12 Tips To Make Your eBay Business More Profitable

Sometimes it's the simple things that can make your eBay business more profitable and run smoother. Here are twelve things you can do that will lead to more sales and increased profits on eBay.

1. Use auction management tools or services

Using an auction management tool or service allows you to automate most of your day-to-day auction business and frees up time for other activities. There are numerous ones available and the majority of them offer a free 30-day trial period. Find one that fits your needs and budget, lea how to use all of it's features, and then stick with it. Make certain the one you choose supports eBay's Item Specifics and Pre-Filled features.

2. Target all your items toward the same market

There's nothing wrong with offering several different items on eBay, but try to sell things that target the same general market or 2-3 markets. You will find this makes it much easier for satisfied customers to buy from you again. The majority of my customers have retued to buy five or more items from me in the past year. You should strive for this also.

3. End all your auctions on the same day and during the same general time frame

Whatever you are selling, test different days and times of the day to determine what works best for you. Once you determine what day and time works best for you, stick to that time. Your customers will come to know your auctions always end on a certain day at a certain time and know that they can go on the computer on Sunday night at 10 PM, for example, and be able to bid.

4. Fast shipping equates to repeat sales

We live in an instant gratification world. Once an item is paid for, get it in the mail as quickly as possible. This will lead to higher customer feedback and repeat sales. If you aren't seeing comments about how fast a customer received their item in 60 to 70 percent of your feedback, it's taking you too long to get things in the mail and it's hurting your business.

5. Give your product a vacation once in a while

It pays to stop listing an item, or type of item, every once in a while so that potential customers don't begin to take it for granted that it will always be available. You will find that if you don't list an item for two or three weeks, when you do it again, it will almost always result in increased bidding and higher bids.

6. Make use of eBay's "Second Chance" offers

If you have multiples of the same item and more than one person has bid on it, make a "Second Chance" offer to the next one or two unsuccessful bidders. You will find the response rate to these offers is quite high. If you simply choose to re list, there's a good chance that many of the under-bidders will never see your item when it is re-listed.

7. Use a template to create a recognizable identity

Every auction you run should have a similar layout, graphics, and style that your customers can quickly associate with you. When one of your customers clicks on an item link and first arrives at your auction, they should instantly be able to say, "This is one of Bill's auctions." They will instantly feel at home and be more ready to bid.

8. Make use of eBay's Keyword program

Most people associate eBay's Keyword program with eBay stores, but it can be used very successfully in conjunction with your auctions too. The Keyword program is usually running some kind of free trial. Take advantage of it and see how it can increase both the number of bids and the ending price for your auctions.

9. Use Google's Adwords program to attract buyers

Used correctly, Google's Adwords program is an excellent way to attract potential bidders who would otherwise never see your auctions. As long as you use search words or phrases that are tightly targeted to the item you are selling, this can be a cheap and effective promotional tool.

10. Sell only one item per auction

There are exceptions, but bundling similar products into one auction almost always leads to fewer bids and decreased sales. While there may be times you do this to get rid of inventory that hasn't sold, it's normally not a good way to do business.

11. Sell inteationally

The simple truth is that if you don't allow inteational buyers to bid on your auctions you are throwing money out the door. This is a lucrative market with lots of money to spend. Since many sellers exclude these buyers, it only makes sense that you give them the opportunity to spend their money with you.

12. Accept PayPal

If you're not accepting payment by PayPal, you may be loosing a lot of bidders and money. Buyers love the convenience of using this service and many won't bid on an item if the seller doesn't offer it as a payment option. If you're not doing it, you are throwing money away.

Gary Hendrickson has been making his living selling on eBay for more than six years. He's the author of two eBay related ebooks, has a blog for eBay sellers, and is the owner of ColdItems.Com.

ColdItems.Com The Auction Rebel Blog

Make Make Even More Money on eBay

Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.

For every seller who doesn't like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there's another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.

Normal Auctions.

These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.

Reserve Auctions.

Reserve auctions are for sellers who don't want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you'll know about if you're familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they'll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.

Fixed Price ('Buy it Now') Auctions.

Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.

Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the 'best offer'. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones – but remember that you can combine the two formats.

Multiple Item ('Dutch') Auctions.

These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don't worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.

What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.

Paul Duxbury has spent several years leaing what not to do on eBay! He now sells quality eBooks through eBay and through http://www.pk-ebooks.co.uk. He has written many articles about eBay and these can be obtained through his Free Course at http://www.ebay-profits.co.uk

eBay and How to Play the What If Game

If you've never played the 'What If?' game before, this is how it goes. You take a common item, say an empty bottle, and you ask yourself: What if it was bigger? What if it was smaller? What if it was packed with sand from Brighton Beach? What if it was painted red with white stripes?

It's a strange pastime, this What If? game, but from it has emerged some of the most profitable products of all time, the most prominent being Coca-cola which allegedly started life as a cough syrup, rather thick, very gooey, and leaving a strong after-taste. Until someone said 'What if we add water and drink it'. The rest, they say, is history.

Here are a few What If? questions, and products they must surely have spawned:

* What if we fill it with something silly?

Tins filled with holes from Polo mints, offered as competition prizes in the 1970s, are valuable collectors' items today and like one I saw in a recent sale of advertising memorabilia they can fetch hundreds of pounds a time.

Tins filled with London Smog - a kind of dirty fog that hung across London and caused hundreds of deaths daily in the early 1950s - were offered as souvenirs to American tourists who sometimes sell them on eBay.

Bottles filled with Irish Turf sold like hot cakes to Irish-American families when they first appeared in the 1980s, before copycats moved in and killed the market.

* What if we broke it and sold the pieces?

Witness the former wooden Brooklyn Bridge, to down and replaced by the current metal and concrete variety, which was sold piece by piece by Paul Hartunian and generated millions of dollars.

The same technique helps sell pieces of turf from well-known football grounds, pieces of meteorites (see www.themeteoritemarket.com - they sell lots of the stuff), even pieces of Plymouth Rock that sold on eBay last year at between $609 and $2165 apiece and none bigger than a walnut.

When the Berlin Wall fell a friend transported hundreds of fragments home, framed them, and sold them in pre-eBay times at £20 a time. Goodness knows what they'd be worth now with an inteational audience to target.

Demand and price can be inflated by linking items to specific events. So pieces of Plymouth Rock (from where originated America's Pilgrim Fathers) sold well during Thanksgiving Week and strips of turf flew out of the tustiles when Wembley's historical football ground was closed for refitting!!

* What if we buy this stuff that doesn't sell and add it to something else that does always sell?

One hundred plus Penny Black postage stamps offered at an auction in Yorkshire last month attracted no bids, not from stamp dealers unused to selling anything quite so to and tattered as these pathetic specimens. My daughter bought them instead, made them into charms, and sold them as charm bracelets under her 'Hobo' vintage jewellery banner with stamp catalogue value of £100 and £200 a time highlighted in her eBay descriptions. Those stamps costing a few pounds each, added £50 and more to bracelets normally fetching ten or twenty pounds each.

Here are some questions for you to answer and tu ordinary items that nobody wants into products that sell like hot cakes on eBay.

* What if we paint it red with white stripes? (Bearing in mind England's presence in the Football World Cup this year and a national flag of similar colours!)

* What if we look for anniversaries that might lend themselves to unique product ideas? This is one of the most profitable ways to play the What If? game so you'll be happy to know that this year:

- May 24th marks 100 years since the The London Ritz was founded by hotelier Cesar Ritz.

- Marmite was created in Staffordshire one hundred years ago. The 'Love It, Shove It' relationship we all have with Marmite might be worth exploiting. I'll be hunting through vintage magazines for cartoons and advertisements from Marmite's early years to recreate as prints, postcards, key rings, place mats, or hundreds of other popular items. Be careful not to break trade mark and copyright laws if you decide to copy early designs, they won't normally be public domain until 70 years after the artist's death. But why bother with copies, I recommend you stick with original items, they're prolific in early magazines.

