eBay Talk

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PeSA) is bringing you a FREE one-hour webinar, "Benefits of Cause-Marketing: Put the Power of the Ribbon to Work for You!", on Thursday August 16th at 2pm ET (11am PT/eBay Time). In the webinar, Kristin Cunningham (General Manager, eBay Giving Works) and David Yaskulka (Vice President, Product Marketing, Kompolt) are going to give you enough information about:

As a eBay seller, one always faces a struggle to maintain and improve the business. We are all in the same boat. Don't miss this golden opportunity. This money-can't-buy webinar is open to all eBay sellers. You can register it here. It's time to learn from the experts. I'll see you there.

Auction listing title is one of the most important elements in driving potential buyers as it contains keywords buyers are searching for. I believe you are aware that eBay listing title only allows 55 characters, but most sellers do not use it wisely. The title is what potential buyers see when they perform a search or browse through the categories, not by description. Meaning that, your title should immediately attract potential buyers to your listing, and eventually place a bid on it. Thus, writing a keyword-rich title is essential if you wanna make money selling on eBay.

Imagine yourself as a buyer, when you come to eBay looking for specific items, you find these items by entering keywords into the search box, because you think it helps you find what you want by using the terms that you thought. Therefore, use words that will help your buyers find your listing first, it doesn’t have to be a sentence, because you will have enough space to effectively describe your item in the description box, why waste the title space? Moreover, buyers get annoyed at meaningless title like “@@BARGAIN!!!@@”, and do you think buyers will enter keywords like “@” or “bargain”? These characters do absolutely nothing to educate potential buyers about the item you’re trying to sell and entice them into bidding.

Think about the search terms your buyers would use when looking for your item and develop keywords relating to them. Although these keywords may not be the same as you would expect the buyers to use, take advantage of all 55 characters you’re allowed and make sure you’ve covered all the keywords. Also make sure your title is as descriptive and informative as possible, and it’s most advisable to include the brand name, model number and any other major detail of your item, in order to maximize exposure and increase the odds of potential buyers actually finding what you have to sell when they conduct a search.

One good example is “Dell Inspiron 640m Laptop Notebook 14.1” 667MHz”. If you know computers well, you’ll know immediately what it’s selling. It gives you the manufacturer (Dell), the model (Inspiron 640m), the screen size (14.1”) and the processor speed (667MHz). I believe you noticed that it also includes “notebook”, as buyers might use “notebook” instead of “laptop”.

Sometimes, we just can’t come up with any additional keywords to put it into the title, it happens. On these rare occasions, ask someone else to look at your item and say a few words that come to mind, you might be surprised to see what keywords they could think of. Last but not least, always remember to revise your title before listing it.

One of the smartest auction strategies to draw new customers or maintain the return customers is giving away free gifts. Consider including a free gift with every successful sales, not only it gains you the clientele, it also helps boost up the loyalty of your existing customers.

The free gift doesn’t have to be a high value item, but if you’re a little tight on budget, consider using promotional items like pen, key chain, calendar etc. When choosing promotional items, try choosing something relevant to the item you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling books, a bookmarker will be sweet.

You may consider attaching promotional gifts in the following circumstances:

1. Every successful transaction to show appreciation to your customers.

2. Every return customer.

3. Multiple purchases done by any buyer.

4. When your customers are not happy with the bought item/service.

5. When a customer refer you to a friend or family.

Of course there are many other situations when you can include a free gift too, just remember to follow this good business practice at every opportunity.

I came across this wonderful post "Risk Management Made Easy…". Don't panic. It’s about ACCOUNTABILITY. I would like share with all of you ‘cause I think it’s very useful, you can definitely apply it to your eBay selling business.

Define accountability. Accountability is all about:
1. Assuming full responsibility for the consequences of one's behavior
2. Following through on commitments to buyers
3. Demonstrating reliability and dependability
4. Keeping the service promise
5. Admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for correcting

In other words, accountability simply means responsibility. Read the great write-up by N2Growth. Apply accountability to your eBay selling, automatically you will build up the trust, the positive ratings, the name and most importantly the sales.

Do you speak eBay’s language? Or, do you speak like an eBayer? There are eBay jargons that many people don’t understand still. Here I include a simple list of them. These buzzwords or acronyms can be useful to help draw in a potential buyer but remember to only use them if they are relevant. Many people on eBay are not experienced buyers and you will lose them if your listing is full of jargons, thus, avoid using it unless you really need to (for example, when you run out of space in an item’s title).

It’s good to be able to understand others’ jargon, so let’s learn.

