Research

There are new products coming on line every day. The consumer’s attention span is short, and his wants and desires change daily. Read about hot new trends and position yourself to take advantage of those trends. Being first allows you the opportunity to take advantage of high demand and charge a premium. No one ever made a lot of money being the last to the party.

Document

Use Excel or another comparable spreadsheet program to keep track of your auctions. Pertinent data to include in your spreadsheet are things like time of auction, number of bids, final sales price, length of auction, day of the week. Power Seller Collegetech provides many tools to help you track your auctions. By tracking your auctions, you can determine when the best time is to place a certain item up for auction.

Try

EBay is the greatest market research tool in the world. Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire the information you can obtain for pennies. Using the dropshippers provided by Power Seller Collegetech, you can market test a product for just the cost of an auction. You can see what auction titles garner the most hits, what description text leads to bids and what photographs spark bidders’ interest. Do not be afraid to adjust your methods until you hit on one that consistently shows results.

The people at the Powerseller College are there to help, but you, as a small business owner, are doing the heavy lifting. Never stop learning. Participate in the forums on Power Seller College and EBay, but do your part to gain knowledge on your own, and then, share it.

Working with a drop shipping company, you can sell its items to customers and make a profit on the difference between what you charge your customers and what the company charges you, and all of this is done without you doing the shipping. Drop sellers will ship your items directly to your customers, but you will be the one providing the storefront, and auction sites gives business owners that opportunity with less hassle.

eBay lets you avoid the hassle of creating and maintaining a website for your business. Its site provides you with a business consultation when you establish your company there and it will offer you tips for how to improve your presentation on the site and market your business. Even as you are still learning the process and how to promote yourself, you have a guaranteed customer base because the site already has traffic; additionally, you will be listed on customers’ searches of the site.

The site works with businesses in a number of ways, like giving the option to adjust to all of your sales at once. Additionally, the site offers reduced fees, rate discounts and health insurance options if a person is a PowerSeller. Top-rated sellers also receive special badges to promote their business with and discounted rates. The rating system on the site also gives you a measurement of your drop shipping partner’s quality and services to your customers.

If you are looking to become a powerseller, a less traditional but simplified method of doing so is to use eBay as a venue for your business working with a drop shipper. To gain the skills necessary to succeed in this, you may consider attending classes through Power Seller Collegetech.

An eBay Powerseller is someone that generates $1000 or more in sales for three consecutive months. You don’t have look too far on eBay to realize that the place is literally crawling with Powersellers.

I’ve spent over 5 years studying eBay, as well as, buying and selling products under several eBay IDs. I noticed that there are two types of eBay Powersellers:

1. Niche Powersellers
2. On-Demand Powersellers

The Niche Powersellers specialize in a particular area – like antiques, coins, dolls, etc. This particular area is a hobby to these people and they are very good at finding products at a low enough cost within this market to sell for a nice profit. These Powersellers are hard to imitate.

One the other hand, the On-Demand Powersellers are not very familiar with the products they sell, but they are very familiar with what the eBay community wants and how they can go about getting it. I call them On-Demand Powersellers because they seek out products to sell based on the level of demand inthe eBay community. These are the Powersellers that you should try to follow.

A common misconception that new eBay users have is thinking that all Powersellers are large retail outlet doing business on eBay. This simply isn’t true. The majority of the Powersellers that I know typically run their business out of a basement or garage. Ebay has a great way of leveling the playing field in this respect. For example, a student can open an account and create ads that are just as enticing as any large company that happens to be selling the same products on ebay.

So how can you do business like On-Demand Powersellers?

That’s actually an easy question to answer; obtain a seller’s permit, find a demand for a particular product, and then find a wholesale supplier for that particular product.

A seller’s permit will allow you to purchase products for wholesale from wholesale venders. This is the first thing any legitimate wholesale company will ask for, and if you don’t have one, they could very likely not do business with you.