- Poet Laureate John Betjeman was bo 100 years ago, the same year that the British Labour Party was bo. The perm is also one hundred years old, as is the first diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease. And the Japanese are currently celebrating the centenary of The Book of Tea, written by art historian and curator Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913) and representing the first study in English to explain the philosophical and aesthetic background of the tea ceremony. Now I wonder if that book is still in copyright or could I reproduce it, maybe bundle it with some special tea bags, or use it to sell vintage tableware, use it as the basis of a book I want to write about healing teas …. OR WHAT IF?

Avril Harper is a triple eBay PowerSeller and editor of eBay Confidential and webmaster of http://www.publishingcircles.com. She has produced a free guide - 103 POWERSELLER TIPS - which you can download with other freely distributable reports and ebooks at http://www.toppco.com

5 Secrets for Increasing Auction Profits

1. Include your ebay seller name, store, and website information with all items you ship. THis can encourage re-orders and help the buyer leave feedback. I remember one particular incident, as a buyer I wnated to reorder a product from a seller but I couldn't remember their ebay seller name and so never reordered the product.

2. Email customers after you have shipped their item to ask them if they recieved the item and if they are pleased with it. This not only builds trust by showing you care but also gives you the opportunity to add a link to your recently lited items on ebay or your website in your signature line.

3. Put a subscription box on your about me page to capture email addresses and follow up with visitors with news about your products, industry, sales you may be having, product information and inprovements, specials, etc.

4. State in all your auction listings that customers can save on shipping costs by bidding on multiple items at the same tim. Include information about other auctions you have listed at that time that may be related to the product in the auction. Try to link to the items and open the page in a new window so the bidder does not lose his place. Use a picture of the item to encourage bidders to look at your other items.

Many people use an auction listings gallery which inserts pictures of their other items into their auction descriptions like the the one at andale.com.

5. Try to add bonus items to your auctions where applicable to encourage bids. Free ebooks, extra ad space (if you're selling ad space), free software, free samples of related items you sell, coupons for free shipping of the next item the bidder wins, etc.

There are several ways to skyrocket your eaing with your auctions, be creative and you're sure to see a difference in your bottom line.

Jennifer Parks is the author of Selling on Ebay Now with free information, software, resources, and secrets for selling on ebay.

Make Money Selling on eBay What to Sell How to Sell

The biggest question people have when starting an Ebay business is what to sell. We will get to that in a minute. First, here are some general guidelines to help you know how to sell:

1. Make sure you have a quality picture of the product: The last thing I want to see when I trying to decide to buy something is a blurry picture or one that doesn't show the product well. You can sometimes raise the price of a product by taking an appealing photo of it.

2. Write an good description: When writing a product description use words to build value but don't over do it.

3. Build up positive feedback: If you don't have enough good feedback you won't make a lot of money. Concentrate on smaller items that you can deliver quickly and that are in great condition and then you can move on to bigger items.

What to Sell: Once you build up some positive feedback and reviews you can move on to selling stuff that will make you money. Just some beginning tips for what to sell: Sell something that will need to be replenished - such as vitamins, energy drinks, protein shakes, etc…. That way you can create an income stream that builds with time and more customers instead of just selling one time items. You should also plan on building a main website separate from Ebay so that you can maintain a list of customers. You can sell them your products and also cross sell them new items. This is a strategy that uses Ebay an alteate source of leads for your main website.

Another good strategy to get started is to find a product you think will do well and then see how popular that item is by using a keyword analyzer tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ You can use this tool to see how many times a keyword is typed into a search engine each month. Once you find out how many times it is searched for each month, you then need to see how many websites there are out there about this keyword or product. If the keyword is searched for a lot and there are only a few websites pertaining to it, then you will have a good chance of being successful with that product and make good money. Be creative when searching for what to sell and you should be able to come up with something that will sell.

