Auction Informer

EBay is a great place to do business. Many people think that it’s too late to get in on the eBay game. They think that there are too many sellers already making a full-time living on eBay. They think that only the people who got in early, at the beginning stages of eBay have a chance to succeed. But that’s just not true. EBay is not a pyramid scheme. EBay is an online auction platform. That’s a big difference.

What does this difference mean to you? It means if you haven’t started profiting from eBay you can still get started. All it takes is some work combined with the right methods and strategies to build a successful business.

One of the most important things to do is to find out what you can sell profitably before you make a big investment in merchandise.

I am talking about market research. Market research is the single most important factor that differentiates successful eBay sellers from the ones who will go broke.

That’s why I want to share one method of doing market research for your eBay business here.

And it’s a very simple to do eBay market research. It’s nothing fancy. You don’t need to buy any fancy kind of service, you do not need to spend a lot of money, in fact you do not need to spend any money - that’s right, it’s completely free.

And it is deceptively simple. So simple that you might think: oh, this won’t work.

But if you’re willing to just actually do it, instead of just doing it in your mind, your fantasy, and hallucinating the results that will come out, you can find it incredibly valuable data about your market.

That is one of the things that always separates successful enterpreneurs from the people who will always work for “the man”. Enterpreneurs try things out in the real world. Employees imagine and fantasize scenarios, find ways why they won’t work and never undertake anything.

So, here is the eBay market research methods I want to share with you today: it’s eBay want it now.

You can find it here: http://pages.eBay.com/wantitnow

This is the place where people go to Post wanted ads for stuff that they want to buy on eBay but they could not find.

Do you understand what this means?

This means that the eBay want it now place is where you find market demand. This is where prospects go, raise their hand and say: ‘I want to give money to anyone who can give me X.’

Now there’s two things you can do with this data. You can look at all the postings and find all the stuff that people are looking for, obscure stuff that is hard to find.

If that is the way you want to go, all I can say is: good luck to you.

The smarter way is to look for repeating patterns. What items do people look for? And when I say people I am talking plural, not singular.

You will find that there are certain items that are searched for by many people. If 20 different people post wanted ads for the same item that is a pretty good indicator that there are a lot more people who are interested in buying the same item.

You see, actually posting a wanted ad is something that takes little bit of effort. And if there are 20 people who are willing to exert that effort, then that’s a pretty good indicator that there are a lot more people who want the same thing.

Now if you can find this item, put it up on eBay and sell it. This could be a gold mine.

However, it’s only a gold mine if you put the auction up the right way. You see, eBay has gotten very complex. There are many mistakes that you can make when listing an auction. And there aren’t many small, little tricks that you can incorporate in your auction to get more attention, more bids, and more dollars.

To find out about these (completely legal but highly effective) eBay tricks sign up for the free AuctionInformer Reports.

EBay is a great opportunity to make money in your underwear, if that is what you want to do.

But no matter what you wear while running your home-based online auction business, competitive research is extremely important.

Let me translate this term into common English. Competitive research means that you spy on your competitors.

That doesn’t sound nice? Well, it’s a reality of business life.

I do not want to say that it’s a dog eat dog world where only the strongest survive. But to be successful and to make a lot of money you need to be grounded firmly in reality.

Now, let me clarify that when I say spy on your competition, I don’t mean that you should wire tap their phone or hire a private detective or install a Trojan horse on their computer or anything illegal like that. That would just bring you into trouble. And besides, it’s not good for your business. In the long run fair play does pay off better.

So what do I mean when I say spy? I mean did you gather all the data that you legally can gather about your competitor, look at his business in as much detail as possible, emulate what’s working and improve upon that?

That’s really the way business goes. Emulate and improve. And I don’t mean rip off. Be ethical in what you’re doing. But what you want to do is really create a better mousetrap. And the way to do that is to look at all the mouse traps that are out there now, see what’s working, and find ways to make it work better.

So how do you spy on your eBay competition?

One very simple, but surprisingly accurate method of spying on your eBay competition is to find the most successful sellers in your market and look at their feedback profile.

And I don’t mean that you should look at how positive or negative their feedback is. But look at what they actually sold on what date and for how much. EBay shows you all this data. You can actually see what item they sold on what date. And you can see what title they used. And you can see what exactly they wrote in the description. And you can see what kinds of pictures to used. And you can see which extra options, like featured listing, bold listing, highlighted listing, etc. they used. And you can see at what time and day they ended their auctions.

Do you understand how powerful this really is? This is almost like being able to x-ray your competitors business and diagnose exactly where their weaknesses and where their strengths are.

For more advanced competitive research tactics and eBay business strategies click here to sign up for the Auction Informer Reprots.

One of the most important things when it comes to successful eBay auctions is the auction title. The auction title can really make or break the profits you make from an auction.

Because more than 90% of all eBay users will only look at your auction title. And if that auction title is not motivating them to click on your auction to read the description, then you won’t get many bidders to your auction.

One thing that you should definitely do is to make use of all the space you have available for your auction title. EBay allows you 55 characters. And you should use as many of them as possible.

eBay Title Case Study

I want to give you an example. Right now I’m looking at an eBay auction that is titled like this:

Sabine SWM7000 handheld mic

Now there’s a lot of room for improvement with that auction title. It’s only 28 characters long, so that seller was wasting almost 30 characters. Look what would be a better way to title that auction:

SABINE SWM7000 HANDHELD MIC MICROPHONE WIRELESS TRANSM

So you can see and added the word microphone, because many people will be looking for Sabine microphone or SWM7000 microphone, but not “mic”.

To demonstrate my point I just want to show you for how much that microphone is currently selling on the Internet. The retail price is $1199 and some shops sell it for $985. Do you want to know how much that eBay auction seller got? $399. Not even half the market price. I’m pretty sure that had a lot to do with the auction title.

Now you can also see that there really is no perfect auction title. For example, that seller sold not just a microphone but also the transmitter that came with it. Now I couldn’t squeeze the word transmitter in. But at least I put in the word fragment transm. Every potential buyer of a microphone like this will know what is meant by those letters and be motivated to click on the auction to see if it really comes with a transmitter.

But this seller did not even mentioned that into his auction title. He also did not include the word wireless, which I suppose is a pretty important one. Probably lots of people are looking for wireless microphone.

So how do I make the decision that wireless is more important than transmitter? Well, I just guessed. I’m not even in the market so I don’t really know what would get better results. If you’re in the market, you probably know which of these two words would’ve been more important. But just including as much as you can fit into those 55 character space is an absolute must. That seller could have easily gotten $200 more for that microphone. And to me $200 in extra profits from a single auction is worthwhile spending an extra minute on the auction title.

In fact, if I were that seller I would have added a subtitle for 50 cent and put in more relevant keywords. Because with a subtitle you can add 55 more characters and thus highly enhance the likelihood of being found by people who are searching on eBay for your product.

Also, noticed that I wrote it in all capital letters? Well, tests have shown that oftentimes writing in all capital letters gets more attention, more views and more bids. In fact, according to some sellers it’s working as good as paying ebay an extra dollar to bold your auction listing. Now, a dollar isn’t much - but if you want to sell lots of items, that single dollar multiplied a couple of thousand times will make a big difference in your bottom line.

Now this is just a very basic tip when it comes to auction titles on eBay. There are other tips that are way more advanced and effective than this one, but it makes no sense using them if you don’t have to basics straight. However, once you got the basics in place I suggest you sign up for the Auction Informer reports — it’s packed with profit boosting insider tips of successful eBayers, and it’s completely free for you. So better click here to claim your copy right now.

This article is for you if you are a total beginner when it comes to selling on eBay. It’s really just about the first steps in getting started on eBay, and if you have previous experience with selling on eBay and you have sold more than 30 items already on eBay and then I suggest you just skim down to the resources section and get the more advanced articles that I’ve written when it comes to building an eBay business.

And now let’s talk about how to get started selling on eBay. The best way to get started really is by selling some of your own stuff that you don’t need anymore. Look around your house and see things that might be of some value to other people that you don’t need anymore.

Photos For Your Auction

Take a digital camera and make some pictures of the thing that you want to sell. Try to make the pictures look as nice as possible, make sure that whatever it is you take a picture of is clean and has good lighting. You also don’t want a lot of stuff in the background of the picture. But you don’t need to be a professional photographer and you don’t need any kind of special equipment.

Then just load the pictures on your computer. If you want to get super fancy, you can edit the pictures with some image editing software to make them look even nicer. There are free programs that you don’t have to pay for, like Picasa from Google or Gimp. I suggest you start out with Picasa, which is a lot easier to use than Gimp.

You can download Picasa here for free:

http://picasa.google.com/

Then you just sign into your eBay account, click on sell in the upper right corner and just follow the steps that eBay tells you to do. It’s pretty self-explanatory and easy to do, so I won’t go into much more detail see it.

But I will give you some tips that help you to make a better option, that eBay doesn’t necessarily tell you about.

The most important thing really is the auction title. You want to put as much relevant information in your auction title as possible. But, eBay does not allow you to put more than 55 characters into your auction title. That’s a pretty limited amount of space. Think of it like a headline in a newspaper. The purpose of the title is really to get people to start reading. It’s something that catches their attention. And in the case of the eBay auction title it’s supposed to make them click on your auction so that they see the description and are able to bid on your item.

You should avoid general terms like
“a beautiful telephone from my old apartment”

That’s not a good auction title, because it is a very nondescriptive. Sure, it means something to you, but to people who don’t know you — and that’s basically everyone who is on eBay — it means nothing. Instead you want to put in the companies that manufacture the telephone and the model name and number and certain features. If possible you also want to include the word telephone and the word phone. Because most buyers find the products they buy on eBay through the search function. And they use certain keywords to look for those products. So some people will use the word Panasonic phone, and others will look for Panasonic telephone. If you have only phone or only telephone in your auction title only one of these buyers will find your auction. But you want to get as much exposure for your auction as possible.

Let me give you an example of how you could describe that phone better. Better auction title would be:

PANASONIC KX-TGA400B 4 LN CORDLESS PHONE TELEPHONE

Now when you look at that auction title two things come to mind. One is you can see that it’s all in capital letters. That’s actually a pretty nifty trick. Because some sellers on eBay experiment in and want to find out whether it would make a difference if they would ride in normal lectures or in AND they found that isn’t a right and IN the auction titles, they are listings get more attention and more bits. So you want to do the same thing.

Another thing that comes to mind when looking at this auction title of a is that it is not exactly perfect. See that “4 LN”? now it would be much better to write “4 lines”. But because eBay limits the amount of characters that can be used in the auction title to only 55 characters that didn’t fit in. So sometimes you have to compromise a bit. And then it’s really up to you to decide where you want to compromise. But don’t worry too much about that. Just get started and put in your first item. Over time you will develop some feeling for what is important and what can be left out of auction title.

What is also very important is that you have a gallery picture to your auction. If you don’t do that a lot less people will buy, or even look at your auction. It’s just human nature, that when we actually see something with our eyes we are more likely to buy it.

But this blog post is already pretty long. There’s a lot more when it comes to successfully selling on eBay. And you find all the information you need in a very easy to understand way in the Auction Informer Reports.

To have a successful eBay online business will the most important things you have to do is market research.

The are several ways to do market research, some are advanced, some are basic, some are free, some you got to pay for.

To be really successful you should use every one of these market research opportunities.

It’s better to know a little more about your market than you have to, than to know a little less about your market than you should.

In this article I want to introduce you to a simple and free method for doing market research on eBay.

In fact, it is so simple that it is often overlooked.  And I highly encourage you to not overlook it, because it’s another piece in the puzzle of your online success.

I’m talking about the eBay WantItNow section.  This is really tells you what buyers want to buy.  People post what they want to buy your, and every day that are thousands of posts.

This is a great way to get a feel for the market.  To understand what products are in demand, but hard to find.

Now what you want to do is to look for repeated wanted ads.  If several dozen people are posting a wanted ad, looking for a specific thing, that is a very good indicator that you can make money by selling that.

If you haven’t yet decided on what market to enter, this is just another tool that will help you to decide which category is most likely to bring you quick profits.

If you already know what market you want to be in, or you already are selling in a certain market and want to continue selling in that market.  The eBay WantItNow page is still very useful for you.

Because what you want to do is you want to subscribe to wanted ads in the categories that relate to your market.  EBay actually allows you to do that.  It’s almost like having a little market research robot that goes out every day to find new little profit gold mines, waiting to be exploited.

Another thing that you want to look for in these wanted ads is how many responses an ad gets.

The more responses an ad gets, the less interesting that item is for you.

Why is that?  Isn’t it the case that the more responses a wanted ad gets the hotter the item is? In this case, no. Because the people who respond to the wanted ads are sellers that that have that item available and are willing to sell it to the person.

But what you are looking for our items where that aren’t many sellers.  Because few sellers means little competition.

Now I am not one of these people who say you have to find something that is not competitive. In fact, normally I encourage you to go into competitive markets, because it is competitive because people are making money.  It wouldn’t be competitive if people wouldn’t be making money.

But in this case it’s different.  Because the sole reason of you going through the eBay want it now section is finding products with high demand a little competition.

For more eBay market research tips and strategies for starting a successful eBay business get your free course on eBay success.

EBay is still a great place to start a home-based business. Yes, their fees have gone up and there are many policy changes in eBay that alienate many of the old sellers. That is why you hear so many people talking: eBay is trying to get rid of the small sellers.

But that is simply not the case. You see, with every change in the marketplace come new opportunities. And the same is true for eBay. But in this article I don’t want to look too much at the eBay changes and what the upcoming opportunities are, but I want to look at a common way to start an eBay business, and that is the drop shipping.

Drop shipping seems like the perfect way to get started, because you don’t need to purchase thousands of dollars of merchandise, yet you get “wholesale prices” that allow you to sell the products for a profit.

And you won’t have to deal with shipping and handling, which can become a real pain in the behind very quickly if you start selling in bulk on eBay. Because the drop shipping company is going to do all of that for you.

But there are downsides to drop shipping too. For example, you need to register a business, because every drop shipper wants to see your tax ID and your business number. Of course it’s not that expensive or difficult to incorporate any more, so that shouldn’t be too big of an obstacle if you are serious about your online business.

Another downside is that there are many scammers who pretend to be drop shippers, but they are really just looking for victims for their schemes.

If you do a Google search for drop shippers, most often the “companies” that show up are not legitimate businesses in my opinion.

Another downside of selling through drop shippers is that your reputation totally relies and depends on another business. If the drop shipper doesn’t deliver the merchandise, or delivers the merchandise in bad condition, or ships out the merchandise to late  you will have to deal with upset buyers and negative feedback. And your customers won’t be very compassionate if you tell them: “But it’s not my mistake, the drop shippers promised me they would send all the items in mint condition to you immediately when the order comes in.”

If you’re thinking about using drop shippers, you should make absolutely sure that the drop shipping company that you choose is legitimate. That means you want to call them up on the phone and talk to them. And you want to check their reputation. You want to see testimonials and recommendations from previous customers. You want to see what kinds of reviews they got on the Internet.

Now don’t be scared off if everything seems okay, but you find some negative reviews online about that drop shipper. That’s just the nature of the Internet. There is no product that will only have positive reviews. But you can see the overall tone of how that drop shipper is talked about in the online community.

I also suggest that if you have the names of people who gave testimonials for that drop shipping company, you call these people up. Talk with them to see their real people, and whether they still think highly of the drop shipping company they gave the testimonial for.

For more free advice on finding the right suppliers and drop shippers sign up for the Auction Informer newsletter. It’s totally free, packed with information that helps you to make more money faster and if you have any questions you can always contact me and I or one of my team members will get back to you with an answer.

Back in 1995 when eBay just started out it was really a small auction house, almost like a virtual garage sales.  And it remained that way for many years.  But now it has all changed.  And you hear many sellers whining and complaining about that.

It was a great way to find a real bargain, something that we would have to pay $150 for in your store bought on eBay you found it for 110.

Nowadays, it has gotten a lot more difficult to find a real bargain.  But in this article I just want to share some simple tricks that help you to spot these are games that still pop up in the thousands every day on eBay.

One of the most common ways to find bargains on eBay is to make use of the many free websites that help you to find misspelled auctions.

And the way that works is that you go to one of these sites and enter the item that you are looking for on eBay.  You click on search and the website is going to search for misspelled items for you.  It will then bring you to the eBay site and show you all the results.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are looking for a digital camera.  What you can then do is that you just type in camera into the misspellings finder, and it will come up for you with all the misspelled auctions on eBay.  I in fact did that and some of the results that showed up are: “CANON POWERSHOT PRO1 BLACK 8.0 MEGAPIXEL DIGITAL CAMER”, “DIGITAL CAMMERA CASIO EXILM EX-Z75 7.2 MEGAPIXELS”, and “Kodak easyshare md853 digital camrea nikon cannon” - you see, instead of camera they wrote camrea, camer or cammera.  That is why less people find them and that these auctions get less bids, and often go for a lower price.