You can obtain a sellers permit here

You can find the demand for numerous products on eBay by using the eBay ‘Hot Items’ resource (in link below). This resource consists of (among other things) a 40+ page pdf document that lists which items are hot sellers in the numerous categories. The data is usually for the previous 2 months.

Find out ‘What’s Hot’ on eBay here

After you’ve identified which items were hot sellers, go to eBay’s Advance Search and conduct a search for those products to make sure they’re still hot sellers (have plenty of bids). Also do a search for the same product with the ‘Completed Items’ option in the Advanced Search checked. This will show you which auctions sold and how much they sold for.

Once you have a product in mind, do a search on Google for the manufacture of the product. When you get to the website, look for a contact number, or a ‘Dealer inquiry’ number. This information is also usually on the box of the product itself, so it may take a run to your local store if you don’t have any luck on the web.

Give them a call. Inform them that you run a business and are interested in becoming a dealer of the product. Most are very helpful in getting you setup. However, be aware, some may have a minimum purchase order. Never the less, if you did your eBay research correctly, you’ll know how much these items have recently sold for, and how much they are currently selling for, thus, you can be pretty confident that the money will be made back.

I recently came across two Powersellers that are extremely successful doing with this process. One Powerseller had sold over $100,000 worth of those little robotic-vacuuming-Frisbee thingies in 60 days! The other Powerseller does extremely well selling dog chews. Both Powersellers simply identified the demand for these products, then sought out the manufactures and became dealers… the rest is history.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com.

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TAGGED WORDS: Power Seller College, PSC, POWERSELLER COLLEGE, Power Seller Collegetech, Powerseller College

The path most unsuspecting entrepreneurs take is by ending up at keyword tool or database to begin their search.

As a keyword research expert and founder of one of the leading keyword research services on the internet, I can say with firsthand experience that keyword databases are not the first place to look nor should be even considered. Here’s why.

The primary keyword databases that are currently available to the general public only give search counts on a limited amount of data that accounts for 1% – 2% of the actual searches people do around the entire world. They can only predict (emphasis added) the real majority of searches that are being done on the big five search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com which hold 97%-98% of the keyword data.

Most importantly, keyword research only shows what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to search for answers, not what people actually buy on the internet. Just because a group of people search for specific terms or brand names does not mean that’s what they purchase. That’s a key distinction many entrepreneurs and business owners tend to gloss over.

When looking for a profitable niche marketplace, your primary focus should be looking for proof of a group of hungry and rabid buyers that want to exchange their money for a service or product (information, physical or digital). Without this crucial qualifier, you may have the greatest product in the world, but you may be lacking a market to sell it to.

This article will present a number of great sources to look at which will give you a running start to uncover a truly, profitable marketplace exists before you go for the gold and put all your resources into a website, product creation or expenditures toward some sort of online property.

Once you establish that you have located a market that contains signs of adequate commerce moving through it, you then have a worthy reason to look further into a keyword research service to find out what keyword phrases people use to find the market you have chosen.

Let’s begin looking at how to identify a profitable market.

MAGAZINES

One of the best ways to find signs of a truly profitable marketplace is looking for a magazine in that industry. If a publisher has enough money to print and circulate a full color magazine, there are most likely advertisers that support the funding of the magazine’s ability to circulate all the copies which most likely means there are sales being made by those advertisers.

Now, this may bring you to question whether there is too much competition in a marketplace with so many advertisers selling in a magazine.

In fact, it’s a great sign to have competition which means there is an adequate amount of customers to sell to and a portion of a sizable pie to be had in that marketplace. If there is very little competition, you may (1) not have adequate product being sold in that space; or (2) not have a marketplace to begin with. The larger the competition is, the larger the piece of revenues you will be able to grab.

Without having to leave your seat, you can hop on over to Magazines.com and looking through the number of different categories to find a profitable topic or industry in which to start an online concern.

One of the things you’ll want to focus in on is the number of subscribers each magazine has and how long the magazine has been in print for stability purposes.

Make a list of magazines you want to look into and then go hunting for them at one of those large dedicated newsstands that covers just about every magazine on every topic.