The Buzzwords
Bid- offer an amount of money for something at an auction
Dutch- an auction where more than one of an item is available
Feedback- comments in the form of opinions about and reactions to other users on eBay
Mint- in perfect condition
Non-paying bidder- a bidder who wins an auction but does not then go on to buy the item
Reserve- the lowest price the seller will accept for the item
Shill bid- a fake bid placed a seller trying to drive up their auction's price
Snail mail- the postal mail, as distinct from the faster email
Sniping- bidding at the last second to win the item before anyone else can outbid you

The Acronyms
BIN- Buy It Now. A fixed price at which you can buy the auction
BNIB- Brand New In Box and never opened
BNWOT- Brand New WithOut Tags. An item that has never been used without its original tags
BNWT- Brand New With Tags. An item that has never been used and still has its original tags
BW- Black and White. Used for films, photos etc
CONUS- Continental United States (for sellers who don't want to ship items to Alaska/Hawaii)

FC- First Class. Type of postage
HTF- Hard To Find
LTD- Limited Edition
MIB- Mint In Box
NBW- Never Been Worn
NPB- Non-Paying Bidder
NR- No Reserve
OB- Original Box
OOP- Out Of Print
PM- Priority Mail
PP- Parcel Post
SH- Shipping and Handling
VGC- Very Good Condition. Not mint, but close
VHTF- Very Hard To Find

If you think the list isn't enough, and that you wanna learn more, you may refer to eBay Acronyms or eBay Glossary for detailed breakdown.

A starting price generally depends on how valuable the item is and how much of a demand it currently has. It is advisable to set your starting price or Buy-It-Now price in the neighborhood of what you expect your item is worth, raise it a little for high-demand or scarce items; or just take a few dollars off if you want to move your item fast.

$0.99 is the best starting price, as it draws people in to bid who otherwise wouldn’t, and items will almost never finish at such a low price. In a brief survey, auctions with the lowest starting prices generate the most interest. Therefore, setting a low starting price not only encourages healthy bidding, it also raises the perceived value and the final closing price.

DO NOT make your starting price lower than you are willing to sell you item for, unless you have a reserve for a higher amount. Most likely at least half the time, you will be selling items for the initial starting price. A reserve is your best bet if you believe that too high a starting bid will prevent you from having any sales, but it can also be a turn-off for some buyers. However, do set a minimum price for the item that you will be willing to accept, and which is realistic.

Since you have learnt how to do research and find out the average selling price in my previous post, you won’t have to worry about your item selling for too little, you should have no problem getting what you want for it. If you haven’t, refer to my previous post, “Research before you list”. Anyway, don’t worry too much about setting a starting price, if the bids are way too low, you can always withdraw the listing before the auction ends, but the listing fee is still chargeable. This method isn’t a good practice to repeat many times, thus, only use it as a last resort. However, there are bids placed in the last few minutes, why not hold on to it if your listing received plenty of interest?

Reminder: People always don’t pay attention to the listing fees when they set the starting price. They either totally forget about it, or perhaps they think the fees don’t matter. This is totally wrong. You better change that if you used to be like that. Let me show you why we should pay attention to the listing fees involved. For example, if you start your item out at $50.00 instead of $49.99, you unintentionally incur an additional $1.20 fee. This amount may seem tiny, but what if you list 10 items a day? It costs you $12 additional. This can definitely be prevented by lowering the price one cent, thus, study the eBay fees schedule regularly and be more alert to fee changes.

It is imperative to know your market. In order to do that, you need researches(and I mean more than one research). Perform a quick search using the Advanced Search function available for eBay users(normally on the top right-hand corner of every eBay page) to look for completed auctions. This function provided by eBay is totally free and relatively painless process. Key in the name of your item, for example, you are planning to research on Sony Ericsson Z610i mobile phone, instead of keying in “mobile phone” or “Sony Ericsson”, why not key in "Sony Ericsson Z610i"? This lets eBay search engine narrow down the results to a specific model of Sony Ericsson’s.

When you get the results page, click on Completed Items(under the display heading) and sort the results by Highest-Priced. Ignore the listings that never received bids, those are failures. Scrutinize the most successful sales and see what the starting price and selling price were, at what price range the item was normally sold, in which category the item was listed, as well as find out how the sellers have described and promoted their items so that you can learn from them and apply it to your listings, but DO NOT copy and paste, make sure you write your own description, because buyers tend to look for a listing with an unique and different description.

Research is a challenging task, but it is definitely imperative. Not only a research helps you in setting an attractive price, it also gives you a better idea of which category suits your item more.

People always asked me to recommend a good payment gateway to accept online payments. Besides Paypal, 2CheckOut and StormPay have been doing a great job to secure certain percentage of the market share. Not forgetting the newly emerged Google Checkout. We all know they are good, that's why I'm not going to recommend any good payment processor today.

However, I'm going to NOT recommend a new payment gateway that I've recently come across. The name is AdvantageProcessors. When you enter the site, everything looks just fine, but when you wanna find out more information about the products and services they are providing, you get peanuts. Let me just rephrase this, before you purchase a product/service from a company, you definitely find out who they are, where they are and how to contact them. There’s NO company name, NO address and NO contact number. AdvantageProcessors is so not convincing that makes me doubt their trustworthiness.

The only way to get in touch with them is by submitting the contact form, hey, they can’t even afford to hire a customer service personnel? And we are talking about business here, of course we need to be serious.

Therefore, stick to your current payment processors. Why turn to a payment processor like AdvantageProcessors? I love Paypal and 2CheckOut.

So what have we learnt today? The moral of the story is, provide as much details as possible in the auction descriptions. Among the vital are the item, payment and shippping details. The clearer, simpler and easier to locate the listing information, the less likely you are to confuse, disappoint and send off the bidders. If your listings make bidders think twice, you already lose half of the battle.