Another way to find bargains is to look for the item you are interested in on eBay.  Look for how much it sells normally.  Write that number down.

Then go back to the ebay homepage and click on “advanced search”.

There, you enter the item you are interested in. (Example: Apple iPhone 8GB AT&T)

Then you click on “Show items priced for” and enter the amount that you are willing to pay for it.

Now you click on search. At the results page, you click on “Save this search” and activate “Email me daily when new items match my search” and select the time period that you want to be notified for (I always chose 6 months, and just switch it off once I found the item).

Now, if you do exactly this way there is a high chance that you will be bombarded with too many irrelevant auctions.  That is simply because every time somebody puts in an auction with a starting price is below what you are willing to pay you will get notified, but since the auction has not yet ended it is very likely that the price will go up a lot more.  That is why there are some other options in the advanced eBay search function that you want to use in order to make sure that only real bargains show up in your e-mail box.

This article is quite long already so I have to come to an end here.  But you can learn about these methods in the AuctionInformer newsletter. Just put your name and email address in the box, click on “Yes, send me my Auction Informer Reports” and you’ll be on your way to ebay mastery. I promise to never spam, bother or annoy you, and if for any reason whatsoever you decide the AuctionInformer isn’t right for you, you can just click on the link at the bottom of every email and your email address will be deleted from my database forever immediately and you won’t receive another email from me.

EBay is a great place to do business.  Many people think that it’s too late to get in on the eBay game.  They think that there are too many sellers already making a full-time living on eBay.  They think that only the people who got in early, at the beginning stages of eBay have a chance to succeed.  But that’s just not true.  EBay is not a pyramid scheme.  EBay is an online auction platform.  That’s a big difference.  What does this difference mean to you?  It means if you haven’t started profiting from eBay you can still get started.  All it takes is some work combined with the right methods and strategies to build a successful business.

One of the most important things to do is to find out what you can sell profitably before you make a big investment in merchandise.

I am talking about market research year.  Market research is the single most important factor that differentiates successful eBay sellers from the ones who will go broke.

That’s why I would share one method of doing market research for your eBay business here.

And it’s a very simple to eBay market research.  It’s nothing fancy.  You don’t need to buy any fancy kind of service, you do not need to spend a lot of money, and fact you do not need to spend any money — that’s right, it’s completely free.

And it is deceptively simple.  So simple that you might think: oh, this won’t work.

But if you’re willing to just actually do it, instead of just doing it in your mind, your fantasy, and hallucinating the results that will come out, you can find it incredibly valuable data about your market.

That is one of the things that always separates successful enterpreneurs from the people who will always work for “the man”.  Enterpreneurs try things out in the real world.  Employees imagine and fantasize scenarios, find ways why they won’t work and never undertake anything.

So, here is the eBay market research methods I want to share with you today: it’s eBay once it now.

You can find it here: http://pages.eBay.com/wantitnow

This is the place where people go to Post wanted ads for stuff that they want to buy on eBay but they could not find.

Do you understand what this means?

This means that the eBay want it now place is where you find market demand.  This is where prospects go, raised their hand and say: ‘I want to give money to anyone who can give me X.’

Now there’s two things you can do with this data.  You can look at all the postings and find all the stuff that people are looking for, obscure stuff that is hard to find.

If that is the way you want to go, all I can say is: good luck to you.

The smarter way is to look for repeating patterns.  What items do people look for? And when I say people I am talking plural, not singular.

You will find that there are certain items that are look for by many people.  If 20 different people post wanted ads for the same item that is a pretty good indicator that there are a lot more people who are interested in buying the same item.

You see, actually posting a wanted ads is something that takes little bit of effort.  And if there are 20 people who are willing to exert that effort, then that’s a pretty good indicator that there are a lot more people who want the same thing.

Now if you can find this item, put it up on eBay and sell it.  This could be a gold mine.

However, it’s only a gold mine if you pull the offer in the right way.  You see, eBay has gotten very complex.  There are many mistakes that you can make when listing an auction.  And there aren’t many small, little tricks that you can incorporate in your auction to get more attention, more bids, and more dollars.

To find out about these (completely legal but highly effective) eBay tricks, sign up for the AuctionInformer Report here.