Almighty Auctions

You’re probably reading this because you know you can make money from eBay. Well, what you know is correct and what this article will teach you will help you even more. Read on to know how to set-up your eBay business in five easy steps.

Your unique Idea!

The first step in starting up your eBay business is to have a unique item that you can sell, though that maybe very hard to do. Among the millions of listings on eBay, there is no product or idea that you can think of, that is not yet listed. This maybe 95% correct, but it always worth a try. Your unique idea should be one you are passionate about. This could be a hobby, an industry or a service that you are very interested in.

Know your Competition First!

After researching your competition, search through the eBay listings for similar items. Again, 95% of the time, items on your list are already being sold. Don’t you worry about that. That’s the beauty of free trade – everyone can sell the same item, and the consumer has the option to choose, whichever one he or she will take. It is ideal for you focus on the item that is closest to your heart, and has the least listings on eBay. This will give you a better chance of competing in the market.

Make Your Listing Visual!

To make your listing more appealing to your visitors, take a digital picture of your item and include it in the ad. Don’t matter how good and detailed your listings are, it is best to have a picture of the item, which will say everything, nothing more, or nothing less. Try to research on the highest hitting listings, and see why their visual representation is appealing to their surfer.

The Right Price!

The power of the dollar is always at work in eBay. Because you allow interested parties to bid on your product, every dollar counts. Some recommend starting your price at $1, which if you were in the shoes of the buyer, sounds very appealing. But you must make sure that you are selling an item that will eventually be bidded to the price that you like, say $500, even if it start from a dollar.

Online Payment!

PayPal is eBay’s partner in it’s payment system. And to be successful in you eBay business, you must be a member of PayPal as well. It is easy to set-up, in fact, you can do it simultaneously with your eBay membership and security is highly rated. Fees are also very reasonable.

Lastly, if you want to be successful selling on eBay, check out The eBay Fortune! This is how I started my first eBay sale 2 years back by applying what I learned from The eBay Fortune. Today I’m selling full-time on eBay and making a very decent income. You too can make it, you just have to do it right!

In my last article I discussed various promotion strategies for your eBay store one of which was using your eBay About Me Page. Your About Me Page is one of the best ways to promote yourself on eBay. It allows you much more freedom than other eBay pages and there is a link to it beside your eBay User ID so every time you buy an item, place a bid etc, people may click on it. Despite this it is one of the most underutilised pages for the majority of eBay sellers. In this article I will discuss how you should be using your eBay About Me Page to effectively promote your eBay store:

1) Describe yourself and your EBay Business:- At the top of the page you should describe yourself and your eBay business. Say a little about yourself, how you got into selling on eBay, and what you sell. Also say why people should buy from you instead of the competition. Examples could be that your eBay store is updated every week, your prices are low etc.

2) Link to your Feedback:- To prove that you are a trusted seller you should link to your feedback rating from your About Me page. Just include a simple sentence like “Click Here to view my feedback.”

3) Provide a Contact Address:- Buyers viewing your About Me page may want to ask more questions so it is only logical that you provide a contact address. Make it clickable for maximum ease to the customer. For example “You can contact me at any time at: sales@theeBaycavern.co.uk.”

4) Provide a direct link back to your eBay Store:- Not all the visitors to your About Me page will have found it through your eBay store. Some may not even be aware that you own an eBay store. The only way to make sure that everyone viewing your About Me page knows that you have an eBay store is to provide a clickable link to it. For example “Click Here to visit my eBay store.”

5) Other Links:- If you have a specific auction which you want to promote, or a specific page you want to link to then do it here. For example “You can visit my super duper auction by Clicking Here.”

If you follow the steps in this article then you should be well on your way to maximising the effectiveness of your eBay About Me page. Many customers will use your About Me page to assess whether to buy from you so it’s essential that yours is effective.

