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- Your Guide To Ebay.com By : Morgan Hamilton
Online shopping is one of the greatest conveniences of the century. I am so pleased with the fact that I can do my shopping through the net. However, sometimes we find ourselves so flooded by online shopping advertisements and advice that we at times have problems. We were cheated, over-charged and we did not receive any additional help with our purchases. Nevertheless, those who were acquainted with the right places to buy online have not experienced these problems. Such a place is ebay.com. Ebay.com offers you a secure, reasonable and amusing online shopping.
May be you do not know that eBay.com is the first shopping web site that is ever designed. On ebay.com you can find anything you are looking for. On ebay.com, you can buy anything from car parts to cooking utensils, food to clothes, memory sticks to souvenirs and so on and so forth. You can make easy, fast, low-cost and free of troubles purchases only on ebay.com. What is more, ebay.com offers taking part in auction for any particular product. This is what ebay.com is famous for. eBay.com is an auction site for common people but not for the rich people who attend antique auctions. - The Cost Of Doing Business On Ebay: The Article Ebay Does Not Want You To Read By : Gabriel Adams -
We’ve all heard the stories of people making a surprisingly good living from opening up a business on eBay. Some people have even become millionaires thanks to the ease of use and global reach of eBay. You may say to yourselves, “It seems easy enough. If others can make a nice profit on eBay, why can’t I?” The truth is, eBay is not as profitable as you may think. The escalating costs of fees and marketing are forcing more and more people to shut down their eBay business.
In August of this year, eBay announced to its members yet another increase in fees. For businesses who make their profit selling more expensive items, the fees don’t hurt as much. It’s the “little guys”, who make up the majority of eBay businesses, which are suffering the most. That is to say sellers that offer goods sold for less than $10. - Making Money On Ebay: A Few Important Tips By : Gabriel Adams -
Selling items on Ebay is a great way to make a few extra dollars. Simply selling items of clothing, jewelry, and old CD’s can add up to some extra spending cash, especially around the holidays. For others selling items on Ebay is their career, and they work hard to make a good living at it.
To be a great seller on Ebay, you have to be very organized. From listing the item to processing payment, packaging, and shipment, you need to make sure you have everything in order. The more items you have for sell, the better organized you need to be. Full time sellers on Ebay are good at anticipating what buyers are going to be purchasing. They take the time to research the going price of selling items, and make their selling price very competitive. Adding low or free shipping is also a great selling point. Take advantage of Paypal as a method of receiving payment. This will ensure the payment gets to you as well as reduce the amount of time it takes to get the item to the buyer. - Reasons To Be Careful When Buying Goods On Ebay By : Blueboy
I decided to write this article to warn everyone using ebay what can go wrong for the buyer when the goods do not turn up.
Recently i won an auction on ebay which was luckily for me at at a low price which is a relief after what happened next. - The Thrill Of Selling Items On Ebay By : Blueboy
Have you ever sold any items on the internet auction site ebay? If you have answered no to this question, you are missing out on a lot of fun. In this article, I write about my own experiences of selling on ebay and what makes it so enjoyable for me.
I was introduced to ebay via a friend who is called Jim. We were having an evening out in a bar when he started to talk about the items he had bought and sold on the auction website. Jim talked with passion and seemed surprised that I had never used ebay before. - The Hazards Of Shopping On Ebay By : Blueboy
Buying online at auction websites such as ebay is becoming ever more popular and there are some great bargains out there to take advantage of. There are however risks involved and in this article I am going to write about a bad experience a friend of mine went through, an experience which would cost him a lot of money.
I have used ebay many times in the past and have not only bought a great many items but have also sold a few. I have to say it is quite a buzz and is a great way of offloading some of the things that I no longer have a use for. I have even been surprised at the amounts of money some of these items have sold for. - Beware, There Are A Lot Of Crooks On Ebay By : Blueboy
I hope you have not had a negative experience on ebay. I was very much enjoying the site until one day, some freak tried to steal nearly £200 from selling me an item which did not exist. This article explains what happened and also the advice the police gave to me.
As I have already mentioned I was having lots of fun buying and selling on Ebay for a number of months without any problems at all. I regularly sold second hand mobile phones and was doing very well for myself. If I ever bought anything that cost over £100, I would offer to meet the seller somewhere, normally just off the motorway. I pulled off what I believed was some good deals and also managed to offload some of my unwanted items which I either had no interest in anymore or that I had no longer a need for. - Ebay Fraud And Risks By : Blueboy
I am one of many people who have had a negative experience on the internet auction website ebay. This article describes how I nearly lost a large some of money from a man who attempts to defraud people out of their hard earned money.
