It is less lucrutive than it use to be. Now many retailers are selling computers for so cheap it is hard to sell lower than places like Best Buy and Walmart. There is still some money to be made if you build a solid rep and become well known as a supplier of quality computers.
I am less confident in it. The best way to figure out is to map out all your parts, figure out your cost when you include shipping and insurance, then look at completed auctions to see if it is enough profit (make sure you include the eBay fees and paypal fees). In my opinion, its not worth the bother, the margins are just razor thin.
I sold about 4 old computers on eBay once. They were no use to us, and I got only about £30 for the lot. Buyer collected and thought I was mad not to put a reserve on them, but frankly I just wanted to get rid. He saved me making a trip to the tip.
Nah there is no money in it. You are competing with retailers that just want to get rid of stock and will take a loss.
You CAN sell virtually anything on eBay. The big benefit of eBay is that it already gets massive traffic. Much more than you or I could ever hope to attract to our own websites! But eBay isn't magic. You need to know what you're doing to get enough of that traffic over to your auction page.
Ebay isn't really a place to sell computers. Buyers do not have a chance to test it out. In such cases, the conditions of the computers are more or less unknown, incomplete information can easily result in a Lemons problem in which the bad drives out the good and hence even if your computer is good, it is more likely to fetch the pricing of a malfunction computer.
Sure, a good description is available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer You may want to google for more interesting examples.
No. Don't even think about it, first off the computer industry is commoditized, with your margin and eBays you will working for peanuts if any at all, suffer from brand contraction ( eBay devalues your brand ), bottom of the barrel scrapers, and fraud risks.
I think everyone completely missed the point? I'm guessing what you're looking to do is build mid to high range new computers and not sell second hand computers? If I'm right, then yes, there is still a market for it. I would personally specialise in high end stuff, for gamers. Learn how to overclock the newest CPUs, RAM and GPUs and you can charge a premium. Go for the guy who wants the fastest gaming PC, but doesn't want to pay Alienware prices when he could get it cheaper. There's also a lack of multiple monitored PCs on eBay. If I purchased one from a website, it's going to cost me a hell of a lot, there's very few of them on eBay, so this is another avenue to go down. The problem with selling mid range cheap PCs like everyone else is that your competition is extremely high, and you need to pack together the cheapest possible components to squeeze as much profit as possible. For people saying that eBay is a bad place to sell/buy computers, pretty much all my PCs have come from eBay, I'd much rather purchase off some geek who loves computers and provides me with assistance through MSN Messenger than have to deal with customer service departments at multinational conglomerates.
Yes, it's good. It's also a great avenue to take to sell them more stuff related to computers later on. Go for it!
I would only consider it if I had a actual store front (company that already did it) and just use ebay as an extension of that. Otherwise I think the competition and how fast everything is outdated (not to mention how cheap things are) would just kill you.
Thats the problem, many online computer retailers do this just to get rid of stock, and will happily take a loss. Its a very cut throat industry.