Forum

Leaving ebay for good and opening my own site ?
 

Hola Amigos.

I am a full time student who up until two months ago was making a decent amount on the side with ebay, however recently got shut down because of a link with one of my paypal old accounts.

To be honest I'm sick of Ebay/Paypal and have saved enough and want to open my own website whilst at still uni in November :)

I'm really excited to start my own site and my plan is

1. Open my own site and concentrate on that. This business will have all my real info, real vat, real name etc

2. Open an ebay stealth and sell stock thru it whilst my site picks up, just for cash flow. This ebay account will have no affiliation with my business site, just another name a totally different business.

Now my plan was to use my stealth for ebay but for my real site never ever accept paypal so I'll be done with them and use a normal merchant.

However someone told me not accepting Paypal on my website will hinder business and people like paypal?

I'm thinking NOOOO I've been through so much crap with them with ebay I'm ready to leave them and the fact that this will be my LEGIT business and I've been kicked off paypal loads of times it would be silly to accept paypal on my real site.


Also I hope to sell alot a week I can NOT be having them freezing my funds etc.


What do u guys think?

Should I just go with my original plan to stick paypal with my ebay 'other' business and use a normal merchant for my main business?


Thanks for ur answers in advance!

no that is not true, plenty of sites, dont use paypal.

If you are planning alot of business, try worldpay.

if you have any choice it is best to avoid paypal, you cannot using ebay uk, but for all other business offer a card processor. Everyone has a credit/debit card.

What merchant to be use to be able to accept credit/debit card on your own website?

Hi Oompaloompa

Thank you for replying to my thread, I've read you give countless pieces of good advice over a long period of time so thanks for the good advice you give on here :)

Here is the plan.

Business One = Ebay Stealth + Paypal Stealth (purpose will be just for cash flow while my site picks up)

Business Two = E commerce website + Merchant (World Pay/ Sagepay etc) with all my own details. There is no way I would accept Paypal on my own website anyway because I will eventually get caught seen as it's all going to be in my real name and that would be stupid of me especially because this is my LEGIT business.

Is this a good plan?

Thanks.

I'm planning to use world pay or sage pay.

yes sounds fine, you have the issue of credit card chargebacks, but other than that its fine. Our forumer gremlin is someone I remember has a site and posts on various issues eg. search engine ranking etc, maybe her posts would be useful.

If your stealth can't be linked to your eCom page I'd be tempted to have a page or a link to "Why I don't accept Paypal/ebay" and trash them. But if it could be linked to your stealth then maybe that's not a good idea.

Sounds good to me kid.

Forget about using paypal for your proper e commerce business though. Apart from the fact that offering paypal makes the site seem less professional, you don't need paypal holding your money hostage for 180 days so they can make money off your money and you starve.

I plan on doing the same as you, use stealth account on ebay for income, while and work on my own e commerce business site. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

Good luck.

Just remember to use, google ad words, social media ect to bring traffic to your site. Also create good looking banners for your store and spread them out around the net.

The point of stealth is not to give up........ no?

I say go and open a few stealth accounts, so if one goes down the rest will support you until the 180 days are up and they do go fast. If you do it right you will not get limited anyway...I have not been limited for a long time now.

I don't use ebay anymore....it is cheaper to sell from my own websites, even after I pay around £1000 per month in advertising. Ebay would just cost more and cause more problems....

I use a stealth checkout system which means that paypal cannot link back to my website via the callback. :spy:

If they do.....I can just change my domain name within minutes and just for for £5.
In 2-3 days, I will get the same traffic as with the old one. I'm too fast!! Much easier than trying to start over with ebay.

All registrations for hosting, paypal, google merchant and comparison sites are stealth.... only the banks have my real details.

At the moment I'm writing some scripts for e-junkie, fatfreecart and basket2go...
Basically what I do is dynamically generating the payment forms during checkout from my website.
At the moment i use another more advanced script I made last year, and which works really well...but a bit of variety is always good. Plus at the end of the day I will probably make some money selling it to others.

Take it easy.....the stealth process looks harder than it is.

your paying £1000 a month just for advertising that is seriously too much?

have you looked ad adwords or forums to advertise your site?

have you tried bigcommerce they give free advertising so you dont have to pay

I use Google's free and paid services they are OK....so part of my money go there.

bigcommerce is not for me because:
1. I will loose my full "stealth" with it.
2. Its not advanced or flexible enough.

I actually make around £800 per month just for selling the small scripts I made for my own use over the past year, and I will possibly increase it to around £2000 once the ones I work on now are ready.

I pay £1000 advertising per month but on a pay-as-you-go mode.
I made £18k clean this month so It is well worth it :)

And guess who owns the company who gets more of my advertising cash......LOL!

I just launched my first official site! Im super excited to see how things go from here.

I designed my own website whilst still on eb/pp and used a third party shopping cart to accept paypal as payment.

When my eb/pp went south i was stuck with no ebay income, nor from my website as i used paypal to accept payment.

After some research i changed to google checkout (beware - it took days to add all the new 'add to basket' buttons!)

As a result I have no less customers, and many customers come back for more.

Losing paypal wasnt the end of the world for me, saying that I will be back on eb/pp soon and have already made another website ready to accept pp when its all set up.

Are you planning on making the ecommerce website yourself or getting a company to do it for you?

The more professional it looks the better, and as others say, some see PayPal as being an unprofessional option, so sod them!