Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about selling on eBay versus selling on your own website.
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Selling On eBay Vs. Selling On Your Own Website
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode we are talking about using eBay to sell your items or using your own website.
Which one is better?
Rob: All right, guys. So today we are talking about using eBay to sell your items or your own website or Shopify store.
Melissa: Yeah. So on Instagram the other day we got asked this question, is it worth it to start selling your stuff on your own store, or on your own website because eBay fees are ridiculous basically.
Like can you, can we opt out of paying eBay and sell stuff on your own website? So, and you totally can, and we're going to kind of dive into the scenarios, pros and cons of each, cause it's something, it's definitely an option to do. But yeah, so we wanted to talk about that. Absolutely.
Rob: First off, we agree, eBay fees, nobody wants to pay to sell, but when we go through this whole process of what it entails, what you have to do to have a Shopify store or your own website, you'll see what we do and we we have access and we have the knowledge. Well, Melissa has the knowledge how to do anything building an own store building our own store Shopify and all that kind of stuff and eBay by far is way easier than going the other route.
Melissa: You already went the punch line of that, but that's okay. But we'll dive into why. So with eBay you do have the eBay fees which they can get little crazy and we don't ever recommend doing any of your promoted listings higher than like two percent so we're not going to give them more than they need to have, but you know they can be annoying but that also goes into the fact that you have to be getting your items at a good price, which we can dive into a little bit more.
But when you go into making your own website, and I'm just speaking from lots of experience of creating, I've started creating a blog of my own before we even started Flea Market Flipper back in, when was that? Like, 2008. Whoa. No. Was it because Roxy was born in 2012, so it was before that. Wow. Yeah, it was like 2007 or 2008.
I think. I built my first blog and it was just for my own personal training clients. Like I'd put recipes on there, I'd do stuff for them. It wasn't really to attract new people, it was just for my current people. But like you have to start up learning how to create a website for one, which there are some website builders that make it a little easier, WordPress is difficult, so, but I did learn WordPress. And then you have to, you know, pay for a domain, you have to pay for hosting for the year or per month or whatever it is. So and the more traffic you get, the more you have to pay for that. So there, there are a lot of fees involved, but it can be cheaper than eBay fees.
But, the biggest thing is getting traffic to your website.
Rob: It boils down to traffic. So the stuff that we're selling on eBay, if somebody goes to Google, which this is what typically normal people do when they're looking for an item, they'll go into Google, they'll type search on Google, they're looking for this item, the best price.
I mean, this is what I do when I'm trying to find an item. I go into Google and I see all the different platforms that are selling that item and the cheapest that I can find. The thing about it is eBay has SEO. They have search engine optimization to where they rank on Google immediately. So something that you're selling, you're not paying the traffic to get that on the first page of Google or to get it to pop up as soon as somebody is looking, eBay is.
And that's where you're paying them fees because they're getting that in front of your buyers immediately if they are searching on Google. Or eBay, wherever they're searching for that item, it comes up quickly and you're not having to pay for that. Now thinking about how much you would actually have to pay to get onto Google on the front page so people could see your items is astronomical.
It's, it's not even feasible for selling a normal priced item. You can't even imagine how much it would cost to do that, to get that ranking on Google when eBay does it for. They don't do it for free, but they charge you a small price because they're so big they can charge you a small price and their fees that they're charging you go to getting your items out there and seen by more people.
Melissa: But you also, if you have items that are really high competition, you're not necessarily going to get onto Google. So you could create your own branding and your own things. I think it would work to have your own website or even a Shopify store is like $39 a month and they kind of handle all the, you just put your items in, but it's still like your listing.
And you could cross post them on there. It's just, we've tried it at one point and it was just a lot of work. And I've, I've even built it out on our website, putting our items on there. But then if it sells on eBay, then I got to go. And it was just a headache to get things listed. And I didn't, it just didn't work out.
And I've even tried Facebook ads to items to like pay traffic to get more seeing if I could pay Facebook less than we would pay in eBay feeds for some of our larger items and it's still never really panned out. So. So far, with the things that we've tested over the years, because we didn't want to pay eBay fees either, it didn't really work out to not do it on eBay.
