How different is eBay Business from Brick & Mortar Business

For first timers hearing about eBay business, it may appear all too complicated. Don’t be surprised if they thought that it was something beyond their comprehension. Occasionally you may find a few people growing apprehensive about it. All these are not because the online business isn’t worthwhile giving a thought to as most of them are brick & mortar businessmen who have grown their businesses the hard way so trying to convince them that eBay can do magic will invariably fall on the deaf ears.

eBay business is different from your offline business in the way it is marketed and to a certain extent in inventory management too while the fundamentals remain the rock hard same. Let’s understand these nuances in detail.

Setting up eBay shop is a procedure which closely follows or mocks the actual setting up off of your shop in a mall. You will name your shop, which in computer parlance is called as eBay ID; display of merchandise will be in pictures and text details to describe product and quality aspects. This is analogical to your verbal explanations.

Now assume that yours is a bid-sale paradigm of business. eBay provides for setting up the bid exactly the way anyone would have done offline. You set a reserve price, set a base amount to begin the bid. You can choose to stop bidding if someone prefers to buy at preset price. This, from your perspective, means you are controlling your eBay business the normal way with internet not being a diversion or constraint. What follows next is shipping the item to the winning bidder.

How and why will buyers come to your shop? To understand this, let’s go back to basics. You will market the shop; market the exclusive items; and be honest with photographs and descriptions of selling items; convince about your fair shipping policies and ask for feedbacks from customers to proudly display them on your storefront. The latter 2 things help to enhance your online reputation while marketing differs somewhat in keyword optimization which is specific to internet marketing. Multiple payment option is a definite plus.

This is as much different as it can get. As regards to similarity, all the hard work you can put-in ranks from 1-10.