Posts Tagged ‘selling on ebay’

How to Sell on eBay:Should I use the reserve price option?

May 6th, 2011

an auctioneer While everyone has their opinion on this subject, I really liked what seller h3caboose said about the reserve price option.

” Pros

  • Setting a reserve on a auction gives you the option to not sell your item unless it meets your reserve price.
  • Reserve price can be altered even after you have received bids.
  • Even if your reserve price is not met you can still send a second chance offer.
  • If your item sells your reserve fee is refunded.

Cons

  • Setting a reserve requires an additional fee which is refunded only if your item sells.
  • It discourages bidders many buyers will not even bid on a auction that has a reserve.

Reserves are generally not a good idea because people will not bid on your item especially when other options are available.  The only time I recommend setting a reserve on an auction is if your item is unique or one of a kind.  If a buyer wants it they will have no other option but your auction therefore the reserve price can protect your investment in case bidding does not go high enough.”

I agree. Although you as the buyer know what something is worth to you. If you can’t part with an item for under a certain amount, consider starting the bid at that price. It’s always a good idea to make sure your costs are covered, but just be aware it may inhibit some deal seekers that like to start with low offers. Decide what your product is worth to you and go from there. If it is a one of a kind item that you know will go for more, start higher, if not start low to encourage bidders.

 

 

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Tips for Selling on Ebay

February 18th, 2011

Starting an eBay business can be tough. You may wonder how to even go about starting out. But, thanks to a few experts like Erica Mueller, I’ll help you  begin selling on eBay with some simple and valuable eBay tips.

Buy or Collect the Following Items:

1. A digital camera that will take close-up and crisp pictures including the items you want to sell.

2.A white sheet and a black bed sheet- Put your objects in front of these sheets to get clear pictures and make your product stand out. If possible take these pictures outside, because the light is generally better outside.  If not possible, shine a light or lights on your product.

3. A scale- This will give you an idea of how much to charge for shipping.

4. Packaging Materials

Set Up a Few Accounts:

2. Paypal- Allows your customer to purchase items with a credit or debit card and adds trust to your site.

3. Flickr- This site allows you to host your eBay pictures for free since eBay charges you to host your photos.

Research:

On eBay- Look at the categories that other sellers are selling under. Look at the very top of the eBay page after typing in a search inquiry.  Find the category and sub category the product was listed under. It will look like this:

picture frame lot,  collage picture frames,  vintage picture frames,  wooden picture frame

This should give you some ideas in terms of what category in which to list your product.

Now take a look at pricing.  What is that specific product generally selling for?  Can you even compete?  Can you perhaps include shipping in your overall price to make it more attractive to the buyer?  If there’s too much competition, consider finding a product to sell in a less competitive category.

Also, take this opportunity to look at the titles and descriptions the sellers are using. A product description can make or break a sale.  Is it new and still in its original packaging?  Be accurate.  Be specific.  Put your product on a pedestal. Every product has a story, so tell it.  Remember, besides the title (which is crucial), the first two lines of your product description will help spark the buyer’s interest so give it thoughtful consideration in describing it.

Give Your Items Strong Titles:

You only have so much space when you create a title so think seriously about Erica’s tips on the subject. Using a man’s dress shirt as an example she said :

“Here’s a little secret: in as few words as possible list the size, color, sleeve length, gender, and brand. Then put USED or NEW at the end. Do NOT put things like Excellent Condition, Like New, Beautiful, Barely Used, etc. People are not going to search for “Excellent Condition” or “Barely Used,” they are going to search for “Men’s Long Sleeve Blue L.” Using “Like New” is against eBay policy.”

When you come to the subtitle option, it’s your choice. It costs extra, but it may be worth it.

Now it’s time to list! Make sure and list all the details you can about your product. Be honest and make it unique. If their is a small stain, or a missing part make sure and list that. Erica suggests that these details be listed in small red print. Remember if you don’t list these details you will hear about it by means of poor feedback scores. So be upfront.  Customers will appreciate you for it.

