In last post I suggest that you start your online business by selling you stuff on EBay first. And if you do every thing right, I am sure that you can make many money from your EBay Business. I know many people have quit their job and make a decent living as a full time EBayer.

However as I mentioned before, I don't think you should take your EBay business as your ideal business model forever. Because although it is easy to start, from a long-term point of view, EBay and Other 3rd party auction sites have many inherent disadvantages.

First of all, the EBay business cost is very high

You May be confused because I just said before that the EBay business does not require a big invest. Yes, when you list you a very limited quantity of items on EBay, the EBay fees are much less than the costs to run an Ecommerce website.

But once you have more products and make more sales, your transaction fees will grow rapidly and exceed the costs for an Ecommerce website. Because EBay charges every items you list on it, no matter you list it as a regular listing or as a EBay store item. What's more, you need to pay for a very high Final Value fee each time you sell your product successfully. And even if you want to do a little more to promote your item or use Premier PayPal account to accept Credit Card payment, You need to pay extra fees.

There is too much competition on EBay

You May have seen EBay has huge traffic and pageviews, and lots of people buy any kind of things on EBay every day. It is certainly an advantage which I have mentioned.

But There are too many sellers, too. A lot of sellers come into the same market with same products. So if you are not a power seller with good record already and don't want to reduce your asked price, your chance to sell this item will be very slim. No matter how good your items are and how great your service is, it is hard for you to stand out of the crowded.

It's hard to control all your business

The most obvious problem with EBay business is that it is EBay who decides the selling fees, not you. In the past, EBay had adjusted its pricing structure for times. Each time many sellers were affected more or less.

And you want to get all outcomes from your hard work. If you work hard to market your EBay store outside of EBay, of course you have the chance to get more sales from it. But the visitors coming to your items may also attracted by other seller's items with a much lower price, because they can easily copy the item name and paste it in the search box existing on the top of your item pages, and click the SEARCH button. BANG! Difficult come and easy go. It should be avoided to market for your competitors but on EBay, you can do nothing about it.

And If you want to change your EBay Store layouts or add some useful features to increase your conversion rate, you can do little thing about it. And what if you want to expand your business and have other people promoting your products? You can easily set up your affiliate program with your Ecommerce website and set/calculate the commissions for your affiliates, but that doesn't work on EBay.

Due to above disadvantages of EBay business, EBay is not your best business model forever. You need to find a new business solution to expand your online business sooner or later.