Auction Power Guide

Many people have at least entertained the idea of starting up their own business on eBay, to allow them the freedom of working from home on their own schedule. However, few actually make the leap into trying, and fewer still are actually successful at creating a home business on eBay that brings in a decent income. The reason for so many failures is that most people don’t bother to do their research, pay attention to their customers’ wants and needs, or even take advantage of the tools available to them to increase their chances at success. You can save yourself from making these pricey mistakes and steer clear of failure with these simple tips:

Do Your Research

Before you start picking up items on eBay, do some research to see what items are selling well at the moment. Just by checking out the current auctions on eBay, you can find the most profitable products that you can sell yourself to make money. Try viewing different categories, and then organize the listings by highest bid first, to see what items are fetching the highest price. These are the items you want to focus on selling yourself.

Focus On Customer Service

This is the most obvious way to build up a successful business, and yet, so many sellers completely ignore it. Customer service is the cornerstone of any good business. Unhappy customers means less sales, and ultimately, an unhappy seller. Go above and beyond with your customers, offering them a return policy, exceptional service, polite responses to their questions, and prompt solutions for their problems. Include extras in your packages, like a hand-written thank you note, or a small bonus item along with their auction item. Every little bit counts, and your customers will definitely take notice. These are the things that keeps customers coming back, and will encourage them to spread the word about your business.

Take Advantage Of The Extras

Sellers on eBay have a lot of tools available to them to boost their visibility and their business’s profits. Take advantage of everything eBay has to offer. Build up your about me page with information about you, your business, and your customer service policies. Use your eBay blog to talk about the products you are offering for sale. Participate in the forums and help new buyers out, and they’ll likely follow the link to your store. Anything that gets your name out there can help you gain more customers.

Taking the time to utilize the options available, provide your customers with quality customer service, and researching the items that sell before investing in anything are the three key steps to building a successful home business on eBay. With so many sellers skipping these essentials, you can really push yourself ahead of the competition if you just take the time to work out your strategies before you begin selling. Focus on these methods, and you will no doubt see wonderful results if you stick to it.

Vickie Sayce

Many people have at least entertained the idea of starting up their own business on eBay, to allow them the freedom of working from home on their own schedule. However, few actually make the leap into trying, and fewer still are actually successful at creating a home business on eBay that brings in a decent income. The reason for so many failures is that most people don’t bother to do their research, pay attention to their customers’ wants and needs, or even take advantage of the tools available to them to increase their chances at success. You can save yourself from making these pricey mistakes and steer clear of failure with these simple tips:

Do Your Research

Before you start picking up items on eBay, do some research to see what items are selling well at the moment. Just by checking out the current auctions on eBay, you can find the most profitable products that you can sell yourself to make money. Try viewing different categories, and then organize the listings by highest bid first, to see what items are fetching the highest price. These are the items you want to focus on selling yourself.

Focus On Customer Service

This is the most obvious way to build up a successful business, and yet, so many sellers completely ignore it. Customer service is the cornerstone of any good business. Unhappy customers means less sales, and ultimately, an unhappy seller. Go above and beyond with your customers, offering them a return policy, exceptional service, polite responses to their questions, and prompt solutions for their problems. Include extras in your packages, like a hand-written thank you note, or a small bonus item along with their auction item. Every little bit counts, and your customers will definitely take notice. These are the things that keeps customers coming back, and will encourage them to spread the word about your business.

Take Advantage Of The Extras

Sellers on eBay have a lot of tools available to them to boost their visibility and their business’s profits. Take advantage of everything eBay has to offer. Build up your about me page with information about you, your business, and your customer service policies. Use your eBay blog to talk about the products you are offering for sale. Participate in the forums and help new buyers out, and they’ll likely follow the link to your store. Anything that gets your name out there can help you gain more customers.

Taking the time to utilize the options available, provide your customers with quality customer service, and researching the items that sell before investing in anything are the three key steps to building a successful home business on eBay. With so many sellers skipping these essentials, you can really push yourself ahead of the competition if you just take the time to work out your strategies before you begin selling. Focus on these methods, and you will no doubt see wonderful results if you stick to it.

Vickie Sayce

Many people have at least entertained the idea of starting up their own business on eBay, to allow them the freedom of working from home on their own schedule. However, few actually make the leap into trying, and fewer still are actually successful at creating a home business on eBay that brings in a decent income. The reason for so many failures is that most people don’t bother to do their research, pay attention to their customers’ wants and needs, or even take advantage of the tools available to them to increase their chances at success. You can save yourself from making these pricey mistakes and steer clear of failure with these simple tips:

Do Your Research

Before you start picking up items on eBay, do some research to see what items are selling well at the moment. Just by checking out the current auctions on eBay, you can find the most profitable products that you can sell yourself to make money. Try viewing different categories, and then organize the listings by highest bid first, to see what items are fetching the highest price. These are the items you want to focus on selling yourself.

