1. Start reading Sell Their Stuff by Hillary DePiano for free right now
  2. What is a Selling Or Trading Assistant? The Ultimate Overview of Consignment Selling
  3. What does consignment mean? What is consignment selling?
  4. What exactly does a Selling Assistant do? What’s a typical day like?
  5. How does a Selling Assistant make money? Who can become one?
  6. Can eBay Trading Assistants still sell on consignment for others now that the program is gone?
  7. Where can a Selling Assistant sell their client’s consignment items?
  8. What kind of items can a Selling Assistant sell on consignment for their clients?
  9. Sellers, here’s why you should add Selling Assistant services to your existing e-commerce business
  10. From SAHMs to retirees, students to teachers: here’s who should start a Selling Assistance service
  11. Designing your Selling Assistance service from terms and conditions to services and features
  12. Money Matters: How does a Selling Assistant profit from selling items for others?
  13. Resale and the Selling Assistant: Sometimes it’s simpler to just buy the items outright
  14. Selling Assistant fees: What are they and how do they work?
  15. The Pros and Cons of charging a fee for your Selling Assistant services
  16. Does charging a commission on your Selling Assistant services maximize your profits?
  17. Charge a combination of fees and commission to maximize your Selling Assistant profits
  18. Here’s how I profit from my Selling Assistant business
  19. Should a Selling Assistant give their client a deposit or advance on future earnings?
  20. Should the Selling Assistant require a deposit of new clients?
  21. Who pays for what when selling for others on consignment?
  22. Should the consignment seller cover all selling fees or pass them onto the client?
  23. How discounted & free shipping offers affect consignment selling
  24. Shipping costs & selling fees are the least of your worries…
  25. Paying your clients their share of your Selling Assistant sales
  26. Calculating client payments on a Selling Assistant contract
  27. Method of Payment: How should I pay my Selling Assistant client?
  28. Reporting and reconciliation of a Selling Assistant client contract
  29. Build yourself a timeline for paying Selling Assistant clients without getting burned
  30. Money Matters Managed
  31. Your Selling Situation: Where and how should I sell my Selling Assistant items?
  32. Multi-Channel Consignment Selling: List your items on multiple marketplaces for greater exposure
  33. Practice your Selling Assistance service before you start taking on clients
  34. Do you need a storefront or standalone webstore to be a Selling Assistant?
  35. Is eBay still the best place for a Trading Assistant turned consignment seller?
  36. Does the Selling Assistant consignment sell from their own account or the clients?
  37. Should I have a designated selling account for my Selling Assistance consignment service?
  38. The 8 questions you must ask yourself before you start selling on consignment
  39. Good customer service is a selling point that can distinguish your services
  40. The benefits of having a PO Box or other Locked Mailbox for your business
  41. Designate a business phone line for more professional client contact
  42. Consider VOIP & internet-based phones like Google Voice or Skype over traditional options
  43. Offering pick-up services is an easy way to attract local Selling Assistant clients
  44. Should you allow Selling Assistant clients to drop their items off?
  45. Expand the reach of your Selling Assistant service by letting clients ship their items to you

The healthiest business is never completely reliant on any one service or tool, which is why you’ll always want to be selling client items on a variety of platforms. There are many advantages of selling through multiple channels, from having increased exposure for your items to diversifying your selling so you’ll never be so dependent on a single marketplace that you’ll live and die by its changes. Multi-channel selling can mean spreading a client’s items out across several platforms or double listing the same items in multiple locations simultaneously to reach several types of buyer at once.

Of course, selling across multiple sites means more to keep track of and more potential to mess things up. You’ll need to be very organized to pull it off, keeping sales and sites separate while still keeping track of which items belong to which client contract. But when you free yourself from the idea that you can only sell on a single platform, you’ll open yourself up to a variety of selling opportunities.

Having good inventory synchronization, preferably automated, is key. The same items listed on multiple sites is a great way to expand the item’s reach and get it in front of as many potential buyers as possible. But what happens if you forget to delist and accidentally sell it twice? Trying to keep your inventory synchronized manually is challenging enough on a single platform, and the problem increases exponentially with additional sites in the mix. Luckily, there are a variety of third-party tools that offer automated synchronization between the most popular selling sites so that when your client’s book sells on Amazon, it’s automatically marked out of stock on both eBay and your webstore. Automated inventory management is an additional expense, but the cross-promotional benefits to your client’s items may make it worth it.

Reporting for a contract where items were sold on multiple sites can also be a challenge. You may need to consolidate fees from multiple invoices on a single reconciliation spreadsheet, and that data entry can be time-consuming. Personally, I just copy the relevant lines exactly from the selling invoices from each site and paste them directly onto the spreadsheet I give my client. Not only does this allow me to use the spreadsheet itself to calculate the fees and totals, it shows the client exactly what I received from the platform, keeping things completely transparent. Add a column simply to indicate which site each transaction refers to and you’re done.