tion money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping

With so many people trading on eBay these days it's hard to see how to get to the top of the eBay pile. Yet making a living is perfectly possible if some basic business methods are followed. This article considers three crucial issues.

Market choice: Most casual eBay sellers don't have a target market as such - they simply sell to anyone who might buy. To be fair, their marketplace is a vast one and the likelihood is great that someone, somewhere, will want what they are selling. This was the original eBay idea - a vast marketplace of potential buyers with something for everyone.

However, times change and, if you want to make a business out of eBay, a way has to be found of sustaining a viable sales level. This is essential if you want to a) make enough money to be worth the effort and b) climb the eBay pile to be recognised as a serious player. There are two main ways of doing this:

First, simply sell more. If you are an 'emporium' type seller - that is, a non-specialised merchant who sells a wide variety of goods - this is, up to a point, easy. You just take on more sales lines to increase your selling chances. The downside to this is that more and more time is spent sourcing, cataloguing and listing - not to mention money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping

uch - they simply sell to anyone who might buy. To be fair, their marketplace is a vast one and the likelihood is great that someone, somewhere, will want what they are selling. This was the original eBay idea - a vast marketplace of potential buyers with something for everyone.

However, times change and, if you want to make a business out of eBay, a way has to be found of sustaining a viable sales level. This is essential if you want to a) make enough money to be worth the effort and b) climb the eBay pile to be recognised as a serious player. There are two main ways of doing this:

First, simply sell more. If you are an 'emporium' type seller - that is, a non-specialised merchant who sells a wide variety of goods - this is, up to a point, easy. You just take on more sales lines to increase your selling chances. The downside to this is that more and more time is spent sourcing, cataloguing and listing - not to mention money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping

if you want to make a business out of eBay, a way has to be found of sustaining a viable sales level. This is essential if you want to a) make enough money to be worth the effort and b) climb the eBay pile to be recognised as a serious player. There are two main ways of doing this:

First, simply sell more. If you are an 'emporium' type seller - that is, a non-specialised merchant who sells a wide variety of goods - this is, up to a point, easy. You just take on more sales lines to increase your selling chances. The downside to this is that more and more time is spent sourcing, cataloguing and listing - not to mention money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping

If you are an 'emporium' type seller - that is, a non-specialised merchant who sells a wide variety of goods - this is, up to a point, easy. You just take on more sales lines to increase your selling chances. The downside to this is that more and more time is spent sourcing, cataloguing and listing - not to mention money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping

tion money ties up in your widening range of inventory.

The other route is via niche marketing. Your sales window may be much smaller but, if you have identified your market properly, that market can be a good one. With less inventory to tie up cash your business can operate on a much leaner model, helping to maximise profit and taking less time in administrative tasks. My choice would always to go with a niche market.

Maximising exposure: It's an old business truism that you can have the best product in the world but, if no-one knows about it your business will fold. An eBay business is no different. Okay, your auction lots are in front of the eBay world and, if targeted correctly, will probably sell. However, selling purely via auction brings its own problems, not the least of which is the difficulty in projecting profit and loss with its attendant cash flow issues.

It might be wise, therefore, to consider how to best expose your business to the wider world! One way is to write articles like this one. Although they must not be adverts for your business, they can - and should - contain useful information for readers that can generate interest in what you do. That of course leads us on to the next way to get noticed:

A website. Web hosting and domain names are these days so inexpensive in comparison to ten years ago as to be almost laughable. If you're paying more than forty pounds/eighty dollars a year for web hosting you're paying too much! It's so easy too to set up a basic selling website compared to those dista