Top 5 Ways To Make Money On eBay

1. Choose Wisely
Anyone who’s trolled around on eBay knows that they can find everything from blenders to toilet paper. But peddling mundane household products isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. The best eBay businesses sell unusual, hard-to-find items at a discount, says Marsha Collier, author of ‘eBay for Dummies.’ By sticking to this approach, you’ll cut down on the competition and the ensuing price wars that could eat into your profits.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know anything about antiques and collectibles to fulfill Collier’s requirements. One idea is to look for items unique to your region and sell them at a discount. If she lived in Manhattan, for example, Collier says she would regularly shop at Century 21, a famous designer discount store, and then resell the hard-to-find name-brand clothing at a markup on eBay.2. Keep Your Costs Low
Nothing eats into your profits faster than high overhead expenses. That’s why experts agree that you should start off your eBay business by hawking stuff that you already own. Once you’ve depleted all of the goodies in your basement, move onto your neighbor’s. Take out an ad in a local paper and offer to sell other people’s possessions on consignment, says Cliff Ennico, author of ‘The eBay Seller’s Tax and Legal Answer Book’ and an instructor at eBay University, which offers instructional DVDs and classes on selling on eBay. Other than your time, your costs will be virtually zero. And, according to Ennico, your efforts and expertise are worth anywhere from a 30% to 50% cut of the sale.
Once you’re ready to graduate to the next level and start your own eBay business — even if it’s a small one — Collier recommends getting a sales tax number or business license (if you live in a state with no sales tax). This will allow you to contact manufacturers directly and buy items at wholesale. Click here for more advice on setting up a small business.
3. Perfect Your Title
If you do nothing else, make sure the title on your listing gets straight to the point. “It’s the most important piece of real estate on the Web site,” says Jim Griffith, a dean at eBay University and author of the ‘Official eBay Bible.’ A common and damaging mistake even experienced users make is thinking that their title should read like a sales pitch and include empty descriptors such as “rare” and “beautiful.” Instead, just list the facts, including a brand name or model number. This strategy will help serious buyers find your item more readily since the search engine scrolls through titles when trying to match key words, says Griffith. As for the marketing, leave “one of a kind!” for the description inside your listing.
4. Build Trust
Gaining the trust of the eBay community is one of the biggest hurdles new sellers face. It’s critical for you to generate a high positive feedback score or else other users won’t even touch your auction. The score tells potential bidders that you don’t falsely advertise or exaggerate when describing your merchandise and that you ship your items quickly. Your goal is to eventually get at least 100 positive responses from other users, says Ennico.
Even if you’ve never sold anything on eBay, you can still work toward building up your reputation. Your score is based on the feedback you receive as both a buyer and a seller. So before listing your first item, buy a handful of inexpensive things just to get the feedback, says Collier. Then, once you start running your own auctions, make sure every person you interact with has a good experience. And finally, be sure you accept PayPal for payments since it offers buyers some purchase protection if a deal goes awry.
5. Grab Eyeballs
EBay is a numbers game. The more people who bid on your item, the higher the price it sells for. That means boosting the number of eyeballs that see your listing is crucial. If you’re selling a high-ticket item, you should consider spending an additional $19.95 to “feature” it, says eBay University’s Griffith. This ensures that your listing gets some prime real estate on the first page of a given category. That way you not only catch people searching key words, but also those folks who like to scroll through category pages.
“Once someone is looking at one of your listings, you can then promote other [listings],” says Griffith. EBay allows sellers to directly link to 12 of your other listings. Better yet, a serious seller could also direct buyers to his eBay Store, where one can customize a virtual “store front” and list his entire inventory. An eBay store is one of the best ways to develop a loyal customer base since users can bookmark your page and hopefully return often to see what you’re selling one week to another, says Griffith.

