Copyright © 1999 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
For current related information, see eBay update -- what's changed over the last few years and how you can take advantage as a seller: details that pay (2002)
For the companion piece -- An eBay Guide for Sellers -- go to www.samizdat.com/ebay.html Both these articles are based on my personal experience at eBay and discussions held in my weekly chat program "Business on the World Wide Web", April 8 to June 10, 1999. Complete transcripts of those chat sessions are available at www.samizdat.com/chat.html Thanks to all the chat participants for their insights and their probing questions. In particular, thanks to Ron Rothenberg (eBay = ronrsr), Tracy Marks (eBay = torreyphilemon), Bob Fleischer, Bob Zwick, Sue Rothberg, and Jay Martin. For an ongoing discussion of similar topics, check the Auction Help forum run by Tracy Marks at www.delphi.com/auctionhelp
Keep in mind that eBay itself offers a wealth of information for sellers
as well as buyers. This guide is not meant to duplicate or replace any
of that, but rather to serve as a quick reference for people who are new
to eBay and want to sell there and want to get the most for their effort.
This is practical advice from one seller to another, tips to help you get
started and help you get the most out of your efforts. Aside from being
a member, I am not affiliated with eBay; what I have to say represents
my own personal views.
Imagine you had a box with 2000 old bottle caps, and you knew that demand was such that you could sell them for anywhere from 50 cents to $4 a piece at Ebay. Could you do so profitably? In other words, can you streamline your procedures such that you could pay someone $10/hour to do the grunt work and still make a reasonable profit? To succeed, you will need to pay close attention to many little details.
Posing the question another way, what is the lower limit, for you personally, at which you can handle auction sales profitably? An average price of $10, $5, $3, even $1? It all depends on how quickly and efficiently you can handle all the steps from posting the item (complete with picture) to shipping it and even depositing the check in your bank account. Don't get stuck working like crazy, selling lots of stuff, and losing money, or losing so much time that it's the same as losing money.
First consider how you organize and group your items at eBay. If you sell them one at a time, the average final price on your auctions will be so low that the 25 cent posting fee will eat up much of it. Also, the time it takes you to post an item and deal with all the details of the transaction are the same whether you sell a single bottle cap or a batch of a hundred. So what is the optimum size of a batch -- to attract bidders, have a reasonable end price, get enough money average per cap, and be able to handle all the logistics in a reasonable time with a minimu of hassle?
Keep in mind that the photo will be an important factor in selling. So the batch size, in part, is limited by how many items you can show in reasonable size in a single digital photo taken with your particular camera. With my old Webcam, I could only show a maximum of about six bottle caps. With my new digital camera, I can, if I wish, handle three dozen.
In correspondence of that kind, some buyers will ask if you would like to sell to them directly in bulk. Sometimes that is quick and efficient. But if you have a limited inventory (you are just liquidating your collection rather than operating as a dealer), you should carefully weigh if you might be able to get much better prices posting at eBay.
Correspondence with customers is one of the most time-consuming, but also one of the most rewarding aspects of selling at eBay. You want to minimize the time you spend on this task, while at the same time getting the maximum value from it -- in terms of information about your particular customers and the auction marketplace for your particular category of goods, as well as reputation. I have a few standard messages as word files, one for each kind of item that I sell. Those messages include general chatty questions geared to learn more about that kind of customer. I cut and paste such a message into an email to the buyer, along with specifics about the particular sale (final bid price, shipping cost, etc.) Sometimes I do that as a new email message, sometimes by clicking on the buyer's email link on the auction page at eBay, and sometimes as a response to the automated end of auction message that eBay sends to both seller and buyer (in that case, I choose to reply to all, which means it goes to eBay as well as the buyer).
The method I use today works fine for me for handling about a hundred auctions a month. More than that, and I would seriously look into special software for auction management.
Today, I print out the page with all the information about an auction that just ended. I then use that sheet to record any and all additional information regarding that sale -- such as the shipping address, shipping cost, type of payment, and date of payment. I put these sheets in manila folders. One set of folders is for items sent, but not yet paid for. Another set is for completed, paid transactions.
