The Art of Selling on eBay

When selling through eBay you need to make sure that you (the seller) is in charge, on top of the game. Have you discovered everything there is to know about your products yet? If you just put the names of your products into Google you will probably get back everything you need to know. When you are trying to sell things, you may feel like you haven’t done something that you should have in order to increase your chances of a sale.

You should really understand that it is pretty simple to make money through eBay. If you have a direct competitor selling the same product as you, just be sure to include more information and content then they do. But also realize that its pretty silly starting an auction at $ 50 if someone is already selling the product for $ 40. Have you looked at your competitors? Monitored they’re sales? You should always keep a track of how your competitors are doing including how many sales they make, and how much they are selling for.

Do you email the buyer? What is a really good idea is to send an email to the person who buys your products immediately after a transaction goes through, something like “Thanks for buying, please inform me when your payment has been sent”. Be sure to follow this up with “Thanks for your payment, your item will be with you in ‘X’ days”. Communicating is key to good customer service, you will avoid a lot of problems by just sending these 2 short emails.

Make sure that you have on your eBay store, your pictures ready. Do you have the pictures of your products? If you have a digital camera, use it and take pictures of all your products for the time it takes to take a picture, the rewards are worth it. If you don’t have a camera yet and you have decided to go at selling products on eBay hard, you may want to invest in one.

Have you included in your product description all the buyer may want to know?  If you plan to deliver to multiple countries, you will probably want to include an international shipping tariff. If you use certain terms and conditions, for example you offer a 30 day money back guarantee. Make sure all this information is included in your display page.

Make sure you are checking you emails at regular intervals. It is possible that buyers may email you before they decide to buy something, so if you haven’t answered all your emails because they were not checked quickly enough, then you may have just lost a prospective buyer. They will decide to take their business elsewhere.

Ensure that you have wrapped and packed your items sufficiently. Remember this phrase “be good at your profession to create the right impression”, this is so true for packing, because if your products are poorly wrapped then it creates a poor impression on your buyers. Make sure you use bubble wrap where appropriate, this will stop your products from being damaged in transit. Be professional little things like printing the buyers address off instead of hand writing it can look good.

Your final customer service you hope to have with each customer is to send out an email a few days later and ask them what they think of their purchase, anything you could do to improve your own service etc. Yes this is a chance for them to complain but it is a good chance for you to get some excellent feedback.