Chapter 14. Purchasing and Managing Your Inventory

While occasional eBay sellers get by selling a few items from time to time, running a successful eBay business involves the selling of large quantities of merchandise, week-in and week-out. To sell that merchandise, you first have to obtain the merchandise, which means finding a steady supply of items to sell. These items become your business's inventory.

Managing your inventory sounds simple on paper. You identify items you want to resell, purchase those items (at as favorable a price as you can negotiate), store those items until they're sold, and then sell and ship them to your customers. When you run low on inventory, you order more. Hopefully, you don't order more merchandise than you can actually sell. And hopefully, you can sell your inventory for a higher price than what you paid for itand high enough that you can pay all your other expenses (and make a little profit) from the difference.

Sounds simple, but it's a lot of work. Finding the best supplier is a big challenge, and handling all that inventory takes space and elbow grease. It's a process that never ends; as soon as you sell some, you have to order more. And the bigger your business gets, the more involved the whole process becomes.

This chapter looks at the entire inventory issuehow you find items to sell and how you manage that inventory in the day-to-day running of your business.