Make Money Selling on Ebay

eBay Sales Reports

2007-05-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

You can set up sales reports in My eBay to track your sales activity for the month. They will enable you to track your sales performance and maximise your business on eBay.

Reports can be accessed by going to the Selling view of My eBay and clicking the "Sales Reports" link.

eBay Knocks Out Yahoo! Auctions

2007-05-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

The fight is over, and eBay won. In a message on its site, Yahoo! told users it would discontinue its auction service.

"After careful consideration, we have decided to close down our Yahoo US and Canada Auction sites to better serve our valued customers through other Yahoo properties," the U.S. auctions site told visitors on Tuesday.

According to Hitwise, Yahoo had little choice but to shut down in a field dominated by eBay, which has a 94 percent market share.

"It comes with little surprise given Yahoo's advertising relationship with eBay, and eBay's massive dominance of the auction category," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott wrote.

The decision to dump the auction service comes on the heels of last week's move to scrap Yahoo Photos. The company told users to migrate to Flickr.

"We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo's resources and focus on core strategic priorities," said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division.

Source

Create an About Me Page

2007-05-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

Creating an About Me page gives you the opportunity to tell buyers about you. You can say anything you want to, and include links to external sites. Tell people your philosophy, why they should buy from you, your background, even add a photo. You can add up to 2 photos.

It doesn’t matter which eBay site you add your page to, it is automatically duplicated in all the other eBay sites.

You can follow their step by step creation process, or use your own HTML.

About Me page overview
http://pages.ebay.com/help/account/about-me.html

Create an About Me page
http://cgi3.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?AboutMeLogin&AboutMeLogin=&guest=1

You can also use your About Me page to promote your own websites, or affiliate links, as a form of marketing.

An About Me page gives buyers more confidence in you as a seller, and will help you to make money selling on eBay.

How to Live The eBay Lifestyle

2007-04-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

There are many tools we can use to make administrative tasks easier, to make sure we choose the HOT (and profitable) products, to make listing on eBay easier. Did you also know that once you have your eBay business established, you can AUTOMATE most of it? That means lots of leisure time!

Follow this step by step process and live the eBay lifestyle.

Steps to an eBay Lifestyle

Make Money Selling on eBay vs Online eCommerce Store

2007-04-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

it's all about traffic! Instead of driving traffic to your store, eBay already gets the traffic! Why reinvent the wheel? Use eBay and piggyback on their success.

2,000,000 shoppers visit eBay each and every day to find products that will give them solutions to their problems, with their credit cards in hand. They spend $121,000,000,000 EVERY DAY on eBay.

It makes sense to use a market that’s already looking for products and ready to buy.
It makes sense to utilise Ebay’s excellent reputation and extensive advertising – you get that for free when you sell items on eBay. No need to find a new market and new customers.

Visitors to eBay are usually ready to buy.

Your eCommerce store needs to establish itself, its market, get people's trust, and will cost a lot more to be built than selling on eBay.

MAKE MONEY SELLING ON eBAY - it makes sense!!

Use Auctiva to List on eBay

2007-04-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

Auctiva is an eBay approved site that you can use to list your items on eBay. It’s free, and they automatically create a store for you, using your user name in the URL. The selling title, category, shipping, description and payment etc are all on one page, making it quicker to list than on eBay itself. And unlike eBay’s TurboLister, Auctiva gives you a variety of templates to use in your listings, to make them more professional.

A scrolling bar is automatically created in your listings to show other items in your store, and links back to it.

And best of all, it’s 100% free.

Go to Auctiva to create your account.

How To Find Hot Products

2007-04-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

Use eBay's Completed Listings facility to see whether a product is hot or not. In Advanced Search, type in your keyword, then click on Completed Listings underneath. It will show you which auctions in the last 2 weeks completed successfully (in green) and which did not (in red). If there are a lot of reds, then the product is probably not popular, although there may be other reasons those products didn’t sell.

This gives you a general idea of what sort of products are worthwhile spending time on in further research.

You can also examine the auctions for title, description, and starting price to work out why one auction was successful, and another wasn’t.

Once you’ve found a popular niche/keyword, then go to Terapeak to research it further, and get exact information on competitors, sales reports, when to sell, how much to sell for, and more. This information is a must for serious sellers, if you want to make money selling on eBay

Use Keywords in Your Title

2007-03-30T17:41:00.000-07:00

Did you know that your title is one of the most important elements, to make more money selling on eBay? The Search facility only looks at the title of your auction ad, not in the description.

