Start Selling Online in 2026 | A Beginner's Guide to eBay!

If you've ever thought about selling on eBay, or maybe you've just started and you feel overwhelmed, confused, or unsure where to start, this video is for you. Hey, and welcome back to The Flip Factory. I'm Trent. And in today's video, we're going to be going through a step-by-step guide of how to sell on eBay in 2026. If you're brand new to the channel, welcome. 2025 was my first full year selling online full-time, and I did just over $200,000 in sales right here out of this garage. In this video, I want to take you through a step by step guide of how to get started and start selling on eBay in 2026. Even if you've never sold anything online before, we're going to go over setting up your account to start selling on eBay, what to sell as a beginner, how to create your first listing, how to find those items for your first listings, how shipping actually works. And we'll talk about how fees work, how returns work and common mistakes that beginners make. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what to do to make your first sale and to continue making more and more sales through this year. And no, you don't need a business. You don't need any kind of special software or even thousands or even hundreds of dollars to make this work. All you need is a phone and an internet connection of some type. First, let's talk about what eBay is like in 2026. I first found out about eBay, I was probably in middle school. This was when eBay was primarily an auction site. And so when I started learning more about eBay sellers in the last few years, I just thought everyone still did auctions on eBay. And even when I tell people what I do, the first question usually is like, so do you do auctions? Do you do a week-long auction on your items? And the short answer is no, I don't do any auctions at all. I've sold over 13,000 items on eBay over the last year and a half, and not a single one was an auction listing. eBay is now primarily a buy it now site, similar to really any other online site like Amazon, any of the shopping sites that you go on to. Most of the listings on there are buy it now. You can still do auctions and you can still bid on auctions, but it's definitely not the most common type of listing on eBay at this time. I think eBay is the best platform for beginners. I really think it's the best platform for anyone beginner to expert. It's really nice because all of the buyers are already on the platform. You don't have to have an audience. You don't have to have a social media following. You just have to have an account and sell items that people are buying every day. So let's start at the beginning with setting up your account. This is definitely the easiest part of this whole method. It's just like setting up an account for anything else. You want to go on to ebay.com or go to your app store, download the eBay app and set up your account through those methods that eBay gives you. Things like your name, email address, physical address. And then you're going to want to connect your bank account with eBay as well. eBay is going to ask you if you'd like a personal account or a business account. And for right now, you can click personal account. You can always upgrade this later to a business account. But for starting off as a beginner on eBay, you only need a personal account to sell those items. A business account is something that I have. I sell 20 to 30 items every single day and a business account gives you a few more customization options with your store as well as discounted fees and discounted shipping rates but you do have to pay a monthly subscription for that business account. Another thing that it gives you is $50 every quarter to purchase some shipping supplies and stuff through the eBay shipping store so i get most of my tape with that money that ebay gives me it's all overpriced stuff but it's $50 another thing that you will have to set up when you set up your account is when you'd like your payouts on ebay to come i suggest doing the weekly it'll deposit your processed funds from ebay every tuesday morning into your account i think that's just the easiest way to do it that way you're not paying $2 to get your funds within 30 minutes or anything like that. You know it's going to come on Tuesday of every week in the morning and it'll be all of the funds that have been processed from the previous week of selling. I suggest going ahead and doing all of this on the actual eBay app on your phone. It's the easiest way to set up the account and to get everything filled out. But then also you want the app on your phone. One of the best beginner tips I can give you is to use that app regularly. Answer questions about the things you have listed, message buyers, send offers, make sure you have offers turned on in your store. That way people can make offers on your items. A large percentage of the items that I sell in my store either come from people offering me and it's either a good offer, maybe 10 or 15% off of the item and I accept it, or I send them a counter offer if I don't like their offer and we're able to kind of go back and forth with the price for those items. Another thing that you want to adjust as a beginner in this reselling game is your shipping and handling time on eBay. I don't really have a suggestion for you. This is all up to your schedule, what you have available. If you have another full-time job and you don't have the availability to ship every single day, then set that shipping and handling time according to your schedule. If you can ship every two or three days, then do two or three business days as your shipping time. Since this is my full-time job and I can ship out, I have the time to every single morning, I do next day shipping. And even sometimes if an order comes in before noon, I'll ship that item out because that's what time my postal person comes and picks up my big bag of packages. is around 12 to one o'clock every single day. So if an order comes in before that time, I'll package it up and ship it out to them on that day. But for beginners, adjust that handling time to whatever you think that you yourself can handle. So you've completely set up your account and now it's time for the fun part, finding something to sell. This is a step where I think a lot of beginners mess up. As a beginner, you wanna sell stuff that is easy to ship. It's in regular demand and it sells already every single day on ebay as an ebay seller You don't have to pick a certain category and only sell in that category or in that niche My biggest category is clothing, but I also sell shoes. I sell hats. I sell video games. I sell vintage toys I sell all sorts of consoles and other things So you don't have to pick one category and only sell in that category. You can sell whatever you want But I would suggest as a beginner to pick a couple of categories and stick in those categories, just starting out to make sure you can get a feel for how eBay works and how the listings work. I think the best categories to start out are clothing, shoes, small electronics, think of like digital cameras, calculators, that kind of stuff, and also video games. Items in those categories sell by the hundreds of thousands and even millions every single day on eBay. So how do you source these items? Well, I have a complete video on how I source my items. I have to find 900 items because I list 30 items every single day. So I find 900 items every single month to sell on eBay. But before you get to that complicated of a sourcing method, I think you can start very very simple and not even have to go to any stores at all Just check your own stuff look in your closet Look in your garage in your basement in your attic and find some items that you just haven't used in a long time And that you won't miss by getting rid of them think of like new with tags clothing Maybe some shoes that are on the newer side. Maybe you still have the box with some of the shoes Maybe they're just really nice shoes that you've used but they're not in terrible condition and you could sell them Maybe you've got old video games sitting around, consoles, or even discs. Maybe you've got small kitchen appliances or even small electronics sitting around. Those are the items that you want to think of, that you want to look for, for starting out selling on eBay. Avoid heavy items. Anything that weighs more than maybe like five pounds, since that tends to get more and more expensive with USPS shipping and other shipping methods. Avoid those items at first. you don't have to avoid them later on, but just get an idea and a feel for what shipping is like before you start selling those heavier items, avoid fragile items, stuff like glassware, vases, that kind of thing. Um, it takes, unless you have a lot of experience shipping fragile items, I would just avoid them. I still personally avoid them. And I've sold thousands of items on eBay. I just don't like taking the time to ship those things and still have a chance of them breaking because the shipping companies aren't always the easiest on those items. They tend to toss them, throw them. We've all seen those videos before. Another thing to avoid is anything that you're unsure if it's authentic or not. Maybe you've got a nice pair of Jordans or some clothing brand that someone gave you and maybe that person doesn't really know where they got it from or maybe it was a sketchy deal. Make sure you're careful about what you sell if it's a high-end item. Anything on eBay that's shoes related over $75, they'll usually send to their authenticator and they'll make sure it's authentic before it goes to the buyer. It's really great. It's a great protection for people that are buying shoes. If I buy a nice pair of Jordans on there and I pay $200, $400, whatever, I want to make sure what I'm getting is real. And if it's not, I don't want it. So eBay went ahead and created its own authenticity warehouse, so it authenticates all of those things. So you just want to be careful. Make sure you know what you're selling is real. If you do end up selling something that's a fake, you run the risk of an account suspension or even a total ban from eBay. So let's talk about listing that item that you found, creating your very first listing on eBay. I went ahead and took my advice and I walked through my belongings that I have and I went to my closet and found a pair of shoes, some on clouds that I haven't worn in several months. I actually thrifted these from a Goodwill for seven bucks and they were basically brand new. Couldn't believe that they didn't have them priced higher, but they were just in that general shoes section and every shoe is $6.99. Every pair of shoes there is $6.99. so I picked these shoes up was going to resell them but decided to wear them for a while and now I just haven't found myself wearing them so I'm going to resell them on eBay I think there are four main areas to remember when listing your first few items and really listing any items I still take this into account every time I list an item those four areas are photos your title your description, and your pricing. So let's talk about that first one, your photos. For me and my business, I have created a photo booth for my pictures that I take of clothing and a separate photo booth for everything else like shoes, hats, hard goods, that kind of stuff. But you do not need that. When I first started out reselling, I didn't have any of that stuff, especially when I was doing this as a side gig. I took most of my pictures outside. A lot of photographers will tell you, it's hard to find any better lighting than natural outdoor lighting. So I'm going to show you an example. I'm going to take these shoes outside and take pictures of these shoes so that you have an idea of how you can take pictures of your item or even specifically your shoes that you find. I find this to be the best method for taking photos of these items. So I've got these on clouds here. Let's go take pictures of them. All right, welcome to the backyard. I was going to try to record while I was out there the audio, but it was a crazy windy day. So we'll just have to do a little voiceover. So with these shoes, to prep them, I cleaned them. These ones weren't very dirty, so I just took a rag, wiped them down a good bit. I'd like to take the shoelaces, untie them, stick them down in the shoe. I usually use shoe trees to kind of bulk the shoes up so they look nice and full. In this case, I didn't use them because I just wanted to do pictures like a beginner would as you can see i'm taking pictures of every part of the shoe getting the sides the insides of each shoe i want to show off any flaws there's really there's no rips or stains or tears on these the only thing of note was on the bottom there was just this little white mark on the bottom of the shoe as you can see here that i take a picture of so make sure you're getting pictures clearly of the whole shoe of any flaws i also like to take all the shoelaces out and get pictures of them along with the bottoms of the soles or the insides of the shoes the lighting was pretty good but i think i waited until it was a little too late in the day for these pictures but it was the only time i had to do these pictures for the video if i had to choose i would have waited till kind of more midday to take the pictures where the sun's kind of overhead to get the best lighting possible but this still was not bad as you can tell by the pictures on the phone So you've already checked off good photos on this list. Now you want a good title. There is a ton of information out there on how to have good title structure for your listings. I'm going to keep this pretty general. And so for something like these shoes, I would list them as brand and then item name, size, and then the style or type. And if there's a style code listing that as well in the title structure. When you are creating a title for eBay, you're allowed 80 characters and you want to use up as much of that as possible. That way, if someone's searching your item or has certain search words that they're including in the search engine, that it's finding them and using them to help find your listing even better. The next important step to remember when creating your listing is the description you want to keep the description short and honest include the items condition whether it's excellent good or fair include any flaws make sure you list them out what they are if it's clothing make sure you list the measurements and finally just keep it short no one wants to read a huge AI listing that explains what these on cloud shoes are and all the performance tracking and all of the cushioning and all that stuff they know what these shoes are you don't have to list out those long descriptions keep it short keep it sweet explain everything be as precise as possible but it doesn't have to be a long novel it can be a short description listing everything that needs to be done in just a couple of sentences finally we get to the fourth step and this is probably i know i've said the other ones are the most important steps of this but this is also an incredibly important step in the making of your listing and that is the pricing of your item. My favorite way to figuring out what the right price is for my item is to search the item in eBay's search box and then scroll down to the tab in the filters that says sold listings. Click on that tab on that little button and turn the sold listings on. That will show you all of the listings of your kind of item that have sold in the last 90 days. Scroll through these listings, especially as a beginner and look through the first like 15 or 20 items and see how much these items are selling for. Keep in mind, you're going to see items that are brand new. Those prices will most likely be a lot higher and you're going to see the used conditions and those prices will be lower and you'll see items that are just dirt cheap selling. Maybe they have some really bad flaws or something. You just got to keep that in mind as you look through and figure out where your item falls in that pricing category. I encourage you to price competitively. For me personally, it's a numbers game. I like to get rid of my inventory as fast as I get it in. I want to keep a 100% sell-through rate in my store. So I price competitively and get those items out as soon as possible. So you've just made your first listing on eBay and it sells. Wow, look at that. Now, the scariest part for most beginners, especially for me, I know it was for me, was shipping. Shipping scares a lot of people, but it doesn't have to. If you're shipping items like I mentioned earlier in this video that are below five pounds, they fit into smaller boxes or even into poly mailers, into poly bags when they're shipping stuff like clothing, shoes, hats, video games, that kind of stuff. You're going to want to use USPS Ground Advantage. I always buy those labels through eBay's app. A lot of times there's discounts when buying it through eBay. Do not take that item to the post office and ship it through them. You will pay a lot more to take it to them and to have them ship it out than if you just print the label off at your home. You don't have to have a thermal printer. If you have some sort of printer at your house, you can print that label from your email or from the eBay website and print that off, tape it to the box or to the bag that you're shipping in and take it to the post office. it's cheaper that way and it also automatically uploads tracking when i first started reselling i just started saving boxes that i would get from amazon or from other places that i would shop online for and i also asked all of my family members in the area to save all of their boxes so pro tip you can get a lot of your shipping materials for free just by asking your family members to save that bubble wrap to save that wrapping paper everything else that comes in those shipping orders and you can use that stuff for free because you get it from the orders that you've already purchased. Like we said before, set your handling time to be realistic to your availability and get that item shipped out as fast as you can. Let's talk about another daunting area for resellers and that is fees and returns. No one likes fees at all. In fact, a lot of people, a lot of resellers are leaving eBay and leaving other platforms because their selling fees are so high. Of course, they're comparing it to previous times like during COVID or even pre-COVID area when fees were much lower, eBay wasn't taking as much. And also it seemed like inventory was moving a lot faster since I didn't get into reselling until like 2024. I never experienced that. So it doesn't bother me that they take their fees. I'm getting my item in front of hundreds of millions of people. I know that's going, that alone is going to cost me. So I'm fine with the eBay fees that they take. Those fees are right around the 13 to 15% range, depending on what the item is and the category that you're selling in. And then you're only allowed a certain number of listings on your free eBay account. Once you get past that threshold, you have to pay a small fee for each new listing you make. By that point, you probably want to go ahead and move to a business account because you're not charged for any more listings with those business accounts in those thresholds. Let's talk about returns. Yes, eBay favors the buyer when it comes to returns but if you list your items honestly returns are a rarity i recommend accepting returns you can turn on no returns for items if you want to but as a buyer if i see someone doesn't have returns on i'm less likely to buy from that person because i just don't trust them i want to be able to return the item if it comes in and it's not the same item that was listed or if they didn't list the flaws on there or if they were dishonest with their listing at all i want to be able to return it so i turn returns on on all of my listings and that way if a person wants to return it they can if it's for a reason that's like it doesn't fit because i do so much clothing i do get several returns for item doesn't fit i don't have to pay the shipping to get that item back because i put all the measurements in the photo so that that person would know if it would fit or not and so if they do return for doesn't fit or i just don't like it or i just don't want it anymore uh if that's the reason that they fill out the return which is most of the returns i get i don't pay for that return the person pays for the shipping label to send it back to me and then i send them the rest of the money that they paid for the item i don't send them back the original shipping or the shipping to get the item back to me if i list an item incorrectly and the person fills out a return for item not as described, otherwise known as I-N-A-D, then I pay for that shipping label for that person to send the item back to me and I refund them the whole money, including the original shipping as well. When I first started reselling, returns really got to me. They made me angry. They put me in a bad mood, but I've learned through the first full year of reselling, that it's just part of the business. If you're running this thing as a side business or as full-time, you just have to know returns happen. I mean, think about Amazon, the hundreds of thousands of items that get returned to them every single month. It just is something that happens. For me, it's about 2% of all of my sales. Most of that 2%, percent. I don't have to pay for anything. It's usually the item doesn't fit because I sell so many jeans and polos, specifically women's jeans. A lot of women return their jeans because they just don't fit right. And so I get a lot of returns on those items, but they're almost always the item doesn't fit. So I don't end up paying for the item to be returned to me. I just simply have to click the relist button when it gets back here and I stick it right back in my inventory. 