Shop Owners Discount Promotion: 20%

Hello everybody, just a quick post to let you know that eBay have another Promotion on.

From 6 April to 30 June 2009 on ebay.co.uk, ebay shop owners can save 20% of the final value fees. All you have to do is offer Free Postage. The offer applies to Clothes, Shoes, Accessories and Video games categories, plus any Tech or DVDs sub-category.

This offer is for all shop owners and for all items in Auction style or Fixed Price style format.

Now’s the time for a Spring clean.

Until next time….

New fee structure for private sellers

Later this week, on the 12th March, eBay are introducing a new fee structure for private sellers, (not full time Business sellers), on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie.

From that date, private sellers who list in the Auction style format with a starting price of 99 pence, (or below), will not be charged a listing fee. The final value fee will be 10% of the final price.

So if you’re a private seller in the U.K. or Ireland why not take advantage of the new pricing fees and get your old books listed. Used books normally have some good results on eBay, but in times of recession they sell that much better, and every little income helps in these troubled times.

Retirement of Multiple Item Auction (Dutch Auction) format

From 6th May 2009 you will no longer be able to use the Multiple Item Auction format, also known as A Dutch Auction.

You don’t have to remove your Dutch Auction listings if they go over the cut off date as they’ll run out of time in due course. Any Dutch Auctions scheduled to start on or after the 6th May will automatically be cancelled. However to renew your listings for multiple items they must be listed in the fixed price format.

We all know what a sniper is, it’s a soldier that stays hidden and waits until he has a clean shot as his target.

Did you know that snipers also operate on eBay?

An eBay sniper is a third party that will enter a bid on your behalf in the last moments of an auction, leaving you to go about your routine as normal. Some people may think “wow what a good idea” and in theory it may be, but in practise is it really that good? You see, for a sniper to operate on your behalf you have to give them the item number, your maximum bid and (more alarmingly) the username and password to your eBay account.

We should all be aware of Identity Theft and never give our details out. I don’t even let windows remember the passwords to my eBay or PayPal accounts. So I would never give them to any third parties, and I wouldn’t advise you to either.

We all know that the competition for sales on eBay is very high, so whenever you make a listing, you should always think like a buyer. You can only make sales from your sales page and you need to get your potential customers to open it. How?

The 1^st most important thing is the title; you have 55 characters, including gaps between words, to say what the item is. In the title you should use as many keywords as possible as most initial searches are based on them. As an example, I’ve found these two listings on eBay just now;

250+slow cooker recipes

250 Delicious Low Fat Slow Cooker Recipes Cook Book CD

It’s the very same product in both listings but I’ll be highly surprised if the top one sells, or even gets looked at. As it only has 2 keywords, cooker & recipes, the chances of it being found are much less than the one on the bottom. The slow, in its title is lost as the seller hasn’t left a gap between 250+slow. The bottom one is much more likely to be successful as it has many more keywords. Just think of the search results for that title; Low Fat, Slow Cooker, Cooker, Recipes, Cook and Book are all good keywords that’ll get the item found for so many different searches.  

Isn’t it frustrating, when your eBay listings just don’t seem to sell. Well I’m about to give you a little tip that may help you make the sales. Before you make your listing, do a little research into similar sales of the item you’re selling. On eBay there’s an advanced search function, which allows you to search not only for current listings, but more importantly, it allows you to search the completed listings as well. Why search the completed listings, you may ask. The answer is simple, it will show you whether the item sold or not, and if so, for what price.

All you need to do is click on the advanced search link, which is right next to the main search button. Next you’ll come to a page where you enter the details of the item you’re researching. Enter some keywords for the item in the first section. Then in the second section (Search including), you have Two check boxes. Click on the box for completed listings and then click the search button. You’ll then see the search results, which tells you if the items had any bids on them and if so, how many. It also displays a little Sold box, under the amount of bids, if the item sold.

In April 2008 eBay changed the policy on the sales of digital items, eBooks. As they thought it may lead to feedback manipulation. Thousands of sellers were affected all over the world, many of which threw in the towel. This in turn left a gap in the market. During my 30 day eBay suspension, as mentioned in my last blog posting, I received an email telling me about a man called Dave Nicholson who had a solution to the problem; he’d produced a package called Digital Media Solutions which not only told us how to get around the problem, he showed us how to do it in short videos.

If we turned our eBooks into physical items and sent them via the postman, then we could still list them on eBay. But how do you turn a digital item into a physical one? Well that’s where Dave Nicholson came into it. His Digital Media Solutions supplied a series of files that were formatted to make a disc auto run once inserted into a PC. Following the videos that he supplied it was quite simple to place the chosen eBook into its correct folder along with bonus items, back end sales and other promotions, including my newsletter. Once the files were constructed all I had to do was burn them to a CD Rom.

So there I was, selling eBooks on eBay, along with the other items of stock that I still had. The difference with eBook sales was that there wasn’t a need to post them, as it was all automated through emails and download links. Because there were no postal charges it enabled me to list items on eBay.com as opposed to eBay.co.uk, which is a much bigger market place, as the sales are world wide.

Within a few short months of selling on eBay.com I was selling enough items each month to become a Powerseller, which I did. Then in April 2008 eBay changed the policy on the sales of digital items. As they thought it may lead to feedback manipulation. I withdrew all my adverts that would’ve ended after their deadline, so as to comply with the new policy. However, one of my auction items had had a couple of bids on it so I sent the losing bidder a second chance offer, after the policy change. What a costly mistake that was. Within an hour of sending that 2^nd chance offer eBay suspended my account for 30 days, for feedback manipulation. I phoned their help desk only to be informed that because I was suspended for a policy breech I would have to wait the 30 days before any communications would be allowed.