PLUS: Three scintillating secrets for successfully selling on eBay

PLUS: Test-market products oneBay without buying in bulk

Often a tiny gap exists between making decent profits and making big money fast on eBay. But you could spend most of your time researching ideas for improving your profits and have little time left for actually uploading listings to eBay. Not a good idea. So study the following tips instead, for ideas to help you make more money in the shortest possible time.

Four quick and easy, low-cost / no-cost ways to make money fast on eBay

• If an item goes unsold on eBay, try listing it again, making a few significant changes next time – such as reducing the price or listing in another category or even using two categories.

I have often found previously poor performing listings achieve multiple bidders and wonderful finishing prices after two or three listings. That’s because eBay is a rapidly changing marketplace with new buyers appearing daily and growing bidder numbers for items that attracted little or no interest previously.

• Link your listings to anniversaries and special events that allow you to include high-frequency keywords in your eBay listings without being accused of keyword spamming. Use words like ‘Christmas gift’ or ‘Valentine’s day’ in your listings to attract millions of potential visitors for seasonal gifts who might otherwise not see your listings devoid of those terms.

This helps you make money fast while the appropriate gift-giving season lasts. But make sure your product has potential as a gift for such events, or you’ll be accused of using keywords purely to generate high placements in eBay search engine returns for products that don’t live up to visitors’ expectations.

• Always remember, it’s just as easy, maybe easier, to sell to wealthy buyers as it is selling to people with little or no disposable income. And that means you can list high-price products and expect to attract fewer buyers but much higher profit margins than comes from selling to people on a budget, which usually means listing many more items on eBay at much lower prices.

• Specialise! Become an expert seller in a specific product area, or even in one solitary product. Test your market first to ensure number of sales and profits match your desired income and really do help you make money fast.
  Specialising helps you gain experience and subsequently reduces time spent researching and describing your products as well as tempting first-time buyers to become regular customers, once they’ve studied your technique and asked a few questions and found you extremely professional on all fronts.

Three scintillating secrets for successfully selling on eBay

Selling on eBay is fun, also potentially very profitable, as well as being an easy and relatively quick way to start and have a successful business up and running and making good profits. That is as long as you apply proven tips and techniques laid down by people who are already making good money on eBay.

What are those people’s secrets?

They are here, in no particular order, but starting with potentially the most profitable tip first:

• Look after your buyers – always, even difficult ones. The reason is you need to keep your positive feedback score and DSR – Detailed Seller Ratings – high. Feedback and detailed seller ratings represent buyers’ views on how well they liked your product and service, and also your communications skills and how quickly and in what condition they received their product.

• Watch out for scammers on eBay, both sellers and buyers, with intention to steal your goods and deplete your profits. As an example, you’ll find buyers saying your product hasn’t arrived and they want a fast refund or they’ll leave you negative feedback.

Such a scenario can easily happen even where you can prove the item was delivered and signed for.

What can you do to stop such a thing happening to you?

Personally I’d check feedback left for your rogue buyer by other people selling on eBay. That’s where, even though sellers can’t leave negative feedback for buyers, no matter how dishonest, you might still see comments like ‘Buyer said product didn’t arrive but post office said it did!’ or ‘Unpleasant buying experience, sellers beware!’

Where you find such comments for people you think are scamming you, contact eBay and let them know what’s happening. Threatening negative feedback is called ‘feedback extortion’ and can get the buyer removed from eBay and his feedback left for you removed.

• Don’t think because a product hasn’t sold after several listings on eBay that no one wants to buy it. It could be you haven’t optimised your listings and it isn’t showing to potential buyers.

One reason you might be reducing your product’s chance of selling on eBay is because you’ve listed it in a category most of your potential buyers don’t visit, or you’ve omitted essential keywords those people always use to locate products such as you are selling on eBay.

One way to correct your listing is to check other sellers’ listings for completed auctions for similar products, and study how and where those other sellers listed their products.

Test-market products on eBay without buying in bulk

Some wholesalers sell in big bundles – say ten or 20 or even hundreds or thousands of items – and many require a minimum spend that’s well outside the budget of smaller sellers on eBay.

The reason is that if wholesalers sell low-price items individually, they’d probably go out of business, considering high overheads required for rent and rates and staff in massive warehouses.

So they make their living selling in bulk, maximising profit per sale and requiring fewer staff and less parking space and other facilities for buyers.

But that doesn’t mean you have to buy goods in bulk to test-market their profitability, only to find they don’t sell and you’re left with surplus stock tying up space in your garage!

This is because many wholesalers will allow you to test-market a solitary item without having to buy it, such as where you use their product images and descriptions in your eBay listings. All you have to do is ask. I have asked hundreds of times and have only been refused once!

However, if you shy away from asking permission to use another person’s marketing materials, you could buy just one unit of your chosen product to test your market before buying in bulk, though not from wholesalers of course.

But you could buy from a fellow eBay seller and you can spy on how that person packages and delivers your order, how he or she handles queries, what other items you’re offered later which could be added to your own product range.

That’s it for this week, but as promised, attached to this eletter is the FREE report about profiting from dismantling books that are in the public domain, so make sure you download it now…