eBay Resources

eBay Hints And Tricks

Save a buck or two or ten - know how to optimize your listings and use upgrades that will benefit your exposure. Knowing a few simple tricks and tips can spread your eBay bucks further. Know how to use your auctions as a marketing tool, use your store as a part of your marketing and you CAN be successful on eBay.

We've been active eBay sellers since 2001 and over the years we developed a strategy that works well, keeps costs low and maintains a well balance of exposure. I've shared this strategy with many of our clients, and now I'm sharing this strategy with you. Why? Because I myself am a small business and I believe in small business helping small business. Many supposed eBooks, consultants and "share my PowerSeller secrets" make you pay for information like this. Not us.

The strategy for store owners.

1. Use store inventory as a way to rotate stock or offer additional stock at a flat-rate price. Store inventory fees are much cheaper than auction fees. For instance, you have 25 units of a widget that you would like to sell at $10.00 a piece. To auction off all 25 units, you'll only be able to list 10 at a time and your insertion fee (without any upgrades) will cost you $.60 per unit. Now, if you list them as store inventory, you can create one store inventory listing with quantity of 25 available and you'll only pay $.05 insertion per 30 days. Then, selectively choose widgets out of your store inventory to auction off now and then to generate traffic to your store.

Another note - if you list one of the $10.00 widgets up on auction - if you list the price at $10.00 you're going to pay $.60 for insertion. If you list the widget for $9.99, you'll only pay $.40 insertion. Ahhhh - saves yourself a couple of dimes. Learn more about eBay fees and you'll see where you can cut back a little.

2. Use auctions to drive traffic to your store. If you opt not to use a custom template, turn on your listings frame and eBay will load a few of your store categories that will help buyers navigate to your store directly from your auction. If you opt to use a custom template, ask your designer to design in navigation to your store. This will make the most of your auctions. Be selective about the items you decide to auction off as your "store marketing". Select items that will prompt buyers to "view more".

3. Keep your upgrades and listing fees to a minimum. Many of the listing upgrades eBay has are not necessarily going to generate sales for you. Learn what listing upgrades are worth the extra expense and which ones you can do without.

• Gallery - this is an upgrade I do recommend. The gallery picture is the thumbnail that loads next to your item title when it appears on categories and/or search results. Many buyers will skip over listings that don't have a gallery picture. It's only one penny per 30 days to use a gallery picture with store inventory, and it's only $.35 for auctions.
• Subtitle - a waste of money! Titles are important because they are searchable, BUT, subtitles are not searchable unless a buyer searches descriptions AND titles. Anything you have to say in the subtitle can be put in your description instead.
• Feature upgrades - again it's not needed. This will feature your items at the top, feature your item on the homepage, highlight, bold, etc. This isn't going to increase your exposure any more or any less. Save yourself the $20 and $30 and skip any features.
• Extras like scheduled listings, additional pictures and such can be found free with 3rd-party listing tools like Auctiva.com, ChannelAdvisor.com and more. These sites offer free hosting, free scheduling and more free tools that can save you money. Auctiva is a free service to boot, so you can really save on fees without an additional monthly subscription fee.

4. Optimize your item titles for effective search results. Avoid wasting characters in your title with nonsense like "LQQK". Use only words that pertain to your item, even if the title doesn't make sense (it's eBay - it doesn't have to). For example, this is a random title we found on eBay when searching for "radio": Vintage Brand New Radio Plastic

Now to the buyer, it doesn't look very descriptive, nor is it very effective in searches. What brand is it? What year was it made? If someone does a search for "vintage emerson radio" will it come up? And the title is a little confusing when it says "Vintage" and "Brand New". After reading the description and gathering more information, we determined that it is not new, and that it's Emerson brand. So, a more effective title for this item would be: "1938 Vintage Emerson Tube Radio" with a few characters to spare.

5. Optimize your store name and description. For your store name, add keywords that pertain to the inventory you keep. For instance, if the name of your jewelry store name is Adonis Finds. Adonis Finds doesn't give any information as far as what you sell, or anything. Add a few keywords to further define your store. Adonis Jewelry Earrings Bracelets. It doesn't have to make perfect sense, it just has to be keyword rich. Same for your store description. Chock it full of your keywords.

6. Turn on your store's RSS feed to make your listings available to Google and other search engines. This is automatic traffic for you!

7. Use Google's free tools like Google Base to add your inventory. Even though eBay already provides a feed, there's nothing wrong with double the exposure. Google Base has a tool called the "store connector" that makes it easy to submit your inventory - and it's free!

8. Create an off-eBay webpage with optimized meta tags and content that is search engine friendly. eBay provides an easy HTML builder to create off-eBay links to your items that you can insert into your webpage. Use your webpage as an additional marketing tool.

Let me just make one final note about our strategy. Nothing is tried and true on eBay and if you've ever read through other sellers' strategies, you'll see that they all differ. The tips we give above are simply those, tips we've used ourselves since 2001. One common mistake new sellers make is going overboard instead of adding to their business as their business grows. There is nothing wrong with starting with basic strategies and adding to them as your business needs them.