Selling your own stuff at eBay: updated tips for serious sellers

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com
(based on a speech/tutorial delivered in Boston in June 2004)

You can use eBay as a sales channel, an additional way to reach a global marketplace with tens of millions of buyers. At the same time, you can use eBay to quickly conduct market research, to experiment, and to learn. Think of eBay as a vast laboratory where you can research the competition and quickly test the effort of your products, your pricing, and your marketing ideas either at low cost or while making a profit. Elicit customer reactions and suggestions to your pitch and your products. Get experience interacting with customers online, learning their expectations, and figuring out how to delight them.

To succeed as a serious long-term, eBay seller, you need:

Yes, there is money to be made, but just as you can set up to do business very quickly, tailoring your pitch and pricing to go head-to-head against the competition, others can join the fray just as quickly, researching what you are doing and going one better. The risks are great.

You can sell

In this article, I'm going to focus on who to sell your own stuff.

To make your life easier, you should focus on things that are easy to package and ship, with predictable/repeatable weight and size. And you should stick to products that you use and appreciate yourself, that you understand well and care about. And instead of selling one of this kind of thing and one of that, you should focus on just one or just a few similar kinds of products, so you can build a reputation in that sub-community at eBay and encourage repeat business.

eBay offers several different ways to sell.

You can set up standard auctions where you indicate the "starting price," and the final price is determined by competitive bidding. That approach works well for collectibles, one of a kind items, and old or limited supply items -- whenever the enthusiasm of potential bidders might drive the price to illogical levels. In this case, you decide how long the auction will last (e.g., 5, 7, or 10 days), and there is no way for anyone to buy your items before that time has expired. You pay eBay a fee (which varies by the starting price that you set) to list each item. And if it sells, you pay a final value fee which is a percent of of what you get from the customer. And you have to pay whenever you relist an item.

You can also sell in "Buy It Now" mode, where you establish a fixed price, and the "auction" ends as soon as someone agrees to pay that price. The fees are he same as with standard auctions, but you could sell multiple copies of the same item in the time it would have taken you to run a single "standard" auction. This approach works well when you have a large renewable supply of the same goods, or you make the goods yourself. It's also good when you don't want the delays of standard auctions or the uncertainties of a variable auction price.

With both those ways of selling, you potentially make your pitch to all the tens of millions of people who use eBay regularly and who might chance upon your listings by conducting searches or by browsing through the categories of goods at eBay.

With the third way of selling -- eBay store -- you don't have access to that massive eBay traffic; rather you have to generate your own traffic.

They offer three different kinds of eBay stores.

For $9.95/month (currently), you get to set up a simple online store to which you can try to drive traffic by email, advertising, links, etc.

For $49.95/month (currently), you also get automated "cross-selling." In other words, potential customers who are looking at one of your items see prompts/links to other related products of yours, making it far more likely that a customer will buy more than one item. (I find this a good deal. I run such a store at eBay in addition to the online store I have at Yahoo for $49/month. Each store reaches a different audience.

eBay also offers "Anchor" stores for $499.95/month (currently). With an anchor store, banner ads for your store appear perhaps millions of times on pages that eBay visitors see. That sounds great, but I found it useless -- the extra money generated no additional sales.

The posting fees for items you add to your eBay store are very low (a penny or two), and you can set these auctions up with multiple copies of the same item at no extra cost and set the time            frame at "good until canceled" so you don't incur relisting fees and   don't have to go to all the time-consuming hassle of relisting items that have sold. Final value fees are comparable to those for regular and Buy It Now auctions; but, of course, you only have to pay those fees when your goods have sold.

An eBay store makes sense when supply is not an issue, and you have many copies of a variety of different related items and are in business for the long run. The store setup lets you organize and categorize your items as you please, rather than strictly adhering to eBay's cumbersome category system. Hence a store minimizes the cost and effort of keeping lots of items available for sale online.  If you are in touch with your own online customer base and can point them to your eBay store -- great.  BUt your store items won't be included in eBay searches and will appear low on the lists of items that customers see when they browse by categories.

I find it pays to list all my items in my eBay ;store and to also list my bestselling items as Buy It Now auctions, so people searching at eBay can find those best-selling items, and my cross-selling links can lead them to my eBay store.

I also pay for text ads at eBay that are tied to "keywords. Check https://ebay.admarketplace.net for details.

When people buy from you or sell to you at eBay, be sure to give them "feedback." In theory, feedback is either positive or negative. In practice, with few exceptions, feedback is positive, and the value to the recipient comes not from the creative friendly words entered, but rather from the quantity of positive feedback. That number indicates who is a newbie and who a pro -- it's a primary indicator of credibility (for both sellers and buyers). People appreciate receiving feedback; so give it promptly and regularly -- that's a friendly stroke that helps build good relations with customers, at no cost to you.