To get a better look at what people are buying in the online world, you will need to ultimately decide whether you wish to represent physical or digital products.

PHYSICAL PRODUCTS

There are two incredibly huge marketplaces that are massively trafficked, move a lot of product and are great places to find what people are really buying.

Let’s start with the first huge marketplace…

eBay

At eBay, you can look through a list of the most popular products people are buying through auctions or from eBay stores that vendors have setup. To see a visual path on how to locate the most popular products, please use the reference below to view the extended version of this article.

Amazon.com

Another really big marketplace is Amazon and it’s not just for books. You can find just about any product and name brand that is a mover and shaker. Again, look at the most popular products in those categories that catch your attention.

DIGITAL PRODUCTS

If you wish to sell products of the digital nature which does not require inventory and which usually carries high profit margins for affiliates, you’ll want to check out the Clickbank digital marketplace that ranks product sales from highest to lowest sellers in each category.

Just browse through categories at Clickbank.com and you’ll instantly find the top sellers of digital info products, software and subscription services which are located right at the top listings. See also reference section below for a link to the extended version of this article for visual aids and more detailed guidance.

Once you gather the adequate market research, you can do one of the following:

• Create an online store that ships out physical products and merchandise (requires inventory)
• Sell merchandise through eBay auctions or their online stores (requires inventory)
• Create a site that represents vendors as an affiliate (requires no inventory)
• Create your own product, service or software for a digital product (requires no inventory)

Having used at least two of the four places above, you can be assured that you have conducted proper market research to uncover “proof positive” what people are buying and, thus, a profitable niche market.

You can then quickly build out a non-complex site with a simple product offering, find some low cost keywords to use in a Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign with a minimal spend of $50 to test the market and see if you have a winner.

If the initial test results pan out, meaning that you pulled a profit from your test, you can invest more energies, conduct more extensive keyword research and expend more advertising dollars. If the test results do not pan out, find another market until something sticks.

I believe this should arm you with enough information to get you moving toward finding a market with bottomless profits.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com.

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TAGGED WORDS: Power Seller College, PSC, POWERSELLER COLLEGE, Power Seller Collegetech, Powerseller College,

Selling on eBay

When selling on eBay, whether it is through eBay auction or the fixed price format, a person has to first register to be a member and then create a seller’s account. Credit card details or being ID Verified is needed to create a seller account. The next requirement is a picture of the item to be sold. This is required since most buyers want to see what the item actually looks like before buying anything.

The next thing to do is to get your item listed by clicking on the Sell Your Item button. After clicking on the button, be sure to give all the necessary information such as the item category, the title, item description, and the price, payment method, shipping costs, return policy, and payment methods. For your item to have a greater chance of being viewed by more prospective buyers you can list the item under more than one relevant category. Another effective strategy would be to have a very specific title that would most probably typed by prospective buyers as their search string.

To keep track of all your listings simply go to My eBay since it keeps track of all the items you’ve sold and are currently selling along with all the bids made on them as well as all the items you have bid on and are currently bidding on. My eBay also has a summary page, a favorites page, and your accounts page. As soon as the item is sold eBay will notify both the buyer and seller through email. Make sure that you communicate well with your buyer and notify the buyer that the item is being shipped as soon as you receive the payment.

In case you plan to sell your item through eBay Auction there are three prices you need to set before putting up the item n sale. First is the Starting Price. The Starting Price is simply the price you want the bidding to start. It is also usually the lowest price you feel that you can accept as payment for your item. Next is the Reserve Price. In case your starting price is lower than the amount you are willing to accept as payment you need to set the Reserve Price. Having a reserve price means that if the bidding ends with the highest bid still lower than the reserve price then your item will remain unsold. This price is concealed from buyers.

