Q: I sold an item two weeks ago and I have still not recieved
payment. I have sent an invoice as well as a payment reminder, but I have recieved no response. I state in my listing that Payment must be recieved within five days. What can I do? I don’t want to leave negative feedback if I don’t have to.

Please Advise,
Bryan Kemper

A: Unfortunatly this happens much more often than it should and you options are rather limited in how you can deal with the situation.

After you have sent the payment reminder, that is the last of the official methods of contact with the buyer. But what you can do, is get their email address off of their invoice and send them another message without going through ebay. Read the rest of this entry »

Thousands of bidders worry about Internet fraud. Several studies by eBay and Yahoo have positively concluded that accepting credit cards will increase your auction bids anywhere from 100% to 300%. This is even more true on web site sales, where accepting credit cards can boost sales over 500%!

Setting up a merchant credit card account can cost between $195 to $425 in set-up fees and anywhere from 2.5% to 7.5% per transaction.

Fortunately, Paypal offers an elegant solution Read the rest of this entry »

There are over seven million items listed on eBay every day. Your headline must stand out above the competition to attract bidders. A great headline should contain two key elements: “Key words” that are searchable, and “emotional words” designed to attract attention.

Over 60% of bidders find the item they are looking for by using the “Search” feature. Unless you use the key words bidders are looking for, you will miss many bids. For example, if someone collects Ferrari Formula 1 model cars, they will search “Ferrari” rather than “Formula 1″ or “model cars.” A search of “Ferrari” turns up 41 items, while “Formula 1″ turns up a few thousand items. A search of “Blue & White” will turn up thousands of listing in the pottery section, but a search for “Liberty Blue” (a specific type of blue & white pottery) turns up only a few hundred items.

Your headline should also include “emotional” words designed to attract a bidder’s attention. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »