Packing for international customers shouldn’t be any different than for domestic customersas long as you do it right. Foreign shipments are likely to get even rougher treatment than usual, so make sure the package is packed as securely as possiblewith more than enough cushioning to survive the trip to Japan or Europe or wherever it happens to be going.

Note

Given the increased chances of loss or damage when shipping great distances, you should purchase insurance for all items shipping outside North America.

What is different about shipping internationally is the paperworkand the shipping costs.

Chances are your normal method of shipping won’t work for your international shipments. For example, you can’t use Priority Mail to ship outside the U.S.not even to Canada or Mexico. This means you’ll need to evaluate new shipping methods and possibly new shipping services.

If you want to stick with the U.S. Postal Service, check out Global Priority Mail (reasonably fast and reasonably priced), Global Express Mail (fast but expensive), Airmail (almost as fast, not quite as expensive), or Surface/Parcel Post (slow but less expensive). In addition, UPS offers its Worldwide Express service, FedEx offers FedEx Express service internationally, and DHL is always a good option for shipping outside the U.S. Make sure you check out your options beforehand, and charge the buyer the actual costs incurred.

You’ll also have to deal with a bit of paperwork while you’re preparing your shipment. All packages shipping outside U.S. borders must clear customs to enter the destination countryand require the completion of specific customs forms to make the trip. Depending on the type of item you’re shipping and the weight of your package, you’ll need either Form 2976 (green) or Form 2976-A (white). Both of these forms should be available at your local post office.

In addition, you can’t ship certain items to foreign countries: firearms, live animals and animal products, and so on. (There are also some technology items you can’t ship, for security reasons.) You need to check the government’s list of import and export restrictions to see what items you’re prohibited from shipping outside U.S. borders. Check with your shipping service for more detailed information.

Note

eBay offers several pages of advice for international trading at pages.ebay.com/globaltrade/.

Customers. They’re either one of the joys or one of the major annoyances of running your own business. And when you’re running a business with your eBay auctions, you definitely have customers to deal with. Lots of them. So you’d better get used to it.

Some customers will contact you during the course of an auction, asking questions about the items you’re selling. Other times you’ll have contact only when the auction is over, when you send an invoice or accept payment. And then you have the kinds of customers no one likesthe ones with problems.

How do you deal with all these customersand these potential problems? Read on and find out.

The more auctions you run, the more likely you’ll run into potential bidders who have questions about what you’re selling. eBay lets bidders email sellers during the course of an auction, so don’t be surprised if you get a few emails from strangers asking unusual questions. And, as a responsible eBay seller, you need to answer these queries.

When you receive a question from a potential bidder, you should answer the question promptly, courteously, and accurately. It’s in your best interest to make the questioner happy; after all, that person could turn out to be your high bidder. Remember, you are running a business, and all good businesses go to great lengths to respond appropriately to customer queries.

Potential bidders ask questions because they don’t understand something about your listing or have some qualms about placing a bid. You need to not only answer the stated questionas thoroughly as possiblebut also anticipate any additional questions that customer might have. Your goal, after all, is to sell the item you have listed, so anything you can do to better present the item to buyers will help you make the sale.

When you respond to a buyer’s question, you have the option of displaying the question and answer as part of the item listing. This is a good option to check, especially if you think other potential bidders might have the same question. You should opt out of displaying the Q&A if the question is more idiosyncratic, or not necessarily applicable to a larger number of potential bidders.

What happens if you get a lot of questions from potential bidders? I have no great advice for you here. There is no secret auction tool that can respond automatically to specific customer questions. You have to craft each response individually, answering the questions as posed. You may want to batch all the query emails into a bunch, however, and answer them once a day. (Although this might not be prompt enough for bidders asking questions in the waning minutes of a live auction.) But you shouldn’t worry too much about this; for most sellers, the volume of customer queries will be small and easily manageable.

Note

If you’re getting a lot of questions about a particular auction, it’s a sign that you’re not including enough information in your item listing. Consider revising the description to be more descriptive, and definitely keep this issue in mind when you launch future auctions.

Here’s the thing. Auction management tools cost money to use. (You can’t get good help for free!) So when you decide to utilize a particular auction management service, you automatically increase your business’s costs.

Before you decide to use a third-party auction tool, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth the cost. Can you afford to spend another 25 or 50 cents per item, just to make your life a little easier? That might sound like peanutsuntil you start adding up all your other selling costs. Remember, you have to pay eBay to list each item and then pay another fee when the item is sold. If you accept credit card payment via PayPal, you’ll pay another fee when a customer pays via that method. Add all these fees together, and you can easily be out a buck or more on each item you selland that comes right out of your profit.

On the other hand, if you’re doing a large volume of eBay business, can you afford not to use an auction management tool? Add up all the time you spend creating item listings, sending emails, and handling end-of-auction transactions. Is it worth 25 or 50 cents per transaction to cut that workload in half?

An important factor, obviously, is just what operations you can automate with these auction tools. While each site offers a different selection of tools, here are some of the tools you can expect to find at the major third-party auction sites:

• Inventory management. Enter and track all the items in your inventory, and automatically delete items from inventory as they’re sold at auction.
• Image hosting. Host photos for your auctions on the service’s web-site, and manage those photos in your item listings.
• Gallery. Create a separate photo page of all the items you have for sale so that potential buyers can link to your item listings and browse through all the merchandise you offer.
• Bulk listing creation. Create attractive item listings with pre-designed templates, and then list multiple items in bulk.
• End-of-auction email. Automatically send notifications to winning bidders, and notify customers when payment is received and items are shipped.
• End-of-auction checkout. Provide a dedicated page that customers can use to verify their purchases, and provide shipping and payment information.
• Bulk feedback posting. Automatically post customer feedback in bulk.
• Sales analysis. Generate reports and graphs to help you analyze your auction sales over time.
• Storefront. Provide other nonauction items for sale on the Web.

Note

A few of these sites also offer eBay research and inventory sourcing services, although these aren’t normally part of the typical auction management package.

Not all sites offer all these services. In addition, the level of services offered will also vary; some sites are more automated than others. Read on to learn more about what’s available.

Popular Auction Management Tools

To give you an idea of the various auction management tools available, we’ll take a look at what’s available from eBay and major third-party providers. Remember, all prices and services are subject to change.

Ándale

Ándale (www.andale.com), shown in Figure 19.1, probably offers the most variety when it comes to auction-related services. It’s the only site that offers the full range of tools from pre-auction research to post-auction management.

Figure 19.1. The Ándale website.

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Ándale Checkout (www.andale.com) provides a post-sale checkout option similar to eBay’s checkout feature, as well as automated post-auction tools similar to those of Selling Manager Pro. At the close of an auction, Ándale automatically sends the high bidder an email with a link to an Ándale Checkout page. (Buyers can also check out by responding to the end-of-auction email.) You can view the entire post-auction process for all your auctions from Ándale’s sales console; you can also use this page to generate invoices and shipping labels.

Note

In case you’re wondering (or even if you’re not), Ándale is pronounced on-de-lay, not an-dale.

The charge for Ándale Checkout depends on the number of customers who use the service. Table 19.3 details the various fee plans.

The nice thing about Ándale Checkout is that its fees are scalable based on the number of auctions you run in a given month. If you run only a handful of auctions, you pay a low fee20 cents an auction, roughly. You’re not forced into a high fixed monthly cost, which can translate into high per-auction costs. It’s a good choice for low-volume sellers or sellers whose volume varies from month to month.

Auction Hawk

Auction Hawk (www.auctionhawk.com), shown in Figure 19.2, is an up-and-coming auction management service with affordable pricing. Auction Hawk offers a variety of tools in its main service, including image hosting, bulk listing creation, end-of-auction checkout with automated winning bidder email, bulk feedback posting, and profit-and-loss reporting.

Figure 19.2. The Auction Hawk website.

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One nice aspect of Auction Hawk’s services is that you are not charged any per-transaction or final value fees. In addition, all the services are included in a single price, so you’re not nickel-and-dimed to death with a la carte pricing. The full-service monthly plans range in price from $12.99 (for 110 listings) to $89.99 (unlimited listings). At these prices, Auction Hawk is worth checking out.

Auctiva

Auctiva (www.auctiva.com), shown in Figure 19.3, used to offer a variety of different plans at various prices, but now offers just a single planand it’s completely free. You get listing creation, image hosting, listing tracking, hit counters, automated feedback posting, and all the rest, all at no charge. As you can imagine, Auctiva’s popularity has increased substantially since the site removed its fees.

Figure 19.3. The Auctiva website.

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ChannelAdvisor

ChannelAdvisor (www.channeladvisor.com), shown in Figure 19.4, offers a fairly affordable suite of auction management toolsas well as services for bigger online merchants. The service you want to look at is ChannelAdvisor Pro, a surprisingly easy-to-use collection of auction management tools, quite reasonably priced at a flat fee of just $29.95 per month. If you’re doing more than 50 auctions a month, it’s definitely worth consideringeven more so if you’re a heavier lister.

Figure 19.4. The ChannelAdvisor website.

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eBay Selling Manager

eBay Selling Manager (pages.ebay.com/selling_manager/) is another official eBay auction management toolthis one web-based, not a separate software program. When you subscribe to Selling Manager, the Selling tab of your My eBay page is transformed into a Selling Manager tab, where you can manage all your auction and post-auction activityincluding sending customer emails and leaving feedback. Cost is $4.99 per month.

As you can see in Figure 19.6, the main Selling Manager page provides an overview of your active and closed auctions. You can click on any link to see a finer cut of your activityto view only your active listings, for example, or only those listings that are paid and ready to ship.

Figure 19.6. The My eBay Selling page turned into eBay Selling Manager.

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I don’t recommend Selling Manager for high-volume sellers because it isn’t very automated; all the transactions have to be handled manually. You also don’t get any listing creation features, which is why eBay recommends using Selling Manager in conjunction with the free Turbo Lister program. Together, they’re not a bad combination for low-volume sellers.

eBay Selling Manager Pro

As you just read, eBay Selling Manager isn’t perfect. One of its biggest problems is that you pretty much have to manage one auction at a time; it lacks features that let you manage multiple auctions in bulk. If you’re a high-volume seller, a better solution is eBay’s higher-end Selling Manager Pro, which does offer bulk management features (including bulk listing). For $15.99 per month, Selling Manager Pro does everything the basic Selling Manager does, plus more. It sends email messages in bulk, leaves feedback in bulk, manages inventory items and issues restock alerts, and generates a monthly profit and loss reportincluding all eBay fees and cost of goods sold. It’s obviously meant to compete directly with the offerings from Ándale, Vendio, and other third parties.

Note

Learn more about eBay’s Turbo Lister in Chapter 15, “Automating Item Listing.”

inkFrog

inkFrog (www.inkfrog.com), shown in Figure 19.7, is kind of a bargain-basement auction service. All of its services are available for a flat $9.95 per month, which makes it extremely popular among cost-conscious sellers.

Figure 19.7. The inkFrog website.

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The current inkFrog is actually quite a bit different from the inkFrog of just a year ago; that’s because inkFrog recently aquired SpareDollar, and integrated many of SpareDollar’s services into its own feature set. inkFrog’s auction tools include image hosting, listing creation/scheduling, post-auction emails and management, inventory management, page counters, consignment track-ing/management, and more.

Note, however, that while inkFrog is attractively priced, its services might prove too limited for some high-volume sellers. That said, many high-volume sellers do use inkFrog, and are quite happy with the results. Give it a try to see if it fits your particular eBay business.

Vendio

Vendio (www.vendio.com), shown in Figure 19.8, is another long-established full-service auction management site. (The company was formerly known as Auctionwatch, back in the old days.)

Figure 19.8. The Vendio web-site.

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Vendio Sales Manager is a powerful set of listing creation and auction management tools. You can use Sales Manager not only to create new item listings, but also to manage all of your current and post-auction activity. Sales Manager will automatically generate end-of-auction emails, print invoices and packing slips, and upload customer feedback to eBay.

Vendio offers Sales Manager in both Inventory and Merchandising Editions; the mix of features is a little different between the two, but the pricing is the same. The company tries to appeal to different types of sellers by offering a mix of fixed- and variable-priced monthly subscriptions, as shown in Table 19.4.

The problem with this type of fee schedule is that you’re never really sure which is the lowest-cost plan. I suppose the Pay As You Go Plan makes sense if you’re a low-volume seller, or one whose sales volume tends to vary from month to month. If you know you’re going to achieve a high sales level, one of the other plans might be in orderand if you’re committed to a really high sales level, the Power plans might be cost-effective. But choosing which plan you’ll need in advance is often difficultespecially if you’re just starting out.

Many eBay sellers prefer to manage their auctions offline, on their own timewithout being tied to a single service. If you’re more of a do-it-yourself kind of seller, you might want to check out some of the software programs designed to help you manage the eBay auction process. Here’s a short list of programs for your consideration:

• All My Auctions (www.rajeware.com/auction/), $39.95. This is a basic auction management software program; it includes template-based listing creation, live auction management (including the ability to track competitors’ auctions), end-of-auction email notification, and report generation.
• Auction Wizard 2000 (www.auctionwizard2000.com), $75/year, $50 annual renewal. This full-featured software offers many of the same tools you find at the large auction management sites, including inventory management, bulk listing creation, end-of-auction emails, bulk feedback posting, and the like.
• AuctionSage (www.auctionsagesoftware.com), $29.95/3 months, $49.95/6 months, $79.95/year. This is software for posting and managing eBay auction transactions, including sending buyer emails and leaving bulk feedback.
• AuctionTamer (www.auctiontamer.com), $22.95/month, $149.95/year. AuctionTamer is an all-in-one auction management software program for both sellers and bidders. For sellers, it lets you create auction listings, schedule delayed auction listings, manage your live auctions, send post-auction emails, and print shipping labels.
• Shooting Star (www.foodogsoftware.com), $60. Shooting Star is a program designed to manage the end-of-auction process. It uses what it calls a “workflow system” to move you through various post-auction operations, including email notification. (Note that a new version 3 of Shooting Star is in the works, which will have more featuresand a $120 price.)

