10 Tips for Increasing Your eBay Response.

So you've got the buyer in front of your auction, and they've read the description. They're must be interested, or they wouldn't be looking… but just how can you push them over that line and make them leave a bid? Read on for some tips.

Improve your picture: In all that description writing, you might have missed the vital importance of your item's picture. A picture with bad lighting or an intrusive background looks amateurish and won't make anyone want to buy from you.

Add an About Me page: You'll be surprised how much you can reassure bidders just by creating an About Me page and putting a little bit about yourself on your business on there. You can also have a few special offers there for people who bother to look at the page, and let people subscribe to your mailing list so that you can email them updates.

Use SquareTrade: Signing up at SquareTrade and displaying their logo on your auctions shows that you are committed to have them resolve any disputes that arise. You always see this on PowerSellers auctions - it makes you look more professional.

Write terms and conditions: Have the 'small print' clearly visible on all your auctions, giving details of things like shipping times and prices, your refund policy, and any other business practices you might have. This helps build confidence with buyers.

Show off your feedback: Copy and paste a selection of the feedback comments you're most proud of to each item's description page, instead of making bidders go and look for it. If you have 100% positive feedback, be sure to write that on every auction too.

Add NR to your titles: If you have extra space in a title, put 'NR' (no reserve) on the end. Bidders prefer auctions that don't have a reserve price, and doing this lets them see that yours don't.

Benefits not features: Make sure your description focuses on the benefits that your item can give to the customer, not just its features. This is a classic sales technique. If you have trouble with this, remember: 'cheap' is a feature, 'save money' is a benefit.

List more items: If you want more people to respond to your items, then list more items! You might find you have better like listing items at the same time, instead of one-by-one. There's no need to use a Dutch auction - you can just keep two or three auctions going at once for an item you have more than one of in stock.

Accept unusual payment methods: To reach those last few buyers, accept payment methods that many sellers don't, like cheques.

Buy some upgrades: The best upgrade is the most expensive one, which makes your item appear first in search results. In crowded categories, you might find that this is worth the money.

Once you've got some buyers, you want to keep them coming back to you. The next email will show you how to turn one-time buyers into long-term customers.

10 Sure-fire Ways to Kill Your eBay Business!

It's surprisingly easy to kill your eBay business, if you're not careful - sure, you can start over from scratch without it costing you anything, but do you really want to? Still, if you want your business to end up dead in the water, here are some simple ways to do it.

Lie about an item: Say it works fine when it sometimes doesn't work. Say it's in perfect condition when it has a scratch. Your customers will hate you!

Post whenever you feel like it: Make sure to leave your customers hanging around, wondering when their item is going to turn up. This makes sure they buy from someone else next time.

Let items end anytime: Few people will be around to care about your auction if it ends in the middle of the night. Why go to the trouble of working out whether auctions will end at a good time?

Don't bother with email: Customers are just timewasters anyway. eBay businesses are supposed to run themselves! Never give informed responses to questions about your item.

Sell rubbish: Really, it's just eBay. You can just sell any old tat from the market for a 200% profit. Let quality be someone else's concern - I mean, really, what do they expect for that price?

Refuse to give discounts: You know what your items cost, you know what your profit margin is going to be, and you're not going to negotiate. Remember that giving customers special deals might make them feel good and come back to you again.

Make your listings ugly: As many colours, flashing lights and animations as possible will really give those customers a headache. Write as much in CAPITALS!!!! as you can. Preferably big, red capitals. Be sure to use the fonts Impact and Comic Sans. For an extra special touch, see if you can figure out a way to add some music.

Don't take photos: It's such trouble, after all. If buyers are picky enough to actually want to see items before they bid on them, then screw 'em, that's what I say.

Write short descriptions: Be as brief as possible, and use lots of mysterious abbreviations. This obviously makes you look very cool. You can even just write the title again in the description box. Think of the effort you'll save!