Last is the Buy It Now Price. The Buy It Now Price is the amount a buyer has to pay to get the item you are selling without having to bid. Both the Reserve Price and Buy It Now Price are optional. The reserve price can be advantageous since it will protect you from having to sell your item at too low a price but can also be disadvantageous since it may discourage buyers from bidding. The Buy It Now Price, on the other hand, is advantageous for buyers who really want to buy the item you are selling since there is no risk that they will be outbid if they automatically buy the item. It is also advantageous for you as the seller since it can hasten the transaction since you don’t have to wait for the bidding period to end. However, it can also be disadvantageous if there is much demand for the item you are selling since having a Buy It Now price will limit the amount bid even if some buyers might actually be willing to bid beyond that set price.

eBay charges the following fees to seller. The Insertion Fee, Additional Option Fees, and Final Value Fee. The Insertion Fee is a non-refundable fee charged for each item listed on eBay Auction. Insertion Fee ranges from $0.30 to $4.80. Additional Option fees are charged if you opt for additional features like the Buy It Now and if you want your item to be a Featured Item. The Final Value fee is charged depending on the closing price your item manages to garner after a successful close at eBay Auction.

Bidding on eBay Auction

To bid on an item in eBay Auction, click on the item you wish to buy to get to the item page. You can then place a bid by simply clicking on the Place Bid Button found on the right side of the picture. In case there is no such button it means that the item can only be bought at the set price and isn’t up for auction. When you place a bid the only price you will see is the starting price since the amount bid by other people will not be visible to you. Enter the maximum amount you will be willing to pay for the item you wish to purchase the click on the Place Bid Button. eBay Auction will automatically compare your bid with others and won’t bid the maximum amount you entered. Instead it will bid only what is needed to outbid the last bid. eBay Auction will do this automatically until it reaches the maximum amount you entered or you win the bid. In case another buyer outbids you eBay Auction will send you a notification so that you can enter a larger amount or at least know that you’ve been outbid.

In case you are bidding on a Reserve Price Auction check whether the current price bid has met the reserve price. If your maximum amount has been reached but the reserve price still hasn’t been met then you know for sure that you need to increase your bid since the item won’t be sold until the reserve price is met.

If you are nervous about bidding on an expensive item keep in mind that eBay has measures to protect both sellers and buyers from fraud. If you are simply nervous since it is your first time try bidding on cheaper items first before going on to more expensive stuff. You can actually find items for less than $1.00 on eBay auction.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com.

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TAGGED WORDS: Power Seller College, PSC, POWERSELLER COLLEGE, Power Seller Collegetech, Powerseller College

No need to look high and low for free eBay secrets, we’ve got them compiled here for you. You can use these free eBay secrets to create a booming business on eBay.

Once you decide to become an eBay seller, choose the user ID you will have to use, carefully. Choose a User ID that represents your business or the items you sell. Your User ID automatically becomes your eBay identity to potential buyers.

Look up the “How to Sell” Tour and watch the eBay selling demonstration video. Then learn of free eBay secrets in starting up at the eBay Learning Center.

Get your ID verified by using the ID Verify option when setting up a Seller’s Account. This gives you an ID Verify icon in your feedback profile thereby giving the eBay community more confidence to buy from you. Don’t let this free eBay secret go unheeded.

Make sure to get computer backup disks in order for you to store up valuable data. A free eBay secret of using accounting software will help you know how your business is doing so you can make it more profitable.

Look for a good place where you can put your inventory and shipping materials. It’s a free eBay secret that they need to be in a safe, dry place nearby. Writing a daily To-Do List will help you organize your schedule. It is also the free eBay secret for you to manage your time on normal tasks and follow up on opportunities that aren’t part of them.

Taking eBay’s fees into account may be the free eBay secret you need that’ll guided the pricing of your items.

Find the best category where to list your products under. This free eBay secret is probably known by everyone. From eBay’s home page, click the “Buy” button, and browse the categories to find categories that apply to your items. Another free eBay secret that’s necessary for your products’ success is checking where competing items have been placed. It’s a good idea to choose two categories for your listings to reach more buyers.

Even if you have to pay additional fee, spotlighting your title is a practically free eBay secret that’s guaranteed to grab buyers’ attention when they search for listings.

