You want to be a successful seller with your own eBay business, do you not? Here’s a simple, ten-step path to fulfill your eBay dream.

Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You will probably see the ’sweet spots’ quite quickly - those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Step 2: Work out a business plan. A business plan doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the selling on eBay market opportunity you’ve spotted, your strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.

Step 3: Find a product. Get hold of a supplier for whatever it is you want to be selling on eBay, and see what the best rates you can get are – do not be afraid to ring round quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you are set.

Step 4: Start small. Do not throw thousands at your idea straight away - get started slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and learn as you go. Remember that it’s very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!

Step 5: Watch the competition. Before you invest any money into selling on eBay business, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and beat them at their own game.

Step 6: Test and repeat. Keep trying different selling strategies on eBay until you find something that works, and then don’t be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche.

Step 7: Invest and expand. This is the time to throw money at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.

Step 8: Automate. You will probably find that you are writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for selling your items on eBay, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.

Step 9: Never give up. Even when it looks like it is all going wrong, do not stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you will almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.

Step 10: Make it official. Once you have made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Do not worry, it is not expensive or hard to do - a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.

Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling part time. But it is not always as easy as that - there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider.