Ebay or a Website?

I get this question often. Should I start out on Ebay or a Website? Of course, Ebay is going to get you the most exposure the quickest. I believe you need to have BOTH! Start off on Ebay and slowly build your website. You can link your ebay listing from your website, and vice versa. This will help your exposure for both of them.

The drawbacks to Ebay are: you have tons of competition, sometimes with the exact same products, exact same product pictures, exact same product descriptions, and some of them selling the products for far less than you - just to get the sale. Also, sometimes your drop shippers won't allow you to sell on Ebay. Be sure to ask! You also have to pay Ebay Fees.

Some of the drawbacks to your own website: The cost & lack of traffic to your website. You can find VERY affordable web hosting companies that even have shopping carts. If you can read you can usually set up the site yourself. Don't pay a ton to have someone do it for you. If you start making the big bucks, then pay someone, but until you do, try to do it on your own. This will save you A LOT OF MONEY!
The biggest drawback to trying to sell products on your own site: LACK OF TRAFFIC! If you don't have people coming to your site, you won't have any customers! Be sure your site is Search Engine Optimized, you can find a lot of free information on this just by going to Google and searching "Search Engine Optimization". Then you have to make sure your site is submitted to the search engines as well. A great way to do this is by linking to your site from your ebay listings, or writing a blog and linking to your site.

There are many tricks to getting people to your website (that won't cost you), but I will save that for another post....

So I say you need both, just be careful on how much you spend, if you are willing and able to do it yourself, you can do really well!