0.7% of the items that get returned are items not as described. So those would be the items that I have a loss on. Either I tell the person to just keep the item because it was cheap anyways. I usually buy my items for $2 to $3 a piece. And if it sells for $20 or $30 and ships to them, I don't want to pay for the item to get shipped back and give that person that money back and then relist that item. Depending on the item, I either let them keep it and I'm just out the cost of goods for that item and the shipping, or I'll pay for the shipping to get the item back if it's more valuable and I'm out that little bit of money. But then I just relist the item into my store, fix whatever thing was wrong with it, whether I had the wrong description or didn't list a flaw, or maybe didn't see whether a rip was in there, a stain was in there, a button was missing, something like that. I fixed that item and just relist it for the correct price. I want to end this video with talking about common mistakes that beginners make and that specifically I made when I first started reselling so that it will save you the time of trial and error when it comes to your reselling business. The first mistake that I made was overpricing my items. Either I was emotionally attached to some item that I was selling and I knew in my head that it was just worth so much money and I listed it for that much money and it comes to come to find out it's only worth like half of that or 25% of that or i just didn't do a good job of looking up what that item was selling for and so you want to make it a regular practice to look up every single item that you're listing especially at first to know what that item is selling for in the current market also markets change so you there are so many brands out there that used to sell like crazy high numbers really expensive golf polo shirts that would sell for 70 or 80 dollars a piece and now used they're only selling for like 20 or 30 dollars a piece if you were to list that item at that 60 to 70 dollar mark where it was it's going to take years literally to sell and it might not even sell because the cost of that item just keep is going to keep decreasing so make sure you know your prices make sure you're not overpricing your items another common mistake is ignoring item specifics ebay has come out with their AI that automatically puts in item specifics for you when they look at your pictures and see your title. They'll go ahead and fill in a lot of your item specifics. You want to go ahead and use as many of those as you can. Check that box that says put all of them in and then make sure you just check each one and you'll get better and better at it as you go on. When you're first starting out, I mean, it would take me 20 to 30 minutes to make one single listing. Now I can do an entire listing in a minute very easily just by filling in all that information very quickly and make sure you have as much information in those listings as possible to keep returns at a minimum. Another mistake I see beginners make is shipping late. Try to ship on time. As a buyer, someone who buys stuff, I like to receive my item in the time frame that it gives me. If it says it's going to be here between January 8th and January 13th, I would like it to get to me by January 8th or through the 13th. If it comes a week later, I'm not a very happy buyer. And so I might be prone to leave a negative feedback. So make sure you're shipping on time as much as possible. Another common mistake, and I think this is like the most important thing to remember when you're talking about your eBay business and starting up this side business in 2026, is to really treat this business as a business. When I had a full-time job and I was doing this on the side, I would get up very early in the mornings to ship all my items out for that day. I would stay up late a lot of nights listing the items that I wanted to sell for that day as well. And so treating this side gig as a serious business, don't be lazy, make sure you're shipping on time, make sure you're pricing right, make sure you're doing your research on every single item that you're buying and that you're listing. Make sure you're listing the flaws and accepting returns and accepting offers. Doing those steps will really help you take off on eBay in 2026. If you take anything from this video, I hope you'll take this. Your first 30 to 50 listings are really just all about learning. Learning how to make a listing, learning what pictures look good and work on eBay, learning how to do title structure. It's really a learning opportunity for you. So don't be discouraged when those first listings take you a long time. It takes everybody a long time to do their first few listings on eBay and also shipping and sending those items off and everything that's included with reselling online. It's all a learning opportunity, especially at the beginning. And even today, after doing $200,000 in this year of 2025, I'm still learning stuff every single day. Even today, I was going to list a pair of nice Brooks Brothers wool blend pants. These are like the Advantage Clark Chinos. So they sell for like $30 to $40. And they looked brand new on the front. I mean, they could have had a tag on them. They looked so crispy and clean. And when I took pictures, I went ahead and took pictures of the whole front, turned them around, even took the first picture of the back. And when I got closer, I saw seven moth holes just down the leg and big ones. And I didn't see those in the store somehow, which is crazy. And so I learned again, I need to be checking my items better. Even now, after a full year of doing this and selling thousands and thousands of items, I'm still learning. And so taking the first 30 to 50 to 100 to all of those listings that you start doing on eBay. Remember every time that you make one of those mistakes that it's just a learning game and that you've learned from that mistake and you can make the next one better. If this video helped you, don't forget to hit like and subscribe to my channel and also leave a comment below on what's going to be your first listing in 2026. Thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next one.