It's true, there are benefits associated with becoming a PowerSeller and boasting that prestigious PowerSeller icon on your listings. The bigger you grow in the PowerSeller ranks, the greater those benefits become. All PowerSellers have priority access to eBay staff to ask questions and help solve problems. Gold PowerSellers and above even have emergency telephone access to eBay staff.

It may surprise you to learn these benefits are available to anyone, if you know where to look.

More about this later, let me tell you why some of the world's top eBayers are not and never want to be PowerSellers. Some don't actually qualify, even if they sell way more product each month than the world's top eBayer. That's because to qualify as a PowerSeller you must meet a specific level of product sales or profits over a three month period in one eBay account.

'In one eBay account' are the operative words here, because most eBay sellers actually do have just one eBay account, into which they commit everything from household castoffs to surplus collectibles, last weekend's boot sale buys, dropshipped items, and much more. In such cases, the key to becoming a PowerSeller (in the UK) is simply to sell a minimum £750 worth of stock each month or 100 items (Bronze membership) to £95,000 of sales or 5,000 products for Titanium membership.

There is a big disadvantage to this 'throw it all in the pot' principle, and it's one of never being able to specialise or grow a niche market for your eBay business. Niche marketing is a powerful concept and on eBay you'll see sellers specialising in one specific product type and generating thousands of sales each month from just a few products. This is because their customers come to recognise niche eBay sellers as THE place to go for products to satisfy their buying needs. The seller also gets to cut eBay listing and final selling fees to the bone, by listing just a few items at auction or Buy It Now. Those few items generate visitors from eBay's search engines who are then directed to other items available inside the eBayer's shop where listing fees are incredibly low compared to those for auction listed items.

There's another reason why the world's biggest sellers may never qualify to become PowerSellers, which also explains why most don't want to qualify anyway. It's because many of them have lots of eBay accounts, each catering to a specific niche audience, where cumulative sales are sometimes low as often happens in tight niche markets. But across several eBay accounts profits can be enormous.

How to obtain many of those benefits normally reserved for major PowerSellers, such as emergency telephone support? Well it's only in the UK that you can't speak directly to eBay staff and must wait in line for email support if you are not a PowerSeller. But go to ebay.com, click on 'Live Help' right side of the home page, give your eBay ID, type out your question, and wait for an eBay agent to reply online. It can take ten minutes or more to gain access to an eBay representative, but it's well worth the wait if your problem is urgent or worrying. It's simple too, all you do is key in your question online, the representative answers online, you reply, they reply, and so the process continues until your question is answered.

Okay, it's not exactly the same as talking over the phone to an eBay representative; it's actually much better because you can read and check questions asked and answers given before bidding goodbye to your eBay guide. And you can print out your findings for future reference. How good is that?