While you should not believe the specifics of feedback comments, the feedback system is an important element of the eBay business model. Fear of negative feedback serves as an important motivator encouraging buyers and sellers to treat one another fairly, and helping to keep the community together.

Because buyers will look skeptically at the offerings of newbie sellers, you should not begin to sell seriously until you have at least a ten positive feedbacks. You can get those feedbacks by buying things you want and need at eBay and asking the seller to give you feedback. Your experience as a buyer will also help you when you switch roles and sell.

As a seller, keep in mind that the beset way to build trust is by trusting. (e.g., I don't wait for payment before shipping. I ship as soon as the sale is completed; and by doing so, I get burnt very rarely, and I very frequently turn ordinary customers into delighted customers, likely to come back for repeat sales.

Other simple ways to delight online customers include:

What's the value of positive feedback? When I started selling at eBay, I experimented selling collectibles in standard auctions. Selling old bottle caps, when I had little feedback, only about a quarter of my auctions got any bidders, and almost always when the items did sell, my starting price was the ending price -- nobody bid the price up. Then after I had two dozen positive feedbacks, three quarters of my auctions got bidders, and the end price was sometimes higher.

Likewise, when selling old comic books, with little feedback, the average sale price was about $2 to $3. But once my feedback got up over two dozen, the average sale price went up to over $10.

In addition to standard feedback procedures, communications with customers are very important. Friendly, prompt, and informative email messages build relationships and relationships lead to return customers. For example, messages thanking customers for buying and telling them you'll put their items in the mail the very next day might include short and friendly questions and comments that could prompt them to let you know why they are buying what they are buying and why they value such things and what other similar things they are interested in. Based on such information, you might decide to change what you sell or how you sell it. Every communication is an opportunity -- so avoid sending automated or canned messages. If you know your products and love them, you probably have something interesting to say about them, and probably would enjoy sharing related information and opinions with customers.

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of selling and to focus on the money coming in, losing track of your costs.  Keep careful records -- not just for tax purposes, but also to make sure that your pricing and your practices are leading to a significant profit.

Take into account:

You should set up your operation so other costs are covered by the customer. These include: You should set up so the shipping cost is predictable and so it is automatically included in your eBay listings and in the customer costs that are included in eBay's check-out totals.

Also, don't underestimate the time required to seriously sell at eBay

Take advantage of all the time-saving tools that eBay provides. My eBay neatly organizes and automatically updates information about all your auctions. In addition, you can post a bio page at eBay (for free) which answers many likely customer questions, so you don't have to answer individually, over and over again, and eBay automatically adds to that bio page a continuously updated and linked list of all your auctions and also all the feedback you have received.  eBay will also host on the Web the photos for your auctions (the first photo for each listing is free). For writing your listings, they give you a choice of html (where you write the markup code the way you ant it) and automated where you just type in the words and they automatically add the appropriate code). They make it easy to relist items and to sell similar items, providing you with forms that have the previous information already filled in -- so you don't have to retype it and can just focus on the few things you want to change.

If someone wants to pay immediately online, eBay makes it easy for them to do so with PayPal. If they don't decide right away how they want to pay, eBay makes it easy for you to send an electronic invoice, as a reminder.

My eBay keeps track of everything for you and even reminds you to relist and to leave feedback, and makes the leaving of feedback easy.

If you have questions, you can ask for online help -- chat-style -- from the eBay home page, and within a few minutes you should be in touch with a knowledgeable live person.

If you regularly sell about $1000 or more per month through eBay, you'll automatically become a "PowerSeller." The most tangible benefit of that status is a detailed monthly report of your sales, sent to you by email.

You should, of course, promote your individual auctions and your eBay store by all means at your disposal: your own Web site, your won email list, your own newsletter site, text and links in your standard email signature, etc.

You  can help stimulate additional business by offering discounts on shipping costs for those who buy multiple items (eBay makes that easy). You can also offer special discounts to repeat customers, telling people about that offer by email when you are getting ready to ship their merchandise.

And, if you have an eBay store, in addition to buying keyword advertising at eBay, you should consider buying keword-based text advertising at Google Adwords as well. (Check http://adwords.google.com for details on how to do that.)

Resources:
My eBay store http://stores.ebay.com/bandrsamizdatbooksoncd
My Yahoo store http://stores.yahoo.com/samizdat
My eBay bio page http://members.ebay.com/ws2/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=richardseltzer
Other articles about selling at eBay http://www.samizdat.com/auc.html


My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.
 

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This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

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