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"Nineteen PowerSeller Profit Tips to Help

You Make More Money on eBay" 

© Avril Harper, Chartered MCIPD, Dip PM

Very often just a tiny change to how you run your business can help grow your profits significantly on eBay.  That being the case, here is a selection of tips to help you make more money on eBay:

1. Don’t think if an item goes unsold on eBay first time round that nobody wants it. Many times I’ve had items that failed to attract even one visitor but achieved multiple bids and high profits on second or third appearance. eBay is a fast changing marketplace with new members appearing daily and many more categories to list previously unsold goods. See the next tip.

2. A more appropriate listing category might increase sales. For example, I had some World War One stereoview photographs which eBay’s suggestion tool considered most appropriate for listing under ‘Antiques and Art > Art > Photographs > Pre-1940’, where I sold some, but not many of my 200 photographs. I relisted unsold items under ‘Collectables > Militaria > World War 1’ and lowered the price from £4 to £3. Almost all sold, many at £3, others up to £40 each. Magic!

3. Market your most likely best sellers outside of eBay. For example, I had a brass statue recently depicting a Greyhound, but not just any Greyhound. This one had won the revered Waterloo Cup in 1906. I listed it under Collectables > Animals > Dogs > Greyhound but visitors were few and the statue went unsold. I relisted it in the same category, but this time I wrote to editors of specialist Greyhound and Dog Racing magazines which I’m certain helped lift a simple ‘Dog’ statue into a much prized Racing collectible that sold for fifty pounds. (It cost me 10p at a flea market).

4. Look for anniversaries or other events that might inflate the price of your goods significantly, and list them close to the appropriate date. For example, an early autograph I had of Fay Wray, heroine of the film King Kong, had gone unsold over two listings, until she died a few years back, whereupon my third listing suddenly attracted dozens of bids and a cool £20 profit.

5. Be aware that it’s just as easy (some say easier) to sell to people who have money as to others on tiny budgets. So rather than offer cheap items with tiny profit margins, go for big ticket items. You’ll probably achieve fewer sales, but you won’t work so hard and there’ll be fewer communications to handle. Consider: computers, fine jewellery, designer clothing, original art, cars, motorbikes. But be careful and check listing fees before pressing the submit button. Some items, like cars and motorbikes cost more to list and could eat extensively into your profits. Check carefully or do as I did and promote a pair of cufflinks shaped like motorbikes under Motorbikes > Accessories, and realise later you paid £6 in that category compared to the 35p you’d have paid under ‘Jewellery’.

6. Consider setting a reserve price on a low starting bid item. The low starting price can generate early interest, but be warned that some bidders feel cheated on encountering a high reserve price on that ‘99p’ starting price item. Nevertheless, the low starting price / reserve price combination can result in furious bidding and high realisations and guarantees you get a good price or the item goes unsold.

7. Specialise! Become an expert in one area and make fewer costly buying and selling mistakes. Experience also saves you time researching and listing items for sale. You’ll also generate repeat business from regular customers who’ll come to trust you and your business.

8. LIST, LIST, LIST!!! And when you think you’ve listed enough products on eBay for one day – LIST SOME MORE! Warning: This applies to items you’ve already tried and tested, and not to expensive new products about which you know little or nothing.

9. Aim to have a web site outside of eBay from which to sell additional items to customers derived from eBay. This can be done by including a leaflet or other mention with the original fulfilment package, thanking the buyer and inviting him (or her) to visit your web site for other items of interest. Consider including a voucher for a small discount on anything ordered outside of eBay.

10. When you have your web site, get it listed faster in Google’s search engine by including the site url in your ‘About Me’ page on eBay. Someone told me that Google and other search engines index eBay related pages faster than most other sites. I wasn’t convinced, so I tried, and found it worked. Start by creating an ‘About Me’, you’ll see how in your eBay account, and say something like ‘Thank you for visiting. We are suppliers of XYZ and you can learn more about us at: www.oursite.com’. Google and other search engine spiders will visit and index your site. I follow this technique for all new web sites and find them indexed in days or weeks, never months. Warning: eBay takes a dim view of anyone giving web site addresses in their listings, or as part of an eBay ID and active links are likely to get you barred. The rule does not apply to ‘About Me’ pages.

