Review of "Ebay Business the Smart Way: Maximize Your Profits on the Web's" by Joseph T. Sinclair

This is a businessman's guide to creating a profitable eBay-based business. The most useful and practical aspects of the advice are applicable to any business - bookkeeping, legal issues, inventory control, and so on. Mr. Sinclair does a good job of discussing the special issues that running a business on eBay can present, paying particular attention to an area most authors completely overlook - customer expectations. You can read all of the books you want, and buy one of those eBay business toolkits from the infomercials, but until you do the footwork and do the basic research in the marketplace, you're just shooting the dice as to whether or not you'll be successful on eBay.

There's a lot of nuts and bolts information here, with good coverage on how to structure your auctions to preserve your profit margins, choosing products to sell, and selecting methods of payments. There's at least a modicum of information on just about any subject I could think of, and I've been an active eBay seller for many years now.

The book does overdo the boldface subheadings and thus pads the pagecount quite a bit, but overall this is an excellent tutorial in creating and running a business selling in the online auctions.