Note

The sites listed here are just the most popular of the many auction management services available today. There are also higher-end sites, such as Marketworks (www.marketworks.com) and Zoovy (www.zoovy.com), that help integrate eBay auctions with larger e-commerce sites; there are also several less-expensive sites, such as ManageAuctions (www.manageauctions.com) and Trak Auctions (www.jwcinc.net) that offer a more limited set of services. You should visit the eBay Solutions Directory (solutions.ebay.com) to see all the third-party companies offering eBay auction management services.

As with the web-based auction management tools, make sure you try out any of these programs before you buy.

Other Tricks for Improving Item Sell-Through

Starting price and end time aren’t the only factors in determining auction success. Let’s look at a few other tricks you can use to juice up your close rate and selling price.

Offer a Discount for Multiple Purchases

When you want buyers to buy more stuff from you, make it worth their while. One popular incentive is to offer a discount on multiple purchases. This approach is particularly popular among sellers who run their own eBay Stores, but any seller can do it, by manipulating payment-due amounts at the end of an auction to override eBay’s automatically generated invoices. Incent the buyer to make multiple purchases!

Note

Another factor in attracting bidder attention is the listing enhancements you choose when you create your item listing. Learn more in Chapter 21, “Choosing the Most Effective Listing Options.”

Offer Free or Discounted Shipping

Offering free or discounted shipping is another popular way to close more sales. Confronted with one seller charging whatever to ship the item or another seller offering free shipping, which would you choose? There are even variations on this technique, such as offering free shipping when a customer purchases multiple items on the same order. (Just don’t inflate your starting price to compensate for the lower shippingwhich could price your item higher than the competition and cost you sales!)

Make Changes Mid-Auction

If several days have passed and an item hasn’t received any bids, you might want to make changes to the auction listing to attract more customer attention. There are many changes you can make, including

• Extend the length of the auction
• Rewrite the item title or description
• Add more pictures
• Add the Buy It Now option
• Lower the initial bid price

You can make any of these changes up until the final 12 hours of any auction, as long as there aren’t any bidders. Once someone makes a bid, the listing is locked in; you can add to the description, but you can’t make changes.

Selling Internationally

Even though most U.S. sellers sell to U.S. buyers (and most Irish sellers sell to Irish buyers, and most Japanese sellers sell to Japanese buyers, and so on), eBay is a global marketplace. This is a good thing because it significantly broadens the market for whatever it is you’re selling. The more potential bidders you have, wherever they live, the more likely you’ll be to sell your itemand command a higher price. Besides, it can be a lot of fun to deal with people in different countries and cultures.

Pros and Cons of International Selling

That said, not every seller opts to offer goods outside the U.S. That’s because international selling is somewhat more complex than selling domestically. You have to balance the pros and cons to determine if you want to limit your sales to U.S. buyers only or take advantage of eBay’s global marketplace.

The pros of opening your auctions to non-U.S. bidders include the following:

• You might be able to attract additional biddersand thus sell more items at (presumably) higher prices.
• You can offset some of the seasonality of the U.S. market; when it’s winter here, you can still be selling swimsuits to the summer market in Australia.
• It’s fun (sometimes) to interact with people from different countries and cultures.
• You might run into language difficulties communicating with bidders from outside the United States.
• You might have to deal with payment in non-U.S. funds, on non-U.S. banks.
• Unless the buyer pays via PayPal, you’ll have to wait longer to receive payment from another country.
• You’ll have to put extra effort into the packing of an item to be shipped over great distances.
• You probably won’t be able to use your standard shipping serviceswhich means investigating new shipping services and options, and upsetting your normal well-oiled shipping routine.
• You’ll need to deal with the appropriate paperwork for shipping outside the U.S.including those pesky customs forms.
• If there are any problems or disputes with the item shipped, you have an international-sized incident on your hands.

The cons of selling outside the U.S. include the following:

You’ll have to determine for yourself whether the pros (increased sales and higher prices) outweigh the cons (more work and increased complexity).

Accepting Foreign Payments

One of the key issues with selling outside the U.S. is in dealing with foreign currency. First, you have to convert it to U.S. dollars. (How many lira to the dollar today?) Then you have to receive it in a form that is both secure and trusted. (Do you trust a personal check drawn on a small Spanish bank?) Then you have to find a way to deposit those fundsand convert them to U.S. dollars. (Does your bank handle foreign deposits?)

Note

When you need to convert foreign funds, use the Universal Currency Converter (www.xe.net/ucc/).

Note

Issues related to shipping internationally are discussed in Chapter 17, “Organizing Your Packing and Shipping.”

The currency issue is simplified somewhat when you specify bidding and payment in U.S. funds only. This puts the onus of currency conversion on the buyer, which is a plus.

The payment process can be further simplified when the buyer pays by credit card, using PayPal or BidPay. For example, PayPal is now active in more than 55 countries and can handle all the payment, conversion, and deposit functions for you.

Payment via international money order is also a good option. Be sure to specify that you need funds in U.S. dollars, and most U.S. banks (as well as your local post office) should be able to cash one of these money orders with little or no hassle.

The first option we’ll examine is one that, in most configurations, doesn’t cost you a thing. eBay lets you choose from five different lengths for your auctions: 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 days. The first four options come at the standard listing price; 10-day auctions cost you an additional 40 cents.

Note

A 3- or 5-day auction is also a good option if you have to start your auction mid-week but still want it to end on the weekend.

The defaultand most commonauction length is seven days. Choose anything shorter, and you miss any potential buyers who check in only one day a week. Choose the longer option, and it’s probably overkill. (Plus, you have to wait an extra three days to collect your money.)

Know, however, that some sellers like a 10-day auction that starts on a Friday or Saturday so that they get two weekends in their bidding schedule. Others prefer a shorter auction (as long as it runs over a weekend), recognizing that most bidding happens during the last few hours, anyway.

My recommendation is to go with the standard seven-day auction, with some exceptions. If you really need your money quickly, go with a three- or five-day auction, but try to time the listing so that you get in a bidding weekend. Also know that some buyers expect and plan on seven-day auctions, so you might not get as much last-minute sniping if you opt for the shorter length.

eBay also lets you choose a specific start time for your auctionwhich, of course, also becomes your auction’s end time. By default, an eBay auction starts as soon as the item listing is placed, so if you place your listing at 10:00 a.m., that’s when the auction starts and ends. However, you can pay an extra $0.10 (what eBay calls a “scheduled listings fee”) and schedule your auction to start (and stop) at a specified time different from when you created the item listing.

This is a good option if you have to create your auction listings at what would otherwise be a bad time to end an auctionin the morning or early afternoon, for example. It’s better to end an auction during the evening, when more users are at home. So if you can’t launch your auctions in the evening, spend the extra $0.10 so that eBay can automatically schedule the start of your auction for you. (Alternately, you can subscribe to an auction management serviceor use listing creation softwarethat handles the scheduling of your auctions for you, at no extra charge.)

Note

Learn more about the most effective auction end times in Chapter 20, “Increasing Sell-Through.”

Picking the right category sounds simple, and it used to be a bigger deal than it is today. When eBay was a lot smaller, potential buyers used to browse through the various categories to see what was available. Today, however, there are so many listings in every category that browsing is no longer practical; most items today are found via searching.

That said, the category you choose for an item can be used by potential buyers to help narrow their search. Unfortunately, not every product fits neatly within a single category. Maybe you’re selling a model of an American Airlines jet airplane. Does it fit better in Collectibles: Transportation: Aviation: Airlines: American, or in Toys & Hobbies: Models, Kits: Air?

Where you put your item should be dictated by where the highest number of potential bidders will look for it. In the model airplane example, if there are more bidders traipsing through the Collectibles category, put it there; if there are more potential buyers who think of this as a toy or model kit, put it in the Toys & Hobbies category. Think like your potential buyers, and put the item where you would look for it if you were them.

You can also use various third-party research tools (such as those offered by Ándale and Mpire) to provide data on where other sellers placed similar items. Most of these research tools will tell you which category provided the best results, in terms of success rate and highest selling price.

If you determine that you can improve your results by listing your item in more than one category, take advantage of eBay’s offer to list your item in two separate categories. It doubles your listing fees, of course, but it also potentially doubles your exposure. (You make this choice when you create your item listing, right at the start.)

Note

Learn more about third-party research tools in Chapter 2, “Researching Your Business Model.”

When you’re creating an item listing, eBay provides all sorts of listing “enhancements” you can use to make your listing stand out from the millions of others currently running. All of these listing options cost extra, above and beyond the normal listing fee, whether they actually improve your success rate or not. Let’s look at each option in more detail.

Subtitle

eBay lets you supplement your main title with a subtitle, which appears below the title on your item listing page and on all search results pages, as shown in Figure 21.1. It’s on the search results pages that a subtitle has the most value, as it essentially provides another 55 characters for you to describe your item to potential bidders. Of course, you pay for this option, in the form of a $0.50 fee. Is it worth the cost? It depends.

Figure 21.1. A listing with subtitle.

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In some categories a majority of sellers have adopted the use of subtitles, so if you don’t choose this option, your listings will look naked and somehow inferior. Other categories have less frequent use of subtitles, which might make a subtitled listing stand out in the search results. Or not.

In addition, it’s worth noting that adding a subtitle doesn’t help potential buyers find your item. The text in a subtitle is not included in eBay’s standard title search; it comes into play only if a user has expanded his or her search criteria to include the item description.

So, all things considered, I’m not a big fan of the subtitle optionunless you’re forced to use it. My advice is to use it if you have to (in those categories where all the other listings employ it), but otherwise not.

Gallery

eBay’s gallery option started out as a way to display your items in a separate picture gallery. That gallery still exists, although few buyers use it. Instead, the gallery option today displays a photo next to your item listing on all browsing category pages, as shown in Figure 21.2. This is particularly important if you’re selling a highly visual item, such as a painting or collectible. It’s also important in those categories where a majority of other sellers use the optionwhich is an increasing number of categories, these days.

Figure 21.2. Two listingsone with a gallery picture, one without.

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At just $0.35, this is one of the few listing enhancements that I recommend.

Gallery Featured

eBay also offers a second gallery option, called Gallery Featured. When you pay for this option, your item will periodically show up in the special Featured section above the general gallery.

Pricing for the Gallery Featured option is $19.95. It’s a fairly expensive enhancement, and I’m not sure it gets you much; most buyers look beyond the first listings on a page.

Gallery Plus

eBay’s newest listing option is Gallery Plus. Not to be confused with Gallery Featured, Gallery Plus puts an Enlarge icon below your gallery image on search results pages. Users who click the icon, or just hover over the icon with their mouse, display a larger (up to 400 x 400) version of your gallery picture.

You pay an extra $0.75 for the Gallery Plus optionalthough this fee also gives you the standard $0.35 Gallery option, so it’s really just 40 cents extra on top of the regular Gallery, if you think of it that way. While Gallery Plus is too new for me an offer an informed opinion as to effectiveness, it smacks somewhat of opportunism on eBay’s part and seems a little pricy for what you get. I’d wait until other users render judgment before embracing this feature.

Bold

How do you make your item stand out on a page full of listings? How about displaying the listing title in boldface? This option, which costs $1.00, displays your item title in bold in any category or search results listings. A boldfaced item listing is shown in Figure 21.3.

Figure 21.3. Two item list-ingsthe second one in bold.

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Note

To use Gallery Plus, you must have your pictures hosted by eBay Picture Services.

Because of the high price and minimal visual impact of this enhancement, I can’t recommend you use it.

Border

Want something a little more attention-getting than a bold title? How about putting a frame around your listing?

The Border option puts a dark border around your listing on every search results page, as shown in Figure 21.4. This option is more expensive than the bold option, costing you $3.00. I don’t think it’s worth the money.

Figure 21.4. An item listing with the Border option.

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Highlight

If you want to spend even more money, how about creating a shaded item listing?

When you select the Highlight option, your listing (on any category or search results page) is displayed with a colored shade, as shown in Figure 21.5. This little bit of color will cost you $5.00and, as with the bold option, I find it too high-priced to recommend.

Figure 21.5. Two item list-ingsthe second one enhanced with the Highlight option.

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Featured Plus!

The Featured Plus! option displays your item in the Featured Items section on the appropriate major category page, as well as in the Featured Items section at the top of any search results page, as shown in Figure 21.6. This option will set you back a whopping $19.95, and I can’t recommend it; it puts your “featured” listing at the bottom of the page, which is hardly a prominent position!

Figure 21.6. The Featured Items section at the top of a search results page.

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Home Page Featured

Ever wonder how much it costs to have your item featured on the eBay home page? Here’s the answer: $39.95. (And this option doesn’t even guarantee how often your item will pop up. What a dealnot.) All you have to do is select the Home Page Featured option, and your item will periodically be displayed on the home page, as shown in Figure 21.7. (And for the same low price, your item also gets displayed in the Featured Items section of normal category and search results pages.) This is another option that I can’t recommend, unless you’re selling something really special.

Figure 21.7. The Featured Items section in the middle of eBay’s home page.

Gift Services

Think your item would make a great gift for a specific occasion? Then pony up $0.25 to add a Gift Services icon beside your item’s listing, as shown in Figure 21.8.

Figure 21.8. An item enhanced with a Gift icon.

[View full size image]

When you pay for the Gift option, you can also choose to promote any extra gift-related services you might offerin particular, Gift Wrap/Gift Card, Express Shipping, or Ship to Gift Recipient. It’s an okay option for some sellers during the Christmas season, but otherwise fairly ineffective.

Counter

This next option available is a free onea hit counter that appears at the bottom of your item listing, as shown in Figure 21.9. When you opt to include a counter in your listing, you and (in most cases) potential bidders can see how many other users have visited the page. The more page visitors, the more likely you’ll receive a substantial number of bids.

Figure 21.9. A hit counter at the bottom of an eBay listing page.

You can choose from three different types of counters: a basic gray-on-black “odometer”-type counter; a green-on-black “retro-computer” style; and a “hidden” counter that is invisible to bidders but visible to you, the seller.

Tip

eBay also offers two specially priced packages of listing enhancements that you may want to consider, if you want all the individual enhancements. The Value Pack offers the subtitle, gallery, and Listing Designer options for $0.65. The Pro Pack offers the bold, border, highlight, Gallery Featured, and Featured Plus! options for $29.95.