10 Common Mistakes eBay Sellers Make

While running an eBay business can be a great way to make some extra cash or even to make a living, there are a lot of mistakes that eBayers make. While some of these mistakes are commonly made by novices, I see experienced Powersellers making some of them too. So here are the top 10 mistakes eBay sellers make – keep them in mind so you don’t have to learn them the hard way.
1. Paying Unnecessary Listing Fees
When listing an item for sale, a lot of people will set the minimum price they will accept, and frequently they don’t even think about it and end up paying a listing fee twice as high as they would have to otherwise. For example, currently when you start an item at $24.99 you’ll pay $.60 to list the auction, but if you were to list that same item for $25, you’d pay $1.20 to list that auction. While $.59 may not seem like much, if you’re running a lot of auctions, that can add up over the long run and cut into your profit margin.
2. Not including pictures
These days with the low cost of digital cameras (use a real camera, not your cell phone), there’s not excuse not to include pictures in your auction. If you’re really in a pinch and you’re selling brand new items, then at least include one of the stock pictures the manufacturer provides of the item, but if you don’t have pictures of your items, you’re missing out on higher bids.
3. Writing one sentence descriptions or none at all.
I just don’t get it, but I guess you should never underestimate how lazy some people can be. Even if you think everyone who is going to look at your item knows what it is and how it works, don’t assume that. There may be a person who was just browsing and doesn’t know everything about the item. If you describe it in detail while another sell just lists it for sale with no description, you’re far more likely to get the bid, and every bid is valuable.
4. Not accepting Paypal
This problem isn’t nearly as common as it used to be but I still run across people who hold a grudge against Paypal, don’t like paying the transaction fee, or they have their own merchant account and prefer to use that. Paypal is so well integrated into eBay now, and it’s so easy for a buyer to use, that you had better be accepting Paypal on all your auctions.
5. Misspelling titles
There are products out there that help people take advantage of sellers who were in such a hurry they didn’t take the two seconds it would have taken to make sure the title of their auction was spelled correctly. Why do these products exists? Simple. Most people get their items on eBay by searching, and when a product name is misspelled then far less people will find it, and the selling price will likely be dramatically lower. As a seller, you don’t want that, you want the highest price you can get. Make sure that you’re spelling the title of your auction correctly.
6. Getting desperate for products to sell and overpaying for inventory
Some sellers have such trouble finding good deals on products that they can sell that they get desperate and just to keep their sales volume high, they’ll buy products that they can’t make any money on or worse, products they lose money on just so they have products to sell. Don’t do this. If you can’t find products you can sell profitably, don’t buy them. (If you’re advanced and are doing a loss leader to get backend sales, that’s fine, but that’s a little beyond the scope of this post)
7. Not answering questions
Some sellers are great about answering questions, but other sellers never reply to the questions people ask. These people are asking for a reason – they probably want to buy the product. Answer your questions and you’ll find that you get a lot more bids than if you don’t.
8. Setting reserves
I always used to hate bidding on auctions that had reserve prices because I wanted to know if I was wasting my time in bidding on the auction, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. In fact, many people won’t bid on an auction with a reserve price, myself included. If you have a minimum price you want for an item, then save yourself paying the extra reserve price fee and just set the starting bid at that price instead. That way everyone knows how much they’ll need to bid in order to be successful and won’t feel like they’re wasting their time trying to figure out how much you want for the product.
9. Trying to act like big corporations
One of the great things about eBay is how you can get personal one on one service from a seller instead of dealing with a big company. However, instead of embracing the personal small business model of eBay, many sellers want to act like they’re a big company. Stick with the personal approach, be informal, inject a little personality into your auctions. You’ll get better results if people know you’re a real person than if you try to pretend you’re some big faceless company.
10. Playing the low price game
This final mistake will prevent you from ever making great money on eBay and will likely put you out of business in a hurry. Everyone seems to make the mistake of thinking that everyone on eBay only cares about getting the lowest price on eBay. That’s just not true. Cater to the buyers who want great service, quality products, and who are willing to pay extra to make sure they have a pleasant buying experience. If the only way you can think to compete with other eBay sellers is to sell your items at lower prices, then you shouldn’t be in that business.

TOP 5 EBAY POWERSELLER TIPS!

