I’ve recommended eBay before as a great way to test a new product. For a growing number of entrepreneurs, though, eBay is their sole storefront. The beauty of eBay is that it lets you get into e-commerce without having to go through the trouble and expense of setting up an ecommerce site of your own. These seven eBay selling tips will help you get started selling on eBay successfully and get on your way to becoming an eBay PowerSeller.

1. A picture IS worth 1000 words.

It’s old-fashioned, but people still like to see things before they buy them. For successful eBay selling, make sure any products you list on eBay are accompanied by professional quality photographs that meet eBay's photo requirements. (Note that all listings must have photos now.)
Photos used on Ebay must be a minimum length of 500 pixels for the longest side, have no borders, and have no text or artwork added (such as a seller's logo). You may use watermarks and in fact, eBay has its own watermark creation service - if you don't use theirs, be sure your watermarks conform with eBay's rules. As of this writing, you can still use stock photos, but only for brand-new items, not "as the primary photo for used items; exceptions are the Books, Movies, Music, and Video Game categories".
Just meeting the requirements isn't good enough if you want to actually sell the items you post and get top dollar for them; I strongly recommend that you read eBay's Top tips for taking great photos (pdf) and work at making your photos the best they can be.

2. Do your eBay research.

When selling on eBay, before you list a particular product, spend some time researching other similar products on eBay and following the bidding process. This will help you gauge the interest for your product and help you determine how much your product might be worth.

3. Learn all about shipping.

Shipping is under the control of the eBay seller, but some methods of shipping are better than others.
You want to find the best method of shipping for your product in terms of expense and reliability and then specify that shipping method in your eBay listing. (And don’t forget to include the shipping cost in your shipping information for potential buyers.)

4. Pay as much attention to the writing of your eBay listing as to your picture.

For selling on eBay, you need a powerful listing. And the trick to writing a strong eBay listing is to combine search engine friendly phrasing with concrete details about the product in a way that will entice people to bid on your product. Take the time to craft your eBay listing just as you would any ad.
Shipping from point to point in Canada? Here's What Online Business Owners Should Know About Provincial Sales Tax.

5. Offer a full slate of payment options, including credit cards.

The more payment options you, as a seller, offer prospective bidders, the more bidders your product will attract and the more successful your selling on eBay will be.

6. Focus on getting positive feedback first.

Feedback really matters when you're selling on eBay. If you have a consistent record of positive feedback, prospective buyers will both bid more often and be willing to pay higher prices.
So you may want to hold back on placing higher priced products until you have a successful track record as an eBay seller established.

7. Be business-like.

Act professionally, provide the kind of superior customer service that will build your reputation, and make sure that you’re following all the business rules that apply, such as registering your business and properly charging and remitting taxes. Selling on eBay is just like any other business; to become an eBay success, you need to follow the rules and provide the kind of customer satisfaction that will translate into increased eBay sales.
The thing to remember about free website promotion is that nothing is ever truly free. If you don’t spend money promoting your website, you’re going to have to spend time. So why waste time trying to market your website using methods that will only bring you minuscule returns, if any? If you're prepared to work on them, these five free website promotion techniques will deliver, rewarding you with increased site traffic.

1. Work on website SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it's the best thing since sliced bread for promoting your website because it's easy to learn and apply the basics to your own website(s).
Through working on website SEO, you can improve the page rankings of your web pages and drive more traffic to your site. And isn't that the ultimate goal? Get started with my 7 Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization.
Tip: If you are using non-text content on your web page(s), such as photos, image maps or JavaScript, include text in the ALT tag so the search engines have something they can read.

2. Get reciprocal linking.

Having other people put a link to your site on their website is a great way to get free website promotion. 
Be aware though that getting inbound links to your website is not a numbers game; it's the quality of the links that really matters. So you want to focus your linking efforts on relevant quality sites.

3. Write articles.

The basic theory of article marketing is that you write an article and then offer it for free to various websites, blogs, magazines etc. Your article, of course, ends with a resource box or 'blurb' that promotes you and your website.
The beauty of this website promotion strategy is that if you get your articles published on popular, long-lived websites or in well-known magazines, they can be sitting there promoting your website for a long, long time with no further effort on your part.
However, there are catches. First, you have to be able to write well on a topic or topics that other people will want to read and/or publish. Second, you have to find the quality places for your articles to be published and persuade the people making the decisions to publish them.
Tip: Find the websites or magazines you want to be published on first, and then spend some time reading the content to see what type of material they might want and if there are any obvious holes in their content that you could cover. Then tailor your material to that particular site or magazine's needs.