Should you add a counter to your listing? If you think you’re going to get a lot of traffic to your item listing page, by all means display a counter. (It’s free, after all.) A high number on a counter will make bidders think they have to bid now to get in on the action. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to tip your hand as to how many potential bidders you might have, go with the hidden counter. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have 2 or 200 visitors, as long as you have one really good bid!

Skype Real-Time Communication

One of eBay’s recent acquisitions was Skype, a company that offers Internet phone servicethat is, the ability to make phone calls from your PC, over the Internet. Many people wondered just what Internet phone service had to do with online commerce, but here’s what eBay had in mind.

Sellers now have the option, in many product categories, of including a Chat or Voice button in their listings. This lets potential buyers contact you in real time, using the Skype service, to ask any questions they might have about your listing. This option is free, if you choose to use it.

Should you offer live chat or voice contact for your buyers? This is one feature that most sellers are not supportive of, for the simple reason that offering live customer service costs moneyeven if the technology itself is free. To offer this real-time support, you have to be available to answer the live questions. That means putting yourself (or an employee) in front of your computer for hours on end, just in case somebody asks a question. That’s a huge time expenditure.

One of the appealing things about an online business, for many sellers, is that they don’t have to have constant one-on-one interaction with customers. That’s what makes online retailing more cost-effective than a bricks-and-mortar retail store. Do you really want to take live calls from customers? Most sellers I know don’t.

Even if you’re a large seller, eBay’s customer support option might not make sense. If you’re large enough to have your own customer support department, you don’t need eBay to offer this service for you. You can simply put your own toll-free number or email address in your auction listings, and answer customers questions through the normal channels. Tying into eBay’s Skype-based support simply isn’t necessary.

Does it sound like I have a strong opinion about eBay’s real-time customer communication? I admit that I do. This smacks of being nothing more than an ill-guided attempt to justify an overpriced and poorly thought-out acquisition. It offers nothing to sellers except more work, and is unlikely to be embraced by many buyers. Avoid it.

In the preceding two chapters we discussed various ways to improve your auction sell-through and selling price. The factor that many users neglect, however, is the auction listing itself. Create a better auction listing, and you’ll close more salesat higher prices.

To make a more powerful auction listing, you need to pay attention to both content and style. That is, the words you write and the way you present those words (and pictures) on the page. You want to write more powerful words and present those words in an appealing fashion. Do so, and you’ll notice the results.

Writing an Effective Item Listing

You can’t neglect the basics. It’s a fact that the better written and more effective your listing title and description, the more successful your auction will be. It’s just like advertising copy: Great copy produces the best results.

Write a Title That SELLS!

Let’s start right at the top, with the title of your item listing. You can use up to 55 letters, numbers, characters, and spaces, and you need to accomplish two things:

• You have to include the appropriate information so that anyone searching for a similar item will find your item in his or her search results.
• You have to make your title stand out from all the other titles on those long search results pages.

Let’s tackle the first point first. Most bidders find the items they want by using eBay’s search feature, so you have to construct your title so that it includes the words that people will be searching for.

To do this, you have to think like the people who will be looking for your item. Imagine how you would search for this specific item, and then include the right keywords into your item title to make your item pop up on as many search results pages as possible.

What words should you include in your title? Well, if your item has a model number or series name, that’s definitely something to use. As an example, you might be selling a 1956 Gibson ES-175 Red Jazz Guitar. This title gets in the year (1956), the manufacturer (Gibson), the model number (ES-175), the color (Red), and a brief description of what it is (a jazz guitar)which pretty much covers all the bases.

Beyond including as many relevant facts as possible in your title, how do you make your title POP off the page and STAND OUT from all the other boring listings? Obviously, one technique is to employ the judicious use of CAPITAL LETTERS. The operative word here is judicious; titles with ALL capital letters step over the line into overkill.

Thinking like an advertising copywriter also pays off. What words almost always stop consumers in their tracks? Use attention-getting words such as FREE and NEW and BONUS and EXTRA and DELUXE and RAREas long as these words truly describe the item you’re selling and don’t mislead the potential bidder. (And don’t bump more important search words for these fluffier marketing termsthat won’t help your item show up in bidder searches.)

You also need to make sure that your title “searches” well. That means adopting a few tricks that play to the way eBay’s search engine works. For example, when describing an item in your title, you should use the full phrase or title for the item. Leave out a wordeven if it’s the word “and”and your item won’t come up as a hit on the search. For example, if you’re selling a copy of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, enter the entire book title in the title field; if you enter only Ring and Book, you’ll be excluded from the results of anyone searching for the exact phrase “The Ring and the Book”.

In short, use your title to both inform and attract attentionand include as many potential search keywords as possible.

Write the Right Description

If the listing title is the headline of your ad, the listing description is your ad’s body copy. This means it’s time to put on your copywriter’s hat and get down to the nitty-gritty details.

What makes for good copy? Remember, you have all the space you need (there’s no character limit, as there is with the item title), so say as much as you need to say. You don’t have to scrimp on words or leave anything out. If you can describe your item adequately in a sentence, great; if it takes three paragraphs, that’s okay, too. (Just make sure you break your info into easily digestible chunks; three short paragraphs are better than a single overly long one!)

When you’re writing the description for your ad, make sure you mention anything and everything that a potential bidder might need to know. Users expect to see certain key data points in your item description; they include

• Name (or title)
• Condition (new, used, mint, and so on)
• Age (if it’s a used item)
• Original use (if it’s a used item)
• Value (if you know it)
• Important measurements, contents, colors, materials, and so on
• Any included accessories
• Any known defects or damage
• Warranty or guarantee (if you offer one)

When you’re writing the item description, you need to put the most important and motivating information in your initial paragraph, since a lot of folks won’t read any further than that. Think of your first paragraph like a lead paragraph in a newspaper story: Grab ‘em with something catchy, give them the gist of the story, and lead them into reading the next paragraph and the one after that.

Stress Benefits, Not Features

Although you need to be descriptive (and in some collectibles categories, you need to be obsessively so), it doesn’t hurt to employ a little marketing savvy and sales-manship. Yes, you should talk about the features of your item, but it’s even better if you can talk about your product’s benefits to the potential buyer.

Note

If you use an abbreviation in the item title, you might want to spell out the entire term in the descriptionfor the benefit of less knowledgeable bidders.

Let’s say you’re selling a used cordless phone, and the phone has a 50-number memory. Saying “50-number memory” is stating a feature; saying instead that the phone “lets you recall your 50 most-called phone numbers at the press of a button” is describing a benefit. Remember, a feature is something your item has; a benefit is something your item does for the user.

Use the Right Abbreviations

When dealing with some types of items, collectibles especially, you can use abbreviations and acronyms to describe the product’s condition. This helps to conserve valuable space, especially in the listing’s title.

For example, if you’re describing an item that is in mint condition and still in its original box, you might use the abbreviation MIB, for “mint in box.” If you’re describing a new (not used) item of clothing that is missing its original tags, you might use the description NWOT, for “new without tags.”

There are literally dozens of these common abbreviations you can use in your listing titles. See Appendix B, “Listing Abbreviations,” for a complete list of these useful abbreviations.

Don’t Reinvent the WheelReuse Item Listings That Work

Here’s another good reason to standardize the types of items you sell on eBay. Once you create the perfect item title and description, reuse it. That’s right; there’s no reason to write a new listing every time you put another item up for auction. Use the old cut and paste to recycle your winning title and description text. That’s not to say you shouldn’t tweak your copy over time, but once you come up with a winner, why change it? High-volume sellers use the same copy over and overjust as real-world advertisers dofor a simple reason. It works!

Note

One easy way to reuse an item listing is to use eBay’s Sell Similar option, which lets you create a new listing based on an older one.

Creating Better-Looking Item Listings

Now it’s time for the fun stuffmaking your item listings look more attractive. Yes, we’re talking style over substance, but style draws the eyeballs. So let’s look at the various ways you can make your listings stand out from eBay’s standard plain-text listings.

Note

The single most effective way to improve your item listings is to include a photograph of the item for sale. This is such an important step that I’ve devoted an entire chapter to the process. Turn to Chapter 23, “Displaying More Powerful Photographs,” to learn more.

eBay’s Listing Designer

We’ll start with the listing templates that are available with eBay’s Listing Designer. As you can see in Figure 22.1, Listing Designer is available to all users from the basic listing creation formproviding you pay the extra $0.10 per listing to use it.

Figure 22.1. Any seller can use eBay’s Listing Designer to choose a template for an item listing.

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Listing Designer provides several hundred predesigned templates, which eBay calls themes. You choose a theme from the list and then choose a related picture layout. Listing Designer is easy to use and requires no additional software or ongoing subscription.

eBay Turbo Lister

The same themes that are available in Listing Designer are also available in eBay’s Turbo Lister bulk listing software (pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/). You choose your template on the Design Your Listing screen, shown in Figure 22.2. As you learned in Chapter 19, “Automating Auction Management,” Turbo Lister is available free of chargemaking it the listing creation software of choice for cost-conscious sellers.

Figure 22.2. Apply a theme to all your bulk listings with eBay Turbo Lister.

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Downloadable Listing Templates

If you place a lot of listings, eBay’s $0.10 Listing Designer fee can start to add up. Fortunately, lots of free auction templates are available for use; it’s always good when you can cut your auction costs. (There are also several sites that offer templates for sale, which are also worth checking out.)

Most of these templates work by asking for specific input and then let you choose from a number of colors and designs. This generates a batch of HTML code, which you copy from the template site into eBay’s standard listing creation form (using the Enter Your Own HTML tab). Other sites have pre-designed template code you can download to your own computer. The results are similar.

Here are some of the most popular of these auction template sites:

• Alou Web Design (www.alouwebdesign.ca/free-ebay-templates.htm)
• Antique-Central eZ Auction Template (www.antique-central.com/eztemplate.html)
• Auction AD Creator (www.auctionlotwatch.co.uk/auctionadcreator.html)
• Auction Insights (www.auctioninsights.info/templates/)
• Auction Riches Free Auction Ad Creator (www.auctionriches.com/freead/create.pl)
• Auction Template Central (www.auctiontemplatecentral.com)
• Bay Dream Design (www.bay-dream.com)
• Auction Writer (www.auctionwriter.com)
• AuctionFlash (www.auctionflash.com)
• AuctionSpice (www.auctionspice.com)
• AuctionSupplies.com Free Auction Templates (auctionsupplies.com/templates/)
• BiggerBids (www.biggerbids.com)
• Birddogs Garage (www.birddogsgarage.com)
• DeadZoom (www.deadzoom.com/auction-template/)
• DeSa C.S. (www.desacs.com)
• Free Auction Help (www.freeauctionhelp.com/free_auction_template.htm)
• K&D Web Page Design (www.kdwebpagedesign.com)
• ListTailor (www.listtailor.com/quickstart.html)
• Nucite Auction Templates (members.nucite.com)
• RobsHelp.com FreeForm Builer (www.robshelp.com)
• SaverSites (www.saversites.com/services_ebay_auction_templates.htm)
• Two Wizards Designs (www.2wiz.net/dtemplates1.shtml)
• The Ultimate eBay Resource (www.sellingonebay.info/templates.html)
• Wizard’s Free Auction Template Creation Form (www.ambassadorboard.net/hosting/free-form.php)
• Xample.net Auction Templates (www.xample.net/templates.htm)
• Woo Woo Designs (www.woowoodesigns.com)
• Ándale Lister (www.andale.com)
• Auction Hawk (www.auctionhawk.com)
• Auction Lizard (www.auction-lizard.com)
• Auction Wizard 2000 (www.auctionwizard2000.com)
• AuctionSage (www.auctionsage.com)
• AuctionTamer (www.auctiontamer.com)
• Auctiva (www.auctiva.com)
• ChannelAdvisor Pro (www.channeladvisor.com)
• eBay Blackthorne Basic (pages.ebay.com/blackthorne/basic.html)
• eBay Blackthorne Pro (pages.ebay.com/blackthorne/pro.html)
• eBay Turbo Lister (pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/)
• inkFrog (www.inkfrog.com)
• Vendio (www.vendio.com)

Third-Party Listing Tools

Back in Chapter 19, we talked about third-party bulk listing tools. Most of these third-party tools also help you create fancy-looking listings, using a variety of predesigned templates.

Most of these tools work in a similar fashion. You go to a particular web page or program screen, select a template from a list, choose available layout options, and then enter your normal listing title and description. You’ll see a preview of what your listing will look like; if you like the way it looks, click a button to post the listing on the eBay site and start your auction.

Here are some of the most popular of these third-party listing-creation tools:

Note

Want to learn more about creating your own auction templates? Then check out my companion book, eBay Auction Template Starter Kit (Que, 2006), which offers advice and instruction for choosing third-party listing templates or building your own templates from scratch, using HTML. The book even comes with a free CD chock-full of free auction templates, that you can use in your own eBay auctions.

Using HTML in Your Listings

Here’s a secret known to successful sellers: eBay lets you use HTML to spruce up your item listings. While this isn’t a task for the faint of heart, writing your own code lets you create highly individualized item listingsmuch fancier than you can do with a template-driven listing creator.

How HTML Works

HTML coding might sound difficult, but it’s really pretty easy. HTML is really nothing more than a series of hidden codes that tell web browsers how to display different types of text and graphics. The codes are embedded in a document, so you can’t see them; they’re visible only to your web browser.

These codes are distinguished from normal text by the fact that they’re enclosed within angle brackets. Each particular code turns on or off a particular attribute, such as boldface or italic text. Most codes are in sets of “on/off” pairs. You turn “on” the code before the text you want to affect and then turn “off” the code after the text.

For example, the code <h1> turns specified type into a level-one headline; the code </h1> turns off the headline type. The code <i> is used to italicize text; </i> turns off the italics. (As you can see, an “off” code is merely the “on” code with a slash before it.)

Entering HTML Codes

You enter HTML codes while you’re creating your item listing. Just go to the Describe Your Item page, scroll down to the Description box, and click the HTML Mode option. When the box changes to the HTML editor view, as shown in Figure 22.3, enter your code in the box. You can switch back to normal text editing mode to view the results of your code.

Figure 22.3. Enter your own HTML code when creating your eBay auction listing.

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While most users enter HTML code directly into the listing creation form, you can create your code in another application and then cut and paste it into the Description box. The only thing you have to remember is that the pasted code must be in plain-text formatyou can’t paste a Word document into the box.