Focus On Customer Service

This is the most obvious way to build up a successful business, and yet, so many sellers completely ignore it. Customer service is the cornerstone of any good business. Unhappy customers means less sales, and ultimately, an unhappy seller. Go above and beyond with your customers, offering them a return policy, exceptional service, polite responses to their questions, and prompt solutions for their problems. Include extras in your packages, like a hand-written thank you note, or a small bonus item along with their auction item. Every little bit counts, and your customers will definitely take notice. These are the things that keeps customers coming back, and will encourage them to spread the word about your business.

Take Advantage Of The Extras

Sellers on eBay have a lot of tools available to them to boost their visibility and their business’s profits. Take advantage of everything eBay has to offer. Build up your about me page with information about you, your business, and your customer service policies. Use your eBay blog to talk about the products you are offering for sale. Participate in the forums and help new buyers out, and they’ll likely follow the link to your store. Anything that gets your name out there can help you gain more customers.

Taking the time to utilize the options available, provide your customers with quality customer service, and researching the items that sell before investing in anything are the three key steps to building a successful home business on eBay. With so many sellers skipping these essentials, you can really push yourself ahead of the competition if you just take the time to work out your strategies before you begin selling. Focus on these methods, and you will no doubt see wonderful results if you stick to it.

Vickie Sayce

Would like to delete a few items I am selling on Ebay until I can learn a little bit more about the process and get my shipping items in order. There are no bids on these items and I plan to relist them soon. Can anyone help? Thanks a bunch!

You can remove them, but I believe you still pay the listing fee. Ebay frowns on this, obviously. Log into your account and I believe the option is there. If not, contact ebay customer support.

eBooks have proved to be a hugely popular product on the eBay market place in recent years. But with popularity comes extra competition and it’s now just that little bit harder to secure that eBook sale. Setting the most profitable price is a hugely important step. Set it too high and you make absolutely zero sales and therefore no money whatsoever, but set it too low and you make very little profit.

Right, let’s get down to…

You’ve selected a topic that you think would be a great seller, you’ve written the content that you believe will provide great value to your customers, and now you need to select a price to ensure the greatest profits.

The first and most important step is deciding what the objective of the eBook is and how it would benefit you to its fullest potential. Would you like to own soul rights to the eBook and profit from higher up front payments, or would you like to grant resale rights and make less profit per sale, but have the potential to make affiliate commissions and sales of higher priced products.

Firstly, is your eBook content going to provide real value for your customers?

If the content is new and will truly benefit your readers, then it would probably be best to sell the eBook for a higher price and not to grant resale rights. That way your product maintains its value and you will have zero competition.

Secondly, is their potential to include affiliate links with high commissions inside the eBook?

If in the eBook you recommend a few services or other products that you can become an affiliate of, then perhaps resale rights are the ideal option for you and you can charge a lower price to get your product in the hands of as many customers as possible and generate as many affiliate commissions as possible.

Once you have chosen the objective of your eBook, you can then set a price.

If the eBook tells the customer how to make $100 per month, then you can’t command a price as high as if you were selling an eBook that told the customer how to make a million pounds in just 34 seconds.

The number one rule that you should consider when selling your eBook with resale rights is not to sell it for 1c or 99c from the beginning. This instantly kills the market place as no other sellers will be able to sell it for any profit. If you start selling it for $10, then the next seller can sell it for $9 etc.
If selling your own eBook, I recommend you charge a price of $5-$30. With a good sales copy, you could sell many copies each day and earn a comfortable income from eBay eBook selling.

James Penn
http://www.articlesbase.com/ecommerce-articles/killer-pricing-strategies-for-selling-your-ebook-on-ebay-80196.html

Pricing your products on eBay can really cut into your revenue unless you are careful. Most anything will sell on eBay and this is what makes it an attractive place to sell your products. The problem with eBay though is that there are so many sellers selling a lot of the same products that the prices are well below retail value. This can really cut into your profit margin and to make it worse, some companies will use eBay to try and sell a large quantity of products to try and make up for the profit loss.

eBay Reality

eBay should really only be used to auction off any products that have set in your inventory for a long time. The supply curve on eBay is extremely high even for those products with a high demand. The best result for using eBay is to use it as a product search directory. This is a very cheap way to get new potential customers in your front door. Post your products that do not cost much or those that don’t bring you a good return on investment. This will give you a sales template to get your potential customers to click a link to your website. Use your eBay sales page as a pitch page for your company’s products and website.

Making Backend Sales

Once you get customers in your front door of your website, you can gain the trust of your customers through your branding strategies and product information pages. This will allow you to make backend sales with eBay shoppers not seeing competing prices and listing your better products for a better profit margin. This same concept will also work if you do not have a website and only have your products for sale in an eBay store.

Customers will always pay a little bit more to buy a product from a credible source or company. To learn more about business branding and customer compliance then check out the marketing strategies section of my website.