Shipping:

Make sure you charge a fair amount for shipping. Get estimates of shipping costs using the weight of the product and the size of the box or envelop you will be using.  You don’t want to lose money here. Ebay even offers a service where you can print out your shipping labels and pay for the shipping costs through Paypal. It doesn’t cost extra and will save you a trip to the post office.

Better yet,  if you don’t want to bother with the pains of postage and shipping products consider drop shipping. When you drop ship you buy a product from a manufacturer, who then ships the product from their warehouse directly to your customer. You can even purchase a drop ship directory which will list thousands of suppliers in one convenient place. This directory will give you access to millions of products.

With some novice and expert advice you’re ready to get started. Don’t lose momentum. You won’t need to be an expert to enjoy selling online, all you’ve got to do is take the first step.

Visit Erica Mueller’s and the HubPages sites for even more eBay selling information.

For more tips on starting your eBay business and even more business ideas follow us on twitter: @gogodropship

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How do I Know What to Sell on eBay?

February 16th, 2011
Ebay

Ebay

How do I Know What to Sell on eBay?

This is a fair question. There are some guides for potential sellers, but the truth is that a little creativity and a lot of research are what will really help a seller do well on eBay. Ebay Pulse is a guide that will give you an overall idea, but remember that many of these products are within markets that are already over-run with sellers. Categories like electronics and phones have so much competition, it’s almost impossible for a new seller to compete. So how can you compete?

Find a Niche Market

Niche markets are the key. Are you involved in social media? What topics are trending? Justin Bieber  has been a popular topic as of late. Could you sell a product based on a celebrity or news? You bet.

I  had a professor suggest that his students sell shirts with funny slogans about the latest celebrity scandals. By watching what key words are popular on Google, he said we’d know what kind of shirts to sell. Looking at current trends and news may inspire you. Just remember that in this type of business, you have to know when to stop selling. You don’t want your product to be old news.

Stay Ahead of the Game

Trending products can be the same way so don’t wait until you see that an item is gaining popularity in retail stores to move forward with it. Why? 1. Retailers will be hard to compete with because they buy in bulk and can get lower prices than the average seller. 2.The fad will be ready to end and you’ll get stuck with unsold merchandise. You have to stay ahead of the game.

So much of success is timing, luck, price, and/or innovation. You really have to nail one or two of these categories to be successful. If your product is creative enough or sought after enough, you’ll never have a problem selling it. However, you may have just as much luck selling something as common as a hot dog by selling it at the right time or for the right price.

My alma mater allows the business program to sell items on campus as part of their entrepreneur curriculum every semester. For some students, it’s their most dreaded semester.  For others, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity they’ll never forget.  Some of them included things like stick-on covers for laptops and cell phones, and wood plaques with etched poems, photos, and pictures on them.  But some of the most profitable businesses included a hot dog stand, a sunglasses booth, and a garbage service.

Make Your Product Successful Using Timing, Price, or Innovation

The hot dog stand offered a cheap, accessible meal to the students on campus. The sunglasses booth offered a seasonal item in high demand, at the right time, and benefited from the great weather on campus.  The garbage collectors heard that girls struggled to take their garbage all the way across the parking lot to their dumpsters. They offered an innovative convenience which was simply taking out the garbage for them at the right price.  Because their overhead minimal and there was no other competition, outperformed every other student-run business.  They didn’t  become millionaires from it by any means, but sometimes half the battle is succeeding at something small.

The less saturated your market the better.  But then you’ll have to create a need for your product. You’ll need to advertise your product extensively to create awareness. But if competition already exists, don’t worry. Let them open the door of awareness and you can enter the market as another, perhaps, better option.

So what technique will help your product succeed? Will it be timing, price, innovation, or pure luck? While we all hope for a little luck, why not make a plan and stick to it? You can’t generally compete on all of these levels, so why not pick one or two and concentrate on competing on those levels.

There’s a rule of thumb in advertising that I’ll call the “Business Triangle.” Each corner of the triangle represent three things. 1. Price 2. Quality 3. Speed. Like the principles above, you can’t have all three without at least one corner of the triangle suffering. If you pick speed and price, quality will generally suffer. If you pick price and quality, the speed will be affected. Think about this and use this to market your products. If you take more time because you are looking to deliver quality to your customer, advertise this on your website. Pick two of these qualities and apply the principles to your products and your website.