I have read about many people who have had bad experiences on ebay, I hope you are not one of them. I must admit, I was having a great time on ebay, and also making some cash myself until this fraudster ruined it for me. - How To Make More Money With Ebay’s Affiliate Program. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you’ve been on the web for a while, the chances are that at some time or other you will have taken part in an affiliate program. They generally work by giving you a URL to send people to their site that contains your affiliate number, and then giving you a small amount for each person who comes in using your link and signs up or buys something.
eBay's affiliate program follows this basic formula, but with a few twists. - How To Use Ebay’s “promotional Flyer” Tool. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you have an eBay store, then you can print off promotional flyers for it for free.
You might have seen ones that other sellers have sent you – they’re basically lists of items available in their eBay stores, usually bearing this default message: “Thank you for your purchase! Please visit my eBay Store for more great items and friendly, reliable customer service.” If you know what you’re doing, though, you can really make your flyer stand out from the crowd. - Tips For Managing Multiple Ebay Auctions. By : Kirsten Hawkins
It can be very time-consuming to keep your auctions ticking along, especially if you have hundreds listed at a time. Don’t despair, though: there are a few things you can do to take the weight off you.
Use My eBay. - Tips For “knowing Your Ebay Buyer” Before You Ship. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Before you send anything to that buyer, you might want to get to know them, especially if you’re selling them a high-ticket item that you couldn’t afford to lose. Even if the buyer has paid, the PayPal transaction could still end up being reversed, leaving you out of pocket. So how do you figure out if you can trust your buyer?
Look at their feedback for others. Go to their feedback page and click ‘Left for Others’. If they leave a lot of negatives for their sellers, then you should try to get away from them as fast as you can – if you do deal with them, make sure not to leave your feedback first. You should consider a negative someone has left to be just as bad as a negative left for them. - How To Check An Ebay Seller’s Reputation (And Why You Should Do It). By : Kirsten Hawkins
When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you won’t get all of that money back.
That’s why you should always check the seller’s reputation, or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk. - The Power Of Ebay “store Newsletters”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay Stores come with a very powerful feature: store newsletters. When buyers add your store to their favourites, you can offer them the chance to join your mailing list. You can then send highly targeted emails to people who you know were at least interested enough in your products to add the store to their favourites.
How Do I Send Them? - Design Tips For Ebay Templates. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Templates are the design elements that you might have noticed some sellers using on their auctions, like the borders around the edge, and the different fonts. Many sellers who are new to eBay don’t bother using them, and you might not have either – generally, a descriptive listing and a good picture will do the job just fine.
If you want to really finish your auctions off and make a really good impression on your buyers though, it’s useful to have a good template. Here are a few tips on what to do and what not to do. - How To Use Ebay’s “pre-approved Buyer” Function. By : Kirsten Hawkins
For sellers who constantly have to put up with bid snipers, non-paying bidders and other anti-social, timewasting buyers, eBay’s ‘pre-approved buyer’ feature is a godsend.
Pre-approving buyers lets you choose in advance who you’re going to allow to bid: not by banning people you don’t want, but by explicitly allowing people you do want. Anyone who is not on the pre-approved list will have to email you and ask you to let them bid. - Creating Ebay Selling Opportunities By Communicating With Your Buyer By : Kirsten Hawkins
One thing many eBay sellers neglect is to actually communicate with their buyers – not with some automated ‘suggestion’ system, but with actual person-to-person contact. If you can be friendly and sound nice, then you can make them think you’re doing them a favour while you make a few extra sales.
‘I Could Throw In…’ - How Do Dutch Auctions Work On Ebay? By : Kirsten Hawkins
A multiple-item (‘Dutch’) auction is an auction where more than one of the same item is being sold at once. There are two kinds of Dutch auctions.
Without Bidding. - How To Use Ebay’s “featured Gallery” Section. By : Kirsten Hawkins
The ‘featured gallery’ is a little-known and little-used eBay feature, but that’s part of its power: it is far more used by buyers than it is by sellers, which means you can pick up some new buyers by advertising there.
Basically, the featured gallery works a lot like ‘Featured Plus’ for normal listings, which shows your item before all the other results. Buying a ‘Featured Gallery’ listing shows your listing at the top when someone chooses to use the picture gallery instead of the list view. - How To Turn Ebay Bidders Into Long-term Customers. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Once someone’s bought something from you on eBay, you suddenly have all sorts of details on them. In marketing terms, this information is gold dust. If someone’s bought from you once before, then the chances are that at some point in the future they’ll want to buy a similar item, and you can take advantage of this to market to them directly.
The simplest form of direct marketing is the email newsletter – and it’s one that is still oddly underused on eBay. Simply ask people who buy from you if they’d like to be added to your mailing list, and then send them a monthly update on your new items. You should also include some information you think might be useful to them, to give the email more value. - When To “buy Now” And When To Bid. By : Kirsten Hawkins
You will often find yourself facing the choice of whether to pay a fixed price or keep on bidding. This choice might be presented to you in a single auction, or you might be choosing between different auctions of the different types. So should you use that ‘Buy it Now’ button or keep on trying to outbid everyone else? It’s all a question of weighing up the advantages and disadvantages.
Buy it Now. - Understanding Ebay's Vero Program. By : Kirsten Hawkins
‘VeRO’? What on Earth is that? Well, it’s a very scary eBay program that can get your auctions shut down, that’s what it is.
VeRO stands for ‘Verified Rights Owner’. It is the eBay policy that deals with complaints about your auctions from companies who own copyrights, patents or trademarks on the items you are selling. Unfortunately, it is often abused to remove items from eBay that are perfectly legitimate to resell, simply because the copyright owner doesn’t want people getting their hands on them. - How To Use Ebay “listing Tools”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Listing tools automate the process of adding listings to eBay, to stop you having to go through the ‘Sell Your Item’ process every time. There is a surprising amount of choice out there when it comes to eBay listing tools, to the point where you might not know what to choose. Here’s an overview of what’s useful and what’s not.
Turbo Lister. - Ebay Auction Starting And Ending Day Strategies. By : Kirsten Hawkins
It’s usually when auctions are about to end that they get half their bids – sometimes they even get their only bids. If you want your item to sell for a good price, then, it makes no sense to let it finish on a day and time when no-one’s going to be around to care.
Selling to Business. - Using The Ebay Anything Points Program. By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay Anything points are a loyalty scheme, just like you might get in a shop. The buyer earns points on their purchases, which they can then redeem for money off when they pay for items through PayPal.
Buyers can also earn eBay Anything points when they use the eBay credit card, or exchange their frequent flyer miles for eBay Anything points. People think it’s really great to take frequent flyer miles they’re never going to use and get stuff on eBay for them. - How To Market Your Ebay Business. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you want to market your eBay business? Well, you probably won’t have too much luck with traditional marketing methods – they’re just not targeted enough. The best way to do things is to pay for targeted advertising, which comes up when people search for keywords you specify: they’re looking for exactly what you’re selling, and so many of them will click on your ad.
On eBay. - Ebay Description Writing Tips. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Once you’ve drawn the buyers in with your title, the next thing to do is to tell them all about your item with the description. But just what should you write in your description?
At its heart, your item description is an ad. Without making it too obvious, you should be writing sales copy. You’re trying to get buyers excited about your products, and that’s usually hard – but on eBay, if you have the right thing to sell and give enough details, the buyers almost excite themselves. - How To Choose The Right Ebay Product Category. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Some people think it’s easy to choose the right eBay category, and often it is. Sometimes, though, it might not be quite clear exactly what to go for.
Why is it Even Important? - How To Avoid Being A Victim Of Ebay Buyer’s Fraud. By : Kirsten Hawkins
From everything you’ve heard about the risk of fraud on eBay, you might think it’s only buyers getting scammed – but you couldn’t be more wrong. Here are a few common scams that sellers fall for every day.
The Rubber Cheque. - Safeharbor; Ebay’s Own Scotland Yard. By : Kirsten Hawkins
SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If you break the rules, commit fraud or try to buy something you’re not supposed to, they’ll be after you.
When You Don’t Pay. - Taming The Ebay Search Engine. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay – and the more you know about how buyers find you, the easier you’ll find it to be found. Here are a few golden searching rules.
Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant. - Turn Your Ebay Shipping Costs Into A Profit Center. By : Kirsten Hawkins
You might think that shipping costs are simple: surely you just add up the price of your item’s postage and the price of packing materials, and charge that – right? Well, you could do that, but there are better ways to make your shipping costs work for you.
Find Cheaper Materials. - Ebay Title Writing Tips. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Trying to be help your buyers find your auctions can be a truly daunting task. Most people only search eBay by title, not by description, and that means that you only have those 55 characters of the title to cover all the possible search terms. That’s not easy. In this email, I’ll give you a few pointers.
Don’t bother with eBay clichés: There are plenty of eBay auction titles that say things like “Super rare camera wow look low price”. These are stupid things to put in your title, as no-one is going to search for them. - How To Stop Ebay Auction Sniping. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Every day, hapless bidders get beaten to the punch by auction snipers who jump in at the last minute. I know how annoying it can be, as I once had it happen to me three times in a row on the same item! The thing is that the only people who can help the poor bidders are us, the sellers.
The Problem. - You Won That Ebay Auction! Now What Do You Do? By : Kirsten Hawkins
It’s a heady feeling when you win your first eBay auction: a mixture of happiness and perhaps just a little fear. After all, there seems to be so much to do before you can actually get your item. What do you do next?
The simple answer is: you send payment to the seller, as quickly as possible. The quicker you pay, the more your seller will like you, and the sooner your item will arrive. But how you go about it? That all depends on how you plan to pay. - Understanding The Different Ebay Auction Types. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay. There are many people who don’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend. Equally, there are people who have hundreds of the same item and don’t want to sell them individually. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and how to spot them.
Normal Auctions. - When And How To Cancel An Ebay Auction Early. By : Kirsten Hawkins
One day, you might decide that you want to end an auction early. Before you do, though, you should consider why you want to do it: cancelling auctions upsets buyers and upsets eBay, and there might be a better to way to get what you want.
I Want to Change my Listing. - The Myths And Magic Of Ebay Drop-shipping Vendors. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you’ve never heard of drop shipping, then prepare to be impressed – it sounds like every eBay seller’s dream. With drop shipping, you don’t have to keep any stock at all. You simply list auctions for what your drop shipper sells, without actually seeing it yourself.
Each time something sells, you let them know, and they deliver it for you – directly to the customer. They’ll charge you a near-wholesale price for the item they delivered, you charge the customer whatever price you agreed, and then you pocket the difference as profit. - How Ebay Consignment Centers Work. By : Kirsten Hawkins
You might not ever have heard of eBay consignment centers – don’t worry, most people haven’t, as they’re a relatively new concept. The idea is that you drop off anything you want sold, and then the consignment center will sell it for you and share the profits.
You Can Sell at Consignment Centers. - How To Turn Ebay Returns Into Profits. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Don’t worry, getting items returned happens to everyone eventually. You can’t satisfy all of the people all of the time, and occasionally someone’s going to want to send something back to you. Turning returns into profits isn’t easy – but with a little determination, you can manage it.
Don’t refund shipping charges: If followed our advice and you’re now making a decent profit on your shipping charges by using cheaper materials, then you might still be able to come out ahead with returns. Just refund the charge of the items but not the shipping. I know sellers who make $1 profit on the sale and $2 profit on the shipping. If they get a returned item then they don’t really mind: they still get to keep two-thirds of their profit. - Special Rules For Selling Software On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Computer software is one of the biggest sellers on eBay – after all, everyone using eBay has a computer, don’t they? There can be problems, however, if you try to sell certain kinds of software that eBay doesn’t allow. Used software is a minefield, and you could end up buying something dodgy to resell without even realising it.
Here are the various kinds of software that you’re not allowed to sell on eBay, and how to spot them. You should always try installing used software before you sell it, as this might give you a few clues. - 10 Tips For Being A Better Seller. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you’ve got this far, you’ve got the basics of eBay. There are a few things left, though, that you might not have thought of trying. Quite a few of these tips go against the advice many give for eBay selling – some are a little risky and some are just odd. They’re all worth a try, though, and I’m sure you’ll find at least some you want to keep using.
1. Keep more records. It might sound time consuming, but you’ll actually find it easier in the long run – less time spent trying to figure out which item that cheque you got this morning is for. - A Look At Third Party Ebay Tools. By : Kirsten Hawkins
There are plenty of companies out there offering third party eBay tools. Most of them are web-based instead of downloadable, so you pay a monthly fee instead of just buying the software. But do you know what these sites can do for you? It can be hard to get to grips with what’s out there using a search engine, so here’s a quick rundown of the key players.
Andale (http://www.andale.com). - Increase Your Ebay Sales With A “squaretrade” Seal. By : Kirsten Hawkins
SquareTrade are eBay’s chosen provider of dispute resolution services. If you want your buyers to have a little more confidence in you, you can get a SquareTrade seal, and put it on each one of your auctions.
The chances are that you’ve seen these seals around. They show SquareTrade’s blue and green logo, along with the eBay user’s ID and the current date. This is followed by the text “SquareTrade Verified Seller, Click to Learn More”. SquareTrade is also used on sites other than eBay, for example Yahoo and eLance – it’s an Internet-wide trust system. - How To Leave Great Buyer Feedback. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So your buyer has paid on time, you’ve shipped them the item, and they’ve left you positive feedback. Everything is going great! You know that leaving your buyer some nice feedback will finish everything off, and make them glad they chose to buy from you.