Lastly, if you want to be successful selling on eBay, check out The eBay Fortune! This is how I started my first eBay sales 2 years back by applying what I learned from The eBay Fortune. Today I’m selling full-time on eBay and making a very decent income. You too can make it, you just have to do it right!

If you’re considering getting started in e-commerce, having your own eBay store is a great way to gain experience-it’s like putting your own website up right on eBay. According to eBay University Instructor Janelle Elms (http://JanelleElms.com, http://StoresSuccessVideo.com), there are considerable advantages to starting online with an eBay store rather than an independent website:

*It’s quick and easy. Launching a website involves time and preparation-you have to secure a domain name, find a host, and then design your web pages, or hire someone to do it for you. With eBay, you can literally have a store up and running in a matter of hours.

*It’s cost-effective. At only $16 a month, it’s highly affordable. And many of the marketing and optimization tools you would pay for with a stand-alone site are included for free with your eBay store. Says Elms, “The marketing opportunities are phenomenal. I’ve had clients who’ve ranked number one on MSN, Yahoo, and Google, for sixteen dollars a month.”

*It produces fast results. You can spend months optimizing and advertising a traditional website before you start seeing results; but with an eBay store, you have built-in traffic from the moment you go live. With some 212 million registered users, eBay stores give you the ability to reach a significantly larger audience. And because eBay’s site is already optimized, eBay stores tend to rank higher with the major search engines than independent websites.

Excuses, Excuses While most people realize starting an eBay store is often the simplest, most successful entry route into the world of ecommerce, many of them mistakenly believe that, for one reason or another, it wouldn’t work for them. Following are some of the more common excuses people give for not cashing in on this valuable resource AND the reasons why those excuses don’t work:

*”I sell services.” This is just a simple matter of marketing. Services can easily be packaged and sold in an eBay store, and you can quickly gain significant exposure for your business.

*”I have a brick and mortar store.” If you have a physical storefront, eBay stores present a great opportunity for you, not only to find buyers for merchandise that doesn’t sell well in your brick and mortar store, but also to expand your business to a much wider audience.

*”I already have a stand-alone website.” Having an eBay store is a great way to market your website. By utilizing eBay’s marketing tools, you could have nothing in your eBay store and just have your business marketed to the entire world on a shoestring budget-no other place on the internet gives you that kind of opportunity.

EBay stores offer an easy learning environment when you’re beginning in online retail, and an effective means of expansion as your business grows. They work well as a complement to your existing business, or they can become your full-time income. But Elms asserts, “If you’re going to be successful online, you’re going to have to have an eBay store-they’re just that powerful!

Lastly, if you are serious in making lots of “easy” money on eBay store without carrying the inventory & handle the shipping yourself, then work with legitimate drop-ship wholesalers. I personally use Drop-shipping Wholesaler to find the good drop-ship suppliers for my eBay Store. You got to check them out!

To really maximise your eBay sales you need to be promoting your eBay store. eBay stores get less exposure than normal eBay listings and therefore will not yield great sales for you unless you promote them. There are many ways both on and off eBay that you can promote your eBay store. This article outlines some of them:

1) Ebay Auction Listings:- eBay Auction and Buy It Now listings get the main exposure on eBay. When someone does an eBay search for an item all the eBay Auction and Buy It Now listings are displayed first. Then after these the eBay Store listings are displayed. Since these Auction and Buy It Now listings are getting the most exposure it makes sense to run a few of these and insert a link to your eBay store inside the actual description. This works especially well with Auction listings as people often click the link so they can buy the item instantly from your eBay store rather than wait for the auction to end.

2) Ebay About Me Page:- The eBay About Me page is one of the best free opportunity’s eBay provides to promote yourself. Every time someone on eBay sees your eBay ID (whether you bid on something, leave feedback, or buy an item) there will be an About Me logo next to it and some people will click this logo. Despite this, it really is one of the most under utilised tools on eBay. If you do not yet have an eBay About Me page yet then get one NOW. Use it to write about your eBay store and tell people why they should buy from you.