4. Use social media to drive traffic to your website.

Social media isn't just a great place to connect with friends and family; it's also a great place to promote your website and/or business as so many people are using it. For instance, a Nielsen study found that Internet users spend 21.3% of their time on social networking sites while PQ Media found the average U.S. Internet user spends around 33 hours per month on the Internet and about 8 of those hours on social media (5 Social Media Tips for Finding and Engaging Your Target Audience: New Research, Social Media Examiner).
Participating in social media can be a great way to get free website promotion as it can give you high visibility at low cost.
To successfully market your website using social media, though, you’ll need a plan. Learn How to Create a Social Media Plan for your small business. 
Tip: Different social media attracts different types of people. Before investing time in using a particular social media platform and building up a group of followers, make sure you've chosen the right platform for your marketing purposes. See how to pick the social media that's the best fit with your business. See also How to Create a Business Page on Facebook and How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business.

5. Create/present quality content.

This is the catch – none of the techniques above are going to work very well for you if you don’t have quality content on your site – the kind of content that other people want to read and promote on their own blogs/websites and on social media.
So somewhere on your website, you need to have a blog and/or articles presenting content that is relevant to your target market.
Where will you get such content? Basically, you are either going to write it yourself or get someone else to write it. The "someone else" might be staff, hired writers or guest bloggers. Which approach you choose depends on your budget as well as your time and talents.
Writing your own blog can be a very effective way to market a website because by blogging about your subject, you'll get the chance to become an active member of the blogging community, building a web of relationships and links. And of course, your blog will be keyword rich, increasing your Search Engine Optimization.
Tip: Most blogs include the facility to make comments on posts. When you're reading another blog that's relevant to your topic, take the time to comment on a post (making sure that your comment says something that's equally relevant). It's another opportunity to promote yourself and your website for free – while getting known in the blogging community.

Consistency is Key

These are not the only ways to get free website promotion of course. But these are the best, and if you select several of these and concentrate on doing them consistently over a period of time, they'll yield the return in increased site traffic that you're looking for.
Despite the fact that it seems like every store has an ecommerce component these days, there is still a market for many types of businesses to begin selling their products online. In fact, only 17 percent of small businesses have attempted to create an online ecommerce store. This presents a tremendous opportunity for small businesses to expand their reach, especially when you consider that by 2019, it is estimated that there will be 224 million digital shoppers in the United States.
If you are thinking about adding an online store to expand your retail experience, this list of tools will help you find what you need to get your online store up and running quickly and cost effectively.

Domain Name Tools

The first step for most online stores is finding the right domain name. A good domain name should support your brand, be as short as possible, and be easy to remember. You have lots of options when it comes to picking a domain name — you can use your existing business website domain, a variation of that domain, or start with something completely new. The tools below will give you some ideas as you start to figure out your domain strategy.
1. Bust A Name: A tool to help you find domains that are available and manage the domains you own.
2. Domainr: This tool helps you find the perfect domain name by exploring the entire domain name space, including domains beyond .com, .net, and .org.
3. Dot-o-Mator: An easy-to-use tool that creates domain name suggestions based on keywords you enter into the tool.
4. Name Mesh: This service provides domain name suggestions using synonyms, suffixes, prefixes, and more.

Ecommerce Platforms

When ecommerce was in its infancy, online retailers had to use many different services to piece together their digital shopping experience, including product gallery tools, shopping carts, payment processors, and more.
Today, there are many platforms that provide all of the elements that are important to have in your online store. This next list is a collection of some of these tools.
5. BigCommerce: Customize your site with easy-to-use templates, manage shipping and payments, and list your products on Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
6. E-junkie: A shopping cart platform that helps you sell both digital downloads and tangible goods with PayPal, 2Checkout, & Authorize.Net.
7. GoCentral Online Store: Part of GoDaddy's suite of services, this platform will help you with everything from inventory management to payment processing.
8. Gumroad: A great tool for digital creators who are looking to build a simple, small store that helps you build your audience.
9. Magneto: An open source ecommerce platform that provide comprehensive online selling solutions, a extensions marketplace and an open global ecosystem.
10. Shopify: An ecommerce platform that has everything you need to sell online, on social media, or in person, providing a platform for online stores as well as retail point-of-sale systems.
11. Squarespace Online Stores: An all-in-one platform for selling online, whether you’re just getting started or are an established brand.
12. Volusion: An ecommerce website builder with professionally designed themes and customization ability that helps you sell more products online.
13. Weebly: A drag-and-drop website builder that makes it easy to create a high-quality website, blog or online store.
14. Wix: Another drag-and-drop online store builder that helps you create a unique, personalized website with product galleries and flexible design.
15. Woo Commerce: A customizable ecommerce platform built into WordPress that helps you sell physical and digital products easily.

