Selling on ebay

Q1: A - If you've seen the pure mass of random oddities and crap that exists on eBay, you know you can sell ANYTHING on there, potentially, from a 1 cent cat whisker to a photocopy of a 1940's wrestling bill (don't ask, it seemed like a good idea at the time) to a $200 "haunted" rubber ducky.

Buyers may find indy games on eBay a novel and interesting venture, thinking "well, its $5/$10, god knows I've paid more than that for worse crap, this sounds kinda interesting" - I've been thinking about doing this myself, I figure I might as well give it a shot, there's no startup or publishing costs for mass market - what's the harm? If no one bites, you're out about $1.00 for your listing fees, so it really depends on how much potential "throwaway" cash you're willing to sink into some eBay listings. Yahoo is free now I hear but I've never used it so you might investigate that too.

Q2: A - You can setup a website and product payment/store using PayPal however you want, providing you're not using a free hosted site (I don't think they allow commercial sales), but the problem will be getting people TO your site - you CAN advertise your website in your eBay auction, but for a "store", eBay offers the eBay Store service, unfortuntely its a bit pricey and you're constantly charged for this or that.

The downside or potential trouble with a website store using PayPal but also eBay is that there is a lot of grey area about buyer AND seller protection if a purchase is made outside of eBay, but they found your item originally ON eBay, who absolutely do not tolerate individual-to-individual sales. You could probably start out with a good solid site, get the meta tags right and get some search engine saturation, and do a few auctions on eBay with a tag for your site placed unobtrusively in your descriptions then phase out the auctions if you start getting some interest - your BEST course of action would be to familiarize yourself with PayPal and eBay's policies on this sort of thing - you could maybe do free live chat with PayPal support if you just don't know where to start on all their pages of information.

Keep in mind that because of the way PayPal accepts credit cards, ANY PayPal payment CAN be reversed and removed from your account, even after you send the item, so if you sell anything, make SURE to get delivery confirmation on EVERY sale. Also, PayPal allows eCheck, which so far has cost a seller friend of mine about one full month of waiting as multiple eChecks continually were extended, then failed, then were put through again, and then PayPal put a HOLD on the payments while investigating, which removed the money from the first sale from my friend's account until PP determined the buyer was suspicious and my friend qualified for seller protection, then they returned the money - be careful, and best advice for eBay itself, post in the Community > Discussion > New To eBay board and ask for advice.