Case History

A client of mine I recently spoke with decided to sell video games on eBay only making him one dollar per game sold because of the price inflation on eBay. He explained that he wanted to try and sell at least fifty games a day to bring him an extra fifteen hundred dollars a month. He had a huge inventory of about thirty different games. By the end of the month he had only made five hundred dollars profit, which is reasonable for the constant sales he was making.

He had a really good supplier and he was about to give it up and try selling a different product when I made him a website, used eBay as a marketing tool to get customers in the door and his backend sales produced him an extra twenty five hundred dollars a few months later.

Jason Collins
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/winning-the-ebay-pricing-war-74294.html

There are a number of places to find things to sell on eBay. The most obvious is, of course, buying items wholesale through the manufacturer, or through a middleman or distributor. Of course, it’s a little bit harder to make a good profit doing things this way, because so many other people will probably be selling the same things. All that competition is going to drive prices down so low on most items that the profits are little to nothing, and only the people who can get their products in large quantities and receive discounts, or who do a massive volume, will be making enough for the ordeal to be worth the effort.

eBay itself is a popular choice. You may find this a bit odd, considering that if an item is available on eBay, others have a chance to get it at the same price you do. You might wonder why they would pay a higher price to you. Well, it’s simple. You want to buy “lots” of items, or you want to buy misspelled items. If you find a pair of shoes that normally sell on eBay for $100, and the title has the brand name misspelled, you might get lucky and be the only person who finds the auction. If the starting bid is $9.99 and there is no reserve, you might get this $100 pair of shoes for $20 or less including shipping. That leaves you the opportunity to make a nice profit!

To see a video from Kim and Charles on their Virtual Real Estate Investing systems click below: http://www.audioacrobat.com/playv/Wjk1ZC6f

You might also buy lots of items and break them up. A lot is a group of similar items that are sold together, in a group. You might find a store owner who is closing their store and selling out the inventory on eBay just to get rid of it. You could run across 500 pairs of sunglasses or 20 pairs of shoes in one lot. The average eBay user is not going to purchase a large lot of items this way, so you have a good chance to get the lot at a decent price. You can then break this lot up and sell the items one at a time for a good profit.

One of the most popular ways of finding items to sell on eBay is through places like garage sales, flea markets, and thrift stores. You can find great items at these places, but you need to be prepared to do this very regularly. Some people visit their favorite thrift stores every week, or even every single day! You never know when they are going to put out a rare piece of pottery, or an antique chair, or a suit that might sell for over $100! And garage sales and flea markets are treasure troves, but you need to be prepared to spend a lot of time sifting through useless junk to find some items that will sell well on eBay.

Another resource that is often overlooked is Craig’s List. This website has free classified listings for nearly every major city in the US, and many others around the world. You can find good items very cheap, and sometimes even free! If you want to spend a little time and effort going to pick up the items, you can very often find great items to sell on eBay in the free section of your city’s listings there.

There are many other ways of finding items to sell on eBay. Consider your local newspapers and thrifty ad magazines, swap meets, live auctions, estate sales, and stores that are going out of business or have surplus inventory. With a little research and a bit of leg work, you’ll find plenty of items to sell that can make you good money!

Charles and Kim Petty

One mistake that business owners make is that they focus on overall revenue instead of profits. While this thinking is flawed in any business, it can be especially dangerous in an eBay business.

Part of the problem is that this type of thinking is promoted by eBay. For example, you need to reach a certain level of sales volume to qualify for eBay Powerseller programs.

Sellers will also frequently sell products even if they’re not making money on them just so that they can build up their feedback.

I’m here to tell you that if your primary focus isn’t on the amount of profit your eBay business is making then you won’t have an eBay business for very long. It’s not true that if you have enough gross revenue that there will be some net revenue around. Trust me; it’s possible to have a lot of overall sales without making any money.

I remember back when I was more active with selling on eBay that I had a lot of months where I sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise every month, but when I actually sat down and crunched the numbers, I’d actually LOST money for the month. Then there were times where I sold only a few thousand dollars worth of items, but over half the revenue was profit. Can you guess which method I ultimately stayed with?

When I first started my eBay business, I’ll admit that I had this flawed thinking that as long as I got my sales volume up, I’d make more money. What I found was that the more stuff I sold, the more time it took up to fulfill the orders, more packing materials I had to keep on hand, and the more fees I had to pay eBay. The added cost of all these items wasn’t necessarily added into my acquisition costs.

The flaw in my thinking was looking at how much the item would cost me and then looking to see how much it sold for. If the selling price was higher than cost, even just a little bit, I’d buy it.

Eventually I got wiser (probably because I had to in order to stay in business) and started to focus on what items I could purchase and sell for a nice profit. While my sales volume definitely dipped, I made more money, and actually had more time to pursue other business interests.

So if you’d like your eBay business to still be open this time next year, then make sure you’re focusing on the right numbers – the bottom line, not the top.

Gary Ruplinger
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/why-an-ebay-seller-needs-to-keep-a-close-watch-on-profits-not-sales-volume-145345.html