How to set up an eBay seller account: so you can buy and sell today

Setting up your eBay seller account

eBay has sister sites in many countries, I encourage you to first register with the relevant eBay site for the country you live in. For example, I live in the UK, so I would register with bay.co.uk, for Australia I would register with ebay.com.au/ and for the United States I would register with eBay.com.

For ease of use, we will use eBay.com as an example of how to set up an eBay seller account. First things first, you actually need to go to eBay. In the upper right corner you will find some menu options: Buy, Sell, My eBay, Community and Help. You will not need those options yet.

In the upper left corner you will find the eBay logo with “Welcome! Login or Register. You will need to click on the registration text. This will take you to the registration page.

The registration page is an easy to fill out form that asks for details like your name and address, phone number (s), etc. It goes without saying that you must enter the correct information in these fields.

Choose proper names and not “mickeymouserocks” or “sexybabes123”

The second section will ask you to create an “eBay User ID and Password” so that you can log in in the future and it will also show up on your eBay sales list, comments, forums and other pages. From here, select an eBay ID of your choice. If you are thinking of operating your own online store or want to link to an offline business, it is probably best to make your ID similar to your offline business i.e ABC textiles could be abctextiles123 as your user ID. This corresponds directly to your offline business name.

However, if you are an individual and want to start selling an item, you can create your own user ID here (just make sure it is not offensive). If you know in advance that you are going to sell items on eBay and you want to be taken seriously, I advise you to use a proper name and not “mickeymouserocks” or “sexybabes123”. I can guarantee that your ads will not be taken seriously.

You must choose a password. I would advise using a new and different password than what you normally use here. If you use a password that you ALWAYS use, your eBay account will be very easy to hack. So choose this wisely. A combination of letters and numbers creates fairly strong passwords.

The secret question:

You will then be asked to choose a secret question such as the mother’s maiden name or the pet’s name. This is an additional security question in case you lose any login information in the future. This can take years in the future, and in this case, the key here is to choose a question that is very easy to answer without even thinking about it.

The last section asks for your date of birth. Just enter the correct details in the drop-down menus.

Make sure you read the user agreement and privacy policy completely, confirm that you are over 18 years of age, and click the sign up button.

Check your email for a confirmation message

You have now completed a simple process of setting up an eBay seller account. You will need to check your email for a confirmation message from eBay that will verify that it was actually you who filled out the form and that no one tried to scam your system.

Before you can start selling on eBay, I think you need to buy about 10 items and have a PayPal account linked to your eBay account. This is something I will discuss in a different article and a way to speed up this process that is completely legal.