When you see that little feedback box, though, you might find that you have no idea what to write to make your buyer happiest. Well, here’s a guide. - How To Use The Ebay “checkout Service”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Back in the ‘old days’ of eBay, getting payment for the item was entirely left up to sellers: you had to choose your payment service, sign up for it and then send links to your buyers. Now, though, eBay handle most of the complexities of payment for you with their checkout.
How Do I Offer the Checkout? - How To Report And Handle Ebay Transaction Problems. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Even when there aren’t any disputes, you might run into a few transaction problems on eBay – glitches that aren’t really anyone’s fault, but are just the result of a technical malfunction or another situation beyond the buyer or seller’s control. The number one cause of problems like this is email.
Email Problems. - How To Increase Your Auction’s Visibility On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Once you’ve optimised your titles for search terms and your items have short durations to get them near the top of the results, there’s really only one sure-fire way to make your auction stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, it involves paying eBay more money – but it can really pay off, especially for higher-priced items.
In this email, I’ll take you through the various ‘listing upgrades’ eBay offer, how much they cost, and whether they’re any good. Remember that if you want any of these, you can just tick their box while you’re going through the process of listing your item. The charges will be added to the other fees you’re charged for the listing. - How Long Should Your Ebay Auction Run? By : Kirsten Hawkins
When it comes to durations, you have a wide range of choices: your auction can run for 10, 7, 5 or 3 days, or even only one day if you have a good enough feedback rating.
There’s a reason why you get to choose your duration, and that’s because different durations are good for different things. To decide how long you should list your items for, all you need to do is ask yourself a few questions. - What You Can Learn From Competing Ebay Auctions. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you’ve a savvy businessperson, the chances are you’ve already taken a look at your competitors’ auctions. What you might not have realised is just how much you can learn if you know what you’re looking for.
To begin with, don’t bother looking at listings that haven’t ended yet – you don’t know what’s going to happen with them. Instead, use the advanced search page to search for listings that sold. Just go to the advanced search page, type in the keywords that you know will find your competitors’ items, tick ‘Completed listings only’ and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Set it to sort by ‘Price: highest first’. - Ebay Auction Pricing Strategies. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If your items aren’t selling, then you might have a bad pricing strategy. There as many pricing strategies in the world as there are buyers – if you look at two businesses selling the same thing, often the only difference you’ll be able to find between them is pricing.
The ‘Few Dollars More’ Strategy. - How To Determine What’s Really Selling On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you want to make the most money you can on eBay, then you need to know what sells. But how can you find that out?
The Manual Way. - 10 Great Ways To Source Low Cost Products For Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you’re having trouble finding stock cheaply enough to sell it for a good profit? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Garage sales. The chances are you’ve gone most of your life seeing ads for these and ignoring them. Start going to as many as you can. You won’t find good things at every one, but when you find one person with good stuff, make them an offer for the lot – they’ll be so happy about it that you can get a real bargain. - Using Paypal On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
PayPal and eBay were made for each other – and now that eBay own PayPal, using them together is getting even easier.
What is PayPal? - Seasonal Selling On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
When you sell on eBay, it’s important to know how to take advantage of the kinds of markets you encounter in the different seasons. As a rule, the summer months are slow and the winter period is fast, but there’s more to it than that.
It Depends What You’re Selling. - Your Rights As An Ebay Buyer. By : Kirsten Hawkins
When you buy things on eBay, you pay the seller before they send you anything. This means that you, as a buyer, are vulnerable to all sorts of problems. You might not get the items you have paid for, or they might be damaged or faulty. Luckily, you have two very important rights when you buy on eBay.
The Right to Receive Your Item. - An Introduction To Bidding And Buying On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Have you noticed that whenever you open a newspaper, watch the TV or have a conversation, people seem to be talking about eBay? If you’ve never used it and you’ve no idea what it’s all about, then the chances are that you’re starting to feel a little left out. But don’t worry! This email contains everything you need to know about the basics of bidding and buying on eBay.
So What is eBay? - Top 10 Reasons Why Ebay Auctions Fail. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Are you finding that auction after auction fails to attract any bidders or buyers? It happens to the best of us sometimes – take a good look at these things to see if any of them could be making your bidders avoid you.
The starting price was too high: People don’t want to have to make a high bid before anyone else has – you should always start your auctions low and let the bidders bid them up. - Should You Run Auctions On Other Sites Besides Ebay? By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay doesn’t have very many competitors, and the ones that there are remain small by comparison – that’s part of what makes eBay so powerful for niche items. If you’re selling more common things, though, you might like to list auctions on other sites besides eBay, to increase your potential customer base and avoid some of the occupational hazards of relying on eBay for all your business. But which ones are worth bothering with?
Yahoo! Auctions. - What’s Your Ebay Reputation Really Worth? By : Kirsten Hawkins
Your eBay reputation is everything you are on eBay – without it, you’re nothing. Your reputation is worth as much as every sale you will ever make.
