How Much Does It Cost to Start eBay Dropshipping in 2026?

today I'm answering one of the most common questions I get about eBay Drop Shipping how much does it really cost to start Drop Shipping on eBay well stick around because I'm going to give you a complete breakdown of every single cost you have to worry about now obviously the first thing you should consider is how much money is going to cost you to sign up for an ebay account and an eBay store and luckily it doesn't cost you anything it's actually completely free to have an ebay account and with that free account you're going to be able to get up to 250 free listings in your store that means you're not going to be paying what's called an insertion fee if you list up more than 250 items though you will have to pay 35 cents for each item over that 250 limit so all you have to do is stay under 250 items and you're going to be fine it's not going to cost you anything to have a store and have items in it now we're not going to get into and talk about eBay store subscriptions too much but what I will say is if you do surpass 250 listings you may want to sign up for one of these store subscriptions because that's going to give you more free listings every single month but for now since you're a beginner and you're looking to do this as cheaply as possible let's stick with the free plan one that doesn't cost you any money and that gives you 250 items completely for free

now even though you have a free plan eBay still needs a way to make money and the way they do that is by taking a percentage of every single sale you make it's called a final value fee and when you're on the free plan eBay is going to charge you a final value fee of 13. 25% plus 30 cents for each item that you sell so if you sell a $100 item they're going to take $13. 55 right off the top now this isn't a cost though that you should really be worried about when you're getting started because this cost this fee is going to be built into the price that you list the item for on eBay so for example let's say you have an item that you listed for sale for $87 and it sells eBay is going to take $183 as their final value fee and they're going to send the remaining $757 to your bank account you'll then subtract from that how much you paid for the item from your supplier and you'll keep the rest as profit so for example if the item costs you $60 you'll be left with $15. 7 in profit Prof however if the item cost you $80 that means you've lost money on the sale that means you did something wrong it means you did not price your items correctly on eBay to cover the fees and the cost of the item both of those are part of the price you sell your items for on eBay and if you do it correctly you're always going to make a profit every time you sell an item now I know all these fees can be confusing H but you can just use an online eBay fee calculator if you want to do this yourself without actually having to do the math this is the one that I use I know the text down here is really small and hard to read so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make all these slides that I'm showing you today available to you for free to download all you have to do is click the first link in the description down below enter in your email and you'll get these slides sent to you automatically included in those will be these links that I'm giving you throughout this uh this video here today but let's look

at another possible expense and that is your software one of the most important parts About Drop Shipping is finding the right items to sell and the best way to do product research and to find those items is by using a software called Zeke analytics this is it right here now what I love about Zeke analytics is that it's really designed specifically for drop shippers to help you find hot selling profitable items so right here on the dash dashboard for instance it's giving me all these items that their AI system has been able to scrape and find for us for instance we have these this razor kit that's giving you like a $14 profit you can Source this from Walmart here's something else I don't even know what this is but it's like a $12 profit from Walmart there's a whole bunch of different product research Tools in here that you can use one of the ones I really like is the trending drop shipper section right here so what Zeke analytics has done is it scans through eBay found a bunch of drop shippers that are doing really well and you can actually look and see what items they're selling so if we look at this seller right here who's selling over $30,000 a month with their store I'm going to go ahead and scan their store this is going to analyze all the items that they're selling and going to rank them based on how well they're doing so for instance this item right here has sold 17 times in the past month this one has sold 14 this one 13 this one 12 these are items that are s selling multiple times a month I can go ahead and Source these same products or very similar ones and I know they're going to do well because someone else is selling these products on eBay themselves now Zeke analytics is not free to use it's currently $4. 99 a month for the cheapest plan but you can save some money by going for the yearly plan paying the whole year upfront you get a little bit of a discount if you do that but I do consider this a necessary business expense because it does pay for itself in other words it's going to help find you consistently winning products that you would not be able to find on your own without this software so it is going to pay for yourself and if you use the link that is right here on these slides you're going to be able to get a free trial of Zeke analytics to test it out see how well it works for you and again you can get these slides at the first link Down Below in the description

