Auction Power Guide

How do I make a profit selling on ebay? I have plenty of stuff to sell. And please don’t tell me to read those books.

To do this, you should take good, clear pictures, and learn to write nice descriptions with all the important details.

If i see two people on ebay selling the same thing, i will almost always bid higher for the item that has the best, clearest pictures and a good description that’s not full of crap or disinformation or lies or fluff.

You probably should NOT sell your best items until you get practice on selling, and get some feedback built up.

Many years ago, i tried to sell an engagement ring and i only had 2 feedbacks. People would email me and demand that i use Escrow, and some even told me that they would bid if i had higher feedback score, etc. I ended up selling it for a lot less than I should have, because i was inexperienced.

SO, sell a few books and trinkets first to get the hang of eBAy. In the mean time,learn what the value of your better items is.

The best tool is to use eBay itself. Look under the completed listings section (Advanced Search) and see what similar items actually sold for.

Don’t outright copy people’s listings, because that’s illegal. But it’s perfectly ok to learn from them.

Now, if you want to truly make profits – that is.. buy things cheap and sell them for more than you paid for them.. the key is your BUYING skills. Buying and sourcing really has nothing to do with eBay. Ebay just gives you the platform from which to sell your stuff. The buying part is up to you. After you sell all your stuff from your home, the next step is to learn how to source products. And make sure you only sell things you’re knowledgeable about.
Sourcing ideas are garage sales, auctions, even retail stores if the item is marked down significantly. Selling things to foreigners is a good way to increase profits. There is more risk in shipping stuff to ENgland or Sweden or Germany, but these Europeans like American stuff and sometimes pay a lot for it. But sell things Domestically first, to get the hang of it. Then move worldwide.

Also, sometimes you can use eBay to buy stuff to resell on eBay. But usually you can’t do this profitably until you have lots of experience, and you are buying from someone who is not experienced.

Finally, you should learn what eBay’s fees are. They definitely eat into your profits, and are approximately 9 to 15% all together, including PayPal fees.
So, if you sell something for 50 dollars, eBay and PayPal will probably take up to 7 dollars right off the top 🙁
So, if you paid 43 dollars for that item and sold it for 50, you didn’t make ANY profit. Ebay took it all 🙁

Finally (again) – eventually you will need to get your business and tax paperwork filed. If you sell one or two things a year, no one will care. But if you sell hundreds of items a year, you will be owing taxes. And of course that eats into profits too, for Uncle Sam and your State.

What and why should I sell on eBay to increase my feedback score rapidly and become a eBay Powerseller?
Hi. I am a new eBayer. But I wanna be a powerseller as well as increase my feedback score rapidly. I wanna know what I should sell the buyers will buy and leave feedback. I also wanna know how to be a powerseller? What are the requirenment? Thanks

It took me 7 months from the time I started using eBay to become a PowerSeller. The fastest way to become a PowerSeller IMO is to sell a large amount of inexpensive items.

There are many different levels of PowerSeller status. At the bottom of the PowerSeller food chain is bronze. To be a bronze PowerSeller, you need to sell at least 100 items a month or make at least $1,000 a month for 3 consecutive months. It’s really not hard to do but it does take a lot of work.

If you have zero feedback currently, the fastest way to increase your feedback is by buying a lot of cheap items from eBay. By cheap, I meant items that cost you no more than $1 for both the item and the shipping combined. I don’t recommend trying to sell until you have at least 10 positive feedback from buying. That will cost you a grand total of $10.

You have to understand that to be a PowerSeller means that you’ll be making eBay your business. It took me a lot of 8 hour days shipping small items to get me where I am today. It also took a significant investment in inventory.

There is not one magic product that can make everyone an eBay PowerSeller. It’s best if you specialize in selling a product that you know a lot about. This will save you tons of headaches when answering potential customers questions about your items. You’ll also need to find a wholesaler to buy the item from at a price low enough to be able to resale it for a profit. This is one of the hardest things involved with starting a successful eBay business.

I listed a laptop for sale on Ebay but the winning bidder lives in Nigeria. I stated in the description that I only ship to the United States so can I just cancel his bids and offer it to the next highest bidder? When I tried to cancel the bid it said that I can’t because the auction all ready ended.
Thanks Renata, thats alot of help. Go shoot yourself.
OH MY GOD DOES ANYONE ON ANSWERS ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTE USEFULL ANSWERS?????????????

You can contact ebay (live help) and explain what is going on with your listing.

Or, you can tell your buyer that you will only accept a international money order payable in U.S. dollars AND that the money order will have to clear your bank before you send out the laptop to them.

Since you stated that you only sell to buyers within the United States, you need to set your prefrences so that only U.S. bidders can bid on your listings.

To do that, follow the following steps.

Go to "My Ebay", under "My Account", (left hand column), you’ll see "Site Preferences". Click on that.

