With nearly one million people receiving all or part of their annual income from eBay it has become evident that a comfortable living can be made by advertising goods on the eBay marketplace. If you advertise on eBay and are interested in increasing your sales than read on to discover 10 tips the powersellers use to rack up immense sales numbers and to keep that pipeline open.
1. Offer niche products at marked down prices - With eBay being open to anyone with a personal computer and a dream, you will find that most of the mainstream markets have been saturated. So unless you have a better unique selling proposition or have an insanely better price point, stick to advertising those items that are harder to get. Industry or hobby specific items come to mind such as industry grade shipping crates or RC helicopter engines. So shrink your market and you will see increased sales activity.
2. Treat good customers like gold ? Nothing will hurt your success greater than too much bad feedback. Not only does it destroy your chances with first time customers but unhappy customers don't buy from you again. Repeat customers are the bread and butter of successful sellers. Just ask any powerseller and they will tell you that most of their sales are made to repeat customers. So Ship Items Quickly, Notify After Mailing the Product, Waterproof and Pad Shipped Products and don't forget to say thank you to your customers for buying from you.
3. Utilize images wisely ? The vast majority of customers search for items with images, so if you are not using images to sell your items? begin now. However a poor quality picture can be as bad as no photo at all|bad quality photos can more readily damage your sales than not having a photo at all. Invest in a camera that takes quality pictures and isolate the item to be sold for starters. Good lighting will help make your item stand out and take more than one shot of the product from different angles. If you are selling items that have crucial specifications such as machinery make sure you get a picture of the label that shows all the specs. Do the same for similar products, it ensures the customer that the product is exactly what they are looking for.
4. Make your auction titles descriptive ? People look for items by model #, product specification, size, brand, color etc... Make sure that you include these in your headline. Use common sense when building your title, put yourself in your buyers shoes and do a search for the item yourself and see what you can find.
5. Remove all the unessential garbage from the body of your auction? Remember that less is better. Unless you are well versed in how to get high returns by writing sales copy. Your description should elaborate on your title. Reiterate the brand, specifications, model #, color, size and anything you can think of that is of use to your buyer. Contrary to direct sales an individual searching on eBay doesn't need to be persuaded that they want to buy your merchandise, so your job is simply to get as many eyeballs on your auction post as possible and let the right buyer find you. Everything else will take care of itself.
6. Scrounge for great deals to resell at a profit ? Many sellers are distributors or wholesalers who have large contracts with manufacturers, for those just starting out however, many items can be unearthed on the internet and flipped or sold for a profit on eBay if you are driven enough to look. An easy search on Google can unearth many products below retail price. If you have an idea in mind for a product you want to sell you'll want to write this down. Open Google in a fresh window or tab and enter this without the quotes ?closeouts item/product name?. You will need to replace the item name with the product or item your looking to buy. You can also use words such as liquidation, wholesale and discount instead of closeouts. These easy searches should bring up lots of low cost products to resell on eBay.
7. Use the eBay store option - If you sell more than one product in the same market make sure you build an eBay store. You will be rewarded with substantially more sales for very little extra effort. All of your auctions will now include a hyperlink to your store where the buyer can browse all of your other auctions. Chances are if someone is making a purchase of an industry or hobby specific product from you, they will also need other items from that same market. Take some time to brainstorm all the items someone in your market might want and add them to your inventory.
8. Offer a Buy-It-Now option - You'll almost always do far better to use the buy-it-now option. It is because most buyers would prefer to get the item than to waist time in a bidding war. Most of the time you will not see a substantial increase in profit by letting the eBayers bid-it-out, in fact you will more likely than not make less for your product than if you had set a buy-it-now price.
9. Multiple methods of payment are better than less methods of payment ? Think about it. eBayers use many different ways to pay for goods, By accepting more payment methods you are ensuring that a higher amount of people make it to the end of your sales process. Just ensure that you have the ability to process every payment type you accept.
10. The money will be gotten by those ready to put in the research involved ? Find your prospects hot buttons, better yet find their buy now buttons. By doing this you will save more time, cash and heartache than any other tip on this list. Through research you will discover what your buyer is searching for, what price to set, the best way to word your titles as well as descriptions and even what your inventory should consist of. So set aside some time to cruise around eBay and search for the items you sell keeping an eye out for what the competition has done that could put more money in your pockets.