|
One of the biggest secrets to selling on eBay is when you should list your items. A lot of folks list their items on Saturday or Sunday morning because frankly, that's when they have time to sit down at the computer and hammer out a description. Others wait until 10pm on a weeknight because the kids are in bed and the house is quiet. Is there a problem with this? Well, just remember that the time you list your item is also the time that it will end - and you want to make sure that your audience at that time is as large as possible. So listing at 10pm Pacific Time probably isn't the best idea - I mean, that's 1am on the East Coast!
The number of bidders available at the ending time is of utmost importance to your auction. As a matter of fact, most of the bidding on any auction will occur at the beginning and on the last day, of your auction, since these are the times that your item will show up at the top of the eBay search pages. An auction is truly at its best when two or more people fight over your item, and they may not be awake to do so at 1:00 in the morning.
Of course, the best time to list an item really depends on what exactly that item is. Tools like AuctionIntelligence can help you here. It allows you to enter the item that you want to know the best time to list, and it will go out to eBay and find all of the items like your item and tell you the prices for the last two weeks, along with the time when they ended. That can be invaluable - if you are selling computer parts, then the best time may be a Saturday afternoon, when more males are home and on the computer. But if you're selling baseball cards, you may want to list them in the early evening on the weekend in order to catch kids on the computer.
Once you figure out the approximate time you want to list, you need to start taking into account time zones and current events. Remember - the east coast is 3 hours ahead of the west coast, so sellers on the west coast should list a bit earlier than sellers on the east coast in order to hit "prime time." And speaking of prime time - don't forget that people have lives - don't schedule your item to end in the middle of the latest episode of Survivor, or even worse, the Super Bowl...you're just not as likely to get the same kind of traffic as an auction that doesn't have competition.
There are many other factors that also come into play. Watch the weather forecasts for various parts of the country. If the East Coast is due for heavy rains, more possible bidders could be available at their computers instead of outside enjoying the spring or summer weather - and vice versa. If an area is in the middle of a terrible heat wave, they may be hiding inside at their computer instead of doing anything outside. In fact, good weather is usually bad for online auction sales. You may not want to have items close on Thanksgiving afternoon when most of the country are sitting down to a big meal.
There are a few ways to avoid overpaying for your inventory. First, you can follow the secrets that we have here for eBay buyers. They list ways to pay the least amount for an auction, but remember, these are single items, and it often takes days or weeks to win an auction using these strategies. As a seller, you probably want to sell more items as quickly as possible in order to make the most profit.
Which brings us to our second strategy. Buy in quantity. You can almost always negotiate a better deal if you are buying items in bulk. This is the whole premise behind "Family Size" items, and behind whole chains of stores like "Costco," "Price Club," and "Vons."
Taking bulk purchases to the extreme, you can consider wholesale purchases - these allow you to buy items at factory prices and realize even more profit. The catch though is that you often have to buy hundreds or thousands of an item - which means you need somewhere to store all of those items until you sell them, and you need to make sure that there aren't a whole lot of other sellers out there, since you'll want to be able to unload your merchandise.
There are a few key things that will help you get the highest price for your item. First, make sure to list your item in the right category in order to get the highest price for it. AuctionIntelligence is a great tool for determining the best category to list in. In fact, there's even a category report that will show you the sell-through rate, the average price, and a bunch of other information for any item you search for.
Second, make sure to include a picture of your item. And not just any picture that you find on the web, but a picture that you took, of your exact item. People like to see what they are buying and are willing to pay more for an item that they have really seen.
Third, make sure to use the right words in your title. So many people out there add characters that they think will catch your attention like "L@@K" and "###HOT###." Not only do these waste valuable title real estate, they don't even describe the item, and describing the item in the title is exactly what you need to do in order to pull someone in from the search results.
Fourth, make sure to price your item correctly. A bit of research with AuctionIntelligence goes a long way here. The entire Report Center is all about telling you what price to expect for your item by summarizing all of the prior sales for the same item. After all, it doesn't take a genius to realize that if you price your item too high, you wont get any bids, and if you price it too low, well you just aren't making as much as you should. Remember, there are several aspects to pricing an item. It's probably better to have a lower starting price in order to attract bids, and have the item work it's way up to the final value. A Reserve Price can be a helper here, but make sure not to set it so high that it will never be reached - since the reserve fee is only refunded by eBay if the item actually sells.
Fifth, make sure to use a good description. It really does count. Why? For the same reason as pictures - humans like to have a sense of what they are buying. Write your description in an effort to answer any question buyers might have. You could get many, many buyers looking during the last five minutes, and that simply not enough time to ask a question and get the answer. And, if a buyer doesn't have enough time to get their questions answered, they will most likely not bid. In the event that someone has a question in the last hour or two, or even the last 24 hours (when your item is in the "ending today" category), do your best to be available. Check your email often.
Getting the best prices for your items starts with a bit of common sense. Make sure that your visitors have every reason to come back to see your auctions next time, and get rid of everything that is not essential or takes up their valuable time. If there are six other auctions for the same item that you want to sell, look at the one that is getting the most bids and the ones that is getting the least (or no) bids and see what the differences are. If you are new to selling, do a lot of browsing first. See how other auctions look.
To really sell on eBay you need to be efficient, knowledgeable, and have a good "system." That system usually includes quick ways to list items, a good place to host your pictures, and a good way of determining the price that you should charge and what features you should take advantage of when listing your item. We've got a few tools here that we think will help you in these areas.
For listing on eBay, there's nothing better than eBay's own Turbo Lister. It's free, it allows you to use auction templates, and it stores all of your items in an item database for easy relisting in the future.
For handling checkout, just use PayPal's checkout functionality. Did you know that they will automatically send your winners an invoice at the end of an auction? And you can use PayPal to print UPS and USPS shipping labels as well.
The most important thing to really selling is of course the research. Knowing what to list, where to list it, and when to list it without going through days and weeks of research is the way that you'll separate yourself from your competition. There's no better tool out there than AuctionIntelligence for that job - it spends the time analyzing eBay for you so that you can concentrate on your customer service, item acquisition, and shipping.
Just like there are things you can do to increase your profit, there are also things you can do to decrease your profit. Remember as a seller not to do these things - in the long run, they won't make you more money (even if you think they will).
Don't charge extra for shipping and packing supplies. Has an antique store ever charged you extra to wrap the fragile antique you bought in lots of tissue paper before letting you out the door? Did that store ever tell you it would be an extra 50� if you want a bag? Did they ever charge for the bag by a percentage of the antique that you purchased? As and eBay seller, you need to remember that there are expenses in any type of business, and you should deal with these eBay fees in the same way you would any other business - deduct them at tax time.
Don't include a huge disclaimer of what you wont stand for in a buyer. There's nothing more likely to scare people away than a bunch of text about who they can not be or what they need to do before bidding. Buyers don't care about all of the bad buyers you have had in the past, so don't tell them. Don't read this the wrong way - disclaimers are fine, but make sure they are short and to the point. Answer your buyers questions, don't whine about how bad your life it.
Don't sneak in extra charges. This goes hand in hand with not charging for packing supplies. Buyers have a pretty good idea of how much things cost, so don't go charging $5 for insurance on a $30 item. After all, the buyer can get insurance direct from PayPal or eBay for less than that! Just remember, the best way to make a profit is to sell a lot of items for more than you paid for them, not to make an extra 2.39� by overcharging on handling.
|
