping label. Takes away all of the guesswork regarding cost and time for shipping. Compares the options for you. It merges with all of your online stores to streamline shipping into one easy step.

3DSELLERS
eBay trust runs on a feedback system. In my experience, a lot of people forget to leave feedback unless you remind them. I don’t blame them, but it does benefit the store to receive positive feedback.

3DSellers remind your customers to leave positive feedback. As an added, it sends out emails on your behalf letting the customer know when the item was shipped. After the purchase was made it will send the “Thank you” letter with including other random products from your store to promote them. It has been a huge help to me in building my business through organic, positive feedback.

TERAPEAK
eBay bought this tool in March 2019. All U.S. sellers with an active Basic, Premium, Anchor or Enterprise eBay store can use it for free.

Terapeak does product research. It’s simple to use. Enter the product name, number or title of the listing into the search bar and it will display reports on that product. You can choose the timeline for the reports. It will show you who your competitors are, how much they charge and what type of shipping they offer. It shows how many have sold and for what price. It will even offer you a list of keywords to use in your title. It’s pretty brilliant.

BYTECONN
I invented this tool out of necessity. That is definitely one of the benefits of being a developer and in the online sales business. I spent a lot of my early years in sales trying to find a way to better manage my inventory. I used spreadsheets but they were time-consuming and lacked the analytics required to make marketing and buying decisions. I couldn’t see who bought the product and when for example. I also couldn’t track returns or if a product was suitable for re-sale once it was returned.

The other products online for inventory management were designed for big business. I wasn’t big. I was a start-up. The products on the market were expensive and had many features I didn’t need. So I created a product that does what I need. It manages inventory. I can track what product sells and when. I can see current product trends to help me make smart marketing decisions. I can see returns. And it is a fraction of the price. I have made it available to all small to medium businesses to use as a comprehensive inventory management system.

These are some of my favorite tools.

I have used many tools and tried many things on my journey of online sales. I started out small in 2009 and I now run a solid medium to large size company. It’s been a learning experience. I hope that in sharing this with you I can help you avoid some of the headaches I had in my early years. Selling online is a lot of fun. Once you know what the heck you are doing!