So, but I did have another point of the traffic. Yeah, it's paying for traffic is a lot.
Rob: It is, and it's almost trying to reinvent the wheel. eBay is doing it, they're doing it at a large scale and that's how they're getting more people to your items there. I think they're the biggest in and granted what our business model is, is we're doing high profit items.
So we're doing kind of unique items, but they're not a high competition. No, we're not selling cell phone chargers. We're not selling these small pennies, profit on these items. They were barely making any money and we're not doing the volume. We're doing a lot less volume, low volume and high profit on what we're doing.
And for what we do, this is by far, it's way easier to pay eBay for the fees and still make a ton of money on the high profit items that we're buying and selling.
Melissa: I was gonna add that if you did have a niche that of stuff you sold, SEO, would work for you because you're constantly talking about the same kind of items and that's what SEO is. You're trying to show Google search that you know what you're talking about on this topic, like you know the stuff on this topic. So you could build it out to where you're known for that, but it's just a, it's a process.
It's a long, it's a long game. It's not like you could build it out, but it's the long game to get things going. But if you were like, maybe you did phones, you flip phones and you were known as the person who to go to the website to go to, it's just getting your name out there. There's other strategies to, if you don't want to do paid, then you start doing content to promote that store or to promote, you know, your website.
And so there are different ways to do it, but, or, you know, but I think the only way it would work is if you had a specific niche and not if you're just kind of selling, we sell lots of different, I mean, we do gravitate towards a couple of kinds of things, but I just don't think it would work for something like that.
We do. It's just not worth it.
Rob: It would work. It's just a matter of how much do you want to spend on it and work. And would it be more costly than actually just paying eBay their fees? And for us, it would be. We know this. For the time, yeah. We know how much time and effort to put into it. And Melissa's got experience on building websites.
She can build stuff out through WordPress and she can do Shopify. She can do all that stuff. She knows how to do it. I've tried it for our stuff. Exactly. The amount of time that it would still require and the amount of investment, to get those items seen is way, way, way more than what eBay is actually charging us for that.
So, you totally can do it. Like Melissa said, if you're specializing in something, it might be more
ideal.
Melissa: I think the quickest aside from doing on eBay, I think the quickest would be a Shopify store. And I think they start at, they're, I looked at like $40 a month, $39 a month, and you could do that cause you can plug your items in.
You're like basically an e comm store. And I think that would be the fastest way you could do it. So. So yeah, but it's, I still go to eBay.
Rob: It definitely boils down to what you're selling on that, those items to get them in Shopify or on eBay, doing it. So, you definitely can do it, but like we said, for us, where our business is way, way more economical, way easier for us just to pay eBay the fees for bringing us those buyers.
Melissa: But then that does go back to making sure that we can get our items at a good cost. So we know that those eBay fees, they're factored in. Like nobody likes to pay them, but it's the cost of doing business right now. And if that, that could change in the future too, if they get to be too crazy, then we will go to another platform or create our own website or do whatever we need to do.
But for now we will stick with eBay for right now. Absolutely. What do you think?
Rob: No, absolutely. We do what we do. We've been doing this for almost three decades now and we have tried, how old are you, we have tried doing different things. We're the same way. We're, yeah, we're a broken record and we don't want to pay eBay fees, but at the same time for what is out there right now, for what we're selling, it's the best way to go.
Melissa: And we're not trying to be like, like eBay is the, like, we're not promoting eBay. We don't get paid by eBay. But we do make our most money on them. So.
Rob: That's just what we're doing. We're giving you guys advice that we're actually, we, we follow our advice. This is what we do day in and day out is we sell on eBay. That's what we're telling you. And yeah, we, we pay the fees. We do it just because they by far make it the easiest to do what we're doing.
Melissa: And if you do, I would love to know if you guys do have, you've created another website, how is it going for you? Like, let, let us know. I'd be curious to know if some people have, and maybe you do have a niche and it's been good.
Or you have a Shopify store, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can hit us up in the DMs on Instagram. It's probably the best way to reach us. So, yeah. Thanks guys for taking some time to spend with us today. We love hanging out with you.
Rob: You guys rock and we will catch you guys on the next episode.