Hiring a Trading Assistant can free up the time you need to let you focus on the more important aspects of your eBay business.
Constantly monitor My eBay for your listings performance and other activities on the site. Keep track of your eBay correspondence by using My Messages. Surely, this free eBay secret will be a great help.

Attending trade shows is not only a free eBay secret advice it is also a great opportunity where you can get product trends preview and connect with manufacturers and discuss the opportunity of selling their products on eBay. Make sure to bring your business cards and be ready for discussions/

Protect yourself from potential fraud. Be wary for unusual buyer requests and consider it as a fraudulent sign if such requests come to light.

eBay consultants are available for advice and even free eBay secret tip offs. Once you know how to sell on eBay and checked out the eBay Community, your head will be buzzing with new business ideas.

Subscribing Chatter may get you not only feature articles, tips, helpful links and member interviews but maybe also free eBay secrets to success. Signing up for the PowerUp Newsletter can get you advanced notice of upcoming events and promotions. You’ll get to know free listing days, feature discounts, seller sweepstakes and more.

There’s nothing wrong in promoting your eBay store. In fact it is another free eBay secret that you design marketing materials to promote your store.

Once you made a final sale price, donate part of it to a Nonprofit Organization of your choice. Remember that the ultimate free eBay secret to success is passing on the blessings and knowledge you acquire!

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com.

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TAGGED WORDS: Power Seller College, PSC, POWERSELLER COLLEGE, Power Seller Collegetech, Powerseller College

It will take some time to learn the inside eBay selling secrets that the top sellers know. Understand that eBay will take some work. There are no eBay selling secrets that focus on get-rich-quick scheme.

For your Ebay business, all you need is internet access and a product to sell. Don’t worry If you don’t have a product. An eBay selling secret on what item to put up for sale is by starting off selling old or odd items from your home like most people do. Others go to garage sales and picking up great deals, then selling them on Ebay. Some purchase from companies that offer low prices and discount deals.

From among the many eBay Selling Secrets, here are among the top 10 you should know:

1. Research!

By doing research, you make sure that there is a need for the item that you are selling. Do this by running a search for your item and see how many items are turn up from the keyword search.

2. List your item in the right category!

There are categories for the items to be put up for sale on eBay. The purpose of this is to have an organized tracking system for the products for sale. It is an eBay selling secret to put your item in exactly the right category where it belongs.

3. Keywords and descriptions are critical!

It is an important eBay selling secret to use appropriate keywords to describe your product. Be specific in your descriptions. Your descriptions are critical to avoid any future problems or potential returns by buyers.

4. Photos in your auction is needed!

The eBay selling secret of using photos of the products during auctions with photos guarantee more sales than those that don’t have photos.

By having a photo of the actual item, more buyers may take up interest. This eBay selling secret also helps to build more trust between you and the buyer.

5. Make the Buying process Easy! Sign up for PayPal!

Signing up for PayPal is another eBay selling secret that would gain you more buyers for your item. If you want to make your auction easy for the buyer, then PayPal it is.

6. List your items during “Hot Time” buying Periods!

It is an eBay selling secret to time your auction so that it ends during peak buying times.
Here’s a reference:
Eastern Time Zone, list your auction between 9pm-11pm
Central Time Zone list between 8-10pm
Mountain Time Zone between 7-9pm
Pacific Time Zone list between 6-8pm.

By knowing these Hot Time buying periods, your products will likely get great exposure.You’ll see the glowing sales you’ll gain after the auctions.

7. Make an “About Me” Page or better yet, create a Website from Free Hosting Sites!

Having an “About Me” page in eBay is an eBay selling secret which let potential buyers get to know you. Getting a free webpage from many companies is also a way to promote yourself

8. Positive Feedback is Important

Having positive feedback is a necessary eBay selling secret. eBay buyers looks at your feedback ratings before looking up your listings. To get positive feedback, make sure to keep a good customer service and customer relations.