After you are making a decent amount of money, you can then teach others how to do the same and charge consulting fees or mentor fees. A lot more money can be made from this than selling products on Ebay. Begin to sell your services on Ebay and use the items as just a way to gain new clients. If you have any experiences with Ebay and making money this way, share it with the people here. Helping others helps you.

Kent Hamilton - founder of http://www.moneygenius.net shares his making money tips for Free to help others get started. Lots of useful information. He has been developing and promoting websites for over 10 years.

List Your Item The Wrong Way And Your eBay Auctions Will Fail

It is a sad fact that most first time sellers have one thing in common; they fail in their auctions. Many of them fail time and time again, never understanding what is going wrong with their listing. They do hours of research looking for the perfect item to sell, get the auction set up, and wait for the bidding to begin. Hours go by and no bids are placed. Days go by, and there are still no bids; or there are very low bids. Finally the auction ends, and it tus out to be a total failure; no one bought the item. Considering the huge number of sellers who run eBay auctions, there are specific things you must do before you can expect to sell any item, and specific things you must not do if you are to be successful selling in eBay.

There are a number of reasons why auctions fail. The most common reason is quite logic, this is,the item is not in high demand. This problem can be avoided by doing the necessary research to determine which items sell well, and which items should be avoided if you expect any profit. This research can take a great deal of time, but in the end, you will find that it is time well spent.

Another important reason for eBay failure is related to pricing. No matter what your reserve price is, your opening bid price should never be more than $50 or so, always remember that. This is how you will attract potential bidders to your auction. If you set that opening bid too high, most people won't even click the link to read the description for your item, and they will simply walk away. Another pricing problem is lack of research. Before you set your reserve price, you must determine what the item is really worth, and the price similar items have sold for in past eBay auctions.

Poorly written descriptions are another cause of failed auctions that you must consider. Poor grammar and misspelled words drive people away. Failing to post a picture of the item will also keep people from visiting your auction page. Always use good pictures. Make sure that your description is well written. This is essentially your 'sales copy' and must be taken seriously.

Shipping prices scare people away from auctions if they are too high. Find the lowest shipping prices that you can find, and consider paying for the shipping yourself if it won't cut into your profits too much. Do not charge handling fees.

Offer great 'customer service' for all of your auctions, this is of vital value and always ask your buyers to give you feedback, this will keep your business marching. If the items that you sell are everything that you said they would be, and you offer a great customer service, you can with no doubt expect wonderful feedback from your buyers and this feedback will help a great deal in your future auctions.

If you want to lea more bout Ebay and how to sell and buy like the pros. You should visit:

http://www.ebay-auction-advice.com

Auctions Make Money

An untapped online business resource--outside of your basic Yahoo and Ebay, among others--is setting up your own auction sales venue.

Since most families have items in their home that have outlived their usefulness, they can get started at online auctions for mere pennies.

And, most selling online at auctions does not have start-up or membership fees. There is a nominal fee per item listed and a percentage commission on each sale. Still, you come out ahead.

With this minimum investment, many are flocking to auction sites to gain additional income to get their families and selves through the seemingly ever present economic downtu.

Besides the low financial risk, individuals see auctions as one of the select few online vehicles where scams are not associated, or not as prevalent as with most online business opportunities. Plus, a majority have ongoing fees which you must absorb; auctions do not.

As with most home business opportunities, to be successful at online auctions also takes time to lea the ropes. Many auction sites do much of the work for you, providing standard formats for the sellers to insert data. Sites further assist in communications between buyer and seller as well as additional support.

Perhaps the toughest part is finding the right products to sell. Don't think for a moment that Uncle Charlies' false teeth in a jar that you've preciously held onto for years will fetch thousands of dollars, although nowadays you never know. Irregardless, with sites such as Ebay with over a thousand categories, that remedies that headache!

With over 30 years of media experience plus background in special events, fundraising, development, grant writing and administration plus Inteet marketing, Walt Pfarr is now writing his own e-course, ebook and soon will publish the PfarrOut ezine newsletter. He and his wife, Joann, reside in Oklahoma and he may be reached at walterpfarr@lycos.com