One way to avoid this swamp, though, is to do a Joint Venture with established eBay sellers. This allows a JV partner to build her own mailing list and sell products off eBay.

There are multiple advantages to this way of doing business on eBay:

1. The biggest uncertainty for would-be eBay sellers is what products to sell. Sometimes vendors risk large sums of money on untried products, only to lose their investment, become sour and give up. With a Joint Venture there is no risk except for a few hours of time.

2. Since there are no auctions listed on eBay, no one can steal copy or pictures from JV sellers - because there is nothing to copy. In effect, we become invisible - no one even knows we exist and this hidden aspect has many advantages.

3. eBay JVs are usually done with a digital product that can be instantly downloaded. This is great for any entrepreneur because inexpensive autoresponders mean that her entire business is handled via autopilot. Contrast this with the usual way of doing business on eBay which involves mailing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of boxes.

4. eBay and PayPal have lots of rules. It's easy to break some unwittingly, and even the most honest seller does so from time to time. A JV merchant isn't answerable to eBay, however, but only to her customers.

5. A JV seller never directly lists on eBay, thus avoiding eBay and PayPal fees.

6. Successful Powersellers have large numbers of customers and there are lots of administrative details involved. Implementing a sales system can cost time and money because without attention to detail packages won't be mailed in a timely fashion, payments won't be accurate, and items will be sent to the wrong buyers, and so on. A JV partner eliminates all of that because all transactions can be funneled through a hands-off system.

7. eBay selling lives or dies through the 'feedback' system. Negative feedback can kill sales instantly and lack of feedback causes buyers to hesitate and choose other sellers. Feedback is totally irrelevant to a Joint Venture seller because she is using the reputation of carefully chosen other sellers. She knows in advance that their feedback is high quality or she doesn't do deals with them.

8. Inexperienced sellers sometimes drag wiser merchants into price wars. In a panic over sales, they foolishly slash prices, beginning a chain reaction that results in bare bones bids that allow no one to make any money. A Joint Venture seller floats serenely above such hiccups in the marketplace.

9. Best of all, a JV seller doesn't settle for a one time sale. She concentrates her efforts on a mailing list of happy customers that she can sell to again and again and again. In this way, not only is she ensuring repeated profits, but she gets paid for creating this list, rather than having to pay someone else for names.

With its 147,000,000 registered users, eBay is the best source of targeted, Net-savvy buyers on the web. By putting together Joint Venture deals with established sellers, anyone can add large numbers of qualified buyers to their database efficiently and inexpensively.