Once you’ve optimized your titles for search terms and your items have short durations to get them near the top of the results, there’s really only one sure-fire way to make your auction stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, it involves paying eBay more money – but it can really pay off, especially for higher-priced items.

In this email, I’ll take you through the various ‘listing upgrades’ eBay offer, how much they cost, and whether they’re any good. Remember that if you want any of these, you can just tick their box while you’re going through the process of listing your item. The charges will be added to the other fees you’re charged for the listing.

Gallery. The most basic of upgrades, this will show your photo on the search results page as well as inside on the item’s description page. This is always worth having. Cost: 35c.

Subtitle. If you add a subtitle, you get a little more space to fit in any extra information that you couldn’t squeeze into the title. Use this if you’re selling a relatively technical item that just has too many good features to fit into that 55-letter title space. Cost: 50c.

Bold. This will put your auction’s title in bold on search results pages. Not especially noticeable, but might make your auction stand out a little. Cost: $1.

Border. Choose this option to put your listing inside a colored box on results pages, making it look a bit special. Cost: $3.

Highlight. You can get your listing highlighted in purple on results pages. Cost: $5.

Featured Plus. This upgrade will show your item at the top of the page in the search results, with the ‘featured items’, for the duration of your listing. It will also be shown in the featured items list seen by people who browse by category. This is easily the best upgrade you can buy, and will easily pay for itself twice over with an item that’s worth more than about $100 and getting a decent number of bids. Cost: $19.95.

Gallery Featured. This will show your item first when someone chooses to view items using the ‘Picture Gallery’ view. Few people ever use this view, but it might be useful for some kinds of items. Cost: $19.95.

Home Page Featured. This is the ultimate in listing upgrades, but its value is questionable, especially given the small space featured items are actually given on the home page. If you think you could pull a lot of buyers into your auction with nothing but the first four or five words of your title go for it. Really, you have to get yourself on the home page at least once in your eBay life, don’t you? Cost: $39.95.

Instead of going to expense to get new buyers through the listings, perhaps you should talk to your existing ones and create some new sales opportunities that way? If you’d like to know how, be sure to read the next email.