One of the main benefits of starting an online selling business was that it allowed me to quit my full-time job as an accountant and gain much greater control over my time.

Even though I had what many would consider a ‘good’ job, there were many aspects that I couldn’t stand. A big one was having to give up at least 40 hours of my time every week, with very little control or flexibility regarding when those hours were. The limited vacation days were also frustrating.

Even if I ended up making a little bit less than what I was at the prior job, the freedom of time would have been well worth it. Fortunately, it’s provided more income as well. 

Five reasons why I think selling online is better than a regular job.

If you read this and are interested in learning about how you can do it too, I have a ton of free content and some courses that will help you.

1. The earnings potential is higher.

The amount of money you can earn with an online business is nearly limitless. There are people out there earning 7-figures or higher, and many more comfortably in the 6-figures.

When you consider that most people earn less than $50,000 at their jobs, it’s not hard to see that your potential to earn more is higher with an online selling business than it is with most traditional jobs.

That doesn’t mean you will earn more, it just means you can.

In my experience, many people who start selling online don’t end up making nearly as much as they could if they actually worked full time because they are more than happy replacing their original income and then taking a lot more time off to spend with friends and family.

I’ve been able to put a lot of time into my business over the last few years, and we now do several million in sales each year. Keep in mind that I employ 8+ people, so I’m not keeping all the profit to myself.

I still make more than my accounting job offered though, and having employees means I have a lot more free time. That brings me to my next point.

2. You get to control when you work.

With a regular job, you get very little choice about when you work. You either work a set schedule like 9-5, Monday through Friday – or even worse, your manager gets to set your schedule differently every 1-2 weeks.

With an online selling business, you are in full control of when you work.

If you aren’t a Monday person, you don’t have to work that morning. If you aren’t a morning person at all, sleep in every day. If your kid has baseball games every Wednesday at 3, you can be there. If something important comes up that you weren’t planning, you can take that time off and make it up whenever you want.

This is a double-edged sword, though. Getting to set your own schedule can easily lead to not working nearly enough if you aren’t careful.

3. You can take more vacations.

This one is related to the last point. When you don’t have someone else telling you exactly when and how you have to work, you are free to take a lot more vacations.

Most people only get 1 week of vacation each year after they use some of their off days on being sick or doing things with their family. When you only have a week, you’re also more likely to focus on nearby vacation spots that you’ve been to before so you know you won’t have a bad time and you can reduce travel days.

If you find yourself going to the same spot year after year, you probably know what I mean. There isn’t anything wrong with doing that, but wouldn’t it be nice to add in a few extra weeks each year so you could go somewhere new and farther away?

Another nice perk of selling online is buying inventory with rewards credit cards. As your business grows you will earn more and more rewards points allowing you to take vacations for very little cash out of pocket.  

4. You won’t have a boss telling you what to do.

Being micromanaged is one of the worst feelings in the world.

On one hand, it’s frustrating always being told what to do. And on the other, it’s demoralizing because its a sign that you aren’t trusted with making decisions.

Starting your own business and selling online requires you to take responsibility and make big decisions. It can even be a little overwhelming at first if you aren’t used to doing it, so this is another double-edged sword situation.

5. You’ll be constantly challenged.

This one may not sound like a perk at first, but I believe that it is.

One of the biggest complaints people have about their jobs is that they find it unfulfilling because they aren’t challenged and the work is repetitive and monotonous.

This will never be a problem if you start your own business. From day 1, you will be constantly challenged and forced to make decisions. You’ll have to spend a lot of time learning, and you’ll grow a lot in the process too.

I’ve learned more through my selling business than I ever could have from my accounting job, and the challenges keep things fun and interesting.

7 Bonus Reasons Why Selling Online Is Better Than Your Job

The five reasons I’ve already listed are the things that I personally have found to be the biggest benefits from quitting my job to sell online full time. But they are far from the only ones.

Through my course and coaching program, I’ve been able to help many other people start selling online and eventually take the leap to full time. Here are the most common reasons participants in these programs have given regarding why they wanted to quit…

1. They don’t have to deal with rush-hour commutes.
2. No more bad coworkers.
3. They didn’t like their company’s culture.
4. They get to spend a lot more time with their family.
5. They felt trapped in the wrong career.
6. They felt unappreciated by their boss or manager
7. They were uncomfortable at work and felt like they had to hide their personality.

All of these are great reasons for wanting to quit, and great reasons to start selling on Amazon.

None of them should be the basis for whether or not you quit your job, though.

Why You Shouldn’t Quit Your Job… Yet.

Reading all those reasons why selling online is better than a regular job probably has you dreaming of walking into your boss’s office and handing in your two weeks notice.

I’d love to help you get to that point, but you need to stop and consider if you are actually ready for that..