For example, when a comic book auction ends, I print the auction page, with the email address of the winner. (NB -- if the winner's username is not the same as his/her email address, click on that name, enter your own identification information when requested and check the box for the system to "remember" you. Then when you see the email address of this person, click back to the auction page, click on Reload in your browser and that address will now appear on the auction page.)
Then I write an email to the winner, beginning "Congratulations", and providing details of price and shipping cost. Then I add by cut-and-paste my standard comic book message, which has details on how they can pay and how they can reach me. The auction page goes into a manila folder for Comics Pending.
When the buyer replies, providing a street address, I save that message in the eBay folder in my email account, and I write that info on the printed copy of the auction page, and package and mail the goods. Then the auction page goes into the Comics Sent folder, and I make an entry in a spiral notebook, when I include the type of item, a brief description of the particular item, the sale price, the shipping cost, the name of the buyer, and the date.
When payment arrives, I use both the notebook and the auction sheets to decipher exactly what the payment is for (many people are very sketchy about that), write "paid" next to that entry in the spiral notebook, and move the auction sheet to the Comics Paid folder.
When you are dealing with many checks, each for a small sum, the time in dealing with them can become a major cost factor. When I was at the height of my comic and bottle cap selling, I was getting about a dozen checks in a day, for an average of less than $10 each, with many of them (bottle cap auctions) as small as $2.55. I deposited these using postage-free bank-by-mail envelopes provided by my bank, and entered in my check register not just the total of that day's deposit, but also the amounts of each check together with the last name of each buyer. That provides me with a quick extra backup to my other ways of keeping track of transactions.
Obviously, there are many other ways you could handle these tasks. The important point is that you need to be efficient and consistent, and be prepared to backtrack, given all the manifold ways that buyers may respond. For instance, some people won't respond to your email, but rather will send you a check with a note and their street address. Some just send the check, and the only indication of their address is on the check. You'll have to match the scanty information provided by snailmail with the sheets in the Pending forlder to determine what you need to send them. Be prepared for the infinite and unpredictable variety of human response; but at the same time, keep your record keeping as simple and time-efficient as possible. And don't turn to automated techniques until you have had enough experience to determine if you really need them and if they will actually cover the variety you are likely to encounter.
How efficiently you can handle the record keeping will determine how many separate auctions you can maintain at a time. I found, with my homegrown techniques, that I could handle a maximum about 100 simultaneous auctions -- each running for seven days, and with some ending each day of the week. At around that point, the sheer volume and the tedium of all the tasks involved started to become a serious burden. I was able to handle that many only because I had many customers who bought than one auction item from me in the same week, often doing so in order to save on shipping charges. So 100 auctions might translate to less than 30 individual customers, and of those 30 maybe a dozen had done business with me before, and I might even have credit card info on file about several of them. All this repetition cuts down on the recording keeping, as well as the time involved in packing and shipping.
Also, remember your record keeping isn't just for your convenience and efficiency, it is also important for taxes. Keep track of all your expenses and all the money that comes in, and be consistent about how you record information. The IRS is well aware that people are making serious money through online auctions, and every sale of yours is permanently recorded at eBay, as part of their mechanism for collecting fees. So even though you aren't a dealer and are just selling old junk, it would be wise to report all your auction earnings on your income tax return (using Form C).
I occasionally print out a page with all my auctions (either using the My eBay feature or doing a search for myself as seller). That list includes the auction numbers which I can use to see an old auction long after it has ended. When I want to post a new item that is similar to one in an old auction of mine, I do a search for that old auction number, then click on "relist", make the few necessay edits (including the URL for the new photo), and submit the result as a new auction.
When I am in a mode of selling a variety of items that don't have much in common, I still do a "relist" from an old auction -- because many of the basic choices will be the same for me (like accepting credit card payment) regardless of what I'm selling, and, aside from the time factor, I don't want to inadvertently make a mistake that could prove embarrassing or costly. I also maintain a few Word documents with standard information I'd want to include in any auction, and copy the pieces that I need into the description, keeping original writing for any given item to an absolute minimum.
To connect to the chat room, go to www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html
Edited transcript of recent auction-related chat sessions
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