I assume that you are asking about net profit. Based on my own experience, yes it’s possible, eBay has become a marketplace where even big consumer chains sell products and some of them have sales volumes of tens of millions.
Just to give you an example, this is a link to the top eBay sellers as of last year and the number of feedbacks they have:
The World’s Top eBay Sellers – Lean Commerce
Let’s take the seller ranked 29, he had 350,000 feedbacks in 12 months.
From my experience (over 20,000 feedbacks…), about 40% of buyers leave feedback. Let’s assume that for that seller, 50% left feedback. In total, he sold 350,000*2=700,000 products in 12 months.
Let’s say that he’s selling items for an average of $30 (which is quite low). This means that his revenues over a course of a year are $21,000,000 ($21 million).
Now let’s assume that he is working on very low margins – 5% –
His net profit would be $1,050,000 for 12 months.
Now this is just an example and you are probably not going to do $21M right off the bat. It just goes to show that you can make a net profit of $40,000 even if you are a much smaller merchant.
In fact, if you have a margin of 10% (which is very reasonable for someone who’s working from home and has no employees) and the only expenses are:
Cost of good + eBay fees + PayPal fees + shipping fee
With a 10% margin, you have to sell products for $400,000 a year to have $40,000 of net profit.
$400,000 yearly is ~$33,000 monthly.
If your average sale is $100, then you have to make 330 sales a month, which is about 11 sales a day. This is not trivial but very doable within a few months if you are able to source reliable suppliers with good quality products that have reasonable demand.
One of the most beneficial things you can do to grow your sales faster is to implement some of the best practices that the top sellers use. Those can be found on the Crazylister blog – eBay seller’s journey to $100k