Email Marketing

An important part of growing your business through ecommerce is having a way to communicate with your customers. This is where email marketing comes in. You need a platform that helps you build a database and send transactional email messages, customer service follow-ups, and special marketing promotions and notifications.
Explore the tools below -- and this list of more email marketing platforms -- to see which may be the best fit for you.
16. AWeber: An email marketing platform with more than 700 mobile responsive email templates to automate your email marketing.
17. ConstantContact: Create email marketing campaigns with drag-and-drop customizable templates that you can personalize, send to your contacts, and track the response.
18. MailChimp: A tool for marketing automation for product follow-ups and other types of messaging that targets customers based on behavior, preferences, and previous sales.
19. VerticalResponse: A platform that helps small businesses send email marketing messages, online surveys and direct mail for campaigns that drive interest in your online products.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is essential for all business, but particularly those that focus on selling online. You can certainly manually manage your social accounts through each separate platform, but it is much more efficient to use a social media marketing platform like of the tools listed below.
20. Buffer: An intuitive social media management platform used by all types of businesses to help drive social media results.
21. Hootsuite: A social media management tool that helps you quickly find and schedule social content, then measure its impact.
22. Sprout Social: Helps all types of organizations extract real business value out of social media through effective engagement, publishing, and analytics.

Support Tools/Help Desk

Have you considered how you will handle product issues, track customer requests, or communicate with your customers while improving your customer service processes? A support and help desk tool can be a great asset to any online retailer. Explore the list below to see if one of them is a good fit for your needs.
23. ClickDesk: Live chat and support software allows you to customize your chat widget interact with visitors in real time and answer customers to boost conversions.
24. Freshdesk: Help desk software for retail ecommerce businesses that includes multi-channel support, ticketing, and product support features that will help you run your online store.
25. Get Satisfaction: A customer engagement platform that helps companies build better relationships with their customers and prospects.
26. HelpSpot: Help desk and customer service software that is easy to set up and helps you improve customer satisfaction.
27. Zendesk: Support products that allow businesses to improve communication and make sense of massive amounts of data from their customers.

Metrics and Analytics

All online businesses should be monitoring their metrics and analytics in order to improve their products and online stores, give their customers more of what they want, and gain an understanding of how customers are finding and navigating through their site. The tools below provide different types of monitoring and analyses of data that can be invaluable to an online store owner.
28. Clicky: A tool that includes real-time monitoring capability so you can monitor, analyze, and react to your traffic in quickly.
29. Crazy Egg: Provides heat map and scroll map reports you can get an understanding of how your visitors engage with your website so you can boost your conversion rates.
30. Google Analytics: A digital analytics tool to measure your advertising ROI and performance of your web properties, as well as track your videos and social networking sites.
31. KISSmetrics: A behavioral analytics and engagement platform to help you understand what people are doing on your website and products, then deliver behavior-based emails to engage them.
32. Mixpanel: A business analytics service and company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them.
As you build your online store, you will also want to make sure you are setting it up to get as much traffic as possible. This guide to ecommerce SEO provides a great starting point.
It can be extremely challenging to find the money to start a business. In fact, this is one of the biggest hurdles most entrepreneurs face. There are many options -- small business loans, investors, small business grants, self-financing, crowdfunding -- but the process of zeroing in on the one funding option that is best for your business may not be a clear cut process.
So, what are some things you should consider when you’re looking for capital to start your business?
 The biggest question is: should you fund your business yourself, or should you use other people’s money (OPM) to get your business off the ground? Here is a look at each option.

Self-Financing vs. Other People’s Money

Self-financing is one path of small business funding, and it includes using your savings, home equity, stocks, bonds, 401k/retirement accounts, and credit cards to fund your business. When you go this route, you are very likely to use some bootstrapping techniques to get more bang for your buck. The problem with this is that you may not have enough liquidity to move at the pace you want. And most importantly, it’s risky. You are completely on the hook for the success or failure of your business when you do it alone.
Other people’s money is the second path. It comes in many forms including bank loans, investors, family and friends, venture capital and angel investors, crowdfunding, and vendor financing/leasing.

Why Using Other People’s Money Works

There are many benefits to using other people’s money to start your business, including less personal financial risk, the potential for guidance and advice from someone who has been down this path before, and often a better chance to build a viable and growth-oriented business.
Using other people’s money also buys you time and gives you an opportunity to do things in your business you may not have been able to do if you financed it yourself. You have more options, increased reach, and the ability to make a bigger impact much quicker as you start your business.

Reasons Not to Use Other People’s Money

I bet that sounds great, doesn’t it? It sure does! But before you head out to look for an investor, consider these reasons not to use other people’s money.
The biggest reason some entrepreneurs avoid using other people’s money is that they don’t want to lose control of the business. In most cases, you will typically have to relinquish a significant amount of ownership and control. You’ll have someone else to answer to and the decisions to be made are no longer just your own.
This also means your business goals will likely change, and sometimes even your business idea itself will morph into something larger, or just completely different. This can actually be a good thing, but you have to be open to this type of change and flexible enough to adjust the big picture you had before.
Another reason using other people’s money is dangerous for small business owners is that you are making a lifetime commitment to someone else — lifetime of your business, that is.
Getting external funding is like a marriage; it’s structured and it has legal ramifications. It can be very hard to get out of it if the relationship goes sour.
If these reasons aren’t enough to turn you away from using other people’s money to start your business, then you have your work cut out for you. The competition for other people’s money is fierce, so make sure you have a solid business plan in place and that you’re ready to put in the elbow grease to locate the capital you need.