A lot of people want to become full time super sellers on eBay. These are my 10 steps to becoming a successful eBay seller online.

Step 1: Identify your market. Take a little while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re thinking about selling. Any market research data you can collect will be very vital to you later on. You mightsee the ‘big sellers’ quite quickly - those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Step 2: Watch competition. Before you spend any money, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their selling strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and take over the niche .

Step 3: Find a product: Get hold of a supplier for whatever it is you want to sell, and negotiate for the best rates you can get are - don’t be afraid to ring round quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you’re in the game.

Step 4: Start at your own pace: Don’t waste thousands at your idea straight away - get started slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and learn as you go. Remember that it’s very inexpensive to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!

Step 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying until you find something that works, and then don’t be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche.

Step 6: Work out a business plan: A business plan doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the market opportunity you’ve spotted, your unique strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.

Step 7: Invest and build: This is the time to at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.

Step 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Don’t fret, it’s not expensive or hard to do - a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.

Step 9: Automate: You’ll probably find that you’re writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.

Step 10: Don’t give up: Even when it looks like it’s all going wrong, don’t stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you’ll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.

Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling on a full time basis. But it’s not always as easy as that - there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider. Selling on eBay is a great way to make money online, but you have to take the necessary steps to become financially secure before diving in full time.