In your step 2 about saving money, there is one very powerful money saver you completely missed ….

Examine carefully the fees between different eBay sites for the same services.

Just as an example, compare the cost difference of your eBay store description between several English (or Spanish, or whatever) language sites.

A basic store in the UK was GBP 6.00 a month (roughly US$ 12.00) but that changes next week and jumps to GBP 15.00 (US$30.00).
However, even a Featured / Premium store on eBay Singapore is only GBP 10.00 a month.

Why is it so cheap there? Several reasons, national population size, no international visibility, no Omniture stats and so on. But the key point is that subscribing on Singapore still gives you a global storefront on eBay.
So if your store URL is currently stores.ebay.com/store-name it remains that on dot com, even if your subscription is in Timbuctoo. On Australia, that same store would be stores.ebay.com.au/store-name – the only bit that changes is the eBay site country identifier ( .co.uk – .fr – .de – .ca etc. )

So why pay mega-bucks for a CA / UK / US stores subscription, when you can shop around the eBay sites and get one cheaper? You still list US listings on the US and get regular US listing fees. You still pay for the store subs in your US invoice, and manage your listings on the US site, and so on. All you do is design and manage your store set up on Singapore – everything else you do as normal from your US account.

I really don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it. I’ve been doing it for years and never had a problem caused by it (other than being banned from the eBay forums for telling people about it – which makes me think it’s a major glitch in the eBay global infrastructure that they don’t want people to know about … because for once it doesn’t top off their coffers).

Gaz