Image is everything! At least when it comes to the image’s in your auction listings. People like to see what they are buying and the better they can see it the more comfortable they will feel.

Anyone who has ever used a camera has at some point had trouble taking a good picture. It happens to everybody, and if you’re like me and forgot to major in photography while in college, then you probably get as frustrated as I do when you take picture after picture and never seem to get a good one.

When it comes to online auctions, the inability to take quality pictures of your items can literally be the death of your business. In an online marketplace where the buyers cannot touch the products they want to buy, the two things that sell are Picture and Description. But if you have a crappy picture or worse not picture at all, you are sabotaging yourself and losing money.

Lucky for me (and lucky for you) I have a friend who did major in photography in college and now makes his living as a professional photographer. The lucky part is that he agreed to help me create a simple guide for helping people like me learn how to take high quality pictures of their items. Read the rest of this entry »

Successful sellers on eBay know how to write an item description (sales pitch) that instantly perks the browser’s interest and then draws them in after a few sentences.

The first part of your eBay sales pitch is the title, which should be catchy and immediately focus a potential customer on your auction. If you get them to click on your auction, then you have won half the battle. I recommend bold-face titles at all times using catch words such as:
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As I have indicated, trial and error is one major tool for success. It works, pure and simple. Don’t be afraid to try out new ideas or to feature dozens of your most popular products. Find out what sells and what doesn’t - continually order new products from your supplier that you feel will become big hits on eBay

Do not get into a rut selling the same thing over and over again; you will saturate the market after a few months. The most important use for trial and error on eBay is to use the regular auctions as a testing ground for your new merchandise to determine its sales percentage and corresponding marketability, as well as its profit margin.

You can then make an educated decision as to whether or not to feature the auction or choose the dutch option, or both. Impulse selling is much like impulse buying - you regret it soon afterwards. Don’t waste your money on the fancy options on eBay until you first use trial and error on all of your products.

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Market analysis is very important to determine what sells and what doesn’t. When you’re paying eBay $100 listing fees for featured auctions or $20.00 listing fees for category featured dutch auctions, you need to continually evaluate the profit potential, profit margin, and sales percentage of your products as relates to the length of auction, type of auction (featured, featured in category, bold face title, etc), description & sales pitch, price, and a number of other factors.

I’m not going to provide you with a complete plan for performing a market analysis because this isn’t an economic manual, but I will give you a few tips. The best way to perform market analysis on your products is to use a spread sheet which automatically calculates your best-selling items and recommends which items you should discontinue and which items you should feature. The auction manager I reccomended before (Auction Tamer) can help make this a simple and quick task. Read the rest of this entry »