Use reserve auctions: Now, this is a fairly controversial final choice, but it really is one of the best ways to scare away your customers. They'll see 'reserve not yet met', and click that 'back' button before you know it. Luckily, they can always bid in a normal auction for the item somewhere else.

Now that you know the ten ways to kill your eBay business, how about we explore what to do if you want to do the opposite, and make a success of it? The next email will give you ten steps to successful selling on eBay.

How To Discover Hot Products You Could Sell At eBay!

If you have decided to earn some serious cash from the number one auction site in the World Wide Web, then you will have to know what sells well. Indeed, eBay may be visited by millions of people per day, but with thousands of auctions going on at any given time, it would be hard to generate great interest on your products if the market isn’t really hot for them. The result can be quite catastrophic. You might end up paying mounted fees without realizing any profit, since no one would bid on your auctions.

So how do you know what products would be the hottest sellers on eBay? Here are some tips you could employ.

Using eBay Tools. Your eBay seller account should also provide for you a way to know the website’s most popular auctions. This should give you an idea about what sells well, and how much they are going for. Simply visit the Seller Central area for a rundown of the day’s top auctions, and try to view the same with a critical mind. Determine if the demand is really huge, or if the price is responsible for pushing the demand to the limit. If the latter, determine as well if you’ll be able to compete with the said price.

Online research. The internet is a humongous resource center for your market research campaign. There are many tools that you could find in this intricate network, both free and paid, that could help you discover what any market is really looking for.

Keep in touch with the times. Generally speaking, what is popular in the real world should be popular on eBay as well.

Registering As An eBay Seller!

Starting an account on eBay is a simple process, and even better, it's free!
Just go to www.ebay.com, click on "Register Now"!
eBay will ask you for a valid email address. Almost everyone has an email address. If you use a free email service, eBay will require credit card information from you in order to validate your identity. eBay's registration is free, so you won't be charged.
You'll need to create an eBay ID. Your potential customers are going to see this name every single time they look at one of your postings.
You'll be prompted to create a password, and also to choose a "secret question" that eBay will ask you in case you forget your password.
You'll be asked for your date of birth, just to make sure that you're of legal age to do business on eBay.
You'll be asked to agree to eBay's User Agreement. Read it before checking the "I Agree" button. eBay will now send a verification email to the email address you gave them, and you must click on a link inside that email in order to finish the signup process.
You're now ready to post items on eBay.

The Pros And Cons In Establishing An Ebay Store!

Ebay has provided some amazing opportunities for many people to earn online. This widely popular auction site has become the primary destination for users who wish to purchase anything – ranging from tangible products to digital items – hence making eBay a website visited by millions of people every day. Because of the volume of transactions happening in its pages, eBay has also become a virtual market place where thousands, if not millions, of dollars exchange hands on a daily basis as well.

Do you want a piece of that big, big pie?

Then you must first have to establish an eBay store.

Now, this is not a strong recommendation. This article is not meant as a sales pitch for a membership with eBay, rather, it seeks to present the advantages and disadvantages of building your own eBay store. You must remember that eBay isn’t the only place where you could peddle your goods. It is a good place where you could sell your items, but there are other alternatives you could consider. Should you settle with eBay? Or should you explore the alternative options? Let’s study the matter more closely.

There are most certainly a lot of benefits that could be gained from establishing your own eBay store. Let’s take a look at them.

* You’d be able to sell in a hotly visited environment. You’ll be able to expose your products to a wide array of prospects.

* A Featured Store would also deliver some advanced reports for your auctions. You could use the statistics delineated therein to improve the way you construct your sales pages, and the way you present your items for better efficiency in your future offers.

* A Featured Store will also allow you more eBay pages, which would mean more exposure for your products. It’s still a numbers game. The more auctions you have running, the more earning opportunities you could capitalize on.

* A Featured Store would allow you to reduce the size of the eBay banner appearing in your every auction. This would give you the chance to work on your page and bring the focus of your visitors to the items you will be selling.

* Ebay provides a certain level of seller protection and dispute resolution for potential problems you might encounter with your buyers.

