For about 8 years now, my mom and I have been collecting hard plastic dolls from the 1950s era.  Of course, every collector ends up with items they don’t want, so to get rid of those — and also to try to make a little extra cash — we decided to try starting an eBay business.

We had some success with this, but not a whole lot.  Because our main idea was to get rid of our castoffs, we didn’t have a whole lot of success business-wise — but we did accomplish what we wanted, which was to downsize our collections and focus on our better quality dolls.  It’s not easy to start your own eBay store, though, and we did encounter some bumps and bruises along the way: It is time consuming to write item descriptions, answer questions, and pack and ship items, and there are of course always the malcontents who make selling a pain in the you-know-what.

For aspiring small business owners, thogh, eBay is a great way to start your own business.  Although the fees are annoying, they aren’t as a high as the overhead you would face if you leased a brick-and-mortar store or even ran your own ecommerce website.  But the biggest advantage to eBay is how high traffic it is — you’d never get that many potential customers looking at your own small online shopping site!

Yes, eBay has its down sides — but overall, I think it can provide some really great opportunities for entrepreneurs!

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