A couple years back when I started by eBay business, Radford Auctions, our main service was going to be to offer a drop off service for the local community of Radford, VA since this is where we were located. After only a couple successful sales with local clients, we quickly switched gears and started focusing on offering different products, which then turned us to becoming a prominent seller of outdoor gear and equipment. With the success continuing for my eBay store and auctions, I want to expand back into the drop off service for the community.

Everyone has so much junk it is unbelievable. Everyone is looking for ways to save money or earn more money. Why not bring the two of those together again? So, here’s the deal. Effectively immediately, I’ll be offering a drop off service again to the local community in Maryland, find details at www.howardcountyebay.com.

The funny part of me saying “immediately” is that I’m not even in Maryland right now and won’t be until the second week of April! Anyway, that is besides the point. Here is how it works for those of you know familiar with the concept.

1. You bring me your items to sell
2. I do some research, give you an idea of how well it might sell and for how much.
3. If you like what I have to say and offer, then I’ll hold on to the item and take care of every part of the auction process.
   • Item photography, listing the item, writing the full description, collecting payment from the buyer, and shipping the item.
4. After an item successfully sells, is paid for, and ships to the buyer, we will then send you a check. Total turn around time for an average customer to get paid is 2 weeks from the drop off date.
5. If you are happy with the service, you then can drop off more items to sell, tell your friends, blog about your experience, tweet to your followers, or anything else you’d like to do to spread the word!

So, what do you think? Anyone live in central Maryland (surrounding Howard County) that is looking to make some extra money? Contact me!

This is not a new service by any means. There are many franchisees across the country that do this as well as any many smaller sellers. However, many of them charge upwards of 35-50% of the final value of the auction as their fee or commission. I don’t. I think that that is highway robbery and is outrageous. You’ll never find me charging that much for the service. Also many of the other companies are charging tiered fee structures. I don’t do that crap either. A straight fee right across the board.alright

If you’re looking to make extra money for yourself, are familiar with eBay, and want to help other people out too, then this is easily a service you can offer in your area. Just don’t start doing it in Maryland…otherwise I’ll be knocking down your door Kidding of course….

Over the past few months, I have really been comtemplating what I wanted to do with this business. When I launched Radford Auctions with my partner back in 2007 it was an opportunity for us to learn about starting a business, expanding on something we knew (eBay), and also making money. We started out with the consignment store mentality where we would sell other peoples items for them. We quickly learned that unless we put some money into the advertising of the business and invested in some software, that we would not be able to do it as effectively as we wanted. Instead, we kept with that idea, but made it a second focus of the business. Our first focus became purchasing inventory and reselling on eBay. I quickly scooped up lots of rock climbing equipment and camping equipment that we sold on eBay seperately.

From there, we expanding into offering brand new products that I purchased from the manufacturers. This worked out very well for us! However, our product line was not as expansive as we wanted so we started looking for other options. Now we are dealing with three different manufacturers of outdoor equipment and looking to add a forth in the next month. This has expanded our opportunities greatly! By now selling more products, we have been able to make a significant amount of more money. Our profits on products went from being a couple dollars to $20+ dollars on each auction. With this strategy, we have also been able to increase our overall sales figures per month and are quickly approaching becoming a Power Seller. I need to have sales of $1000 per month, for three months in a row to achieve the status and then maintain that. Now that I am selling a lot of items that range in values of $50 – $150, this should not be too much of a hurdle to jump over and I am looking for to it!

With the increase in product offering, and the more focused related industry/niche, I have been considering changing the name of my eBay store. I currently operate as Radford Auctions and my username is radfordauctions. However, your store name and username do not have to be the same. I have been thinking of changing my store name to TheGearHouse to coincide with my website – www.thegearhouse.com. This would be a great opportunity because then I can cross promote and sell products directly from my website and the eBay store. I have been working on doing this, but I have been a bit hesitant because of using two differnet names. The other reason I am hesitant to make the switch is because I sell a decent amount of stuff that is not outdoor gear related such as coins/stamps and supplies, jewelry, books, clothing, and more.

Some numbers:

• $900+ in sales in the last 30 days
• $2,000+ in sales in he last 90 days
• Top performing categories: camping/hiking/backpacking, rock climbing – ropes, coins and supplies
• 60 successful listings in the last 60 days (includes store format and auction format)

Do you sell on eBay? I’d love to hear your experiences and stories! If you have any questions about eBay and being a seller, feel free to ask!

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So, I wanted to learn more about my options, discuss my ventures, and see what may be the best idea for me as an entrepreneur. Now, before I go any further, I want to STRESS that this is advice that was given to ME and is specific to my case. That being said, it is always best to get your own advice from a certified professional such as an accountant or lawyer or both! So, with that, I am going to just talk about some of my different options, the answers to some of the questions that I asked, and what the future holds for how I do business.

