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How to make money on eBayAuction have been around for a long time - they are basically an oganized market where buyers and sellers set prices in real time according to supply and demand. Whereas a real world auction might take place in a matter of minutes, eBays global audience makes things move a little slower. If you are selling something on eBay, you normally open it up to bids and let prospective buyers check it out and bid on it for a week or so. Making money on eBay is pretty easy - making a LOT of money on eBay is a lot harder, but getting to those big profits are easier if you know some of the eBay secrets that power sellers use to improve their auction results. Our guide below will offer some tips and suggestions to making more money on eBay, including listing tips, photo help, automated tools to handle auctions, payments, and shipping, and more.
How to sell something on eBayThe steps to selling something on Ebay are pretty simple. In fact, eBay has a section called Seller Central to help get you started: here. First, you need to set up an eBay account and get an eBay ID. Then you need to post your item for sale - click on the link for SELL YOUR ITEM in your eBay account. This involves selecting a category (like clothing, art, coins, etc.), writing a title, putting in the description, price, payment options, starting bid, shipping information, etc. -- basically the webpage people see when they come to check out and bid on your item. You can also pay extra to have your item highlighted at the top of the list when someone searches or browses in your topic. Then you review and submit your listing, and voila, the rest of the world will now see it. Ebay will automatically contact you via email when the auction is over along with the buyers basic contact info, and it is your job to work out shipping and payment, although much of this is automated if you use PayPal. Of course, eBay would be out of business if they didn't charge for their services, and they do charge fees for every item listed and sold on their site. How much does it cost to sell something on eBay? For an eBay auction fee calculator, visit here. There is a small listing fee, and then a commission based upon a percentage of the final price the item sells for. Then you need to sign up to accept Paypal or some other form of electronic credit card payment. To find out how to get started with PayPal, click here.eBay Help - Automated Ebay Tools - Auctions softwarePeople make money on eBay in different ways. Some people specialize in collectibles, scavenging garage sales and estate sales to find merchandise to put up for auction. Some of these items offer large profit potentials. Others sell in high volume, offering specialized, in-demand products that they sell over and over again (like eBooks, information packets, etc.). Some sell big ticket items like used cars, where the $$ profit per item sold can be large. Other manufacturers simply use eBay as an online storefront for themselves, having their items come up for sale when someone searches for their category of product (ie, ski gloves, kayaks, etc.). MainStreet Commerce offers a product called BusinessFlow aimed at high end sellers, allowing them to maximize effeciency in everything from inventory control to order management to payment processing, with an aim at migrating customers from lower margin auction selling to direct buying from your ecommerce site. But this is overkill for most individual sellers on eBay. Their key to making more money is automating a lot of the tedious work that goes into posting products for sale, tracking auctions, closing sales, processing payments and shipments, and then starting all over again.Auctiva.com is one company that helps with this process, offering free listing designers, templates, photo hosting, and schedulers to make your job easier. Their auction templates make it a lot faster to put together a cohesive, professional looking auction listing, with nice table layouts, graphics, colors, and text. Once you have a template or templates you like, it is much easier to automate the specific details of future listings without having to recreate each page by hand. eBay themselves also offer all kinds of tools like Turbo Lister "to help you create professional-looking listings and upload thousands of items in bulk." They offer Selling Manager for medium-volume sellers, which helps in managing and tracking your eBay listings (it costs $5 a month), and lets you submit bulk feedback, print invoices and shipping labels, and much more. Their higher end products are Selling Manager Pro ($16 a month), which lets you manange and track inventory, relist items by the thousands, handle feedback automatically upon payment receipt, and more. File Exchange lets you list bulk items loaded from a flat file (like a database or spreadsheet) into the eBay listing system, greatly reducing the time required to get your items ready for sale. Blackthorne Basic ($10 per month) and Pro are made for sellers selling more than 25 items per month, handling professional bulk listings, tracking of auctions and sales, feedback manager, etc. all in one package. The Pro version offers more reporting and inventory tracking functions and costs $25 per month. Check out all these tools here. eBay Selling TipsHaving pictures, lots of pictures when possible, makes it easy to really present your product, answer customer questions, and avoid having to deal with a lot of email back and forth with prospective buyers. It doesn't take a lot of time or money to buy some simple photography lighting and screens to use at home to get well-lit, professional looking photos with your digital camera. Check out the book "Shooting for Dollars" on Amazon.com for tips. Making payment as easy as possible is also a big deal. A small minority of people still want to pay with check or money order - you need to weigh the pros and cons of dealing with people outside of the electronic payment system. First, it is much slower waiting for mail and matching paper payments with online sales, and there is the added risk of bounced checks after you have shipped products. Paypal makes it easy for everyone to buy and sell on Ebay, and it is the recommended payment system (eBay bought PayPal years ago) - we suggest all sellers to use Paypal whenever possible. The next big thing is user feedback. The entire eBay system runs based upon trust between buyers and sellers, and trust is established by have a long, proven track record with many transactions and positive feedback from each. It is important not only to communicate quickly with buyers, but also to ship products quickly and then follow up with a request for buyer feedback to make sure you build up your number of positive comments. Also check out Entrepreneur Magazines book "Make Big Profits on eBay" for helpful advice on making money on Ebay.
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