3) Ebay Reviews and Guides:- These are a relatively new addition to eBay but they are still a great way to promote your eBay store for free. The reviews section allows you to write product reviews such as CDs and DVDs. The guides section is more relevant to eBay sellers as it allows you to write guides on just about anything. There has got to be some topic that you can write a guide on so get righting now. When people read your guide they are presented with a link to your eBay store which is again more free exposure.

4) Ebay Seller Cross Promotion:- I outlined in the last article that with an eBay store you can cross-promote your items. Recently eBay has also added the ability to cross-promote with other sellers. This is very easy to set up and eBay manages the whole process for you. All you have to do is go to the “Cross-Promotion Connections” area of My eBay and then use the request cross-promotions link in order to set them up. If the other seller agrees then a box promoting their products will appear on your listings and vice versa. This is a valuable way to increase your eBay sales and also generate more traffic to your eBay store.

5) Search Engines:- As I mentioned in my last article you get an actual URL with your eBay store. This URL gets listed in the eBay stores directory and search engines which means extra traffic for your eBay store. What’s more eBay allows you to pick your search engine keywords so you can be listed under the categories that you feel are most appropriate to your eBay store. Getting listed in the search engines is a great way to bring in customers from outside of eBay and maximise your sales potential.

6) Store RSS Feed:- When you access the home page of an eBay store you may notice a small RSS box in the bottom left corner. If you click on this RSS box then you will be shown your store’s RSS feed. Now I myself am not an expert in RSS but I do know that it is another way to promote your eBay store easily and effectively from outside of eBay. You can get some free software that submits your RSS feeds to the main RSS directories by doing a search on Google.

7) Blogging:- For those who don’t know a blog is a weblog. It’s basically like an online journal where you post your thoughts, comments, or whatever else you want. Blogging is an excellent way to get traffic to your eBay store. Quite a few websites offer free blogs which you can sign up for and then link back to your eBay store. Post in it regularly to gain exposure and your blog should soon become a great source of traffic.
Article Submission:- There are 100s of article directories out there that will you can submit your articles to, and if accepted you are allowed to have a live link back to your website or eBay store in the author resource box. This is a great way to generate traffic to your website in the long-term as not only do the search engines index your article, but people also reprint these articles on their websites complete with your author resource box (and live link back to your eBay store). The longer your article is online the more it will be reprinted and so the more traffic it will generate.

Hopefully this article has opened your eyes to some of the free and effective promotion methods for your eBay store. At first the fact that eBay Stores do not get as much exposure seems like a major problem but by putting a little effort into promoting it yourself, it can be much more successful than any eBay Auction listing.

Lastly, if you want to be successful selling on eBay, check out The eBay Fortune! This is how I started my first eBay sales 2 years back by applying what I learned from The eBay Fortune. Today I’m selling full-time on eBay and making a very decent income. You too can make it, you just have to do it right!

EBay has moved offline. Several companies, like Snappy Auctions and I Sold It On EBay, offer sellers franchises for brick-and-mortar eBay stores. These drop-off spots take customer items, evaluate, photograph, and list them online, collect the payments, and ship the items to their buyers. In other words, they do all the work – for a percentage of the selling price, of course.

Beginner Strategies If you’ve contemplated jumping on the bandwagon and opening a physical drop-off location, fellow store-owner and eBay University instructor, Christopher Spencer has some advice for you:

* Location is key. Get a good broker to help you identify convenient retail sites. It’s important to be in a high traffic area, such as a strip mall or a facility near good anchor stores, anyplace frequented by upscale individuals. To get high-quality merchandise, you need a higher level of clientele.

* Take store layout into account. As your business develops, you’ll need exponentially more storage space. Advises Spenser, “Consider whether a building will fit your needs for future expansion, so you can avoid growing pains.”

