Ebay Selling 101
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.
Tags: auction title tips, ebay auction tips, getting started on ebay, how to sell on ebay, sell on ebay, selling on ebay