Note

If all you want to do is add some bold or color text to your listing, you don’t have to learn HTML or use fancy listing-creation tools. eBay’s standard text editor is available when you create your item listing with the Sell Your Item form. It lets you add HTML effects in a WYSIWYG environment, much the same way you add boldface and italics in your word processor. Just highlight the text you want to format and then click the appropriate formatting button. No manual coding necessary.

For example, I typically use Windows Notepad to create short amounts of HTML code. I’ll actually save some boilerplate code in a Notepad file and then edit it for my individual ads. It’s very easy to cut from Notepad and then paste into the Description box. And I can save the code I use in a Notepad file, so it can be reused in multiple auction listings.

Codes to Format Your Text

We’ll start off with some of the most common HTML codesthose used to format your text. Table 22.1 shows some of these text-formatting codes you can use in your item description.

Just surround the text you want to format with the appropriate on and off codes, and you’re ready to go. For example, to format a piece of text as bold, you’d write something that looks like this:

<b>this text is bold</b>

Codes for Font Type, Size, and Color

You can also use HTML to specify a particular font type or size, using the <font> code.

To specify a font type for selected text, use the <font> code with the face attribute, like this:

<font face="xxxx">text</font>

Replace the xxxx with the specific font, such as Arial or Times Romanin quotation marks.

Another common use of the <font> code is to specify type size. You use the size attribute, and the code looks like this:

<font size="xx">text</font>

Replace the xx with the size you want, from 6 to +6, with 6 being the smallest, +6 being the biggest, and 0 (or no size specified) being “normal” size type.

You can also use the <font> code to designate a specific text color. In this instance, you use the color attribute, like this:

<font color="#xxxxxx">text</font>

Replace the xxxxxx with the code for a specific color. Table 22.2 lists some basic color codes.

If you don’t want to bother with learning hexadecimal color codes, you also have the option of simply entering the actual name of the color (still within quotation marks, of course). While this limits you to a handful of primary colors, it’s easier than remembering all the detailed codes. For example, to rewrite our previous red text example, you use the following simplified code:

<font color="red">red text</font>

Note

By the way, the twenty colors listed in Table 22.2 are just a fraction of the available colors you can use in your auction listings. To view all available colors, consult one of the many web-based HTML color charts, such as the ones at www.immigration-usa.com/html_colors.html and www.html-color-codes.com.

Codes for Paragraphs, Line Breaks, and Rules

Some of the simplest HTML codes let you break your text into separate lines and paragraphsand add horizontal rules between paragraphs. These codes are inserted into your text just once; there are no matching ending codes.

Table 22.3 lists these “on-only” codes.

Codes for Graphics

Adding pictures to your item listings really brings some excitement to the normally plain-text world of eBay. While you can add pictures the eBay way (via the Sell Your Item page), you can also add pictures in the middle of your item description, using HTML.

Before you can insert a graphic into your listing, you need to know the address of that graphic (in the form of a web page URL). Then you use the following code:

<img src="URL">

No off code is required for inserted graphics. Note that the location is enclosed in quotation marksand that you have to insert the http:// part of the URL.

Note

eBay allows links to pages that provide additional information about the item listed, additional photos of the item, and your other eBay auctions. eBay prohibits links to pages that attempt to sell merchandise outside eBay. Link at your own risk.

Codes for Links

You can use HTML to add links to your own personal web pages (a great idea if you have additional images of this specific item) or to related sites. Many sellers also like to provide a direct email link in case potential bidders have questions they need answered.

To insert a link to another web page in your item listing, you use the following HTML code:

<a href="URL">this is the link</a>

The text between the on and off codes will appear onscreen as a typical underlined hyperlink; when users click that text, they’ll be linked to the URL you specified in the code. Note that the URL is enclosed in quotation marks and that you have to include the http:// part of the address.

You can also create a mail-to link in your listing; users will be able to send email to you by simply clicking the link. Here’s the code for a mail-to link:

<a href="mailto:yourname@domain.com">click here to email me</a>

Codes for Tables

Believe it or not, tables are key to creating some of the more interesting auction listing effects. You create a table and then format the cells within the table however you likeand put whatever you like within each cell. Used correctly, a table creates an invisible (or visible, if you like) grid that lets you align multiple text and graphic items within your listing.

You start by enclosing your table with <table> and </table> codes. Then you enclose each individual row in the table with <tr> and </tr> codes and each cell in each row with <td> and </td> codes.

A basic table with two rows and two columns (four cells total) is coded like this:

<table>

<tr>

<td>row 1 cell 1</td>

<td>row 1 cell 2</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>row 2 cell 1</td>

<td>row 2 cell 2</td>

</tr>

</table>

Within any individual cell in your table, you can insert any type of itemplain text, formatted text, bulleted lists, background shading, and even graphics. Figure 22.4 shows what this simple table looks like (with borders separating the cellsas described next).

Figure 22.4. A simple two-column, tworow table.

You can also use HTML to format both a table as a whole and the cells within the table, to some degree:

• To dictate the width of the table border, use the <table border="xx"> code, where xx is in pixels. (A border value of “1″ is common.)
• To specify the border color, use the <table bordercolor="xxxxxx"> code, where xxxxxx is the color hex code.
• To shade the background of an individual cell, use the <td bgcolor="#xxxxxx"> code, where xxxxxx is the color hex code.

Note

I’ve shown just a handful of the huge number of HTML codes available to you. If you want to learn more about these and other HTML codes, I recommend that you go to the HTML Goodies (www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/) website. You can also pick up a copy of Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, 7th Edition, by Dick Oliver and Michael Morrison (Sams, 2005), available wherever good books are sold; this book is a great primer for creating your own web pages with HTML. And Nicholas Case’s Easy HTML for eBay (Que, 2004) offers a variety of eBay-specific code you can use in all your auction listings.

• To dictate the width of a cell, use the <td width="xx%"> code, where xx is a percentage of the total table width; for example, <td width="50%"> specifies a cell that is 50% of the total table width. You can also specify an exact width, in pixels, like this: <td width=xxx, where xxx is the number of pixels wide

Showing a picture of your product in your item listing greatly increases your chances of success. It also helps to increase the average selling price of your item.

Managing product photos is an important part of any successful eBay business. You need to learn how to take good photos of your products and how to insert those photos into your item listings. It isn’t hard, once you get it figured outbut it does require some small degree of photographic skill and mastery of a photo editing software program. So clean off your camera lens and get ready to shootit’s time to learn all about photography for eBay!

Figure 23.1. Position auxiliary lighting to best effect.

You don’t always have to photograph the items you want to sell. If you’re selling relatively flat items (books, comics, CDs, DVDs, and so on), you might be better off with a scanner than a camera. Just lay the object on a flatbed scanner, and scan the item into a digital file on your computer. Scanning something like a book or a DVD case is actually easier than taking a picture of it. You don’t have to worry about lighting, or focus, or any of that. And when you’re scanning compact discs, take the CD booklet out of the jewel case to scan, instead of scanning the jewel case itself.

Here’s something else: Since your scanner operates just like a camera, you can scan practically anything you can fit on the glass. The item at hand doesn’t even have to be perfectly flat. Just about any item in a box can be easily scanned, as can many other small objects. When in doubt, test it.

Editing Your PhotosDigitally

When you’re taking a digital photo or making a scan, you want to save your images in the JPG file format. This is the default file format for most digital cameras and scanners, although some devices give you a choice of other formats (GIF, TIF, and so on). The JPG format is the de facto standard for web images and what eBay expects for your item listings. Given the choice, choose JPG.

With your photos in JPG format, you can easily touch them up with digital photo editing software. What kind of touch-up are we talking about? Here’s a list of the most common photo editing operations:

• Lighten up photos shot in low light
• Correct the color in poorly shot photos
• Crop the picture to focus only on the subject at hand
• Resize the image to fit better in your eBay listings
• Decrease the resolution or color count to produce a smaller-sized file

If you’re a perfect photographer, you may never need to touch up the pictures you take. But since most of us are far from perfect, it’s great to be able to “punch up” the photos we takeand make them as perfect as possible for our eBay listings.

Choosing Image Editing Software

To edit your photos, you need a software program designed to edit digital photographs. There are a lot of programs out there, some free and some tremendously expensive. (Adobe Photoshop, used by many professional photographers, falls into the latter category.) You want something in the middlea low-cost program that’s easy to use and includes all the image editing features you need to create quality product photos.

There are a number of easy-to-use, low-cost programs available. The most popular among eBay users include

• Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com)
• IrfanView (www.irfanview.com)
• Paint Shop Pro (www.corel.com)
• Picasa (picasa.google.com)
• Microsoft Digital Image (www.microsoft.com/products/imaging/)
• Roxio PhotoSuite (www.roxio.com)

Most of these programs cost less than $100 and have similar features. (And Picasa and IrfanView are free!) I personally use Photoshop Elements, but any of these programs should do the job for you.

Resizing Your Pictures for Best Effect

While you’re editing, you’ll probably need to resize your photographs to best fit within your eBay listings. Most pictures you take with a digital camera will come out too big to fit on a web page without scrolling. Even the smallest digital photos are typically sized at 640 [.dotmath] 480that’s 640 pixels wide, which is too wide to fit comfortably on most computer screens.

eBay recommends that you size your image to no more than 400 pixels high by 400 pixels wideunless you’re using the Supersize option, which can accept photos up to 800 [.dotmath] 800. This is particularly important if you use eBay Picture Services, which will compress any larger pictures to these dimensions. The results of this compression are yucky-looking pictures, so either resize to fit or use a different picture-hosting servicewhich we’ll discuss in a moment.

Personally, I find the 400 pixels-wide requirement okay in most instances, but will sometimes go up to 500 or even 600 pixels wide, depending on the item photographed and the importance of viewing item detail. I won’t go over 600 pixels, however.

While you’re considering the physical size of the photograph, you should also consider the size of the file that holds the photograph. The bigger the file, the longer it takes to download from the Internet. Create too big a file, and users won’t want to wait to view your item listing.

The right file size is something less than 50KBand less is better. Holding the files under the 50KB level keeps the loading time for each photo down to a reasonable level.

Your photo editing software should include settings that let you reduce both the physical size and the file size for your photographs. And, of course, the two go hand in hand: Reduce the physical size, and you’ll also reduce the file size.

Adding Photos to Your Item Listings

When you have your photos properly edited, it’s time to add photos to your item listings. The easiest way to add a photo to an item listing is to use eBay’s picture management services and choose the appropriate options when you’re creating your item listings. You also have the option of using third-party image management services; we’ll look at both options.

Using eBay Picture Services

When you have eBay host your photos, you have some choices to make. If you want to show only one picture, eBay’s built-in picture management is a good choice. It’s free (for a single picture), and you can use the Listing Designer (discussed in Chapter 22, “Creating More Successful Auction Listings”) to choose the right position for your photo.

If you want to include more than one photo in your ad, you’ll have to pay for it. Here’s how eBay’s fee structure works:

• First photo: Free
• Each additional picture (up to six, total): $0.15 each
• Picture Show (multiple pictures in a slideshow format): Free
• Supersize pictures (allow users to click a photo to display at a larger size): $0.75
• Picture pack (up to six pictures, supersized, with Gallery display): $1.00or $1.50 for from seven to twelve photos

You can see how the costs start to add up. Let’s say you have two pictures of your item (front and back, perhaps) that you want to display large. You’ll pay $0.90 for this privilege ($0.15 for the second picture, plus $0.75 for supersizing). As you can see, if you have more than one photo in your listing, finding another site to host your pictures might be cheaper, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

If you choose to use eBay to manage your photos, you do so from the Pictures section of the listing creation form. Click the Add Pictures button and when the Add Pictures window appears, select the Enhance tab, shown in Figure 23.8. Now you should click the Add Pictures button in the first (top left) box. An Open dialog box now appears on your computer desktop; use this dialog box to locate and select the photo you want to use. Click the Open button when done; the photo you selected now appears in the Add Pictures window.

Figure 23.8. Using eBay Picture Services to insert photos in your item listing.

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To insert an additional picture (for $0.15 extra), click the Add Picture button in the second box and repeat the previous instructions. To insert even more pictures, click the Add Picture button(s) in the next box(es) and repeat the instructions again.

When you’re done adding pictures, you’ll need to select which picture options you wantStandard, Supersize Pictures, Picture Show, or Picture Pack. This done, click the Upload Pictures button to upload the selected photos from your computer to eBay.

That’s it. eBay will automatically upload the pictures from your hard disk to its picture hosting server and automatically insert those pictures into your item listing.

Note

If you choose to use eBay’s Listing Designer, return to the listing creation page, scroll to the Listing Designer section, and select a position for your photo(s) from the layout list.

Using Third-Party Image Management Services

Many experienced sellers choose not to use eBay’s picture hosting service. They find this service somewhat expensive (if you want to show a lot of pictures) and somewhat limited.

If you don’t want to let eBay manage your pictures, you can use another web hosting service to host your image files and then manually insert these pictures into your item listings using the HTML code you learned in Chapter 22.

A large number of websites will host picture files for your eBay auctions. Most of these sites charge some sort of fee, either on a monthly basis for a certain amount of storage space or on a per-picture basis. You’ll want to compare the fees at these sites with what you’ll pay at eBay and then make the smart choice.

The most popular of these services include

• Ándale Images (www.andale.com)
• Auction Pix Image Hosting (www.auctionpix.com)
• Photobucket (www.photobucket.com)
• PictureTrail (www.picturetrail.com)
• Vendio Image Hosting (www.vendio.com)

Your Internet service provider might also provide image hosting services, often for free. Many ISPs give their users a few megabytes of file storage space as part of their monthly service; you may be able to upload your photos to your ISP’s server and then link to that server in your eBay item listings.

Inserting a Single Photothe Easy Way

After you have your pictures uploaded, you can then add them to your new item listing. If you’re adding a single photo, you can do so when you’re creating your item listing. You do this from the Pictures section of the listing creation form. After you click the Add Pictures button to display the Add Pictures window, select the Self-Hosting tab, shown in Figure 23.9. Now you should enter the full web address of your photo into the Picture URL box. If you have multiple photos, check the Picture Show option and follow the onscreen instructions to add additional URLs; otherwise, click the Upload Pictures button and continue with the rest of the listing creation process, as normal.

Figure 23.9. Pointing to a picture file uploaded to another hosting service.

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That’s it. Your completed listing will now include the photograph you linked to. Simple as that.

Inserting Photos via HTML

As you learned in Chapter 22, you can include HTML code in your item descriptionsand you can use this code to link to pictures you’ve already uploaded to an image hosting service. This process isn’t as hard as it sounds, assuming you’ve already found a hosting service, uploaded your picture file, and obtained the full URL for the uploaded picture. All you have to do is insert the following HTML code into your item description, where you want the picture to appear:

<img src="http://www.webserver.com/picture.jpg">

Just replace www.webserver.com/picture.jpg with the correct URL for your picture. And remember, when you use this method, you can include as many photos in your listing as you want.

Chapter 24. Promoting Your eBay Auctions

If you’ve followed all the instructions and advice throughout this book, you should now have your eBay business up and running and generating a steady stream of sales. But no matter how much revenue you’re generating, you always want morewhich is what this chapter is about. A sure-fire way to make your auctions more successful is to promote them, and there are lots of ways to do that. We’ll look at some of the more efficient ways to promote your auctions and hopefully help you increase your trafficand your selling prices.

Cross-Promoting All Your Auctions

The most obvious place to promote your eBay auctions is on eBay itself. Once you have potential customers interested in one thing you’re selling, why not show them what else you have for sale? You’d be surprised how many customers can turn into purchasers of multiple itemsand those extra sales are especially profitable.

Linking to Your Other Auctions

eBay helps you cross-sell in this fashion by including a View Seller’s Other Auctions link at the top of all item listing pages, as shown in Figure 24.1. It links to a page that lists all your current auctions.

Figure 24.1. Every item listing page includes a link to your other eBay auctions.

Unfortunately, many buyers tend to overlook this link, so you might want to emphasize your other auctions by including another, more prominent link to this page in your item listings. You can create this link by adding the following line of HTML code to your item description:

[View full width]

<a

href=”http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&amp

;userid=USERID&amp;include=0&amp;since=-

1&amp;sort=3&amp;rows=50&amp;sspageName=DB:OtherItems” target=_blank> Check out my other

items!

</a>

Naturally, you should replace USERID with your own eBay user ID. You can also replace the Check out my other items! text with any text of your choosing.

Linking to Your About Me Page

You can also create a separate link to your About Me page, which includes a list of all your current eBay auctions. This is an easier way to provide a constant link to all your auctions in progress, and it can be inserted into any web pagenot just your item listings.

Note

Of course, another way to promote your auctions on the eBay site is to employ eBay’s extra-cost listing enhancements, such as bold and highlight. Learn more about these features in Chapter 21, “Choosing the Most Effective Listing Options.”

You create a link to your About Me page by adding the following HTML code:

<a href=”http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/USERID/”>text</a>

Again, replace USERID with your own eBay user ID and text with the text you want for the link.

Where else can you advertise the items you have for auction on eBay? Here are some ideas you might want to explore:

• Send emails to previous customers when you have new items for auction that they might be interested in. (Know, however, that eBay frowns against spamming other users, so take care when making this type of email solicitation.)
• When you’re sending out end-of-auction emails to your high bidders, include a link to your About Me pageor even a list of other items you have for sale or plan to have for sale in the near future.
• Post messages on Internet message boards and Usenet newsgroups that are dedicated to the types of items you have for auction.
• Barter with other website owners to include links to your auctions or About Me page on their sites, in return for links to their sites on your site.
• Include your About Me URL or eBay Store URL as a signature in all your personal and business email messages.
• Include your About Me or eBay Store URL on your business cards and stationery.

Probably the most important type of promotion, however, is word of mouthbased on your good reputation. You want to encourage repeat bidders and drive buyers into your other auctions or online store (if you have one) for additional sales. That means treating your buyers fairly and with respect and going the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction.

When it comes to promoting your auctions, the eBay site itself offers a lot of resources for sellers. Most of this help is informational in nature, and almost all of it is free.

A good place to start is eBay’s Guide to Seller Resources (pages.ebay.com/help/sell/services.html). This page includes links to all the seller-related tools services offered by eBay, from seller education to global trading advice.

Another good resource is eBay’s Seller Central Advanced Selling page (pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/techniques.html). Here is where you’ll find links to selling tools of particular interest to eBay businessesinventory sourcing, promotional opportunities, data and research, you name it.

Finally, there’s the topic of seller education, in the form of eBay’s online workshops. Check out the Workshop Calendar (pages.ebay.com/community/workshopcalendar/current.html) to see what workshops are available in the near future; eBay usually offers three or four different workshops a week, many of them targeted at the professional seller community.

In other words, there’s a lot of free advice available directly from eBay on how to improve your online salesand smart sellers always take advantage of free advice.

Chapter 25. Becoming an eBay PowerSeller

One of the steps to running your own eBay businessalthough not a requirement, by any meansis to become an eBay PowerSeller. eBay’s 600,000 or so PowerSellers generate enough business to warrant special attention from eBay, in the form of dedicated customer support, premier tools, and the occasional special offer. Plus, they get to display that cool PowerSeller logo in all their auction listings.

Should you be aiming for PowerSeller status? Read on and find out what’s involvedand whether it’s worth the effort.

What Is a PowerSeller?

PowerSellers are the most profitable sellers on the eBay site; that is, they generate the most profits for eBay. They don’t necessarily sell the most merchandise; instead, they generate the most revenue, which is how eBay generates its fees. Still, an eBay PowerSeller does a fair amount of business, however you measure it.

You can’t choose to be a PowerSellereBay chooses you, based on your past sales performance. If you’re chosen, you don’t have to pay for the privilege; membership in the PowerSellers program is free.

Note

Just because you qualify as a PowerSeller doesn’t mean you have to display the logo in your item listings. Some PowerSellers prefer to forgo the logo in an attempt to seem more like normal folks and less like ruthless business types.

When you become a PowerSeller, a special logo (shown in Figure 25.1) is displayed next to your user ID in all your eBay auctions, and you automatically qualify for the rewards appropriate to your level.

Figure 25.1. The sign of an eBay PowerSeller.

Ten Tips for Achieving PowerSeller Statusor Just Increasing Your Day-to-Day Sales

The key to becoming a PowerSeller is to increase the number of auctions you closeand to increase your final selling prices. To that end, anything you can do to make your auctions more effective will improve your chances of achieving PowerSeller status.

What can you do to improve the success of your eBay auctions? Here are 10 tips that will benefit any eBay seller, PowerSeller or not:

Tip #1: Focus your sales activity. Occasional sellers can get by selling onesies and twosies that they pick up here and there. High-volume sellers focus on a specific type of merchandiseand sell lots of it. By focusing your activities, you can be much more efficient in your packing and shipping, as well as have a better feel for the category you’re working with.

Tip #2: Buy low, sell high. It goes without sayingyou want to make as much money as possible on each item you sell. That means obtaining your inventory at the lowest possible prices. Some sellers try to double or triple their cost when they sell an item. You may not be able to achieve this type of profit margin, but you should definitely be aiming to reduce your product costs however possible.

Tip #3: List in volume. You won’t become a PowerSeller by selling one or two items a week. You need to list in volume to sell in volume. That means running multiple listings simultaneously, having listings close daily, and utilizing the Dutch auction feature when you have multiple quantities to sell.

Tip #4: Be organized. When you’re closing a large number of auctions every week, you have to get the process down to a science. That means being more efficient every step of the wayfrom creating your listings to shipping out the merchandise. Wasted time and energy cost you money.

Tip #5: Create professional-looking listings. The better-looking your item listings, the more auctions you’ll closeat higher prices. For best results, invest in a good-quality digital camera (for crisp product photos), and utilize a professional auction creation and listing service.

Tip #6: Write powerful headlines and descriptive listings. Pack as much useful information as you can into the item list’s headline. Avoid fluff words, and focus on words and phrases that are “search-friendly.” In the body of your listing, be as descriptive as possible. Include all the information a buyer might need to make an intelligent purchasing decision.

Tip #7: Use auction management tools. Running dozensor hundredsof auctions a week can task even the best-organized sellers. Utilize one of the many auction management programs or services to help you track every step of your auction activityincluding the crucial post-auction communication and shipping processes.

Tip #8: Accept credit card payments. A large number of your potential customers want the convenience of paying via credit card. Don’t turn away business; at the very least, sign up as a PayPal merchant so you can accept payment by plastic. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to pay.

Tip #9: Provide stellar customer serviceand fast shipping. Remember, the customer is king. Bend over backward to satisfy your auction customerswhich includes shipping your merchandise promptly and securely.

Tip #10: Take your business seriously. To run a successful eBay business, you have to be serious about it. For most PowerSellers, it’s a full-time activity. Treat it like a businessnot a hobby or occasional pastime. Be professional in everything you do, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Obtaining Additional Exposure with eBay Express

eBay Express (express.ebay.com) is an odd bird. As you can see in Figure 26.1, eBay Express is eBay’s attempt to provide a fixed-priced marketplace for buyers intimidated or otherwise put off by the online auction process. eBay Express offers consumers the ability to shop from multiple sellers yet pay via a single shopping cart and checkout. Buyer peace of mind is enhanced by a special Buyer Protection Policy; payment is via PayPal.

Figure 26.1. eBay’s new fixed-price marketplaceeBay Express.

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For sellers, eBay Express really isn’t a separate thing. That is, you don’t explicitly list items for sale on the eBay Express site. Instead, any fixed-price item or auction item with the Buy It Now option that you have listed on the general eBay site or in an eBay Store is automatically made available to eBay Express shoppers. When a customer makes a purchase via the eBay Express checkout system, you’re notified the same way you would be if it were an eBay or eBay Stores purchase.

Listing Requirements

That’s not to say that you don’t have to meet some listing criteria. After all, eBay Express is intended to be a “safer” marketplace than the wild and wooly world represented by eBay auctions; they don’t want a lot of riff-raff clogging the virtual aisles with shoddy merchandise. To that end, if you want your merchandise listed on eBay Express, you as a seller have to meet the following requirements:

• You must be a registered U.S. seller (or a Canadian seller shipping from the U.S.).
• You must have a minimum feedback score of 100, with at least a 98% positive rating.
• Your feedback profile must be public.
• You must have a PayPal Premiere or Business account. (All eBay Express payments are via PayPal.)
• Your PayPal settings must be set to allow shipping to unconfirmed addresses.

In addition, the merchandise you sell must meet these requirements:

• It must be listed on the eBay.com site, and it must be located in the United States.
• It must be listed in fixed-price, auction with Buy It Now option, or eBay Stores inventory format.
• The Item Condition field (New, Used, or Refurbished) must be filled in.
• You must use prefilled information when available.
• All shipping costs (either flat or calculated) must be spelled out in advance, and the appropriate listing fields must be completed.
• The item listing must include a photo.
• The selling preferences for this item must allow shoppers to pay by a single combined payment for their purchases.
• Post-sale, purchasing must be routed via eBay’s checkout system or a registered third-party service.
• The price of the item must not exceed $10,000.

Assuming you fill in the right fields, most items you sell should meet these criteria.

Listing on eBay Express

As I said, you don’t have to do anything to have your item listed on eBay Express. If an item meets the requirements, and if you meet the seller requirements, the item will automatically be listed on eBay Express.

You can check to see if your items are listed on eBay Express by going to search.express.ebay.com/merchant/ USERID. Replace USERID with your own user ID, of course; the resulting page, like the one in Figure 26.2, will list all your items that appear on the eBay Express site.

Figure 26.2. Viewing your items that are listed on eBay Express.

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Shopping at eBay Express

An eBay Express item listing looks a tad different from the same listing on the eBay auction site. As you can see in Figure 26.3, there’s a lot more information at the top of the listing, including item condition, quantity available, and shipping costs and information. Your standard item description appears at the bottom of the listing; the customer makes a purchase by clicking the Add to Cart button.

Figure 26.3. A typical eBay Express product listing.

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The purchase isn’t complete, however, until the customer checks out. All purchases (from multiple sellers) are stored in the eBay Express shopping cart, shown in Figure 26.4. When the customer clicks the Checkout button, all items currently in the cart are officially purchased; the buyer’s credit card is charged, and the sellers of each item are notified of the respective sales.

Figure 26.4. The eBay Express shopping cart.

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Is eBay Express for You?

Here’s the thing about eBay Express: If you’re selling fixed-price or Buy It Now items on eBay or in an eBay Store, you don’t have any choice as to whether those items appear on eBay Express. As long as you meet the minimal seller and product requirements, your items will appear on both the original site and eBay Express.

Note

eBay Express isn’t available for all product categories. To be specific, eBay Express doesn’t include categories not covered by PayPal Buyer Protection (such as eBay Motors), those that don’t have Item Condition values, or those where eBay’s Category Managers have not yet worked out all the necessary details. For a list of non-Express (eBay-only) categories, see pages.ebay.com/sell/itemcondition/list/.

In other words, if you want to sell on eBay Express, all you have to do is create a fixed-price eBay listing or an auction with the Buy It Now option, or enter that item as fixed-price inventory in your eBay Store. You can’t not list on eBay Express; as long as you’re selling fixed-price or Buy It Now items, you’re a member of the eBay Express retailer collective. (That’s not entirely true; you can edit your general selling preferences on your My eBay page to opt out completely of eBay Express selling for all your listings.)

Caution

eBay Express search results return new products only. So if you sell used merchandise, you’ll be at somewhat of a disadvantage against other merchants selling the same item new.

The good part of this is twofold. First, you get more exposure for your items. Second, you don’t have to pay for this privilege; any item listed on eBay Express is subject to the standard eBay or eBay Stores listing and final value fees only. Not a bad deal, overallmore exposure at no extra cost.

Chapter 27. Opening an eBay Store

Another important step in your creation of a successful eBay business is to set up your own online storefront. This is surprisingly easy to do, thanks to a service called eBay Stores.

Running an eBay Store is the way for a heavy seller to provide the facsimile of a retail storefront within the eBay environment. If you’re thinking of making the move into real honest-to-goodness retailing, an eBay Store is a relatively painless way to start.

What Is an eBay Store?

An eBay Store, like the one shown in Figure 27.1, is a web page where you can sell fixed-price items that are not currently up for auction on eBay. Your eBay Store also contains all the items you currently have listed for regular auction on eBay. The non-auction items in your eBay Store appear only in your eBay Storenot in the eBay auction listings.

Figure 27.1. The author’s Molehill Group eBay Store.

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As you can see in Figure 27.2, merchants on the eBay Stores home page (stores.ebay.com) are organized by the same categories as the eBay auction site: Antiques, Art, Books, and so on. Buyers can also search for a specific store or a store selling a certain type of item, or view an alphabetical list of all stores.

Figure 27.2. The home page for eBay Stores.

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The items offered by eBay Stores merchants are a combination of items currently for auction on eBay and additional fixed-price inventory. When buyers access a particular eBay Store retailer, they have access to this entire collection of merchandise. If they tried searching on eBay proper, they wouldn’t find the non-auction items the retailer might have for sale.

For a buyer, purchasing an item from an eBay Store retailer is a little like buying from any other online merchant, and a little like winning an item in an eBay auction. On the one hand, it’s buying from an actual merchant at a fixed price, and the buyer can always pay by credit card. On the other hand, eBay Stores offer all the niceties found on eBay, including the ability to check the merchant’s feedback rating. Checkout is handled from within the store.

How to Set Up an eBay Store

Opening your own eBay Store is as easy as clicking through eBay’s setup pages. There’s nothing overly complex involved; you’ll need to create your store, customize your pages (otherwise known as your virtual storefront), and list the items you want to sell. Just follow the onscreen instructions, and you’ll have your own Store up and running in just a few minutes.

Creating Your Store

To open your Store, start at the eBay Stores main page (stores.ebay.com), and click the Open a Store button. When you accept the user agreement, the store creation process begins. You’ll start by choosing a name for your Store then, on the subsequent Quick Store Setup page (shown in Figure 27.3), you’ll get to choose a Store design, select a color and theme, enter your Store description, select your item layout, insert promotion boxes, and select various marketing options. Click the Apply Settings button to launch your newly created Store. It’s that simple!

Figure 27.3. Setting up your eBay Store.

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Listing Merchandise for Sale

Now that you’ve created your eBay Store, you need to add some merchandise. You do this by clicking the Sell link at the top of any eBay listing page; the normal Sell page now includes an option for Store Inventory, which is what you want to select. Go through the normal Sell Your Item listing creation process, and your new listing will be added to your eBay Store. That’s one of the nice things about having an eBay Store; it’s well integrated with your other eBay activities.

Customizing and Managing Your Store

eBay lets you customize, to some degree, the pages in your eBay Store. You do this by clicking the Seller Manage Store link at the bottom of your Store’s home page. This takes you to the Manage My Store page, shown in Figure 27.4. From here, you can

Figure 27.4. Managing your eBay Store.

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• Customize individual pages in your Store
• Manage your Store subscription
• Put your Store on “hold” while you go on vacation
• Specify which Store items you want to cross-promote in your auction listings
• Add promotional boxes to pages in your Store
• Buy eBay Keywords (as described in Chapter 24, “Promoting Your eBay Auctions”)
• Send promotional emails to your customers
• Register your domain name
• Cancel Good ‘Til Cancelled listings
• Access your eBay Store reports

Just click the appropriate link for the action you want to perform.

For example, you may want to create a page in your Store to detail your store policies, or to list promotional items, or to showcase specific merchandise. Go to the Manage Your Store page, and select the Custom Pages link. When the next page appears, click the Create New Page link. This displays the Create Custom Page: Select Layout page, shown in Figure 27.5. As you can see, you can create many different kinds of pages. Select the layout you want, and click the Continue button. This displays the Create Custom Page: Provide Content page, where you essentially fill in the blanks with your new page’s contenttext and pictures. Continue on to preview the new page and load it into your Store.

Figure 27.5. Adding a new page to your eBay Store.

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Promoting Your eBay Store

One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don’t promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for excess merchandise. It doesn’t have to be that way, however; smart eBay Stores sellers know to promote their Store listings separate from their regular eBay listings.

Use the URL

Naturally, you should post the URL for your eBay Store as many places as possible, to drive more business to your Store. That means driving sales from any other website you have back to your eBay Store, as well as promoting the Store URL on business cards, local advertisements, and such. Your eBay Store address should be on every promotional item you deliver.

Create a Listing Feed

Another way to drive traffic to your eBay Store is to create an RSS listing feed. This feed lists all the new items you list in your store. You can then syndicate or distribute this feed, so that anyone subscribing to the feed will automatically be notified of new items in your eBay Store.

To create an RSS feed for your Store listings, go to your My eBay page and click the Marketing Tools link. From the Marketing Tools page, click the Listing Feeds link. From there, check the option to Distribute Your Listings via RSS, and then click Apply. That creates the feed.

Once you’ve created the feed, you now have to distribute it. One of the best ways to do this is via the FeedBurner service. Here’s how to do this.

Start by going to your eBay Store page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the orange RSS box. This displays the RSS feed for your site. Write down or copy the URL for this feed, which appears in your browser’s Address box.

Now go to the FeedBurner site (www.feedburner.com). You’ll need to create an account (no charge), and then follow the onscreen instructions to “burn” a feed. You’ll enter the URL that you copied for your eBay Store RSS feed, and continue following instructions to save and distribute the feed. Feedburner will then make sure your feed is syndicated across the Web.

Tip

Since updates to your feed go out only when you add new items to your store, you want to list something new in your store every few days. There’s no need to add a lot of items at a time, the key is a constant addition of merchandise, so that subscribers are receiving almost-daily updates.

Whenever you add a new item to your eBay Store, your RSS feed will be updated, and any subscribers to the feed will be notified. It’s a great way to attract repeat business to your Store.

Export Your Listings to Search Engines and Shopping Sites

There’s another promotional opportunity available on the Listing Feeds page. eBay lets you export your Store listings to third-party search engines and price comparison sites.

When you check the Make a File of Your Store Inventory Listings Available option, eBay creates a special file of your store listings, and posts that file to a web page. This is an XML-format file that contains the following information for each item listed in your store:

• Item title
• Item description
• URL of the item page
• Whether the item is orderable
• Current price
• Availability
• Item number
• Shipping cost (if specified ahead of time)
• Gallery picture (if available)
• Quantity
• Currency

You can then submit the URL for this file to your favorite search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and so on), as well as to various price comparison sites (Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, and the like). While eBay creates the file for you (and keeps it updated with your latest listings), it’s your responsibility to submit the file’s URL to whatever sites you choose. Naturally, you should follow the submission instructions for each particular site.

When you submit your eBay Store listings to a web search engine, your listings will appear in the search engine’s search results. When you submit your Store listings to a price comparison site, your Store will appear as an option whenever someone is price-shopping for a particular item. It takes a little work on your part, but the result is much wider exposureand wider exposure means more sales.

There’s an added incentive for spreading your eBay Store URL around to as many websites as possible. That’s because you earn eBay credit when you refer people from other sites to your eBay Store.

Earning credit is as simple as adding a referrer code to every link you post to your eBay Store. When someone clicks on the link + referrer code and ends up buying something, eBay gives you a 75% credit on the item’s final value fee. Learn more about these referrer codes at pages.ebay.com/help/specialtysites/referral-credit-faq.html.

In Chapter 27, “Opening an eBay Store,” we looked at eBay Stores, where you can sell additional fixed-price merchandise to your auction customers. An eBay Store, however, is a rather limited online store-front. If you want to move full-force into online retailing, you need something more fully featured.

Fortunately, setting up your own online storefront isn’t nearly as involved as you might think. Numerous services, including eBay itself, provide prepackaged storefront solutions; all you have to do is point and click (and pay some money) to get your store online. Or, if you want something really fancy, you can design your own store on your own website, complete with your own proprietary web domain.

However you do it, opening a dedicated web store-front lets you sell your merchandise 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. You don’t have to wait for an auction to end to sell an item and collect your money; you’re open for business anytime your customers want to buy.

If you have dreams of turning your online auction business into the next Amazon.com, read onand learn how to become a bona fide Internet e-tailer.

Tip

One of the advantages of using a prepackaged storefront, especially one with strong ties to eBay (such as Ándale Stores or eBay ProStoresis that they help you drive new customers to your stores from your eBay listings. If you build your site from scratch, you don’t have this ability to link to your site from eBay.

The easiest way to create an online store-front is to let somebody else do it for you.

Several of the big auction services’ sites offer prepackaged web storefronts you can use to sell both auction and nonauction merchandise. The advantage of using a prepackaged storefront is that all the hard work is done for you: You put your storefront together by filling out the appropriate forms. The disadvantage of a prepackaged storefront is that, in many cases, it’s not really your storefront; there aren’t a lot of customization options, and you have to settle for a somewhat generic look and feel (which means that your store is going to look like every other store managed by the same servicenot necessarily a good thing).

Still, if you want to launch a storefront without a lot of fuss and mussand get it up and running in record timethen a prepackaged storefront service might be for you. We’ll look at some of the most popular services next.

Ándale Stores

Ándale (www.andale.com) lets you build your own storefront on its service. As you can see in Figure 28.1, an Ándale Store is similar to an eBay Store, but maybe a bit nicer looking and somewhat more functional. An Ándale Store can be fully customized with your own personal color scheme and graphics.

Figure 28.1. The AstroGadgets.com Ándale Store (www.astrogadgets.com).

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Pricing to open an Ándale Store is $9.95 per month, cheaper than the $15.95 fee for an eBay Store. You also have to pay Ándale 5% of all your online sales. These fees cover everything you need to run your storefront; as with all these third-party services, Ándale provides all the web hosting and storage space you need for your store.

Ándale also does a little marketing for you. When you open an Ándale Store, your items are listed on the Froogle, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com comparison shopping sitesin addition to Ándale’s own Ándale Plaza shopping destination site. It’s good exposure, something you don’t get with many other e-commerce services.

ChannelAdvisor

The ChannelAdvisor Stores service (www.channeladvisor.com), which is part of the ChannelAdvisor Merchant package, helps you incorporate a full-service storefront into your eBay About Me page or create a more full-featured online storefront, including integrated checkout and payment services. (Figure 28.2 shows an About Metype store page.) You’ll need to contact the service personally to get a price quote for your particular needs.

Figure 28.2. A ChannelAdvisor storefront on an About Me pageSophia’s Style Boutique (members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=sophias*style).

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eBay ProStores

I guess eBay got tired of losing business to third-party storefront services, because in 2005 it launched its own prepackaged storefront service, dubbed eBay ProStores (www.prostores.com). eBay ProStores offers much the same types of services that you find at the third-party sites, including domain hosting, real-time credit card processing, and an e-commerce shopping cart. Figure 28.3 shows a typical ProStores merchant site.

Figure 28.3. The Travelled Home’s ProStores site (www.thetravelledhome.com).

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ProStores offers four different packages for different-sized businesses. These are detailed in Table 28.1.

The chief advantage to eBay ProStores over competing services is the seamless integration with regular eBay auctions and eBay Stores. You can copy your eBay listings directly to your ProStores product catalog, transfer items from your ProStores inventory to an eBay auction or eBay Stores listing, display your eBay listings in your ProStores store, and manage all your eBay listings from your ProStores store. No other e-commerce service offers this level of eBay integration.

Homestead Storefront

Homestead Storefront (storefront.homestead.com), which is powered by the same technology that powers eBay ProStores, offers an easy-to-setup solution, especially for smaller sellers. You get your choice of packages, priced from $6.99/month to $59.99/month, depending on how many items you want to merchandise and how much storage space and data transfer you need.

Storefront sites can look quite professional, as you can see in Figure 28.4. Getting started is as easy as working through a few wizards.

Figure 28.4. The Homestead Storefront of Worldwide Child (www.worldwidechild.com).

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Infopia

Infopia (www.infopia.com) is one of those companies that cloaks what it does in a suffocating blanket of business-to-business buzzwords. According to its website, the Infopia Marketplace Manager “is an all inclusive multi-channel e-commerce platform.” In plain English, that translates into web storefronts that link to your eBay auctions, like the one in Figure 28.5. (For what it’s worth, Infopia drives many of the big consignment drop-off chains, including Auction Mills and iSold It.)

Figure 28.5. Collector Bookstore (www.collectorbookstore.com), an Infopiaclient.

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A full list of features includes auction-listing creation, automated communication and feedback, image hosting, email marketing, tracking and reporting, inventory and order management, and a “smart” shopping cart and checkout. To determine pricing, you have to contact Infopia for a “no-obligation assessment” of your needs.

NetStores

NetStores (www.netstores.com) offers a variety of online storefront services, from shopping-cart integration into your existing website to complete store-front design. Figure 28.6 shows one of its online storefronts.

Figure 28.6. The NetStores-driven website of V i X (www.vixswimwear.com).

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In addition to the shopping cart, you get sales and traffic reporting, bulk product uploading, web hosting, customizable layouts, real-time credit card authorization, and a secure checkout system. Prices start at $19.95 per month.

Vendio

Vendio (www.vendio.com) offers web storefronts as part of its Vendio Stores service. Stores, such as the one in Figure 28.7, include a free gallery, mailing-list management, and a fully customizable look and feel. Vendio also promotes your store items on the Dealio, Froogle, and Shopzilla comparison shopping sites.

Figure 28.7. The Rare Performance DVDs store (shop.vendio.com/RareDVDs), driven by Vendio Stores.

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Vendio offers three different pricing plans, as detailed in Table 28.2. All plans let you list an unlimited number of items in your store.

Yahoo! Small Business

That’s right, along with all its search-related services, Yahoo! offers small business website hosting, too. Yahoo! Small Business is actually one of the largest hosts for small online retailers, offering all-in-one e-commerce solutions that link back to the Yahoo! Shopping marketplace.

Yahoo!’s merchant solutions start at $39.95/month for the Starter plan, and go up to $299.95 for the Professional level. You get all the usual features, including integrated shopping cart, credit card processing (via PayPal), automated shipment processing, easy-to-use site setup wizards, and the like. Figure 28.8 shows a typical Yahoo!-powered online store.

Figure 28.8. Trains4tots (www.trains4tots.com), powered by Yahoo! Small Business.

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Zoovy

Zoovy (www.zoovy.com) offers its Zoovy Storefront service for online merchants. Figure 28.9 shows a typical Zoovy merchant.