We started off by just discussing the differences between setting up an LLC and a corporation such as an S corp or C corp. Besides the initial set up costs, another major difference was the tax filings that would have to be done. In my particular case and with my particular accountant, if I were to set up an S or C corp, the corporate tax filings would be an additional $600-$1200 on top of the standard $300 to file the normal state taxes. That’s a lot of money when I am only talking about generating say $10,000 over the next 7 months. However, I’ll save all the talk about the different types of entities for another day or for another blogger. Check out the SBA or SCORE for more related resources.

When figuring out if you are going to start a business and move from being a sole proprietorship to a more formal corporate structure, you need to determine how much money you think you would realistically make/earn. In my case, by the end of the year, by goal is to reach $10,000 through website development projects. That being said, in the scope of things, that is not really a lot. And IN MY CASE we decided that it would actually be better to stay a sole proprietorship for the time being rather than setting up a business such as an LLC in the middle of the year. So, come the first of the new year, I will be reevaluating and at the point, for sure, be registering a company to roll all my business assets, income, and expenses into. However, the nice thing that I liked about staying a sole proprietorship is that I can still obtain a DBA (doing business as) name. That way, I can do business as ProfessionalGFX and have clients make payments to ProfessionalGFX instead of me personally. This is nice to keep the income separate. Another nice thing with this set up is that it is very easy to move from one business structure to another. In my case, the progression will most likely be: sole proprietorship > LLC > C Corp.

Many of the questions I had for the accountant were focused on my business and the type of things that I am doing, including ebay and website development. So one thing we discussed was the legal protection that each structure offers and the suggestion was made to have a clause in my web development contracts that clearly states that any clients who decide to take legal action can only sue for up to the amount of the contract (say $1,000 or $2,000 as opposed to being able to sue and go after all my personal assets – car, money, etc.).

Another question I had was about different deductions that can be taken when operating the business. Even as a sole proprietorship, I will still be able to start taking different business deductions including travel, conference registrations, eduction (seminars, training, etc), meals, and entertainment. One major question I had was about deducting different meals or equipment if I were to write reviews on the restaurant or piece of camping equipment on one of my blogs such as Dorm Room Biz or TheGearHouse. The determination was made that if the meal is for entertaining purposes (such as a lunch or dinner meeting with a client) 50% of the total would be deductible because it falls under the category of meals and entertainment. However, the loop hole or catch to this is that if you were to provide a meal to your employees or contracts while working on a project (say you had to work late on something and worked through dinner time) you could deduct 100% of the total because it deals with the employees welfare. With purchasing different items and equipment for reviewing, it was my accountants belief that as long as the review that was written was publicly available (posted on a website) and was in depth and thorough then you should be able to deduct the full value of an item as a business expense. This is good news because that is something I am going to be looking to do in the near future

Isabella commented on my previous post:

I would add to that: as far as expansion thoughts go, is it better to add on new people as employees, or as 1099 independent contractors and b) does the answer change based on the business structure chosen.

These are also questions that I had and were answered for me as we discussed my future plans for my development business and how I thought it was going to expand. I mentioned that I would mostly be using contractors or outsourcing different work to others as opposed to hiring new employees. If you can get away with using independent contractors, this is a better option, because as long as you have a solid agreement/contract in place with that person, you can get away with out having to pay any health insurance, medical benefits, or workers compensation for that person. These are some of the biggest expenses that businesses face, so if you can avoid them, try to! You would just need to state in your contract with the independent contractor that you are in no way responsible for any insurance or benefits and you as the business are not liable for anything that may happen. This puts the responsibility on that contractor to find their own insurance, retirement accounts, etc, etc. Then, all you have to do is send them a 1099 for the amount of work that they performed and it becomes their responsibility to file that correctly. Also, that answer should not change based on the business structure you have set up. My suggestion is to avoid hiring employees for as long as you can to avoid all the added extra expenses. However, as you expand and grow your business, that may be hard to do and you will eventually need to bring on employees and incur those different expenses.

I think that pretty much sums up most of the meeting that I had. My accountant did pass along a business card of another local web development company that I am going to network with and see if there may be any possibilities for collaborations or outsourced work in the future! On top of that, he also gave me a copy of a version of Quick Books to start using to manage the income and expenses for my business.

So what’s the next step? I’ll be filing my DBA forms and then setting up a separate bank account to use for my income and expenses to keep everything a little better organized! After a few months, I’ll be able to evaluate where I am at and better gauge the need for a corporate entity.

Got any accounting related questions? We also discussed other deductions like home office space and similar items. Leave a comment and maybe I can pass along some more information that was brought up during my meeting!

Best of luck everyone! Now get out there and make some money!