The first thing everyone must do before they can buy and sell on eBay is to register. During the registration process you are asked to decide on what you want your eBay User Id to be. For many people who are just buying and perhaps selling some stuff from around the house, the User ID you choose isn’t that big a deal, as long as its not offensive. However, if you are planning on starting a business enterprise on eBay you may want to think a little more about how you want to portray yourself.

You should be thinking of your eBay User ID as your brand name, or business name. It is a way of marketing yourself to every eBay user that you come in contact with. Pretty soon, if you have a good product or become known for good prices, people will start to search for you by name. Thus it makes good business sense to brand yourself with a memorable but relevant name. I have a client who puts his User ID into the title of every listing he creates. This then puts his business name right into the search results where people start to associate his ID with the products they are searching for. This has had the advantage of promoting off eBay sales as well, as people type his User ID directly into Google which then returns both his website and eBay store.

So, if you already have a business name I would highly recommend that you use that as your eBay User ID to build brand recognition.

Things to take into consideration when deciding on a eBay User ID:

• you cannot use a URL as your User ID such as businessname.com.au or even businessnamedotcomdotau.
• you cannot use the following :
  • @, &, ‘, (, ), <, or >,
  • spaces or tabs,
  • the word eBay,
  • the letter “e” followed by numbers,
  • obscene or profane words,
  • an ID that is the same as another sellers or eBay store,
  • or a term that can be confused with a trademark.
• you can use a - (hyphen) or an _ (underscore) to represent a space.
• you can change your current User ID, but only once every 30 days.
• you can have more than one User ID.

This last point is worth considering especially if you sell two totally unrelated products or if you want to keep your personal buying and selling activity separate from you business activities. To set up a second User ID you just need to go through the registration process again but this time you will need to supply a different email account from the first. In fact you can have as many User IDs as you need as long as you have separate email accounts for each.

Need to create another eBay User ID? Click here…

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Or perhaps you would prefer to receive email updates, if so just fill in the box over on the right. Thanks for visiting!