There are only three situations where quitting your job might make sense, and if you aren’t in one of them, you definitely shouldn’t quit yet. They are:

1. You are already selling online and making enough to get by.
2. You are selling online and between your current sales and your savings, you could make it 6-12+ months without running out of money.
3. You don’t have a business yet but have enough savings to last 6-12+ months, and you have a relatively high risk tolerance.

Even if you are in one of these situations and want to quit, you may want to hold on to that job a little while longer. There are a lot of factors that can make the decision to quit much more significant.

Five questions you’ll definitely want to ask yourself are:

• How easily could you get a similar job back if you needed to?
• Is running out of money within the next year a possibility if you didn’t make any money?
• Do you have dependents like a spouse and children that are counting on you?
• Is time the thing that is currently holding back your selling business’s growth?
• Do you have enough capital available to invest in inventory for your business?

If you have a family and a job that took you a long time to get, quitting is a much more serious decision than if you are a college kid working at a local restaurant.

You should only quit your job if the risk associated with doing so is manageable and one that you are comfortable taking on. That is up for you to decide.

Most people who come to me with questions about quitting aren’t sure if they are ready, and my advice is usually that if you aren’t sure that it’s time to quit, you shouldn’t quit.

The decision isn’t one that other people can make for you, but it can help to talk the decision over with friends and family – people who actually know you. You don’t want to jump in too early, but if you’re risk averse, you want to make sure you don’t wait too long as well.

You don’t have to quit your job to start selling online…

The biggest reason that you shouldn’t quit yet is that you can get started selling online and earning money while maintaining your existing job.

With the strategies that I recommend, you can start earning thousands of dollars a month in your spare time while maintaining the job you have now. I know this is possible because hundreds of people who have enrolled in my course are currently doing it.

If you’ve done any research about selling online, you’ve probably heard about dozens of different strategies for getting products to sell.

The model that I recommend for almost all beginners is arbitrage. When used in a selling sense, arbitrage means finding undervalued goods, buying them, and then selling them to people who do value them.

The three main ways this arbitrage is done is through used item ‘flipping’, retail arbitrage, and online arbitrage.

The same core principle applies to all three, the buying and selling locations just change.

A lot of people incorrectly assume that there isn’t a lot of opportunities to make money this way. They see that other people are already doing it and think that it’s too late. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Arbitrage opportunities are everywhere.

Every yard sale, thrift store, auction, estate sale, and flea market is an opportunity to find used items that will sell for more on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and eBay.

Every Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kmart, Walgreens, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco, and discount store is an opportunity to find new stuff that sells for more on Amazon or eBay.

I know people easily replacing full-time incomes doing nothing but flipping used stuff they find at local sales. My own multi-million dollar business still relies on retail arbitrage as a main sourcing strategy.

These strategies don’t sound as cool as startups and apps, but they are practical. You can use them to make money no matter who you are, where you live, or what your skills are.

They will teach you the value of goods and services and allow you to make money right away, not in a few years.

You could be making profit this week. You can be making a lot of profit within the next year.

How much comes down to how much you are willing to work. I don’t mean to make this all seem easy, because it’s still a lot of work – especially in the beginning when you aren’t good at finding stuff.

But if you keep at it, the money will come.

Start This Week.

If you aren’t ready to quit your job but want to eventually, stop daydreaming and commit to actually doing something.

Do something this week.

Go out to a thrift store or garage sale and commit to buying at least one item to try to sell online (Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or eBay). Browse the free section on Craigslist for something you could try to sell for $10-$20. Use the Amazon Seller app to look through clearance sections at your local big box stores for something that sells for more on Amazon.

Do your best to find something that allows you to make a profit, but don’t worry if you don’t. Just get started and use the experience to learn about how to value a product.

This is what I think is the smart way for people to start. Not with thousands invested into inventory or app building.

All you need is $20 and a few hours, and you’ll learn more about making money and be closer to your goal of quitting your job than most people ever make it.

Repeat that a few thousand times and you’ll be free of your job and sitting on a nice chunk of change that you can use to invest in the ‘cool’ business models.

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If you want to learn more about retail arbitrage and selling on Amazon, check out my How to Make $1000+ Per Month on Amazon course. I’ve been offering it for about a year now, and the results have been fantastic.

You can also check out this How to Sell On Amazon Beginner’s Guide that will help you get started selling on Amazon for free.

Another thing to keep an eye out for is a book that I’ll be releasing soon on all aspects of flipping and arbitrage. If that is something you are interested in, click here to find out as soon as it launches (I may be letting early downloads happen for free).

And if you’d like to see what other things are possible outside arbitrage, check out my monthly Shopify income reports and my series on affiliate marketing.

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