Figure 28.9. The Zoovy store-front of Perfect PJs (www.perfectpjs.com).

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With Zoovy you get order and inventory management, integration with shipping and payment providers, hundreds of predesigned store layouts, and the ability to sell your items on eBay and other online marketplaces. Zoovy also pipes your store inventory for listing on the Froogle, NexTag, PriceGrabber, and Shopping.com comparison shopping sites. As with several others of these services, you have to contact the site to get a custom quote.

You don’t have to open up a sophisticated e-commerce website to supplement your eBay business with other online sales. Read on to learn about the other places to sell online.

While eBay is far and away the largest online auction site today, it’s not the only one. You can use several other online auctions, many of which feature lower fees than you pay to eBay. (Some even let you list for free!)

Know, however, that these sites have a lotand I mean a lotfewer members than does eBay. Fewer members means fewer potential buyers, and fewer potential buyers typically means fewer sales and lower selling prices. That might not be the case in all categories, of course, and a lower sales rate might be offset by a lower fee structure. You’ll need to evaluate the potential of these sites personally, to see if they offer anything for you.

Amazon.com Auctions

Amazon.com Auctions (auctions.amazon.com) is just one component of the massive Amazon retailing megasite. You know Amazon as a great site to buy stuff; the fact that it also runs an online auction site might come as a bit of a surprise. But auctions it does run, as you can see in Figure 29.1.

Figure 29.1. Amazon.com Auctions.

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Amazon’s auction fees are quite affordable. You pay just a dime to list an item, no matter what the starting bid price. (eBay listing fees start at $0.20 and go up to $4.80, depending on the starting price.) Naturally, Amazon also offers a number of listing enhancements at additional cost, such as boldface and featured placement, but they’re easily skipped.

Final value fees (what Amazon calls payment fees) are also more affordable than eBay’s. You pay 25 cents per listing plus 5% of the final price. This fee includes the payment transaction through the Amazon Payments system, which means the 5% fee is the same as eBay’s 5.25% final value fee plus the 2.9% PayPal fee. Do the math, and you see that Amazon is significantly lower priced for sellers than eBay iseven if Amazon’s 5% fee is on the selling price plus shipping and handling fees.

ArtByUs

If you sell original artwork, you probably want to check out ArtByUs (www.artbyus.com), an online auction site specifically for artists. As you can see in Figure 29.2, ArtByUs is like an eBay auction that specializes exclusively in original artwork. It’s still relatively new, so it may or may not work for you, but many artists have achieved good initial results.

Figure 29.2. ArtByUs art auctions.

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ArtByUs charges no listing fees and no final value fees. It does charge for listing enhancements, such as Featured and Bold. Obviously, the volume isn’t near as large as eBay’s; on any given day, only a few thousand items were listed. (Of course, that makes your item stand out even more!)

Bidville

Bidville (www.bidville.com) is another eBay-like online auction site. As you can see in Figure 29.3, it offers merchandise in many of the same categories as offered on the eBay site. On a recent day, close to a million items were listed75% of which were in the Sports & Memorabilia category.

Figure 29.3. Bidville auctionsno listing fees!

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You can list any item on Bidville free of charge; this site doesn’t charge any listing fees. Final value fees (what Bidville calls final success feesa nice positive attitude, that) run 5% for items up to $25.00. For items between $25.01 and $1,000.00, you pay $1.25 plus 2.5% of the amount over $25.00. For items over $1,000.00, you pay $25.63 plus 1% of the amount over $1,000.00.

iOffer

iOffer (www.ioffer.com) is an auction site that isn’t an auction site. Unlike the traditional online auction format, iOffer (shown in Figure 29.4) is based on the principles of negotiation. That is, you list an item for sale, a buyer makes you an offer, and you decide to accept or decline the offer. You can go back and forth with a potential buyer until you find an agreeable selling price.

Figure 29.4. Make an offer at iOffer.

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The site doesn’t charge any listing fees. Final value fees range from $0.50 (for items under $4.99) to 5% (items priced from $25.00$99.99), with lower rates for higher-priced items. On a recent day iOffer had almost a half-million items listed for sale.

whaBAM!

The newest competitor in the online auction space is whaBAM! (www.whabam.com), shown in Figure 29.5. This site doesn’t charge any listing fees; instead, you pay 1% of your final selling price, or a maximum of $25. If you’re a heavy seller, you can opt for the Fee Buster service, which charges a single monthly $49.99 fee for an unlimited number of transactions. So far, whaBAM! doesn’t seem to have generated much traction, with the number of items listed hovering below 25,000.

Figure 29.5. The newest online auction site, whaBAM!

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Yahoo! Shopping Auctions

The auction site that’s number two (to eBay’s number one) is Yahoo! Shopping Auctions (auctions.yahoo.com). As shown in Figure 29.6, Yahoo! Shopping Auctions looks and feels a lot like eBay, and its auctions work pretty much the same way, toobut without listing or final value fees. That’s right, Yahoo! Shopping Auctions, which started out by charging lower-than-eBay fees, is now completely free to buyers and sellers. (It still costs to accept PayPal payments, however.) Pretty temptingeven if the volume level is several orders of magnitude below what you’re used to with eBay.

Figure 29.6. An affordable alternative to eBayYahoo! Shopping Auctions.

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If you want to skip the auction format, there are a few sites let you sell your merchandise at a fixed pricekind of like selling an item with a Buy It Now price or in an eBay Store.

Amazon Marketplace

If you’re tired of the auction grindand sell items that are more suitable to the fixed-price formatconsider selling at the Amazon Marketplace. This is a subset of the Amazon.com site that lets individuals and small businesses sell all manner of new and used items; it’s particularly well suited to selling used books, CDs, videotapes, DVDs, and other fixed-priced items.

Marketplace items are listed as options on normal Amazon product listing pages (to the right of the main listing) and show up when customers search for specific products. Figure 29.7 shows a typical listing of Marketplace items for sale.

Figure 29.7. Amazon Marketplace items for sale.

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One nice thing about selling in the Amazon Marketplace is that customers can integrate their orders and payments with other Amazon merchandise. Customers place their orders with and pay Amazon; then Amazon informs you of the sale and transfers payment (less its fees and plus a reimbursement for shipping costs) to you. You ship the item to the customer.

You pay $0.99 to list an item in the Marketplace (although the fee isn’t charged until the item sells) and then pay Amazon a percent of the final selling price. You pay a 6% fee for computers, 8% for electronics and cameras, 10% for office products, 12% for musical instruments, and 15% for all other items. Each listing lasts for 60 days. To learn more or place a listing, click the Marketplace link on the bottom-left side of the Amazon home page (www.amazon.com), in the Making Money section.

Craigslist

The dominant online classified advertising site on the Web is the venerable Craigslist. As you can see in Figure 29.8, Craiglist has local sites for all major cities and states, from Atlanta to Washington (DC). Posting a classified ad is completely free; there are no listing fees or sales commissions involved. And, in many categories, Craigslist is a major force, equal to eBay in terms of number of listings and sales. It’s worth checking outespecially if you’re selling something big or difficult to ship across the country.

Figure 29.8. The place to sell items locallyCraigslist.

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Google Base

An up-and-coming competitor to Craigslist is Google Base (base.google.com), from the good folks at Google. As you can see in Figure 29.9, Google Base is a big database of product listings. Items you sell can be paid for via Google Checkout, which is Google’s payment service that competes directly with PayPal.

Figure 29.9. Google Basea competitor to either Craigslist or eBay, or maybe both.

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The nice thing about Google Base is that it’s a totally free service, for both buyers and sellers. Not only can you post items for sale, you can also choose howor, more precisely, whereyou sell or distribute your items. If you want to use Google Base as a classified advertising services to sell items for local pickup or delivery, you can. If you want to offer items online for shipment anywhere in the country (or the world), you can. It’s your choice.

While Google Base is starting small, it never pays to underestimate Google. It’s possible that Google Base could become a true competitor to eBayor, at the very least, a viable alternative to Craiglist. Only time will tell.

LiveDeal.com

If you’re interested in selling your goods locally, consider LiveDeal.com (www.livedeal.com). As you can see in Figure 29.10, this site lets you market goods locally or regionally, on a fixed-price basis. LiveDeal.com was founded by one of the original members of the eBay development team, so it works and feels quite a bit like the eBay sitebut without the auction process. The site doesn’t charge any listing or final value fees; the only charges are for various listing enhancements and for the use of PayPal. It’s worth checking out if you have large or heavy items that would be difficult to ship nationwide, or if you want to supplement your eBay business with more local sales.

Figure 29.10. Sell locally at LiveDeal.com.

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If you’re successful with your eBay business, you’ll see the sales start to grow from month to month. That’s what you want, after all; the bigger your business, the more money you make.

Managing your business growth, however, can be a challenge. It’s one thing to move from $50 to $500 of sales every month; it’s quite another to advance to the $5,000/monthor even $50,000/month!level. As your business grows, everything gets bigger. You have more auctions to manage, more photos to take, more emails to send, more items to pack and ship. The prospect of all this extra work can be daunting, but all in all, it’s a good problem to have.

This final chapter will help you prepare for and deal with the various issues that result from business success. Are you ready to play with the big boys?

As your eBay business grows, it’s increasingly important for you to analyze your business’s performance. That’s because lots of sales don’t always translate into lots of profits.

Let’s take the example of a businessperson I know who had grown his eBay business to the $2,500/month level. Do the math, and you see that this person was on a pace to generate $30,000 a year in sales. That sounds good, but the seller couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t quit his regular job and rely on his eBay business for full-time employment.

The answer, if you remember my advice from Chapter 3, “Creating a Business Plan,” is that revenues aren’t the same as profits. Yes, this seller was going to sell $30,000 of merchandise over the course of a year, but after subtracting the costs of that merchandise, along with all relevant eBay fees, the money left overhis profitwas less than $10,000. That $10,000 profitnot the $30,000 in revenuesis the seller’s salary. And you can’t live on $10,000 a year. This person would have to triple his sales rate to generate a minimal net income to live on.

I’ve seen even worse situations. What about the seller who was moving $2,000/month worth of merchandise and never built up any money in her bank account? She was selling collectible cards for a buck or two a piece, but selling a lot of them to achieve those sales figures. The problem is that she wasn’t making any money on it. Yeah, she was able to generate revenues of a buck or so a card, but eBay’s listing and final value fees (along with PayPal’s credit card fees) ate up every bit of that buck, and sometimes more. Almost every sale this person made cost her a few pennies, and you simply can’t sell at a loss and make it up in volume. This seller needed to reevaluate her entire business model and consider charging more for what she soldor move into higher-priced products.

The takeaway from both these stories is that you not only have to run your eBay business on a day-to-day basis, you have to analyze it, as well. That’s why establishing a solid recordkeeping system is important so that you can generate the financial reports necessary to determine just how much profit you’re really generating. Only after you’re sure that you’re truly making moneyand enough of it to mattercan you think about increasing your sales and growing your business.

Note

Learn more about accounting and financial analysis in Chapter 6, “Setting Up a Recordkeeping System,” and Appendix A, “Accounting Basics.”

As you grow your business, you have to feed more merchandise into the pipeline. That means somehow obtaining more inventory to sell; you don’t want to be constrained by product availability.

How do you beef up your product inventory? Here are some suggestions:

• If you resell used items you find at garage sales and thrift stores, consider hiring someone to scrounge for you full-time. Also consider buying large assortments at estate sales and live auctions.
• If you’re a collector, consider purchasing large collections for resale, or expanding your selection to include related merchandise and accessories.
• If you purchase closeout or liquidated merchandise, consider purchasing larger lots or entire pallets.
• If you purchase merchandise from a manufacturer or authorized distributor, consider upping your orders or expanding your selection.
• If you’re an artist, consider selling prints in addition to original paintings. Also consider reselling works by other artists you know.
• If you create your own crafts to sell, consider hiring someone to help you create a larger volume of items.
• If you’re a manufacturer, consider increasing your production output.
• If you’re a Trading Assistant, consider increasing your advertising and promotion for new clients, or opening a drop-off location.

In short, you need to start thinking more about your purchasing, in addition to your selling. And remember to buy smart. Shaving a few pennies off the price of each item can result in huge profits as you increase your sales volume.

Naturally, the more inventory you buy, the more space you need to store it. If you’re running your eBay business out of your house, there will come a time when you simply run out of room. Short of kicking out your kids (and that may not be a bad thing, for various reasons…), there are only so many empty rooms you can use to store your merchandise. When the walls start to bulge, you need to think about finding additional warehouse space.

This extra space can come in many forms. For many eBay businesses, you may be able to make do with rented storage space in one of those “u-store-it” places. If you’re getting really bigor selling really big itemsthen you may need to look at more professional warehousing solutions.

The challenge in all this, of course, is the cost. When you get big enough to require paid warehousing, you have to figure that monthly rent into your business costs. The first month you have a rent bill will be a big shock, trust me.

And you may need more than just warehousing space. Consider how much space you need for your packing operation and for general office work. As your business grows, all your space needs grow, as welland space costs money.

Hiring Additional Employees

Space isn’t the last of your problems. The more items you sell, the more physical work you have to do. As your weekly sales increase from 10 items to 100 to 1,000, how do you handle all the listing and packing and shipping and such?

The answer is that when you reach a certain point, you won’t be able to do it all yourself. When the work becomes too overwhelming, you’ll need to bring in someone to help you with it. That’s right, I’m talking about hiring employees.

When I say “employee,” I’m not talking about the neighbor kid you pay a few bucks to run some boxes down to the post office. I’m talking about honest-to-goodness employees, part-time or full-time, that you write a paycheck to at the end of every week. The kind of employees who call you “boss”which you now are.

Hiring employees is a challenge, a subject worthy of an entire book; I don’t have the space to go into all the ins and outs here. Suffice to say you first have to find your potential employees (via help wanted ads and other venues), interview them, figure out how much to pay them, set their work schedules, and then train and manage them. Yes, being a boss is a lot of work; you’ll have to devote some portion of your day to employee-related issues, including basic management.

What Should Your Employees Do?

Before you hire an employee, you need to be clear about what it is that you want that employee to do. At its most basic, you want an employee to handle some of your auction-related activitiesto lighten your workload. The question is, which activities do you want your employee to do?

