Who can become a Selling Assistant?
There are no prerequisites to working as a Selling Assistant though I would personally recommend that you have at least some prior experience selling online so you know what you’re getting into. Anyone who is willing and able to sell items online or off can do so for others which is one of things that makes this such a fantastic opportunity. There is nowhere to register, no terms to agree to, no feedback system to cater to and no fees for running your service. You can start whenever you’re ready!
In the past, eBay had the largest and best known Selling Assistance program. Founded in 2002, any seller in good standing could register as a Trading Assistant (usually individuals working out of their homes), Listing Assistant (eBay Motors) or Trading Post (which later became Registered eBay Drop-Off locations when eBay started to run afoul of local auctioneering laws) and sell items for others on eBay. Some third party franchises sprang up as Drop-Off locations and many are still in business to this day. Though eBay shut the program down in 2013 and replaced it with the in-house eBay Valet, the eBay Trading Assistant program was really just an unnecessary middle man for what was already a booming business relationship between sellers and those with something to sell.
If you’re a former eBay Trading Assistant feeling adrift without the stamp of legitimacy you got from having your service officially registered, I think you’ll find you’ll ultimately prefer the freedom of running your services on your own terms. Now you owe no allegiance to any platform and don’t have to comply to anyone else’s terms or contracts which frees you up to offer customer enticing features like multi-channel selling, email marketing or even external webstores. And while you may miss some of the marketing benefit of being listed in the eBay directory, that was only a single marketing opportunity, and not even a very good one, for helping customers find you. In the end, getting the freedom to sell your own way without being shackled to a single platform’s fees and policies is well worth the loss of the directory.
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