If you’ve ever bought anything on eBay (and the chances are you have), then think about your own behaviour. Buying from a seller with a low feedback rating makes you feel a little nervous and insecure, while buying from a PowerSeller with their reputation in the thousands doesn’t require any thought or fear – it feels just like buying from a shop. - Why Adding Pictures Increases Ebay Bid Response. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Buyers really like pictures. The more pictures you have, the more they’ll feel like buying their item from you, and not from your competitor. In fact, there are plenty of buyers who will literally leave your auction within 5 seconds of arriving if they don’t find a picture there waiting for them.
A little extra work on photography can pay off massively, especially if you’re working on slim profit margins. But why is it so effective? - Is Your Ebay Income Taxable? By : Kirsten Hawkins
The income you get from selling items on eBay is just like the income you get from any other business: it is taxable, at least in theory. In practice, many get away without declaring profits from their eBay sales just because they’re hard for the government to track. If you want to be strictly within the law and legit, though, you should be paying tax.
Income is Income. - How To Dispute Unfair Ratings On Ebay By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you’ve done everything you can to keep your buyers happy – but still someone’s left you negative feedback! You don’t think it’s fair, either because you fixed the buyer’s problem, or they never gave you a fair chance to fix it. What can you do?
Communicate. - How To Use Ebay’s “second Chance Offer” Feature. By : Kirsten Hawkins
When someone wins your auction, you might think that’s the end of it. In fact, you can offer the item to anyone else who bid in the auction but didn’t win.
Why Would I Do That? - How To Get Help From Ebay’s Safeharbor Team. By : Kirsten Hawkins
SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If a buyer does something they're not supposed to, then it's SafeHarbor you should be reporting it to.
Non-paying Buyers. - When Not To Use “buy Now”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
As you get more experienced on eBay, you might be tempted to use fixed price auctions, just so you can budget better. It’s often more reassuring to know that either you will make a small profit on an item instead of having to wait and see whether it makes a big profit or a big loss. However, you should be aware that there are some times when you really shouldn’t use ‘Buy it Now’.
In the Holiday Season. - How To Respond To An Ebay Buyer’s Complaint. By : Kirsten Hawkins
At some point in your eBay selling life, one of your customers is going to send you a complaint. As long as you respond to it properly, however, it’s easy to keep a complaint from turning into a crisis.
Respond Immediately and Grovellingly. - An Ebay Seller’s Checklist. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Being a seller is a lot of responsibility, and sometimes you might feel like you’re not doing everything you should be. This simple checklist will help you keep on top of things.
Have you found out everything you possibly could about your items? Try typing their names into a search engine – you might find out something you didn’t know. If someone else is selling the same thing as you, then always try to provide more information about it than they do. - Learning The Ebay “Lingo”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Do you have trouble sometimes understanding when people talk about eBay? Don’t worry, some of the jargon is really obscure, and you can’t be expected to understand it until someone’s told you what it means. Here’s a little list of some of the most useful lingo to know, but you don’t need to memorise it – even the most common jargon is only used relatively rarely.
Words. - Are There Any Ebay “secrets” That Are Worth Buying? By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you look around a little on the web, you’ll no doubt come across people trying to sell you ebooks about eBay’s ‘secrets’ for as much as $20. Here’s a sample:
“Along with 400,000 other excited eBay fanatics I now make a living using the Internet and eBay. I can go days without ever speaking to a single customer, but I have a world wide customer base. My online business runs like a well oiled machine with a part-time effort!” - 10 Tips For Increasing Your Ebay Response. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you’ve got the buyer in front of your auction, and they’ve read the description. They’re must be interested, or they wouldn’t be looking… but just how can you push them over that line and make them leave a bid? Read on for some tips.
Improve your picture: In all that description writing, you might have missed the vital importance of your item’s picture. A picture with bad lighting or an intrusive background looks amateurish and won’t make anyone want to buy from you. - What? You Don’t Have An Ebay Store? By : Kirsten Hawkins
In fact, you might not even have heard of eBay stores. Read on to find out what you’ve been missing.
eBay stores come at three levels: Basic for $15.95 per month, Featured for $49.95 per month or Anchor for $499.95 per month (yes, that is typed correctly: almost $500). The best place to start out is with Basic (you can even get a month’s free trial), but if you like what you find then you should upgrade to Featured quickly, simply because it has so many extra features. Note that you must have a feedback rating of at least 20 before you can get an eBay store. - The Ebay Buyer’s Faq. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you have a question? Has something gone very wrong and you don’t know what to do? Well, fair enough. Here are the questions that I hear all the time from buyers.
