Upgrade Your Personal eBay Account or Create a Brand New Business Account?

Happy Friday!

On a regular basis I receive emails asking about eBay accounts. And even though I have already covered the topic of multiple eBay and PayPal accounts in a separate blog post, many people simply ask what the best option is when you have an established personal account and want to start selling on eBay as a business?

This is exactly what Mark asked me:

Hi Andrew,

I am working my way through your EAB tutorials which I find extremely informative, and wondered if you could provide me with some assistance please.

I have held a personal eBay account for 7 years selling items from around the house that are no longer of use. I have not sold on a regular basis, but just as and when. I have 100% feedback and a light blue star. I have recently changed the account name as the previous one was more a novelty name selected by my young daughter.

I am looking to establish myself with TRS status and then build upon that to Premium Service level.

In the previous 10 months I have sold two vehicles through Classified Ads so can satisfy the requirement of a minimum of £1000 sold in the previous 12 months. However, I have not had 100 transactions.

In order to achieve the required 100 transactions in the previous 12 months, following your tutorial, I have identified a number of items around the house that I would normally sell off at auction.

I am looking to establish a niche market, and therefore the household items would not fall within this niche. In view of this, would I be better placed to leave my eBay account as a personal one and create a new one to use to auction my items to reach the 100 transactions, or would I be better off simply changing the account to a business one and selling my items on this, although they do not fit within the niche market I aspire to?

Kind Regards,

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your email.

There’s no need to start a BRAND NEW account from scratch! Why? You already have an established account with a proven track record, feedbacks and sales. You must likely also have decent selling limits too.

What you want to do is simply upgrade your current personal account to a Business account, that’s it. You can also change the user ID if you feel that’s necessary (it can be changed once every 30 days).

This way you are not starting from scratch and will benefit from the sales history you’ve already accumulated on that personal account.

If you need a separate account for personal use – open a new personal eBay account. It will have 0 feedbacks and no sales history but for buying stuff or selling the odd personal item here and there, that’s perfectly fine.

As for selling household items in order to reach Top rated seller status – this is really not a big problem, seriously. Usually people sell off these items, get TRS status and then start selling their real “business/niche” items. But even if you start selling both at the same time, it’s not a big issue as this is only a temporary situation while you get those 100 sales and become a TRS.

Yes, people will be able to see those sold items via the feedback page but very few people will ever look at this and even if they do – it doesn’t mean anything anyway. So don’t worry about it!

The most important thing is to take advantage of that established personal account to turbo start your new business!

One thing to be aware of – once you upgrade your personal eBay account to Business, there’s no going back and you won’t be able to change it to personal again later. But this really shouldn’t be an issue – as I said, you can always open a new personal account or even multiple accounts when you need them.

As always – I would love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions! If you have something to say about this topic, please leave a comment below this post and I will personally reply to it within 24 hours Monday – Friday.

If you want your question to be featured in an up-coming Reader’s Question post, get in touch with me via my Helpdesk here.

Have a great weekend!

Andrew