Due to the competitive nature of eBay selling, you should always be looking for ways to communicate with your auction visitors to let them know why and how you are better than your competitors. Every good eBay Power seller does this. If you are aspiring to become an eBay powerseller, you will learn that this is absolutely necessary to gain the advantage in the eBay marketplace. To help you do that, it is necessary that you take heed to these five tips of eBay powerseller advice to help you gain more market share with your eBay business.
1. Most eBay sellers know that your feedback is a very important asset to your business. Here’s a top powerseller tip to use feedback in your auctions as testimonials for your product or business! Make sure to always use feedback that details positive remarks about you, your products, services or business itself. It will help if it’s geared toward your product.
Put this feedback in all of your listings as these will serve as testimonials to help you to either gain more bids and or sell for a higher price. This technique is also great for your eBay store as well. Put these feedback testimonials in the middle of your listings and make them big and bolded. Using this simple strategy has been proven to increase auction bids by 40%! Now, you can do this all by hand which will prove to be a laborious task and will take a lot of time to do, OR…the best way to do this across all of your of your auction listings and have it all done automatically in about 3 minutes is by using a tool called FAME. FAME will automatically place your feedback in ALL of your listings for you! The best part is it only takes about 3 minutes and it’s all automated. Even better, FAME comes in the package of tools from AuctionTNT, which is every eBay sellers ultimate auction tool which has several various tools and services all wrapped up into one! Learn more about AuctionTNT and the tools it has including FAME which will help you grow your business, increase your profits and help you to make money with eBay!
2. Make your eBay auctions and store listings stand out by using multimedia strategies such as audio and video. People love stories. Using audio and video will help you to tell a story about your item. If you can tell a story about your item, people will listen. They will tell their friends the story behind the item. If your market is real competitive, do you think that audio or video will help you stand out above the crowd. Using royalty free music is also a key to use with your audio and video clips.
3. Everyone has heard about how important it is to use good quality pictures in your listings. However, good eBay powersellers will take this picture tip a step further. Turn your photos into a good photo gallery or slide show. Ebay motor listings are big on that but not many regular listings use this eBay strategy. If you’re showing a lot of pictures, you WILL want to use video and picture slide shows as this tip alone will greatly increase your auction bids and sales.The best part about this tip is it is simple and fast to do! Again, this is a super feature that AuctionTNT! has built into it! In a matter of seconds, you can have your own slide gallery of your item! It will make your pictures stand out and capture your visitors eye.
4. One of the most important but often overlooked eBay selling tips is helping people to reorder! Make it easy for people to purchase from you again and again. If you sell ink or a reusable item, make it easy for people to buy again from you. After all, you’ve already gained them as a customer and if you’ve provided great customer service, then you’ve gained their trust as long as you’ve delivered. How often do you remember the seller you bought from? You want to make sure people know to come back to you. Put a label on the actual item. Put your name, phone number and eBay ID on the item. Make sure to send your customer a coupon with your information on it to easily reorder. You can also give them a discount for re-ordering. This is also important because your customer will be able to reorder from without buying through eBay! This will save you seller fees.5. Include your phone number in your ad. You can get an 800 number and redirect it to you home phone, Skype phone or any line for about 4 cents per minute. Most people will not call it and it is worth having because it makes you look much more professional and trustworthy!Now, start using these five eBay Powerseller tips and watch your auction business and eBay income grow!

How to Avoid Getting Scammed on eBay

eBay was rated by The Observer as the #1 website that changed the internet and is used by over 168 million users. It is a utopia for used goods, but it is also a nesting ground for ill-intentioned scammers. Being scammed (paying for an item but not receiving it, or buying a damaged item) is a very rare circumstance that is generally easy to avoid.
Steps
The first step is to check the user’s feedback. It can be found on the right side of the screen. This tells you how many items the user has sold, and what percentage of users were pleased with their service. It is reccomended that you only buy from users with a percentage of 95 or greater.
Then, if the user has negative feedback, click “Read Feedback Comments” to see what the issue was. Normally the problem is something along the lines of “Arrived Late” or if there is a serious problem, you can read the seller’s explanation of the issue.
Next, you should check how many items the user has sold, if the user had just created an account, sold one item, and has 100% feedback, it isn’t saying much. The number next to the seller name is how many items they have sold and bought, and the symbols next to the number represent the titles the seller have. If a user is a power seller, they are a trusted member of the eBay community, and you can expect excellent service from them.
Next, you should check what methods of payment that the user accepts. If the user only accepts cash or money orders, then you should be slightly suspicous. The safest method is PayPal. It draws money from your bank account and puts it into the seller’s. If you are scammed, you will be refunded (partially) by PayPal. The best part, is that the seller gets none of your personal information.
All the previous steps are to protect yourself from not receiving the item. Another way you can be taken advantage of is by being sold a damaged item. The best way to avoid this is to pay attention.
Read all of the descriptions, especially the fine print. If the condition of the item is stated correctly in the description, you cannot receive a refund.
Look at all of the pictures. What may look like a reflection could actually be a large scratch.
If you do receive an item that was inaccurately portrayed, you should contact the seller, demand a refund, and send the item back.
If, despite all of these steps, you are still scammed, or the seller refuses to refund you, then fill out an eBay fraud report, you will either get your refund and return the item, or if you never received the item you will not get all of your money back, but you will get a percentage, and the seller’s account will be shut down.

How to Avoid the 7 Deadly Mistakes of Selling

The first objective of effective sales training is to break down your bad sales habits and build your skills back up again using habits that lead to success, which are built on a firm foundational understanding of human motivation.

STEPS
Avoid talking your way out of the sale. Swallow your pride. It is our need to prove to our prospects that we are smart and worthy of their respect that often leads us to losing the sale. We talk too much and listen too little. We blurt out features and benefits without first finding out if that information is relevant to our prospects. Or even worse, we neglect to find out if revealing such information will actually lessen our chances of winning the sale. The key is to assume less, pitch less, and ask more questions.
Avoid stumbling due to systemless selling. Setting up a system helps salespeople fight against laziness also known as the deadly sin of sloth – and keeps us from drifting into bad habits that will inhibit our sales performance. You should be looking to automate your sales process as much as possible so that you can save yourself time, money and effort. And we don’t just mean automate with computers or other technologies. We mean that you must work on developing systems habits, scripts, typical questions that have proven to be effective in any given situation. It doesn’t matter what system you use, just make sure you are using one and monitoring the success it brings you. Your main goal as a salesperson is to find what works as fast as possible and then keep repeating it time after time to reach extraordinary sales goals.
Avoid gorging your way to a loss of credibility. Building trust and lowering your prospect’s resistance to change are the biggest challenges you will face early on in the sales process. For any number of reasons, your prospects fear doing business with you or any other salesperson. Therefore, what you need to do is slowly build trust and rapport with your prospects. By building trust slowly, you are avoiding the deadly sin of gluttony. Don’t go in trying to win the big deal without first building credibility. There is an old saying that in order to eat an elephant you must do it small bit by small bit. The same applies in sales. Those salespeople who try to win small pieces of business and then build incrementally end up with a much greater portion of their customers’ share of wallet. Even more striking is that those that use this strategy manage to break into many more accounts than those who simply try to go out and bite off more than their prospects will allow them to chew.
Avoid sexy but substanceless marketing. While many marketing and advertising executives are seeking the instant gratification (i.e. lust) of highly creative, flashy campaigns, salespeople are looking for substantive strategies that sell. There is an old saying that goes: sell the steak, not the sizzle. For our purposes here, think of the “sizzle” as the sexy features of your product/service and the “steak” as the solid benefits. If you are selling features, you are probably going to end up dead in the water. What you must do is sell benefits that are relevant to the prospect sitting across the table from you.
Avoid losing sales because of the blame game. Anger often rears its ugly head when reality does not meet one’s expectations. Many salespeople, especially early in their careers, are discouraged by:
the amount of work it takes to succeed in sales;
the amount of rejection that one must endure; and
the many factors that are outside of one’s control as a salesperson.
Although there are many factors that a salesperson cannot control, one very powerful factor that they have total control over is their attitude. Combat the damaging effects of anger by keeping a realistic yet positive attitude.
Avoid putting your own needs before those of your prospect. Greed drives salespeople to:
rush the prospect to buy instead of taking the time to build rapport and create trust first;
sell products/services that do not solve their prospects’ and customers’ problems; and,
at best, make one sale but lose potential future sales by ruining their reputation with the customer.
To avoid greed, you must not only become a true trusted advisor to your clients but also, and perhaps more importantly, understand how to create the perception that you are their trusted advisor.
Avoid blindly following the masses, because of envy, instead of leading through customer-centric differentiation. The reason why most sales training programs fail is that they are focused on tactical tools rather than strategic frameworks. Tactics are essential; however, typically, where most sales courses, books and tapes fall short is in tying their tactics together into an overall flexible strategy. No one can tell you exactly what notes to play, but you can get the sheet music that you can interpret and play based on what sounds right for you given your own unique style and what sounds right for your buyer, given any situation that confronts you. Differentiate yourself by focusing on the specific needs of your customers.

