My Best Kept Secrets For Making Big Money On Ebay

Specialize. Become an expert in one area and know what you're selling. It will save you time when writing your descriptions and listing items for sale. (If you don't know anything about the item you're selling you're looking at research time on the net or going to the library to do research on the item your selling- it will slow you down. Look at the charts at the end of this report to see how many listing you will need to send to eBay each day to meet your $100,000+ a year income goal)

Save every listing you make. If you followed my advice above, and you're specializing in one area all you have to do is adjust your description, take a new picture and list the item.

Continually develop new sources for purchasing the collectible items you're selling. Local auctions, estate sales and ads wanted in the local shopper or newspaper work for me. (One caution: eBay has become such a popular place to sell collectibles that local auctions are not always good for bargains anymore. EBay sellers are attending them in record numbers. Be very selective when bidding locally. PS - Keep reading for a way to actually make money on this trend!)

List, list, list!!! And when you think you've listed enough - LIST SOME MORE!

Use counters on your auctions to see what's popular. Counters will only give you the number of 'hits' on the page (and not the number of UNIQUE visitors) but it does tell you how enthusiastic and interested people are in your item. If you've had an item up for auction for 3 days and your counter reads "4", it tells me the item is probably a loser. On the other hand if it reads "144" then you have a winner on your hands and all you need to do is find more of those to list and sell. It's good marketing data to have.

Provide excellent, clear, focused photographs (jpg's) of your items. Always have at least 3 - one general frontal pic, one close-up (or more depending on how many highlights you want to show), and one of the back of the item. If you don't have a digital camera- get one. Prices have come way down and it's an essential selling tool. Very few people will take a risk and bid on an item they can't see- no matter how well your written description is.

Use a low-minimum bid rather than a reserve auction format. If the very lowest price you will accept on your item is $50 (and, at that price you have a profit margin built in), list it with NO RESERVE for $50. If it doesn't sell, at least you know it won't sell at that price and when you go to buy a similar item you won't be tempted to pay as much. I have good results when I do this. It shows potential bidders I'm a serious about selling the item because one, single bid could take it. I use a reserve only when I'm testing the market- to see if there is interest and if it actually makes my reserve. About once a week I use a "99 cent" NO RESERVE auction to generate traffic to my other auctions. Usually it's a very popular, but low-priced item that I can afford to loose a few dollars on if it sells below what I expected. On the plus side it builds traffic for my other auction items, it generates a good amount of competition among bidders and sometimes I even make a killing :-)

Use 5, 7 or 10 day auctions. 3 day auctions might be useful in some cases, but I've gotten best results using a 5, 7 or 10 auction linked to my low-minimum bid. For example: On items I'm auctioning for a $5 to $25 minimum bid I'll use a 5 day auction; on items between $25 to $100 I'll use a 7 day auction; and on items over $100 I'll use a 10 day auction. I end up selling a higher percentage of my listings using this strategy.


Entire Contents © Copyright 2001 by David Vallieres. All rights reserved.