Tutorial 8: How to Build A Positive Feedback On ebay

Tutorial 9: Design your ebay store

Tutorial 10: How to Find Products To sell on ebay "Wholesale or Dropshipping"

Tutorial 11: How I Do IT

Tutorial 12: How To Make Money With ebay classifieds

Tutorial 13: How To Use Ebay Selling Manager

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Selling On ebay Auction Format

In this section I will focus on how to sell on ebay using ebay auction

A typical ebay auction listing works this way

The seller offers one or more items and sets a starting price.
Buyers visit the listing and bid on the item during the online auction's duration.
When the ebay auction listing ends, the high bidder or bidders buy the item from the seller for the high bid.
The auction-style format is flexible. When you use it, you will be given many options, including giving buyers an opportunity to buy at a fixed price (Buy It Now), selling multiple identical items, and setting a hidden minimum-selling price (reserve price).
Let’s go and take a screen shot of the listing page and choose the ebay auction format.

Here is a screen shot of the Auction Format. The items are numbered and we will discuss each in detail :

1. Starting price:

The starting price for an ebay auction listing is the lowest price you are willing to sell your item for (unless you also specify a reserve price). Bidding will start at this price.
Let us assume that you want to sell on ebay a digital camera. The price you want is 100 dollars. You can put a starting price for your ebay auction of 49.99 for example.
When buyers see your listing and find that they are buying a 100 dollar value for 49.99, they will start placing bids. The price will rise for each bid placed by buyers.
The risk comes when your item is not popular and will not receive much bids. In this case I recommend using a reserve price. [ will be discussed in the next few pages]
However if you are selling a popular item, mostly you will get the price you want..
Some professional sellers, who are selling on ebay very common and high selling products, put a starting price of 1 dollar or even 99 cents for their ebay auction, although the price they want for this product can be hundreds of dollars.
They depend on the fact that their products are hot sellers and that they sure will get a lot of bids.
Sellers have found that setting the starting price too high may discourage bidding. Some Sellers often use reserve pricing to ensure they sell the item at the amount they want.

2. Buy it now price for an ebay auction format listing:

Let us take the same 100 dollars camera as an example. You put the starting price for selling on ebay 49.99.

Some buyers might find that bidding may let them wait for the whole duration of the ebay auction [ can be from 1 – 10 days] and they want to buy the camera immediately.

When you put the Buy It Now price, always put it slightly higher than the actual price you want from the camera.

In this example , I will put it 104 dollars …Why?? When bidders see your buy it now price, they will get a rough estimate that your camera falls within this range. They will start placing their bids with their mind set that the actual price of this camera is 104. They will be thinking that even If they placed their bids and won this ebay auction for 102 dollars, they have got a good deal.

Also if someone buy it for buy it now price [104 dollars], you already made more profit.

3. Reserve price for an ebay auction format listing

A reserve price is the lowest price at which you’re willing to sell on ebay your item. If you don’t want to sell your item below a certain price, you can a set a reserve price.
The amount of your reserve price isn’t shown to your bidders, but they will see that your ebay auction has a reserve price that has not been met. If a bidder doesn’t meet that price, you aren’t obliged to sell your item.
Why have a reserve price? Many sellers have found that too high a starting price discourages interest in their item, while an attractively low starting price makes them vulnerable to selling at an unsatisfactorily low price. A reserve price helps with this.
Let us take the same 100 dollars camera as an example. You put the starting price 9.99. If you received 1 bid only through the whole ebay auction duration, you are obliged to sell with this unsatisfactory price. However if you put a reserve price of 100, your listing will show to the bidders that reserve price is not met. And they will keep bidding until your reserve price is met.
All Reserve Price Auctions are subject to a Reserve Price ebay Auction Fee.
You may lower your reserve price after you receive bids on the item.

4. Quantity

Quantity means how many items of the same product you are going to sell on ebay. As a beginner, I recommend that you sell a quantity of one for the product…why???
Let me explain: you have 2 sony digital cameras. If you are going to sell the 2 cameras in 2 different ebay auctions, you will put a quantity of one and you set the starting price as 49.99.
if 2 buyers are interested in the cameras, the first one will place a bid for 49.99, the second buyer will have to place a higher bid 50.99 to win the camera and so on with more buyers.
If you decide to put the 2 cameras in one ebay auction, you will put a quantity of two in your listing and you set the starting price as 49.99.. If 2 buyers saw your listing and decide to bid, the first buyer will put a bid of 49.99 and the second buyer will put the same bid 49.99 for the second camera.
The risk here for multiple quantity auctions is that you will need more buyers to sell your items and to get the bidding price higher.
This might not happen during the duration of the auction.
The bottom line: if you have a high selling product, and you are expecting a lot of interested buyers, you can sell multiple quantities of it in the same ebay auction listing. If not, I would prefer one auction for one quantity.

5. Duration

Duration of your ebay auction can be 1, 3, 5, 7, 0r 10 days [You pay extra fees for 10 days auction].
The most commonly used duration for selling on ebay is 7 days.
You can use less duration, if you want to sell your item faster. The problem with small durations is that you might get less number of bids. However, with small durations you will get higher ranking in the search.

Tips for ebay auction format Listings

Tip# 1: Whenever you decide to start an ebay auction for an item, the first thing you should do is to look up its value on eBay. Let us take “BebeSounds Video Monitor” as an example. Go to www.ebay.com and follow my snapshots.

After going to ebay, click advanced search:

After going to advanced search, put the product you want to search for in the search box..The most important thing is to check the box saying completed listings to see how much this item is sold for.

After you click search, all the item similar to yours will appear, and the selling price of those which are sold will be displayed next to them as shown in the figure above.

Tip# 2: Be sure to close your ebay auction at a time when people get home from work. Auctions closing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday do better, and those closing in the evening do Much better. However, some sellers noticed that ebay auctions ending in the middle of the week where people check their computer at work can do well also.

Tip# 3: Start your ebay auction with a low starting price [0.99]. Most buyers when searching eBay sort the search results by the number of bids. This usually brings the auctions with more bids to the top and lets most of the others sink to the bottom of the list. A low starting bid gets the bidding war started and can have a dramatic effect on the bid count column. However, It’s also not true that a 0.99 starting price is always the best policy. This is only true if your item has a lot of demand.

Tip# 4: You can run a ten day ebay auction, starting on Thursday evening. That means your item is up for two weekends rather than just one, it finishes on a Sunday night. This will give the product you are selling on ebay a good exposure.

Tip# 5: A lot of bids come in during the last 2 or 3 hours you list an item. Thus, the logical close time is the one that happens when your target buyer is at his or her computer. For example, If your ebay auction listing targets college students, make sure it ends around 7- 9PM, before they go to sleep and when they are mostly done with their classes.

Tip# 6: Always write accurate descriptions of your listings. You want every buyer to get exactly what they expect when they made that bid. Writing clear descriptions builds trust and confidence with your buyers and make them repeat customers.

Tip# 7: Avoid running an ebay auction ending around big holidays where people mostly travel, like Christmas and memorial day.