Most multi-million dollar eBay businesses started off with humble beginnings in a living room, basement or garage before being moved to a commercial warehouse or perhaps a fulfilment house. However, there are many steps growing eBay sellers should consider first before committing to a warehouse.
If you need more storage, here are a few options available:
- Rent someone else’s unused garage in your area. There are many home owners who do not use their garage and would enjoy some extra cash each week. These can be found in local Newspapers.
- Storage units are more expensive than renting a garage, however they do often give the benefit of 24 hour security. They are also easy to rent and close down with normally only 2 weeks lead-time to close down a unit(s).
- If you have room on your property, consider purchasing a garden shed and store some stock in there. These can be made waterproof by raising the stock off the floor. If you have more room, consider purchasing an enclosed box trailer or an old truck or an old shipping container. The old truck does not even need to go! As we were growing, we purchased an old furniture truck with over 1 million kilometres on the clock which could hold a whole unloaded shipping container! This saved us a ton of money, then when we finished with it, we sold it for the same price we paid for it. Just make sure whatever you use is waterproof!
Using the 80/20 rule, consider keeping quantities of the most popular items at home and storing the rest. Use the 80/20 rule to keep your trips to your storage location to a minimum.
Packer(s)
One of the most time draining tasks for an eBay seller is packing. Consider getting a part time mum? We love mums, often mums quit the workforce and their well-paid careers to become mums. Today their focus is on dropping the kids off at school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon and they just want some extra cash for some of the hours in between. Often mums are not prepared to go back to their previous demanding careers and therefore are willing to work for less money in favour of flexibility.
The reason we love mums is they are often a bit older and often have an eye for detail which is so critical for an eBay business. This as opposed to say a young male… do I need to say more! Sure, there are some great young males with high attention to detail, however I know I wasn’t one of them!
Please leave a comment below about your experiences.
To your success
Neil Waterhouse
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some great storage ideas .. another is to buy a secondhand colorbond shed which you can buy for practically nothing on ebay or gumtree as long as youre willing to dismantle it (which i did!) . For years every wardrobe, cupboard , drawer and storage space in our house has been literally overflowing with my ebay stuff..(and still is) even after i bought a 6 x 3 metre shed which i built under the carport..now ive outgrown that too so my husband is in the process of building me an office/store room/ photo-studio in the huge unused space under our polehome.. i cannot WAIT to get my home back and finally segregate once and for all my living space from my workspace 🙂 … my woMAN-cave yay!!
Tracie, that is a great idea about buying and dismantling a colorbond shed!
would you recomend that as you do grow then it would be a better idea to use 3pL . are the costs similar to storage ?
……… a large caravan (stripped out of fittings) worked well for as at on stage – and easy to sell 🙂