Anywhere near that kind of earning potential

There are only few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential. If you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay. And since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that is not exactly difficult.

Buy a lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you are making money already, with no set-up costs. If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to buying anything, then you can just sell things that you have got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you will probably find you have got a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff lying around in there.

There is always someone who wants what you are selling, whatever it might be, and since they have come looking for you, you do not even need to do anything to get them to buy it. There are only a few little things you need to learn to get started. Going full-time as an eBay seller is living the dream.

Making a real income, working from home, being your own boss, and all the rest of it. It is the promise of a million scams, and it is finally come true. What they do not tell you in the success stories, though, is that becoming a full-time eBay seller is not for everyone.

You really, really ought to try it part-time before you even consider taking it up full-time, and even then, caution is recommended. Work out how many hours a week you spend doing eBay-related things and divide it by the average amount of profit you make in a week. If you were doing full-time hours, would you earn as much as you earn now?

Think about what you might lose if you give up your job to focus on eBay. If you are in a well-paid job with good promotion prospects, then it is well worth reconsidering. You might get a few years down the line and wish you would stay in your traditional job, as you would probably be the CEO by now.

Unless you are selling a large quantity of small goods, most of what you do on eBay will be waiting for auctions to end, and you can wait at work just as easily as you can at home. This is why whether you would make more money on eBay really depends on what kinds of items you are selling. For low value items, going full-time could be a good move.

For high-value ones, the chances are you will hit the limits of how much money you must invest in inventory long before you hit the limits on your time. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. Omidyar wanted his site, then called “AuctionWeb”, to be an online marketplace and wrote the first code for it in one weekend.

It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name “eBay” comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. Omidyar’s company's name was Echo Bay, and the “eBay AuctionWeb” was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com.

The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for. The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself.