In the run up to Christmas it's easy to focus on buying gifts for family and friends and arranging your own seasonal festivities, and just as easy to forget about a very straightforward way to increase your bank balance in the shortest possible time - by selling Christmas goods on eBay!

Christmas is THE best time to sell on eBay, as many eBay PowerSellers know, and that applies even if there are just a few weeks left before the big day.

These tips will help you make money fast on eBay at Christmas.

Use ‘Buy It Now’ to Maximise Your eBay Earnings This Christmas

Buy It Now happens where people place their order and normally pay right away. Sometimes called ‘BIN’, also ‘Fixed Price’, Buy It Now predominates on eBay just before Christmas, mainly from buyers wanting to order before stocks run out and without having to wait until an auction ends to see if they’ve won their chosen product.

You can list your products Buy It Now as a stand-alone offer, or with an additional auction option. In the latter case potential buyers can choose to place a bid or buy right away. Once a bid has been placed the Buy It Now option disappears. There are pros and cons to using Buy It Now with auction in one listing which to my mind are inappropriate for seasonal selling. I have never used the auction / BIN format myself, and personally I don’t recommend you do either, certainly not in the run up to Christmas when the best selling approach is quick sales and definite prices. And that means using Buy It Now wherever possible.

Copy Other eBay Sellers – But Not Too Closely!

You can claim your share of the Christmas Gold Rush right away, beginning today, and you can start by ‘borrowing’ other people’s most successful product ideas and by ‘copying’ their more profitable marketing strategies, all of which saves you time and means you don’t risk your own money on sourcing and listing products that don’t actually sell.

Don’t panic, because ‘borrowing’ and ‘copying’ do not mean breaking copyright or intellectual property laws, and they won’t get you banned from eBay. That’s because we only want ideas from other people and ideas are rarely copyright protected. Only trademarks and designs, also words and illustrations from marketing materials, are copyright protected.

That means you must not copy another person’s wording or illustrations too closely, but you can create something similar; you can’t use another person’s copyright protected book or artwork but you can create your own on a similar theme, and you can not use brand names and trademark terms for other people’s products without their owners’ permission.

However, there’s no law against finding out what products sell in multiple quantities and fetch hundreds of pounds pure profit per sale for other people, and there’s nothing wrong with sourcing similar products for your business; and you won’t risk court action by copying prices and listing durations that prove most effective for other top sellers.

These tips will help you determine good from bad ways to ‘emulate’ other people’s listings:

* If you see a specific well known brand of perfume selling well on eBay and that product is available from wholesalers and allowed to be sold on eBay, you can also sell that product on eBay. If, however, the product is listed by its manufacturer as not for resale you are not allowed to sell it on eBay, even if you bought it for personal use and no longer need it!

* If the perfume is trademark registered, for example ‘Perfume for Modern Girls’, you are not allowed to use that same term in your listing for other perfumes, or even for the same product except with express permission. A trademark is for exclusive use by the product owner and others he authorises to use it …. and he almost certainly does not authorise sellers of competing products to use it!

* If a seller says the following of his product: ‘Available in sizes: 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 and colours: blue, yellow, red, green. These t-shirts are created by students at the Morton Academy and are guaranteed to compliment wearers of all shapes and sizes…..’ you should not copy that wording. The exception is where the text was created by the manufacturer who allows copying by resellers. Without evidence of right to copy you must leave other people’s text alone but you can model your own on other people’s descriptions without copying them too closely. Something like this should be okay:

‘Offered in sizes 12 to 20 ….. in blue, red, green, yellow ….. bearing the Morton Academy label and designed to suit every figure.’
 

Make Your Christmas Offers Better Than Other eBay Sellers

This Christmas, like any other time of year, will find numerous people selling similar products on eBay, charging much the same price, and creating competition that finds them sharing the market for those products and restricting their individual eBay income potential. How silly can that be when just a few tiny changes to how a business operates can lead to any one of those people earning the lion’s share of the takings on eBay? Those tiny changes include:

* Offer better standards of customer care than other sellers. Let’s face it, we all like getting good customer service, we all want our custom to be appreciated, and we all like being treated with respect – especially by people we choose to give our hard earned cash. And because all traders are not created equally, it follows those with the highest standards of customer care are likely to generate more customers than others offering sloppy service.

* Keep on reminding people it’s Christmas, it creates a feelgood factor, it gets people in the mood to buy. Do this by having a seasonal border around your product illustrations and choose a Christmas template for your description. You should also use the word ‘Gift’ in your eBay title and use icons eBay provides from around October onwards to indicate gift items with fast delivery options.

* Start your Christmas trading early and always allow at least a week to ten days for sourcing, testing and introducing new products to your business. Planning and testing reduce the risk of stocking up with products that don’t sell and gives you time to test and choose efficient dropshippers and wholesalers for your main product lines.

* The closer it gets to Christmas the more worried people become about products going out of stock or of not winning an auction for their chosen gift product. This is when you should offer most items Buy It Now so buyers don’t have to wait until auction ends to get their product, if in fact they do get their product. If you must use auction, use short durations, like 1 or 3 days, and include an optional Buy It Now button.

* Highlight your delivery times and last posting dates before Christmas clearly in all your listings, also in your eBay shop, give options for speedier delivery and last minute buys.

* Closer to last day for Christmas delivery offer to ship direct to recipients. Have a gift card service where buyers gift details of note and address immediately after paying for your product.

* Have multiple best selling products in every listing so your products are available 24/7.

* Offer gift wrapping and gift cards as standard free add-ons for all gift items. Use eBay icons to highlight your gift wrapping and fast delivery service.