Does eBay have a Customer Service Department I Can Phone? - What Else Belongs On Your Ebay Shipping Box? By : Kirsten Hawkins
The quickest answer I feel I should give to this question is this: not your handwriting! Scrawling addresses on boxes with a pen is extremely amateurish, and you shouldn’t do it. Print your own labels instead. But what should you put on them?
The buyer’s address: This might sound obvious, but you need to make sure the full address is there, including country and zip or postal code. Make sure you spell their name correctly, too, as they might be a little insulted if you don’t. - 5 Simple Steps To Posting Your First Ebay Auction By : Kirsten Hawkins
It’s surprisingly simple to get started posting your very first auction on eBay. Here’s what you need to do.
Step 1: Open an eBay seller’s account. - Is The Ebay Customer Always Right? By : Kirsten Hawkins
I can answer this question for you right now: the answer is ‘yes’. In fact, the answer is ‘YES!’ – the biggest yes you’ve ever heard. Of the course the customer is always right. If you want to be a successful eBay seller, you should go miles out of your way to make sure every single one of your customers is 100% satisfied, however much time or money it might cost you.
A dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part. - 10 Steps To Successful Selling On Ebay By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you want to be a successful seller with your own eBay business, do you? Here’s a simple, ten-step path to eBay enlightenment.
Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You’ll probably see the ‘sweet spots’ quite quickly – those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price. - Ebay – Part Time Or Full? How To Decide. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Going full-time as an eBay seller is living the dream: making a real income, working from home, being your own boss and all the rest of it. It’s the promise of a million scams, and it’s finally come true – at least for some.
What they don’t tell you in the success stories, though, is that becoming a full-time eBay seller is by no means for everyone. You really, really ought to try it part-time before you even consider taking it up full-time, and even then, caution is advisable. Before you burn your suit, here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself. - 10 Sure-fire Ways To Kill Your Ebay Business. By : Kirsten Hawkins
It’s surprisingly easy to kill your eBay business, if you’re not careful – sure, you can start over from scratch without it costing you anything, but do you really want to? Still, if you want your business to end up dead in the water, here are some simple ways to do it.
Lie about an item: Say it works fine when it sometimes doesn’t work. Say it’s in perfect condition when it has a scratch. Your customers will hate you! - How To Use Ebay To Grow Your Other Businesses. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Most of the people who make money from eBay don’t actually make all of that money on eBay. There are all sorts of ways you can use eBay to give your existing businesses a helping hand.
The Supply Side. - How To Think Like An Ebay Powerseller By : Kirsten Hawkins
So what’s a PowerSeller? PowerSellers are the people on eBay who’ve made it, recognisable by the little ‘PowerSeller’ badge next to their name. You’ve probably seen these people around – and to succeed on eBay, you want to think the way they do.
How to People Get the Right to Call Themselves PowerSellers? - 10 Ways To Avoid Being Ripped Off On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
It is important to remember that eBay is a lot like a marketplace. There will always be a dodgy guy in the corner, selling things that most people wouldn’t touch. The trouble is that, on the Internet, these people can be a little harder to spot. Here are ten tips to help you keep an eye out for the rip-off merchants.
1. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is: This holds for everything in life, but especially for eBay. Things that seem too cheap are usually too cheap for a reason – it might be a complete scam, or the items might just be of extremely poor quality. Investigate before you go further. - How Important Is Your Buyer’s Reputation? By : Kirsten Hawkins
Your reputation as a buyer (or ‘feedback rating’) is the most important thing people see when they deal with you on eBay. It is on the basis of this little number that they will decide whether they can trust you or not.
Each time you buy or sell something on eBay, people can leave feedback for you, and you can leave feedback for them. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral, along with a comment. Your feedback rating, then, is worked out using a very simple sum: the number of positive feedback comments people have left for you, minus the number of negative ones. This means that someone with a feedback rating of 28, for example, might have 30 positive ratings and 2 negative ones. - Introducing The New Ebay “buyer’s Credit” Program. By : Kirsten Hawkins
In an effort to compete with more ‘traditional’ shops, eBay has started to offer finance agreements though PayPal for expensive items. This means that, if the seller decides to offer it, you can now spread the cost of an item into affordable monthly payments.
This is good for buyers, good for sellers, and good for eBay. Buyers can get the kind of credit agreements they’re used to in shops. Sellers can make their items more attractive to buyers who might not have all the money then and there, but eBay still pays the sellers upfront – they don’t have to wait to be paid each month or anything like that. Buyers make their monthly payments to PayPal’s credit provider instead. - How To Get Ebay Coupons. By : Kirsten Hawkins
You have to be very lucky to be one of the chosen few who receive an eBay coupon by email. These coupons are just like cash that you can use towards anything you buy on eBay – the only conditions being that you pay using PayPal, and that you are using eBay in the USA, Canada or the UK.
