Turning a Hobby into a Business

The step from hobby to business is a matter of setting up yourself to sell the things you collect, and then doing that selling in volume. If you're a serious collector, you're probably already using eBay to purchase items for your collectionit's the world's largest marketplace for collectible items, after all. Well, if you can buy collectibles, you can sell them, too. And there's your business model.

There's a comic book store near my house. The guy who runs it started out as a collector, amassing huge boxes full of old comics in his basement. One day he realized he had enough comics collected to start his own store, and that's what he did. People come into his store to buy vintage comics and also to sell him old comics from their collections. Is he running a business or indulging a hobby? Both, actually. It's as good a reason as any to open a business; his business is buying and selling those things that he loves.

You can apply this same model in the eBay marketplace. If you're a collector, by definition you have a collection of things. That collection can be the starting inventory for an eBay business. Assuming that you keep feeding that inventory by collecting additional items (either on eBay or in the real world), you can set up a continuous stream of auction listings, as well as populate a companion eBay Store. Your customers, of course, will be your fellow collectors and hobbyists.

Naturally, running a collecting/trading business is slightly different from simply collecting as a hobby. You need to feed your sales by buying new collectibles on a consistent basis; you need to set up an assembly line to photograph, list, pack, and ship the items you list for sale; and you need to manage your hobby like a business, keeping track of sales and expenses and worrying about taxes and the like. But all that probably won't take much more work than what you're already expending on your hobby. You're just going pro, is all.