11. Use counters in your eBay listings. These are provided by eBay, free of charge, during the listing process. Counters let you see how many visits each listing gets, from which you can plan and make changes (lots of visits but no bids is a sign something is wrong in your listing; few visits and several bids normally indicates a hot product). Few visits and plentiful bids could indicate a niche market, one with fewer members but one hundred per cent responsive buyers. But your competition can also check popularity of your listings, allowing them to capitalise on your expertise and possibly poach your ideas and products. The choice to use counters or not is up to you and you can always remove them once testing is complete and you know your product’s a winner.

12. Big benefits of using ‘Buy It NOW’! The vast majority of PowerSellers sell items on the BUY IT NOW principle, thereby generating constant sales for easily available items, and meaning the same listing can be used time after time, allowing potentially thousands of similar items to be delivered worldwide, often via dropshipping companies. Oftentimes the PowerSeller never even sees items he or she is selling. He or she simply lists items, takes payment, then sends order details and an agreed amount of money to another company – the dropshipping company - which then sends items direct to customers. So all you do is find 100 or 1000 high selling items, list them, sell the items, take payments, deliver orders, then press a few buttons next week to relist those items again in just a few minutes. Look at the great majority of PowerSellers and you’ll see some with many, many thousands of items listed, of which just a handful of listings are auction format. (Did you really think people selling 5,000 plus items create all those listings weekly from scratch?). See the next tip.

13. When size does matter and small is usually best. Aim to regularly list similar (tested profitability) best selling items as opposed to continuously listing one-off items (unless you have experience of those one-off items). The benefits of this repeat product business model are many and varied and include: less time spent listing items for sale; all things being equal, regular reliable profits can be expected from relisting the same products for sale every day, week or month; planning is easier for the business man or woman who knows almost exactly what will sell next week and the week after that, as well as roughly how many sales will ensue and what profits are likely; the seller can book holidays and take days off by anticipating sales, packing and delivery demands; he can confidently answer most queries by simply emailing back standard replies from wherever he or she is on holiday; the business can be highly automated, primarily through the push button process and by organising automated responses to buyers and sellers; even stock levels and reordering can be made faster and more efficient by use of standard templates or signature files which save time and energy otherwise spent placing orders by post, fax, email, telephone.

14. The magic of PayPal: I strongly recommend you use PayPal for receiving payments and for paying eBay fees. Buyers generally prefer PayPal and will actively avoid non-PayPal sellers. Using PayPal your customers can pay immediately they receive an invoice or immediately an auction ends, meaning less likelihood of the buyer forgetting to pay later.

15. Sell coals to Newcastle! Some items naturally attract more people in their country of origin, especially collectibles such as books about New York City or ‘Arizona’ printed souvenir china (they’ll attract more interest on eBay.com), and others from Melbourne, Australia (best on eBay.com.au), and Berlin, Germany (ebay.de). In reality, really enthusiastic bidders check the entire eBay marketplace through the ‘Search’ facility on every eBay page, but you can never be sure, so consider your market for every new listing (‘new’ meaning untested items).

16. Spread your listings to maximise your audience: You can list each item under two categories to ensure a wider target audience. Imagine, for example, that you own a car that once featured in a well-known television programme, like ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ or ‘Coronation Street’. Do you list it under ‘Cars’ or ‘Television Memorabilia’? The seasoned eBayer might use both categories in one listing. But if your product doesn’t sell, you’ve just lost money, more than if you’d chosen just one category. Two categories can work wonders, generating lots of bids and high realisations, but is normally best used with experience. So work at getting the first category right before expanding.

17. Keep careful records of successful bidders who have paid and others who haven’t. eBay provides a reminder button for your slow-paying bidders. But proceed with caution. Remember why erasers are placed on the end of pencils - because people make mistakes - and the mistake might be yours. Check, check, check everything carefully before sending reminders and always before writing derogatory letters to bidders or reporting them to eBay. See the next tip.

18. Look for hot eBay categories, where most items attract bids, preferably multiple bids. Finding these categories, and their best-selling products, is largely down to research and hard work. When you find your niche, dominate it, have more listings than others in the niche, look for products they don’t have, be first with new products. Examples from my own research: keyrings, charms, metal detectors, dog jewellery.

19. Spend time researching other people’s listings, especially for products you’d like to sell. The best indicator of a popular product is the number of people actually entering the listing to obtain more information. Visitor numbers can easily be checked from counters displayed at the foot of most listings. But not all eBayers use counters. Note too that low visitor numbers may still indicate a popular product, as for instance products for tiny niche markets with fewer potential buyers but greater intention to buy.