Help and advise needed please

[GREMLIN]

Hi
I have a friend who has never traded on on ebay and paypal. I have introduced him into this way of trading. He is in the process of verifying his paypal and ebay account.He will be selling consumer electronics such as lcd players, microwaves, dvd players and much more. He will be earning a living by selling on the internet. He is looking into getting a merchant provider however in the meantime he will be using paypal and GC for payments. He will be looking to put through in the region of £7-10k a month. He asked me for advice and i mentioned some issues relating to paypal and its limitation procedures. However as he is totally new and using own id do you think he will still face as many difficulties and what advise would you give him to develop his paypal/ebay account correctly to progress to a powerseller status and maintain his account.

He understands that consumer electronics is in a high risk category. Would he be classed as extra high risk because he is new and unusual activity will be going on or something?

[GreenBean]

I'll be blunt. Bad bad time to think of making a living from internet trading. I would not go
near ebay for starters with these goods. I can imagine many powersellers giving this newbie
a very hard time because they perceive him as a competitor which he is. IF he thinks he
will make that much money, he should have his own website. Personally, I think he's taking
a risk. Sorry not willing to be more encouraging. Look at your own troubles with paypal. Any
account doing that volume will be limited quickly.

[GREMLIN]

cheers for the reply greenbean
I understand exactly what your saying and have advised the same thing to him too. As hes new and he has seen the power of ebay sales he wants to be apart of it. He's only forcasting this volume because of ebay's massive consumer customers. If he was to get his own website it will take him ages to get up and going. Would you say its ok to do about £3k a month to start off with on ebay and then slowly build up the account?

To be perfectly honest he wants to do what i was doing when selling to consumer. But my consumer sales were usually all from ebay, ebid, a very few from my website, tazbar and a few from amazon. I used to also put down national adverts. The products he can get hold of are very workable on ebay and the whole net however ebay has all the trafic. He is getting his website set up already however will take some time to get indexed by the search engines and come up. For the items that he is selling would you be able to recomend other methods of sales? and methods of quickening this process.

What advise would you give?

cheers

[GreenBean]

Funnily enough, I discussed this with an assoicate of mine. We both thought
that attempting a volume of £3000 monthly in sales is still a risk. For starters
the £1700 money threshold is reached practically at once. Would not be prepared to say that paypal would like this sort of business. Can see that there
would be a paypal limitation and a parting of the ways letter, not to mention
funds held for 180 days.