the next software you're going to need to run your eBay store is your automation software this software is going to allow you to quickly list items onto eBay from your supplier's website then if the price changes or the item goes in stock or out of stock that will automatically be updated on your eBay store for you and that's all possible thanks to this software Auto DS let me show you how this works so if we're over here this is me logged into my autod DS account and if I click up here where it says add product single product this will now allow me to list an item into my eBay store so let's come over here to Walmart we'll find a random item to sell I don't know if this is one that would do well on eBay or not this is just for the sake of the example so I'll choose this item I'll go ahead and copy down the URL that's all you need and you can paste it in here and click on edit now quick now what it's doing is it's pulling in all of the information it pulls in the photos title and you can go ahead and optimize the title and change it here if you want it automatically adds tags it automatically creates the appropriate shipping and handling time you can see if there's different colors all those colors will be available in here or different sizes here are all the images I can change it so if I want a different main image I can choose that main image brings in all the item specifics as well all that done for you automatically I usually spend a few minutes optimizing the title going through the description real quick maybe changing the main image and then I'll go ahead and click on Save and import and that item will now be live in my eBay store takes me a few seconds instead of the several minutes it used to take me to list items the other cool thing is that it also protects your account as well so this is telling me that this manufacturer is actually on eBay's Vero list now I'm not going to go too far into what eBay's Vero list is but these are basically brands that you're not allowed to sell on eBay and if you do try to sell them you could get in trouble with eBay now luckily autods tells you hey this is a Vero brand you shouldn't sell it so guess what I'm not going to sell this item I would go ahead and choose a different item instead now in terms of pricing for autod DS the other thing I should say is now that I've listed this item if this item goes out of stock on Walmart autods will automatically make that item out of stock in my eBay store as soon as it comes back in stock that will be updated in my eBay store and all price changes are reflected as well so it's really like an full automation tool for your dropshipping store as far as pricing

goes you're going to see that there are several different uh plans available for autod DS the one that I recommend is the first one that's not the import plan which is the cheapest plan only allows you to list items it doesn't actually reprice and it doesn't do the stock monitor during either so you need the starter plan at least again you can save money by switching to the annual plan um if you want to oops let me go back to that the annual plan if you want to but again you can get a free trial of this with my link that's included in these slides so do make sure you download these slides at the first link down below if you want a free trial of both Zeke analytics and autods because with both of those that really puts your total startup cost at 0 you're going to be able to get started completely for free at least for your first few weeks now there is a snag here however something that we really need to address if you're going to be successful with eBay Drop Shipping in terms of pricing and your upfront investment of cost eBay has a policy where they will not release your money to you right away there is a delay between when the sale happens and when you're given the money from the sale but if you have either a credit card or a debit card with a couple hundred dollar on it you're going to have enough to get started with this so let me give you a breakdown of how this entire process works and kind of like the timeline of how it works so first you're going to have a customer and she's going to buy an item from you on eBay is then going to send you all the information about the sale they're going to tell you what item was purchased the buyer's shipping address and even how much they paid for the item but they are not going to give you the money from that sale yet but they still expect you to turn around and fulfill that order in other words to get the customer their item so what you're going to do is you're going to buy the item let's say it cost you $80 in this example from your supplier the supplier will then ship the item directly to your customer then at that point eBay is going to release the money to you again in this example it's going to be $100 which is how much you're going to get after your final value fee you'll then use that money to pay off your credit card which is $80 because that's how much you spent on the item and you'll keep the rest as profit simple so many people overthink this they think that this means that Drop Shipping on eBay doesn't work but it does work you just have to know how to use the system don't over complicate it it's simple and the reason eBay does this is really just to prevent fraud they don't want sellers to sell a bunch of stuff on eBay and then run off with the money without actually shipping items to the customers this is something every seller has to deal with no matter how long you've been selling for and it exists on every single marketplace now so just get a great cashback credit card and you're going to be fine so to recap you really are not going to have any costs for the first few weeks that you get started with Drop Shipping assuming that you do use the links inside these slides to get those free trials I know a lot of people don't get started with eBay Drop Shipping because they are so afraid of spending money to get started but as you can see The Upfront costs are very low with this business model so there's really no excuse not to at least try this for yourself as a reminder you can download a copy of these slides for free at the first link in the description down below otherwise thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one bye for