9. Decrease Postage and Shipping Costs!

Don’t underestimate or overestimate your shipping costs. It is an essential eBay selling secret to be prepared and to determine its costs beforehand.

10. Don’t put any ad that would scare your potential buyers away!

Never put Reserve Prices and Buy-it-Now in your product listing. Instead of getting buyers, you’ll more likely scare them away. These ads can cause you to lose money on an item. final auction price. It is an eBay selling secret to get buyers who’ll keep bidding at your products.

These unveiled eBay selling secrets and those others you will learn eventually will help you become a successful eBay seller.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College

For a live example of an eBay powerseller, there’s Ted Corriher, a home, garden and farm equipment dealer in Newton, North Carolina. When he started out four years ago, he didn’t know much about computers or the internet. He didn’t even have a personal e-mail account.

During that time, all of his friends were buying on eBay, and he didn’t want to be left out. He asked one of his employees to research about eBay and find out how he could sell his equipment on eBay. Now, three years later, he sells about $100,000 worth of equipment on eBay every month. His predominantly tractor-sales business has grown from $4 million to $10 million according to his annual sales.

Since joining to become part of the 147 million registered users on eBay, Corriher says that being an eBay powerseller has been a rewarding and enlightening experience for him. It also helped in reviving his grandfather’s business. He has also started on business expansions.

For those of you wanting to be inspired, and become an eBay powerseller like Corriher, know that it’s not impossible for a startup seller to reach the eBay powerseller level of achievement in a short time of 3 years, like Corriher did.

So, as you aim for the recognition of being an eBay powerseller, start focusing your energies first on being a better eBay seller. Here are ten tips that can help you to transform into a better seller.

Once you got this far, you already got the basics of eBay. However, there are several little, but significant things left that you may not have thought of trying, yet.

Some of these tips may go against other advices being given for eBay selling. Some are a little risky and some are just odd. But, there’s no harm in trying, though. And you can easily discard the things you don’t agree with and apply those you want to keep using.

1. Keep more records – even if it sounds time consuming, it would probably keep your job of tracking down cheques, delivery and shipping receipts and other such paper work, easier in the long run.

2. Post without payment – this might sound a bit risky, but it means that the buyers get their items more quickly than the usual process of waiting for payments to clear and be received. Do this ideally for small items, you might find it worth the occasional loss to give such quick service. Buyers would remember you for it.

3. Post every day – if you have started shifting on high volume items, posting them every day might help you satisfy your customers. By posting your items everyday, your customers will them quickly enough and thereby make them very happy, indeed. If you have items that are small enough to drop in a postbox, you might consider doing this.

4. Encourage an auction mentality. Entertain bidders by boosting them to place a bid on the product and not just buy quickly. However, make it very clear when it’s the last or only stock you’ll be getting in. Boost the bid winners’ confidence more by referring to them as ‘winners.’

5. Mention every defect your item has. Or better yet, have a good, truthful & detailed description of your item in the search results listing. By doing this, you build credibility and have buyers trust you. People bid more when they trust the seller.

6. Say how you got the item. This should also be part the detailed description you need to prepare. Say all, like the fun details of how you got hold of what you’re selling. Providing this bit of information gives your auction character and, again, builds trust.

7. Accept odd payment methods. Be flexible on whatever forms of payment your buyer would suggest.

8. Don’t be afraid to sell low. By occasionally letting an item go for a really low price to a good buyer, chances are you might be getting even on it. But, you have secured a buyer who’ll come back again and again.

9. Give free shipping for a certain number of orders, or orders over a certain amount. Sometimes people buy some item they don’t want, just because of the free shipping. Try it, it is an Amazon.com tactic

10. Ship worldwide. Be nice to international customers and get more market by this. Take time to investigate the prices. Just imagine how much your market will expand once you do worldwide shipping.

Try to use some of the many eBay tools available. If you just be more open-minded and see the long term effect of several of the tips mentioned, then in no time at all, you might just be the next eBay powerseller.
For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com.