Lastly, if you want to be innovative, be innovative.  Retail chains like Walmart do well because they offer everyday items, but there is something to be said of the smaller company that offers unique, handmade, or one-of-a-kind items.  There is value in it.  Take Etsy for example.  They have become a popular website for this very reason.  So although there is plenty of thinking and products to offer “inside the box,” don’t be afraid to venture outside of it.

So as a recap, remember:

1. Do your research

2. Find your niche

3. Let timing, price, and/or innovation work for you

4. Find a market that isn’t over-saturated

5. Pick two areas of the business triangle in which to compete

6. If you’re going for innovation, consider the value of a one-of-a-kind product

Be fair to yourself and sell a product that can be successful. By doing your research and taking into account these tips, you can build yourself a profitable business on eBay. Good luck, but then again, with the right product you won’t need it.

Want to get more tips for having a successful online business? Visit us on Twitter: @gogodropship or read other posts on our blog.

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eBay Crash Course: Feedback Effects

January 20th, 2010

Feedback has an effect on reputation, sure, but what does that mean to us? Why should it matter what my reputation is; I can get by regardless… can’t I?

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is also no. Feedback is going to effect us on eBay in a variety of very real ways. Let’s first talk about the positive effects of Feedback.

High Feedback helps us in the following ways:

  • First, you need at least 10 Feedback to have access to many of the more advanced listing options.
  • You need at least 100 Feedback to become an eBay Powerseller.
  • Consumer confidence; high feedback means high sales. People can trust you, and they’re not going to be afraid that you’re an unknown seller, and will shop with confidence.

In addition to the Feedback requirements, a Powerseller needs to have near-perfect DSR, which means you need to score perfectly whenever a buyer of yours rates how well you did as a seller. The positive feedback will help confer the multitude of powerseller benefits, and is a key part of accomplishing your long-term eBay goals. You should always strive to reach powerseller status if you are working on eBay, and feedback is an integral piece of that game plan.

Bad Feedback can hurt us just as much as good Feedback can helps us. Bad Feedback:

  • Can cause us to lose our Powerseller status. You need near-perfect DSR if you want to be a Powerseller, and once you start slip and getting back Feedback, you can lose it all.
  • If you gain more Negative Feedback than Positive Feedback, you will actually be blocked from seeing a lot of listings!
  • Buyers are not going to be interested in buying from us if we have a proven bad track record. They can see our Feedback history, and if it isn’t pretty, they’re not going to stick around and try to deal with us!

We are going to live and die based on Feedback on eBay. If we have positive Feedback, we will be rewarded. If we have negative Feedback, we will be punished. It is as simple as that. We should strive towards perfection as much as possible with eBay, as it will be to our benefit. Stay tuned next week, and we’ll continue our crash course on eBay!

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Ebay Crash Course: Feedback Introduction

January 19th, 2010

Dropshipping and eBay is a powerful combination, but many people do not know many of the basics involved with working on eBay. Feedback is a crazy esoteric term, and everything seems poised to overwhelm and undermine us even as we begin. However, with a little perspective, we can find eBay is actually pretty manageable, once you learn the ropes.

First and foremost, when you think of eBay, the savvy customers out there think feedback. We had talked about feedback before, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on Feedback, and its significance to us as new eBay users.

eBay, as we know, is a behemoth on the internet these days. There are literally tens of thousands of transactions going on hourly, and eBay quickly came to realize that it was fast growing infeasible to try and track all this information on a case by case basis, if not outright impossible. In this position, you typically have one of two options available to you: let chaos reign, or try to keep some semblance of order. eBay opted for the latter.

The concept of Feedback is simple: you have a “pass/fail” metric by which you rank a transaction, and the buyer and the seller involved both get to have their say. By keeping things strictly as Positive or Negative, there is no guessing. There is the eBay DSR rankings that allow us to get more in-depth, but as far as the transaction itself goes, you either did your job, or you didn’t.

