Some Ebay Tips for Online Retailers

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"The Benefits of Trying, Testing & Touting on Ebay"

Why use Ebay?
Well, because whether you simply want to reduce wastage by selling your unwanted items of stock or use it as a regular sales channel in it's own right, there are loads of people using it so you will have the opportunity of fantastic EXPOSURE.

More people know about Ebay than your website right?

Additionally, you can use it to test your market before paying for an online, or as another channel to test price sensitivity, delivery terms etc.

What can you sell?
Anything within reason. However, items that are easily wrapped and without complicated or expensive shipping usually do best.

How to Start.
Firstly, you need to get some good feedback before people will want to start trusting you. Ignoring for a moment the possibilities of setting up multiple accounts or trading with co-operatives, simply build up your feedback by running at a break even point (or even a a slight loss if necessary). Sell your old stock to build up a reputation.

Deal with many different people to increase feedback units. Dealing with one person multiple times will only score as 1 feedback unit.

Buy loads of cheap stuff that you use anyway- office supplies, penny products etc. Screen savers, recipes, downloads, ebooks etc to build up your reputation.

Leave feedback quickly & first to ensure you get your feedback quickly too.

Ebay Trend Setting.
Ebay can be a great listening post for trends etc. If you're an online retailer and want to know what's hot to sell for Christmas - Ebay can be a valuable sounding board and provide an insight into what people are looking for & prepared to pay.
(Use the Ebay Pulse Feature for more details)

Quick Merchant Account Set Up.
You can use Paypal (owned by Ebay) to take money online if you haven't yet got a merchant account. A rival service to this that looks set to give Paypal a run for it's money is Google Checkout. Personally, I'd prefer to have my own merchant account as it's more 'grown-up' and professional(and incurs less charges) but Paypal is widely supported and so is an avenue you may with to offer in the absence of anything else - or even AS well as your regular merchant account.

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Getting your stuff noticed on Ebay
This is similar to the challenge of getting your website found in the search engines. In fact, Ebay has its own search engine, so the parallel isn't entirely inaccurate.

Given that you only have 55 characters to play with or the headline, you'll need to use these characters well.

It is important that your listing stands out. You'll need to test & measure (according to how many views you get) with what works and what doesn't.

Try underscores, highlighting, capitals etc. I advise trying various things judiciously without making the listing look like you were typing with boxing gloves on.

Getting the items listed as the result of a search is more scientific, and I'd advise using a basic formula - what it is(product description) followed by a compelling USP.
i.e.
The USP needs to be punchy yet short as you want to leave as much of the 55 characters available for the description. This enables the search engine to pick up on as much as possible.

USP's can be "Boxed", or "RARE", or "Signed Copy", or "Half Price" or "MINT COND-N" etc

Add a clear, picture(reduce the file size to less than 60Kb(at 72dpi) with dimensions of around 500 by 500 pixels (ish) tops. To avoid user-download abandonment) and take the time to make sure it's in focus and on a neutral background, with a clear description underneath.

You can revise the item if it isn't attracting (any) bids. Just like fishing - change your bait until you get bites.

Choose the listing-time as a reflection of the amount of visitors and price of the item. A car may warrant 10 days exposure but a £5 box of string may well not.

Choose timings carefully and remember Weekends are a good time to advertise as there is more people looking at weekends and evenings.

Friday mornings are a bad time to list because your listing will stop on a Friday morning! Also, I've read somewhere that it's Ebay's maintenance time and so could affect your listing.

Practice Selling Small...

Like everything else, you should test your price points and start selling items with a minimum bid of (say) 1p or 99p and encourage more bids. It makes sense to practice selling stuff you don't care about making a (small) loss if necessary by getting lots of bids and seeing what times of day, response rates etc than dong this 'for real' with your high ticket items.

Always set the starting price ending in .99p - to increase visitor response AND because it can keep the Ebay listing charges under the THRESHOLD for the next price increase.

Use long copy to describe your products.

People cannot feel, touch, taste or smell your products online and so you need as much descriptive copy about the product, the BENEFITS it conveys and also the condition that it's in. The more information you give the better, as it allays mistrust.

Give HONEST, reliable information and answer questions as rapidly as you can. If you don't, you feedback will suffer.

Where appropriate, offer guarantees and refunds.

A Couple of Disadvantages of Ebay.
They charge relatively high transaction fees and don't allow you to link to your website -
or indeed other websites.

For more details or advice, Checkout my Proven Internet Marketing Training System http://www.mklink.com/training/ today!

'till next time,

Mike Knight. http://www.mklink.com/training/