Improve your picture: In all that description writing, you might have missed the vital importance of your item’s picture. A picture with bad lighting or an intrusive background looks amateurish and won’t make anyone want to buy from you.

Add an About Me page: You’ll be surprised how much you can reassure bidders just by creating an About Me page and putting a little bit about yourself on your business on there. You can also have a few special offers there for people who bother to look at the page, and let people subscribe to your mailing list so that you can email them updates.

Use SquareTrade: Signing up at SquareTrade and displaying their logo on your auctions shows that you are committed to have them resolve any disputes that arise. You always see this on PowerSellers auctions – it makes you look more professional.

Write terms and conditions: Have the ‘small print’ clearly visible on all your auctions, giving details of things like shipping times and prices, your refund policy, and any other business practices you might have. This helps build confidence with buyers.

Show off your feedback: Copy and paste a selection of the feedback comments you’re most proud of to each item’s description page, instead of making bidders go and look for it. If you have 100% positive feedback, be sure to write that on every auction too.

Add NR to your titles: If you have extra space in a title, put ‘NR’ (no reserve) on the end. Bidders prefer auctions that don’t have a reserve price, and doing this lets them see that yours don’t.

Benefits not features: Make sure your description focuses on the benefits that your item can give to the customer, not just its features. This is a classic sales technique. If you have trouble with this, remember: ‘cheap’ is a feature, ‘save money’ is a benefit.

List more items: If you want more people to respond to your items, then list more items! You might find you have better like listing items at the same time, instead of one-by-one. There’s no need to use a Dutch auction – you can just keep two or three auctions going at once for an item you have more than one of in stock.

Accept unusual payment methods: To reach those last few buyers, accept payment methods that many sellers don’t, like cheques.

Buy some upgrades: The best upgrade is the most expensive one, which makes your item appear first in search results. In crowded categories, you might find that this is worth the money.

Once you’ve got some buyers, you want to keep them coming back to you.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com

At its heart, your item description is an ad. Without making it too obvious, you should be writing sales copy. You’re trying to get buyers excited about your products, and that’s usually hard – but on eBay, if you have the right thing to sell and give enough details, the buyers almost excite themselves.

Technical Details.

Include every technical detail you know, including the item’s manufacturer, its condition, how big it is, where and when it was made, its history, and anything else special about it. Don’t be too boring, though: the best descriptions are written in friendly, conversational language, and show a real knowledge of the item. Whatever you do, make sure you tell the truth!

Remember that most of the people who’ll be buying your item will be just as knowledgeable about it as you are, if not more – this is their hobby, and they’re experts. Don’t feel like you need to explain the basics of the item: just go into as much technical detail as you can. As a rule, don’t write anything in the description if you don’t know what it means, as the chances are someone will, and if you’ve got it slightly wrong then you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Interesting Details.

You might find that you enjoy writing a few things about how you got the item, why you’re selling it, and who you think might like it. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it gives your auctions some character and a personal touch, and can make people more likely to trust you. People might wonder what you’re doing selling 500 CDs all at once, and if you tell them the reason, then they’ll feel reassured that nothing dodgy is going on. If you’re selling them because you’re having a baby and you need the space, just say so.

Write as Much as You Can.

Leave nothing out of your description, even if that seems to you like it makes it cumbersomely long. There is no way you can be too thorough: someone, somewhere will appreciate that you took the time to write the extra information.

Don’t assume that anyone who wants extra information will email you to ask a question: many buyers are shy and won’t do it. Think of questions that buyers might have and add the answers to your description, as people generally tend to ask the same questions over and over again.

Each time a buyer does email you with a question, you should both answer their question and update your description so that it will include the answer next time. If people ask questions that are answered in the description, try putting these parts of the auction on a line alone, or in bold, to make them easier to notice.

In the next article, we’ll focus on increasing the number of buyers who respond to your auctions.

For information and public comment, contact Public Relations Department at Power Seller College via email: informationtechnology@powersellercollege.com or on the web at: www.PowerSellerCollege.com