It was a great way to keep the buyers and sellers on eBay in line; you were at the mercy of whomever it was you were directly working with as far as Feedback was concerned. Your reputation itself was at stake with each and every transaction, so it was very important to uphold your end of the bargain, and ship promptly and as outlined, or pay promptly as promised. It helped impose some order onto an otherwise unwieldy environment, and it took off well.

Reputation is well and good, but what practical effect does that have on us as eBay sellers? Find out in our next article!

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The China Problem

December 14th, 2009

As we’ve worked within the wholesale and dropship sector, no doubt we’ve come across a lot of suppliers hailing from the far east… China, in particular. They offer us a glimmer of hope that the iPhone is not an unattainable dream, and maybe we can get those great Prada bags. However, as with all beautiful dreams, they do not typically stack up well when compared to the starkness of reality. When you find something that seems too good to be true, that is typically because it is.

When sourcing from Chinese suppliers, there are a few things that we need to be aware of. First and foremost, the copyright laws that we’re accustomed to in the United States do not apply to Chinese suppliers. They can market an in-house product as a name brand if they so desire, and there is nothing by their laws that has them at fault. This is what is called the “Grey Market”. It is not necessarily illegal in China, for instance, to market a non-name brand as a name brand, or to replicate an item exactly. However, we are still bound by the laws of our land, so if we’re unknowingly marketing the Chinese iPad as an iPod, it is we who will be in trouble for it. We will be flooded with returns almost immediately from our dropship website, but if we’re trying to source these counterfeit items on eBay, then we’re going to quickly find our accounts banned for it.

A second issue we run into is that the product that we’re purchasing may be coming from black market sources. Black market sales are strictly speaking illegal, and as such it will exist as an ephemeral thing. Since we are not receiving from our supplier a consistent source, when their stock is gone, it is gone, and even if we’ve placed the order, we have no assurance we’ll ever receive the order, or see the money again once its been sent.

Now, taking a huge leap of faith, if we find that the items we are receiving from our Chinese-based supplier are the real deal, we now have the logistic problem of getting it halfway across the world in a reasonable amount of time… and while still being able to maintain a profit. In recent years, tracking technology has made leaps and bounds when it comes to international orders, and we’re going to need to take full advantage of that. We will want to know where our item is exactly… because its going to be spending a fair span of time getting from the supplier to the customer. The shipping cost to allow for a more reasonable amount of time will typically be much higher than a buyer is willing to pay, and the increased cost of having to go overseas is going to eat into our profit.

The biggest thing to remember when sourcing from Chinese suppliers is that these problems lie directly on our shoulders; any instances that come up are our responsibility. eBay does not accept “I thought it was legitimate” as an acceptable excuse if we try and source counterfeit products from a Chinese supplier, and our buyers on our website also tend to be less than forgiving when their $300 iPad arrives at their door. It is our responsibility to ensure that our supplier is legitimate, but how will we do this?

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Dropship Companies: Your Road to Success

August 17th, 2009

I would like to somehow debunk the myth that drop shipping on eBay is not a possibility. Throughout time, civilization has only grown through opposition and effort, this does not exclude drop shipping. Some would say that, when confronted with a little opposition, one should turn tail and run the other way. I would like to submit that nothing is gained without first putting forth effort.

There have always been times of vast opportunities. Perhaps the opportunities have changed a little over time but the number of them has not. Opportunity is created through effort so who is to say you cannot succeed by drop shipping on eBay using dropship companies. Give it a shot; we have proof at www.gogodropship.com that profit can be made through the use of eBay and good dropship companies.

Live your dream of being an entrepreneur by starting off selling on eBay and see what happens. You can’t lose anything by using dropship companies; you don’t even have any inventory to worry about. All you need to do is set up an eBay account, find a good dropship company to set up an account with, and start selling on eBay. Of course, as in all business, you are going to want to communicate with the companies you’re working with and keep that contact open. Always make sure the company has inventory in stock and that they can drop ship that inventory to your customers, before you list the product on eBay. Dropshipping on ebay is merely a way to put forth effort to get yourself on the road to success, your destination is up to you.

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