There are two ways to get eBay coupons. - Tips And Tricks For Using Ebay Search. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.
Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant. - Watch Out For Ebay Automobile And Computer Scams. By : Kirsten Hawkins
There aren’t that many scammers on eBay – but the ones there are tend to be greedy. This means that they will always try to pull their scams on high-value items like cars and computers, so that they can make a lot of money quickly. Since buyers generally buy these items very rarely, they may not know about the various scams out there.
Automobile Scams. - When Things Go Wrong: How To Resolve Ebay Disputes. By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay has quite an intricate and long-winded dispute resolution procedure. In this email, I’ll try to break each step down for you, so you can see what’s involved and how long it takes.
As an example, let’s go through what you would do if you paid for an item but didn’t receive it from the seller. - Tips For Buying Collectibles On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Buying collectibles is one of the most enjoyable things to do on eBay, simply because you can find so many things that you just can’t get anywhere else. Here are a few tips to help you on your way.
Find your Category. - Understanding Ebay Buying Tools. By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay offers quite a few simple tools to help make your buying easier, so you don’t lose track of what you’re doing. Most of them are on the ‘My eBay’ screen – if you’re logged in, you can go there just by clicking ‘My eBay’ on the toolbar at the top of any eBay page.
My Summary. - How To Become An Ebay “sniper”. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you bid for a few things on eBay, the chances are that sooner or later you’ll end up getting your bid beaten at the very last second by a ‘sniper’. This can be a frustrating experience, and while in theory sniping is against the rules and you can report it to eBay, in practice they never do anything about it.
The bad news is that there’s only one way to beat the sniper – and that’s to become the sniper. The good news, though, is that once you understand sniping you can use it to win auctions at a far lower price than you would otherwise. - Top 10 Strangest Ebay Items Ever Sold. By : Kirsten Hawkins
eBay can be a very odd place, given that you can sell almost anything you want. Here are the auctions we’ve picked as being the strangest ever.
#10 - Girlfriends: Some girls auctioned their services as ‘imaginary girlfriends’, who would send the winning bidder pictures of themselves and loving letters, which they could use to pretend they had a girlfriend
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#9 - Wedding dress: Nothing strange about selling a wedding dress, you might think – but this was the guy’s ex-wife’s wedding dress. And he modelled it, as well as writing a long screed about his ex-wife in the description. It sold for £3,850. - Ebay: The First 10 Years. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Yes, you read that correctly: ten years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site – then called ‘AuctionWeb’ – to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name ‘eBay’ comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company’s name was Echo Bay, and the ‘eBay AuctionWeb’ was originally just one part of Echo Bay’s website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.
The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb’s expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer. - Doing Your Holiday Shopping On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Most people do far more shopping in the holiday season than they do for the rest of the year – and now you know how to use eBay, why not do it there? If you know what kind of thing your friends and family like then eBay’s categories are ideal places to get ideas. Plus, you won’t have to fight your way through the holiday rush when you’re getting everything posted to you at home!
Buying Presents for People. - The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Buying On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
The Case For.
Whatever you want to buy, whether it’s large or small, cheap or expensive, everyday or just plain weird, the chances are you can find it on eBay. It’s the largest auction site in the world, and when it comes to the variety of what’s on sale, size is vital. When was the last time you heard of someone getting a great deal on a weird and wonderful item at uBid or Yahoo Auctions? - A Beginner’s Guide To The Different Ebay Auction Types. By : Kirsten Hawkins
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.
For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you. - What You Need To Know Before You Get Started On Ebay. By : Kirsten Hawkins
So you’ve decided that you want to get started as a seller on eBay. There are a few things that you really need to know before you go and throw yourself in at the deep end.
What to Sell. - Ebay Income Possibilities. By : Kirsten Hawkins
If you’ve ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.
Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that’s eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month! - Staying Out Of Trouble With Ebay’s Listing Policies. By : Kirsten Hawkins
While you can sell most things on eBay, quite a few things are banned. If you try to sell any of these things then eBay will remove your auction and all bids will be void.
Here is eBay’s full list of prohibited or questionable items: - Auctions: Sales Solutions With Marketing Potential By : Scott Lindsay -
You have evaluated your stock and have discovered you have more of a certain product line than you feel you are able to sell. Upon further evaluation you discover you have a line of products you will be discontinuing.
This is a moment of decision. A moment when you decide how to dispose of the items you don’t feel you can reasonable sell in your normal online store.
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