Tip #6 for eBay Success: Postage
Offering international postage has given me the biggest profits in my business.
I recently sold an industrial printer on eBay. The highest offer from the UK? £1,000. The highest offer from the Middle East was a whopping £5,000.
Don’t let the size of your item put you off offering it overseas. The above printer weighed five tones but we found a way to dismantle it and ship it in a container. It cost less than £1,000 to ship and the buyer was happy to pay for it. More >
Tip #5 for eBay success: The Description
Now that you’ve seduced a potential customer to look at your product you ought to write a clear description or you’ll quickly lose her.
I’ve aborted many eBay purchases because of bad descriptions. The frustrating ones are the ones which don’t tell you the size, weight or material of the item, or how long it will take them to post it.
At times like this I end up buying the same product at a higher price but with straight-forward descriptions. (Amazon and John Lewis are masters of clarity.) More >
Tip #4 for eBay Success: Taking Photos
You don’t need expensive equipment to take good photos on eBay. A regular camera will do the job. What I consider to be the main factors on taking good photos are:
- Having a plain backdrop or uncluttered background
- Getting good natural lighting
- Showing the item from many angles
- Showing the scale of item
- Taking a short video if necessary More >
Tip #3 for eBay success: The Title
There’s no point in selling a great product on eBay if no one can find it. You should really maximise its title so that the search engines can track your item down.
The majority of people looking for something specific to buy don’t go straight to eBay. They first go to a search engine such as Google. If it points them to eBay then that’s where they go. More >
Tip #2 for eBay success: Selling format
Once you have a decent product to sell on eBay, you must decide whether to list it as an auction or at fixed price. Your choice can sometimes make all the difference between getting a fantastic price and going home empty handed.
There’s no fixed ruled about which format to use but you’ll develop an instinct about it from bittersweet experience. However, here’s a quick guide of the different formats: More >
Tip #1 for eBay success: It’s the product, stupid!
I’ve been trading on eBay for nearly five years and I can confidently say that the top secret of success is having a ’hot product’.
By a hot product I mean something that is either collectible, scarce, the newest model, a top brand, or has become popular because of it’s connection with a celebrity.
A few weeks before the much-hyped Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” bag was about to launch in 2007, a select group of people were given one for free at a press conference. More >
Would you end your eBay auction early?
A dilemma for you: You list a unique/rare/collectible item for a seven-day auction on eBay. You don’t know how much it’s going to fetch because there’s nothing like it around.
Within minutes of starting the auction you get a phone call from someone offering you lots of cash for the item on the condition that you take it off the site and sell it to them immediately.
Would you sell it there and then? After all, it’s instant cash and you don’t know the value of the item. Well, I wouldn’t sell it and you shouldn’t either. More >
Are you getting too many questions on your eBay listings?
A lot of eBay sellers complain they spend too much time answering questions from potential buyers.
I have answered many a question on eBay. The one that sticks in my mind is when someone asked about the diameter of an internal valve of an oven (five millimetres if you must know)! More >
Does the end time of an eBay auction matter?
The answer to this question is ”a bit”. Don’t be fooled by thinking that ending your auction at a certain time will get you lots of bids. The most important thing when selling on eBay is the item itself. If your item is considered ‘hot’ it’ll sell well any time.
But if you want to pump the profits do end the auction at a time when there’s a lot of traffic on the site. Possibly a Sunday night, the busiest time on eBay. More >