When it comes to selling and making money on eBay, one of the most often asked questions is how to sell on eBay successfully. As a somewhat successful eBay vendor myself, I have been using a step by step guide that I have come to perfect for the last few years of using eBay as a money making platform.
The following 10 tips will help you establish and maintain a profitable eBay business no matter if you are an eBay beginner or a long time vendor.
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10 Tips For Selling Successfully On eBay
1- Get An eBay Store
If you really want to make a profitable business out of your eBay selling thing, you have to get yourself an eBay store. Having an eBay store not only allows you to pay less for listings on your shop, but you can also cross promote your products easily and quickly.
But perhaps the best benefit of having an eBay store is that you can send out newsletters to your buyers and establish a long lasting relationship with them. Lots of successful eBay sellers make most of their sales from people who respond to their newsletters.
2- Create A Good About Me Page
Lots of eBay sellers don’t even have an about me page and when I see that, it makes me sad that these guys haven’t realized the potential their seemingly unimportant about me page can have.
Your about me page is your first chance to establish trust and credibility. People like to buy from sellers who are credible and trustworthy. Make sure you give some detail about yourself and who you are, where you are located, your eBay business and so on. Sometimes its even a good idea to include a bit detail your family and kids as that makes you even more real and trust worthy.
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3- Use Pictures
A Picture is definitely worth a thousand words. Get pictures of your product to visibly display the overall condition of it, and also any impairment or perhaps odd features of it.
eBay makes it easy to add 1 picture 100 % free and in case you are using your own personal picture hosting program you can actually incorporate as much pictures as needed to exhibit your product in a thorough form.
A lot of Power Sellers go with as much as Twenty pictures for just one product. Determine just how many are actually needed for your product, and additionally give some thought to making use of the gallery choice in order that the picture can show up in the search listings.
4- Don’t Use Reserve Prices
A lot of vendors continue to put reserve prices on their merchandise. If you don’t want to sell your products below a certain price, you have the option of using what is called a “Reserve Price“. That means, if bidders fail to meet that number, you are not obligated to release the product even if the auction has a winner.
Reserve items, though rather on occasion can be needed when it comes to really expensive products can turn your potential bidders off. Why would anyone bid on your item with a reserve price, unless they already knew what the actual reserve price was.
5- Start Your Auctions With Low Prices
Prior to deciding to get your auction up and running, determine what exactly is the most reasonable price you would be willing to sell an item for. A lower starting price tag is going to entice significantly more bids not to mention at a much faster speed.
Studies have shown that the standard $0.99 starting rate can get you bidders in just a couple of hours. A lot of cars as well as other expensive goods are bought with a very low starting price tag particularly if the item is being sold by a well-known Power Seller, on the grounds that unless of course it is really an incredibly bad week the particular product will broadly speaking end up getting many hundreds of offers at a price which is satisfactory
to the vendor.
On top of that buyers have a propensity to look at listings that already have got a successful bid since it creates desire for your product. Remember, no matter where you find items to sell on eBay, you can in most cases get those items for cheaper so you can have more room and flexibility when it comes to your auction prices.
6- Do Cross-Promotion
You did a lot of work and promotion to have potential buyers see your listing, so make sure they see as many of your auctions as possible by simply linking to other product you are selling, within each auction. This is made possible on top of the already supplied hyperlink to “View other sellers’ items”.
You can also use third party services including Anadale to incorporate pictures and product descriptions.
7- Draft A Sensible Return Policy
If you want to sell on eBay successfully, you have to offer some kind of return policy. Almost nothing provides potential buyers more assurance than knowing that they could return the item in case it isn’t really for them. And so think of creating a good and reasonable returns policy.
Make sure to answer common questions in your policy detail. Questions such as Are you going to accept returns? How about if the product comes back defective? How much time the buyer has after paying for the product to return it if he or she has to?…
It may look as a huge risk to provide this kind of policy knowing that you’ve got to take into account the cost of re-listing the item and reshipping it, but considering that very few buyers may return any given item and the fact that just having this policy can increase your sales, it is obvious that the positives outweigh the negatives.
8- Offer Reasonable Shipping Rates
Don’t make the mistake of trying to over charge people on shipping in hopes of making a few extra dollars. People can easily find out how much an item really costs to ship and they would not be likely to buy from you if they see you are trying to over charge on shipping. Also, keep in mind that over charging for shipping is against eBay policy and you may put your account at risk.
Of course, if you sell digital products that don’t require physical shipping, but you still have to spend time on handling them, you should go ahead and charge a small fee to cover that. But make sure to charge a fair price for handling.
9- Offer Not Good But Great Customer Service
Customer service is one of the biggest factors when it comes to becoming a power seller on eBay.
You have to provide the best customer service you can and by that I don’t just mean replying to buyers after they bought and paid for the item, you should also reply quickly to questions and concerns raised by potential bidders and buyers. The faster you respond and take care of their needs, the more likely they are to buy from you now as well as in the future.
If you ever make a mistake and the buyers mentions that, don’t be afraid to own up to it. People can understand that mistakes happen. Try to make it up to them by offering them perhaps a cheaper shipping or take a few dollars off their total. It can go a log way.
10- Take Feedback Seriously
We all know that successful selling on eBay depends heavily on feedback and feedback is the number one thing that almost all buyers look at before buying from a seller.
In order to get your feedback on every sale you make, be sure to leave feedback for the buyer as soon as you can and don’t forget to send them a friendly message letting them know that you will appreciate their feedback as well.
The above mentioned tips should help increase your eBay sales. But perhaps the most important tip that I can give you is to simply treat each and every buyer just as you would want to be treated. If you can do that, then you already know how to successfully sell on eBay.