* Be careful what you accept. Don’t waste your time with items that won’t be worth the research and energy you’ll invest in them. Patrons sometimes bring in boxes of junk, or items with very little value. Be realistic with your clients, and counsel them what will and won’t bring in money. That way they know what to expect, and they aren’t disappointed by their final prices.

* Charge a reasonable amount for your services. Keep yourself in line with what others are charging, rather than trying to undercut everyone in order to compete. Instead, add value to your services by focusing on areas at which you excel. If you have a staff member who specializes in a certain area, encourage your customers to bring in items in that field because you’ll be able to get them the maximum prices on eBay.

* Concentrate on customer service. Exceed your customers’ expectations. Says Spencer, “Building a reputation and getting good clients is a matter of word of mouth and referrals, and that’s something people build over time.”

Help Me Help You! People want help with things they don’t know how to do, or don’t have time to do – that’s why there’s such a need for this sort of service. It provides the convenience and ease of being able to just drop off an item and pick up a check. Though users have to pay a commission, they’ll typically get more for their item by using an experienced, knowledgeable seller, than they would by selling it themselves.

Lastly, if you want to be successful selling on eBay, check out The eBay Fortune! This is how I started my first eBay sales 2 years back by applying what I learned from The eBay Fortune. Today I’m selling full-time on eBay and making a very decent income. You too can make it, you just have to do it right!

Since eBay hit the ground running just a few years ago, the service has millions of sellers with as many buyers. eBay has created a truly global market, where shoppers can find and purchase exactly what they’re looking for, without leaving home.

If you’re thinking of owning an eBay business, and making a lucrative career of it, you can easily make that dream come true. You don’t even require a product of your own to make a living by selling on eBay. eBay provides many opportunities to people who want to quit their corporate nine-to-five jobs, but don’t necessarily have a lot of start-up capital to invest in a new business.

Many eBay retailers are finding it easy and convenient to market merchandise with the help of ‘drop shippers’. eBay drop shippers don’t provide the merchandise for sale–they simply arrange to send merchandise to the customers of business owners.

If you want to run an eBay store, it is possible to offer a huge variety of stock, without needing a warehouse to store all of those products. All you need to do is list the items for auction, and sell the products. When the sale is confirmed, the information is passed along to the drop shipping company. eBay drop shippers take over from there. eBay drop shippers will package, label, and ship the products that you sell, allowing you more time to set up more auctions and bring in greater profits. They’ll take care of all the shipping details, and will even use your company information, including your logo. When the product arrives at your customer’s home, they will have no idea that it wasn’t actually shipped directly from your company.

For this process to work to your benefit, you need to establish relationships with several different drop shippers. Until you’ve cemented a trusted working relationship, eBay drop shippers will likely require you to pay for the items that your customers order before they are shipped. Orders need to be filled and shipped in a timely manner, so it’s in your best interest to pay for the items with a credit card for speedy service. Eventually, your eBay drop shippers will be confident in filling your orders right away, and billing you for them later.

When you set up your eBay auctions, make sure that your reserve price is set higher than the drop shipper’s cost. Don’t forget, your primary goal is to earn a profit! Depending on the item you’re selling, your reserve price should be about 10 percent higher than the price charged by the drop shipper. It will be beneficial for you to research to see if the item is selling for a lower price in another eBay auction, or through other online sources.

Running an online business using the eBay drop shippers presents almost no financial risk. The product will be sold before you actually pay for the item. This is one business where you can actually turn a profit before you have to pay any expenditures.

Millions of buyers are ready and waiting to buy your products. Use eBay drop shippers to your advantage, and cash in on the world’s favorite way to shop.

Lastly, you have to find the legitimate drop-ship wholesalers in order to succeed on you eBay business. I personally use Drop-shipping Wholesaler to source for good drop-shippers to work with. Most drop-shippers in this directory are genuine wholesalers, not a middle-man, and they work with eBay seller.