Though these are great advantages for your online business, please bear in mind that they do not come without cost. There are also other disadvantages that are attached to having your own eBay store.

* Having your own eBay store would pressure you to perform well when it comes to your sales. Though some may consider this as a benefit since such will motivate the seller to plan his course of action, the dangers will be experienced when you fail to earn enough profit to cover the cost of your subscription.

* People go to eBay expecting the best deals in the online market. You have to compete at this level, otherwise, the moment people would see the going rate for your auction, they’d immediately hop to the next item up for sale.

* You’d be bound by eBay’s selling policies. You cannot go around some of these restrictive policies, otherwise, you account can get suspended, or worse, terminated.

Establishing an eBay store is a solid choice for a business model. But you have to determine your goals as well as your marketing plan. Would an eBay store help you accomplish them? Or would selling your own goods in your own website be better for your online business?

The choice is yours.

Ebay Secret: Finding A Drop Shipper!

Drop shipping involves a contact with a wholesaler, known as a drop shipper. The drop shipper would offer some items for wholesale prices. The clincher?

There are a couple of them, actually:

1. You’d get to purchase these items at wholesale prices even if you’re going to get them per piece.

2. The drop shipper will take care of shipping the item to the designated location.

You won’t have to buy items for resale. You won’t have to create items for your offers. You just need a relationship with a drop shipper, select from his selection of products, and market the same at eBay. You could place your own markup. And you wouldn’t have to worry about storage space or shipping. Better yet, you wouldn’t be too pressured to make a sale, as your items aren’t technically in stock, rather, they’re with the drop shipper who will be awaiting your word as when to deliver the same to the winning bidder.

Now, here’s what is of the essence. Where could you find drop shippers?

Here’s an important piece of advice: forget about offers that promise to provide a list of drop shippers. More often than not, these lists contain outdated information, dead links and even fabricated entities. This is a fact that has been confirmed by eBay itself.

Here’s a fact that you should know: 80% of manufacturers would be more than happy to do some drop shipping for you. Whereas a couple of years ago, drop shipping was a novel approach to selling items online, nowadays, manufacturers have realized that drop shipping can be an effective evolution of the direct selling model. It’s easier to look for drop shippers today than it was a couple of years ago.

The first thing you have to learn is how to focus. What do you want to sell, exactly? Have you researched the market for it? Is it a profitable market?

The second step should entail researching appropriate products for the market you have chosen. What are available for the same? What, among these choices, do you want to sell?

All that remains to be done is to pinpoint specific manufacturers based from the list you have prepared, and contacting them individually. Ask them if drop shipping is among the services they could offer for willing partners. Chances are, you will get an affirmative reply.

The bottom line is this: drop shipping can make your eBay business more profitable and more convenient.

How Ebay Sellers Can Protect Themselves From Auction Scams.

Are you an eBay seller? If you have been conducting your business in this widely popular online auction site, then chances are you would’ve experienced some fraudulent activities perpetrated against your enterprise. Scam artists are everywhere, it seems, and the sheer anonymity provided by the World Wide Web makes the virtual world a paradise for all sorts of unscrupulous folks.
Condemning them is one thing. But you do need to positively act on the real perils of getting scammed. You have take some precautionary steps and adjust the way you operate your online business to minimize, if not completely eliminate, the risks that these scam artists present.
For many of us, eBay offers great income streams that serve us well. We must strive to protect the opportunity we have been given by being vigilant against scams and combating them through the implementation of precautionary measures for our every auction.

Free Instant Auction Traffic.

Here's an easy way to get extra traffic to your eBay auctions...
"Do you look at other people's feedback ratings?"
You probably answered yes...
So here's my idea:
"Whenever you leave feedback, put your website URL in the feedback Comment"
For example:
“your website. com” - Excellent communication and great eBayer, highly recommended.
You can see how the domain will *jump-out* at the reader.
Also, when you leave feedback for your auction sales, do the same.