Most eBay sellers hire an employee to do those activities that they either don’t like to do, don’t do well, or don’t add any value by doing themselves. In many (but not all) instances, this translates into letting your employee handle your “back end” activitiespacking and shipping. That’s because, when you evaluate what it is you do, you’ll probably find that your talents are better suited to purchasing merchandise and creating and managing your eBay listings. It’s easier, in most instances, to train someone to pack boxes and drive to the post office than it is to train him or her to create effective item listings.

You should, of course, make your own decision about what you want from your employees. I know some sellers who hire people to go to garage sales, yard sales, and the like, while they stay in the office and manage the other auction activities. Other sellers hire people to take photos and write HTML code for their listings. Deciding what you want your employees to do depends on what you need doneand what you like doing.

Don’t Forget the Details

Obviously, a certain degree of recordkeeping needs to be done when your business has employees. You’ll have to add your employees to your accounting system, start paying employment taxes, and do all the associated paperwork.

There’s not enough space here to go into all the details, but here are some specific things to keep in mind:

• You’ll need to have each employee provide you with his or her full name and Social Security number, which you then enter on a W-2 form.
• You must verify that each new employee is legally eligible to work in the U.S., by having him or her fill out the Employment Eligibility Verification form I-9.
• You’ll also need each new employee to fill out an Employee’s Withholding Allowance Certificate form W-4.
• You’ll have to withhold the proper amount of income tax from each of your employee’s paychecks, which is tied to the W-4 form. Obviously, you don’t get to keep the money you withhold; you have to pass it on to the government, according to a predetermined schedule.
• Speaking of paying taxes, you’re also responsible for paying various federal, state, and local employment taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes.
• At the end of each calendar year, you’ll need to prepare and provide W-2 forms to each employee; you also need to send copies to the Social Security Administration.

Note

Learn more about your tax responsibilities as an employer from the IRS Employer’s Tax Guide, at www.irs.gov/publications/p15/index.html.

Sound complicated and potentially messy? It is, which is why now is definitely the time to schedule a meeting with your accountant. And if you don’t yet have an accountant, get one.

Another thing to think about is what sorts of benefits you want to offer your employees. These benefits might include paid vacations, health care, and the like. Again, your accountant is a good person to consult about these issues.

Managing Your Time

The whole point of hiring employees is to help you better manage your personal time. What’s the point of making a lot of money from an eBay business if you have to work 20 hours a day to do so? It’s okay for your eBay business to be a full-time job, but you don’t want it to be more than that. You have to learn to manage your time in an efficient mannerand offloading some work to others is just part of that process.

A large component of time management is developing processes and a schedule. You can’t run a big business if you treat every sale as a special event. You need to plan your time so that you handle things in batches. Maybe you handle all financial transactions in the evening, or all your packing on a certain day, or make just one trip to the post office a week. You have to strive for efficiency, or else you’ll become overwhelmed by everything you need to do. And don’t forget to offload some of that workload to your employeesthat’s why they’re there!

How Big Is Too Big?

As you can see, it costs more (in both time and money) to run a bigger business than it does to run a smaller one. At some point you’ll need to ask yourself just how big you want your business to grow. Do you want to run a $50,000/year business that takes 80 hours a week of your time, or limit yourself to a $30,000/year business that you can manage in an eight-hour day? Is growing your sales worth the hassle of hiring an employee or two or renting warehouse space, or can you be happy with a smaller home-based single-person business?

Running a bigger business is a lot different than running a smaller one. When you have a small business, you’re truly working for yourself. As your business grows, you’re now working as part of a machineeven though you’re supposedly running that machine. There is much stress associated with managing employees, making sure you have money in the bank to pay for rent, and so forth. Many people prefer to keep their businesses small and their stress levels low; others like the challenge of running and growing a thriving enterprise.

Bottom line, you can control just how big your eBay business becomes. If you want to keep it small, keep it small; there’s nothing that says it has to grow beyond a certain point. If you want to run a bigger business, go for it. (Although there’s no guarantee that will happen, of course.) The point is, it’s your choice to make. That’s one of the benefits of running your own business, after all; you have total control over the form that business takes.

With an eBay business, you control the size by controlling the number of auctions you run. You grow your business by running more auctions; you limit its size by running fewer auctions. That’s one of the things I really like about an eBay businessyour future is fully in your own hands.

Part 6: Appendixes

For those of you who slept through your college accounting classes, this appendix will help you brush up on just enough basic accounting to help you manage your burgeoning eBay business.

What follows are the key financial concepts that describe how a business is doing, money-wise.

Revenues, Expenses, and Profits

Three related concepts are key to the running of any business:

• Revenues. Revenues (also called sales) are the dollars you generate by selling your products. There are two types of revenues: gross revenues and net revenues. Gross revenues are the straight sales dollars you record; net revenues are your sales dollars less any returned or discounted sales. Revenues never have any costs or expenses deducted. They’re pure sales; nothing else is included.
• Expenses. Expenses are your costs, the money you have to pay for various goods and services. There are several different types of expenses. Cost of goods sold (COGS) are product costs directly associated with the manufacture or purchase of the goods that contribute to your revenues. Operating expenses are those nonproduct costs that reflect the day-to-day operations of your businesssupplies, salaries, rent, and so on. COGS and operating expenses are typically reported in different parts of your income statement.
• Profits. If revenues reflect how much money you take in and expenses reflect how much money you pay out, profits reflect how much money you have left after the two previous activities. (Profit is often referred to as income or earnings.)

Note

Costs can be either fixed or variable. Fixed costs are typically those operating expenses that you have to pay no matter how many (or how few) products you sell; your monthly Internet bill is a good example of a fixed cost. Variable costs are those costs that vary depending on your revenues; eBay final value fees are variable expenses.

Don’t get these concepts confused. It’s easy to slip and think of your revenues as “earnings” (since you “earned” that money!), but the word “earnings” actually refers to profits. Same with incomeincome is profit, not revenue. If in doubt, refer to Table A.1 for some quick guidance.

The way it works is simple. You generate your revenues from selling items on eBay. You subtract your expenses (cost of goods sold, daily operating expenses), and that leaves you with your profit. (Hopefully.) Here’s what the equation looks like:

If you subtract expenses from revenues and get a negative number, that means you’ve generated a loss; that is, you’ve spent more than you earned. Not a good thing.

Let’s work through a short example. Let’s say that in a given month you generate $1,000 in eBay sales. The items you sold cost you $500 to purchase, and you spent another $300 on miscellaneous day-to-day expensesshipping boxes, labels, Internet access, and the like. Add the $500 to the $300 to get your total expenses, and then subtract that number ($800) from your $1,000 of revenues. You end up with $200 left overwhich is your profit for the month.

Assets and Liabilities

Revenues, expenses, and profits are used to describe what your business does; assets and liabilities describe what your business owns and owes. Here’s how they’re defined:

• Assets. Assets are those items that you own. Assets can be in the form of physical things (land, buildings, equipment, fixtures), cash or cash equivalents, or accounts receivable. In short, anything you own or that is owed to you is counted as an asset.
• Liabilities. Liabilities are the opposite of assets; they’re things that someone else owns and for which you owe. Liabilities are typically in the form of loans, expenses, or taxes due.

If you take everything you own and subtract everything you owe, the balance represents your net worth in your businessalso known as your equity. This equation is the core concept behind that financial statement called a balance sheet.

Again, a short example. Let’s say that you have $300 in inventory sitting in your garage, another $100 in unused shipping boxes, plus you’re owed $100 for closed auctions that the buyer hasn’t paid yet. You also happen to have a whole $100 sitting in your business bank account. Add it all together, and that $600 total represents your assets.

Now let’s look at what you owe. Rummaging through your “bills to pay” file, you see that you have a $100 bill due to pay for those shipping boxes, plus another $220 due for various other expensesutilities, Internet service, and the like. That $320 total represents your liabilities.

Subtract the $320 in liabilities from the $600 in assets, and you end up with a net worth of $280. That’s your current equity in your business.

Let’s return for a moment to your income statement, and your business’s revenues, expenses, and profits. You might think that the profits you make would feed the cash component of your assets. In theory, this could be the caseespecially if you run a relatively small, relatively simple business. However, two factors can make these two numbers get out of whack.

First, you probably don’t pay all your bills on the day you receive them. When a bill is due but you haven’t paid it yet, you have created a liability, which will change your asset position. Let’s use an example in which you start with zero assets and zero liabilities. You sell an item for $5 and, after subtracting $2 cost of goods sold, generate a $3 gross profit. That $3 in your pocket is both cash and assetuntil you receive a bill from eBay for $1 worth of fees. Now you have a $1 liabilityand a $1 expense. Even though you haven’t paid the bill yet, you still have to figure the expense, which reduces your net profit to $2. You still have $3 in cash, but your profit is now just $2. So, for the time being, your cash doesn’t equal your profit. (This will be rectified as soon as you write a check for $1 to eBay, of course.)

The second way in which cash and profits differ is if you accept payment on credit. Let’s say you sold that $5 item (which generated a $3 gross profit) to Mr. Smith, who signed the invoice and promised to pay within 30 days. Now you have a $3 profit but zero dollars in cashand you won’t have the cash until Mr. Smith sends you a check later this month.

This is all to demonstrate why you must look at your cash situation as being separate from your profitsas tempting as it might be to think that your monthly profits would equate to real cash on hand.

Note

The $5 due from Mr. Smith becomes an asset on your books, in the form of an accounts receivable.

Just because you have a certain amount of cash in the bank doesn’t mean that all that cash is yours. Some of it may have to be used to pay future bills.

Financial Statements

You measure all your financial activity via a series of numerical reports that we call, in general, financial statements. There are two key financial statements for any business: the income statement and the balance sheet.

Income Statement

An income statement is a financial statement that details your business’s revenues, expenses, and profit (or loss). As you can see in Figure A.1, it acts kind of like a giant equation. You start at the top with your revenues; then you subtract the cost of goods sold and the operating expenses. What you have left, at the bottom of the statement, is your net profit (or loss).

Figure A.1. A typical income statement.

Operating expenses are typically broken out into multiple line items. In addition, you’ll see the gross profit and net profit described as percentages of net revenues. (When shown this way, they’re called gross margin and net margin.)

Here’s a brief explanation of the most important line items on the income statement:

• Gross Revenues. This line (also called Gross Sales) reflects all of your dollar sales for the period, not counting any damaged or returned goods.
• Returns. Sometimes called Returns and Allowances, this line reflects the cost of any returned or damaged merchandise, as well as any allowances and markdowns.
• Net Revenues. Net Revenues (also called Net Sales) reflect your Gross Revenues less your Returns and Allowances.
• Cost of Goods Sold. This line (also called COGS or Cost of Sales) reflects the direct costs of the products you sold for the period.
• Gross Profit. This line reflects the direct profit you made from sales during this period. It is calculated by subtracting the Cost of Goods Sold from Net Revenues.
• Gross Margin. This line (also called Gross Profit Margin) describes your Gross Profit as a percent of your Net Revenues. You calculate this number by dividing Gross Profit by Net Revenues.
• Operating Expenses. This line reflects all the indirect costs of your business. Typical line items within this overall category include Salaries, Advertising, Marketing, Selling, Office, Office Supplies, Rent, Leases, Utilities, Automobile, Travel and Entertainment (T&E), General and Administrative (G&A), Dues and Subscriptions, Licenses and Permits, and Training. Not included in this section are direct product costs (which should be reflected in the Cost of Goods Sold), loan payments, interest on loans, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
• Net Profit (Loss). This line (also called Net Earnings or Net Income; the words “income,” “earnings,” and “profit” are synonymous) reflects your reported profit or loss. You calculate this number by subtracting Operating Expenses from Gross Profit; a loss is notated within parentheses.
• Net Margin. This line describes your Net Profit as a percentage of your Net Sales. You calculate this number by dividing Net Profit by Net Sales.

Note

Not all income statements include the Gross Revenues and Returns lines. Many income statements start with the Net Revenues number as the first line, assuming the necessary gross-minus-returns calculation.

Note

In all financial statements, a loss is typically noted by inserting the number in parentheses. So, if you see ($200), you note a loss of $200. An alternative, although less accepted, method is to put a negative sign in front of any losses. If you’re printing in color, you would use red (in addition to the parentheses) to notate all losses.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet is a companion record to the income statement. As you can see in Figure A.2, it lists your business’s assets (on the left side) and your liabilities (on the right). The total value of your assets should be equal to the total value of your liabilities; the basic concept is that what you’re worth balances with what you owe.

Here’s a brief explanation of the most important asset items on the balance sheet:

• Current Assets. This category includes those items that can be converted into cash within the next 12 months. Typical line items would include Cash, Accounts Receivable, Inventories, and Short-Term Investments.
• Fixed Assets. This category (sometimes called Long-Term Assets) includes assets that are not easily converted into cash, including Land, Buildings, Accumulated Depreciation (as a negative number), Improvements, Equipment, Furniture, and Vehicles.
• Long-Term Investments. This category includes any longer-term investments your business has made.
• Total Assets. This line reflects the value of everything your company owns. You calculate this number by adding together Current Assets and Fixed Assets.

The following are the key line items on the liabilities side of the balance sheet:

• Current Liabilities. This category includes any debts or monetary obligations payable within the next 12 months. Typical line items include Accounts Payable, Notes Payable, Interest Payable, and Taxes Payable.
• Long-Term Liabilities. This category includes debts and obligations that are due to be paid over a period exceeding 12 months. Typical line items include Long-Term Notes Payable and Deferred Taxes.
• Equity. This line (sometimes called Net Worth) reflects the owners’ investment in the business. Depending on the type of ownership, this line may be broken into separate lines reflecting the individual equity positions of multiple partners or the company’s capital stock and retained earnings.
• Total Liabilities and Net Worth. This line (sometimes called Total

Liabilities and Equity) reflects the total amount of money due plus the owners’ value. You calculate this number by adding Current Liabilities, Long-Term Liabilities, and Equity.

Note

To make your balance sheet actually balance, the Total Liabilities and Net Worth number must equal the number for Total Assets.

Appendix B. Listing Abbreviations

The following table presents the most common abbreviations you can use in your item listings. These abbreviations can be used to describe the condition of the items you’re selling.

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