That means that to get more exposure and traffic, the title must contain your keywords. These are what visitors will type in to search to find what they are looking for.

Free Promotion

2007-03-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

Get yourself a free webpage at Squidoo and advertise yoursel - promote your products, link to your store if you have one, sell related products, whatever.

Apart from the promotional angle, you can make money from this at Squidoo.
The $ earned can be donated to charity or shared with Squidoo.

You get your own URL too.

Within 15 - 30 minutes you can set one up (why stop at one?) and it's easy.

Items to Sell on eBay

2007-03-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

One source of products to sell on eBay are stores that sell products cheaply, like dollar, discount or thrift stores.

You'll need to do your homework first, so you don't get stuck with unsaleable items.

Make a note of what they have available, then do some research. If the research says you have found a winner, return and buy those products.

It helps to create a set of like items. As an example, pull together a set of stickers
that includes multiple packages of stickers around a specific event, character, or topic. Sets of items nearly always sell for more money on eBay.

Auction Buyer Personality Types

2007-03-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

It helps to remember that buyers all have different needs, and personality types when you are dealing with them. Here are some of the personality types you may need to spend extra time on :

The Impatient Buyer
People are impatient and want their goods fast. The "Antsy Buyer" is the embodiment of this time honored sales principle. Be patient with them... explain things.

The Post-Auction Heckler
Post auction heckler's think that the bargaining begins when the auction ends. Put your foot down. Tell them no unless you have time for it.

The Unhappy Buyer
Some folks will be disappointed with your product or service regardless of how good it is. Someone cut them off in traffic and they're taking it out on you.

The Deadbeat
The most irritating bidder in the world is the one who tells you, "The check is in the mail"- of course it never comes... 1-4% of your auctions will end this way.

eBay Stores

2007-03-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

If you open an eBay store, read as much about it as you can before you start listing items in it.
I know you’ll probably be impatient, and keen to get going, however, it will save you heaps of time and frustration.

Click on every possible link you can to see what your options are.

Then set up your information pages and About Me page.

Create a logo/banner for yourself.

Set up the different categories/pages you’ll have in your store – where each item will be listed.
If you haven’t already done the keyword research for your store, now is the time to do that. Once that’s done, go back and set your keywords, and other settings.

Build a Mailing List

2007-02-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Give your eBay auction buyers the option of signing up for a mailing list so that you can contact them when you have new items listed.

If your service was exemplary, then they are more likely to buy from you again, because they trust you and your products.

It's much easier to sell to previous buyers than to try to find new ones.

eBay Research

2007-02-18T18:44:00.000-08:00

This research tool is highly recommended and used by many eBay Power Sellers, to gain an advantage over their competition and to make money selling on eBay.

It's called Terapeak.

Features :
Research your competition easily
Discover new products that make you money using eBay data
Get eBay seller research sales reports
Research when to sell, how much to sell for, and what keywords drive profits

More information at Terapeak

Keyword Research

2007-02-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve talked about the importance of keyword resarch before.
It is essential, because words are how people (and search engines) find you.
It is essential to know what words or phrases people are using, and to find those where the demand is high and the supply low, so you can get a higher search engine ranking. There are many keyword research programs and tools available.

The main source of keyword information for many of them is Overture, which will be deleted from the net soon. The industry now has to find another source for its information.

The keyword research and analysis programs currently available will need to be updated.
The best ones are those that do not rely on Overture solely for their information.

Rapid Keywords is the best because it uses several information sources, not just Overture. They have assured me that they will be providing more sources in the future, and that the software I purchased from them will automatically update each time I use it.

So, even though many people are concerned about their keyword research, I’m not!
And since keywords are so important if you want to make money selling on eBay, that is a huge relief!

Rapid Keywords has a full 24hour free trial, so you can check out first. If you only have 1 project to do, do it all in 24hrs and pay nothing. Many of the programs I tried gave only a limited feature trial, not enough to see how well they worked.

I’ve done a review of Rapid Keywords, and other keyword research and analysis tools, at http://www.free-web-site-marketing.com/keywords.html.

PayPal Special Offer

2007-02-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

The US Paypal site has a special offer on at the moment, which you can use to make money selling on eBay. That is, if you have given your buyers the option of paying you via PayPal.

They are refunding $15 for every purchase over $30 made via PayPal. Just click on the link on PayPal’s home page, bottom right hand side.

Add this to your auction description, and see your sales increase!

Note, this does not apply to PayPal Australia – unfortunately.