How to Structure Your eBay Auctions for Maximum Success

How you structure your eBay auctions has a huge impact on the results you get. One format might get five to ten times the traffic and many more bids than another. This article is going to provide with a clear-cut plan for great looking and great selling auctions.
Choose your title carefully. You need to be very clear and specific in the title. People should be able to see at a glance exactly what you’re selling. The title should get your potential customers interest and grab their attention right away. Spend a good deal of time crafting a killer title for your product.
Write a very clear description of the product in your eBay aution. Try to emphasize the benefits of your product. Make the description interesting. Use short sentences, short paragraphs and bullet points in your sales copy. This combination makes for very readable and entertaining copy.
Upload good pictures of the item you’re selling. You should use a good quality digital camera and a nice, white background. You can use white sheets if you’re on a budget. Be sure to provide multiple angles of the product, as well as close-ups. Try not to use stock picture, take your own!
Offer free shipping if possible and build the extra cost into your price point. Many people will actually pay more just to get the free shipping. Use this aspect of human nature to your advantage! If you offer free shipping, be sure to say so in your title or subtitle

How to Know Whether to Bid or Not on eBay

Don’t you hate it when you win something on eBay, and then when it comes in the mail it’s not what you thought it was? Learn how to decide when to bid on an eBay item!

1. Always contact the seller before you bid. This helps you get a good idea of what kind of a seller they are. This also allows you to ask questions about the object. They don’t always include every detail. Whether it is a mistake or not, the listings should be very accurate, so if there’s any question about what something includes or doesn’t, if it has a return policy or not, or anything you might not understand, email the seller. If they do not email you back, do not bid on the item unless your question wasn’t going to affect your bidding. If anything should go wrong, and you have a good explanation, you can retract your bid if it’s before the auction ends.
2 Read the description very carefully. If you made a mistake, misread, didn’t read the whole description, etc., you can’t blame the seller. If you won an item that you don’t want because you made a mistake, it’s yours. The only way to send it back is if the seller has a return policy. Then again, you could refuse to accept it, but you would have to deal with eBay. If the description isn’t clear, don’t bid on it. Email the seller and ask in detail about what you don’t understand.
3. Take a look at the seller’s feedback. If they have good feedback, you can probably trust them. Also, look at some of the comments they’ve received. Sometimes a seller will get pretty bad comments. Depending on what the comment is about, you can probably determine whether you should bid on the item. Also, look at the type of items the seller usually sells. If the item you’re looking at is unlike anything they usually sell, it could be cause for suspicion.
4. Make sure you know how they would make you pay. Some sellers use PayPal, which is very helpful when it comes time to pay. If they want your credit card number and you don’t want to give it to them, use an alternative way to pay. If there are no other alternative ways, you will have to give him your card number, although most sellers use PayPal or another type of payment system.
5. Always total up the cost of the item and the shipping cost, and the insurance cost should you choose to put insurance on it. Sometimes the item will sell for a pretty low price, until you look at the shipping cost. You could end up paying much, much more than you had planned because you didn’t look at the shipping price.
6. Shop around to find the best deal. Sometimes you’ll have your eye on a certain item, when another auction might have fewer bidders, less time, and be going for a lower price. Always have more than one option, if possible.
7. Take note where the seller lives. The farther a seller lives from you, the more the shipping cost will be. If he lives close to you, you might be able to save the money and pick it up personally.
8. Look for ‘Buy It Now’ items. Sometimes these items are better than the auction items. Even though some of them might be a little or a lot more expensive than the auctions, you can ensure that you will get the item and that somebody else can’t pull it right out from under you.
9. Make sure you know how long it will take for the item to get to you. If the item is for a birthday, Christmas, or any other type of present, make sure that the item will reach you within enough time. In reality, you can’t find out what day, hour, minute, or second it will arrive, but you should get an approximation. If it doesn’t reach you in the approximated time, contact the seller. Do not contact Ebay. It might not have arrived when you expected for a number of reasons: the seller didn’t send it soon enough, there were problems with the mail, etc. If the seller sent it, then it’s neither you nor the seller’s fault. The seller should then contact the mail service. If the problem is with the seller, such as he changed his mind and doesn’t want to sell, then contact eBay. They will take care of the matter. You might not get your item but you will get your money back, and most likely the seller will be banned from eBay for a while.
10. Always note the item number. This is the best way to keep track of an item you have won, bid on, or are planning to bid on. Sometimes the auction will be taken off of eBay for certain reasons. If you need to email the seller about an item not arriving to you, and the auction has been removed from eBay because it’s over, you can type in the item number and get all the information you need from the auction page.
11. Check if a return policy is offered. Sellers that stand behind their products will offer a return policy. Be sure to read the terms and conditions as most return policies expire very quickly.