Under "Selling Preferences", go to the 8th item down, which will say "Buyer requirements". To the right of that, click on "show"

Now you’ll see this:

Block buyers who:
Have received 2 Unpaid Item strike(s) within 1 Month(s).
Are registered in countries to which I don’t ship
Have a feedback score of -1 or lower
Are currently winning or have bought 10 of my items in the last 10 days and have a feedback score of 5 or lower

Click on "edit" and check this box:

Buyers in countries to which I don’t ship
Block buyers who are registered in countries to which I don’t ship.
This requirement can help you avoid buyers who agree to purchase your items without realizing you don’t ship to their location.

Then click on "submit"

You’re done then.

Hope this helps!

I am considering ordering a Louis Vuitton bag off Ebay.
I have no experience with Ebay so could you please help me out?
What are some ways to know if it’s real or fake based simply off of the one picture that you can look at and the not very detailed description?

I’m a professional ebay shopper haha so I’ll give you some really good tips that have always worked for me…..If you’re ordering a Louis Vuitton item you’ll want to look at the sellers feedback. If they have 0 feedback I would walk away no matter how great the deal looks. A ton of scammers will post a LV item on ebay with a 0 feedback score meaning that is their 1st and probably last item they will post on ebay. Another hint of a fake or scam is there are no pics except for 1 pic that looks like a stock photo.

Sometimes too a seller with a high feedback score may of gotten a LV bag as a gift and it was fake but they have no idea because they arent a stylish person and really have no common sense that the bag;s fake. I suggest going into a Louis Vuitton store and getting an up close look at the actual authentic bag, this way you’ll have a good sense of what an authentic one looks like and spend time studying the ebay pics for the auction you’re interested in.

Finally, don’t be fooled by a country. Just because the bag is from Japan or China doesn’t mean it’s fake. There are a bunch of ebay stores on ebay that are overseas and have wonderful authentic bags for great prices. If you see a bag you like take a look at the other items they for sale and the prior feedback. After a while you’ll be able to spot a real LV bag very easily.

As a new member in ebay I need some feedback in order to sale my items – Do you have any tips ?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180377956529&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:US:1123

Some buyers are reluctant to buy from someone with zero/low feedback.
Why dont you purchase some inexpensive items that you want/need & build up your feedback score so buyers know what you are like to trade with.

Recently a guy has been outselling my (same)software 10-1 on ebay and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong in my listing(i have the same feedback score and no negatives. I’m planning to change the auction description around so it looks similiar to his, can someone help me change this passage around, i don’t want to copy him but something similiar and will attract buyers is what i want
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Nero-8-1-1-1-DVD-CD-Burning-Backup-Software-USB_W0QQitemZ290241411770QQihZ019QQcategoryZ105879QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
BUY NOW! GET IT Lightning FAST & CHEAPER!

Some excellent advice already.

Key words may drive additional traffic when searching. Review the other sellers listing, including hidden text and then adjust yours accordingly.

eBay can be a very lucrative marketplace. You need to know that when you build a store on eBay it is not as simple as registering and creating your eBay store pages. There is a lot more involved if you want to achieve success.

Before you even go to the eBay website to open your eBay store and build it, you need to know what you are going to sell. However, even that is not enough.

You need to know how well your items are going to sell. It’s no use going through all the effort of building your store on eBay, and it brings in no sales.

For this you do need to do market research and determine what kind of demand there is for your products, what the competition is like, and what competitive pricing would be.

The next thing you need to consider is your eBay feedback rating. eBay buyers are very wary of eBay sellers with a very low number of feedbacks against their name.

If your eBay id has only a few feedbacks, then spend some time buying and selling items on eBay without an eBay store until you have built up a solid feedback score.

Once you’ve done this, you are ready to build a store on eBay.

The next step is to register and open your eBay store on eBay. Once your store exists, you need to add what they call store inventory auction listings. These are auction listings that do not expire like regular auction listings. Consider those like items you would always have on display on your virtual product racks until someone buys them.

Once you get to this point of building your store on eBay, it is not the point to sit back and wait for sales. You might wait forever and get zero sales.

This is the time that you need to jump in and furiously market and promote your eBay store.

There are several ways you can market your eBay store. One way is to always have regular eBay auction listings that appear in the eBay searches. Always include a link to your eBay store in those auction listings.

Another way of marketing your eBay store is to put out a press release, which you can do free of charge on several websites. Yet another way is to advertise in your local community via flyers, business cards and classified ads.

Another way is to start your own blog where you write about topics relevant to your eBay store and types of products that you sell. You would then include several links back to your eBay store from your blog.

I hope you see that how to build a store on eBay involves much more than following the step-by-step instructions on the eBay website. That is the easiest and quickest part of building your eBay store.

The most work and the secret to your success lies in what you do before and after you have built your store on eBay.

Jason Griffith
http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/how-to-build-a-store-on-ebay-122914.html