Using Turbo Lister

2007-02-08T16:58:00.000-08:00

It is much quicker to list items on eBay if you use their Turbo lister software. It is free to download from the site.

Enter all your items into Turbo Lister, then upload everything at once. You can save templates, to be repeated, and this saves time. There are limitations with this, for example, fonts may become skewed.

Cross promotions are done automatically for you, however, if you want to cross-promote something specific, this will need to be done manually.

Overdeliver

2007-02-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

You will soon get a reputation and some very positive feedback, if you give a little unadvertised bonus to your winning buyers. It can be something as simple as an eBook on the topic, or something which doesn’t necessarily need cost anything.

It’s the thought that counts with this. Your buyer expects to receive A, and they receive A + B. Knowing this, they will be more inclined to add you to their favourites, and recommend you to their friends.Your auctions will receive more traffic, and you will make more money selling on eBay!

Free eBay Books

2007-01-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

Just found this guy, who is giving away a collection of ebooks, totally free.

The package contains everything you need to make money selling on eBay and it is totally FREE.

You can access the package here

Testing Your Auction Ads

2007-01-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

In marketing there is a concept known as leveraging. It simply means getting the most out of your time. Or more specifically: getting the most from your advertising dollar.

In order to get the most from your auctions the critical ingredient of testing comes into play.

Services like Honesty.com offer free counters and image hosting will give you an easy free way to do this.

Test different ads against one another. You'll be amazed that something as simple as a more persuasive headline can explode your bottom line:

http://www.honesty.com is a critical tool for keeping up with and improving your auction results.

Testing is one of most essential ingredients to your overall success. If you want to know what works best, you must test.

One of the drawbacks of testing is that your efforts could possibly bomb. It’s natural to find something that works and stick with out of fear of losing.

Push through that fear and keep trying to find better results. Your goal is to establish an ad that is a winner.

PS. Auction-o-matic will easily help you to format winning ads.

Sell Unique Products

2007-01-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

Unique and unusual products attract attention. The more unusual your product is, the less direct competition it will have on eBay, so you can make more money.

There are many ways to obtain unique products for your eBay auctions. Search online and look for small manufacturers of innovative and unique products. While most manufacturers do a good job of advertising their products, there are hundreds more that are virtually unknown.

You can set up deals with them where you will be their exclusive eBay seller.

Of course, this takes tme and effort. An easier way to get products is to use an already established supplier, like SaleHoo. They have everything set up already for eBay sellers.

An eBay Business

2007-01-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

To buy a 'normal' business, would cost thousands of dollars. Plus a new business owner would pay for research in to the business, in to the market and in to competitors. Software may need to be purchased, a web site, and many more expenses.

To set up an eBay business, costs peanuts in comparison. However, you still need to do your research. And purchase tools to help you. That is, if you're serious about making sales. Look at your eBay business as if it IS a normal business that you have spent a lot of money purchasing.

You only need two interested bidders to drive up the price of your auction. If you lose one, you might as well give your stuff away. So make your auction as attractive as possible. Use the tips in this blog, join a membership site, spend whatever money you need to set up and help your business.

The cost for these in comparison to a normal business, is minimal.

Visit eBay Auction Secrets to see which tools and software I recommend to help you make money selling on eBay.

Getting Traffic to your eBay store

2007-01-07T18:31:00.000-08:00

Just because your eBay store is up and running, doesn’t automatically mean your customers will find it. You need to market it to get traffic/visitors.

Your eBay store is a web site, like any other, except that it is a subdomain of ebay. What this means is that you can market your store just like any other web site, and there are hundreds of ways you can do this for free.

Free Web Site Marketing is a web site that has already assembled these resources for you. Includes keyword research tools and reviews, a free search engine optimization tutorial and more.

Sell Based on Season

2007-01-01T23:28:00.000-08:00

I've had a break from posting on my blogs - my son came to stay for Christmas and I had difficulty getting near my computer!!

So here we go with another year of tips to help you make money selling on eBay :

Sell based on season.

Don't waste your time selling swimsuits in January, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere (in Australia, it's a good time to sell them). To get better prices, take the season into account. But don't wait until eBay is inundated with other sellers selling similar products. Get in before the rush, early in the season.

Use an Auction Template

2006-12-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

A professional-looking auction can do wonders for your final selling price. If you take yourself seriously, buyers will too. If you're not computer savvy enough to create your own template, consider paying someone to create one for you. Not only will it get more buyers interested in what you have to sell, but it will also save you time. Whenever you have a new listing, just change the image URL and write a new description.