Have you ever been delighted after a huge sale on
Ebay. . .only to find out that your massive profit
margin was whittled away by fee after fee after
fee after fee?
eBay charged you to list your item; they charged
you to add pictures; they charged you to add upgrades;
they charged you to use a template; they charged you
to put your auction up at a certain time; and then,
on top of everything else. . .they charged you AGAIN for
closing the sale.
At this point, you would have been happy to walk away
from your huge sale with the shirt on your back.
But no. Paypal arrived on the scene to process your
transaction for a small fee – your shirt.
. . .and there you sat at your computer, frustrated
and shirtless. You were probably ready to just throw
your hands up in despair and quit selling on Ebay.
But you didn’t. You stuck with it. Maybe you haven’t
had any success on eBay since then, but what matters
is that you stuck with it. And that is easily the most
important part about selling on Ebay: sticking with
it until you get that breakthrough.
And for that, I am going to reward you by showing you
some simple tricks I have used to prevent the fee-mongers
from extracting all of my profits. Hopefully this will
help you to do the same and find your breakthrough.
The first method is using free hosting services for all
of your auction pictures. If you sell a lot of small
items on Ebay, this will save you a considerable amount
of money in fees. If you only sell large items, this
will allow you to cut back on unncessary fees on each
auction.
I personally suggest using Geocities.com for this.
All you have to do is upload the pictures you want
in your auctions and then then reference them in
the actual auctions.
The second fee-saving method I suggest is creating
or purchasing a template for your auctions. I personally
suggest learning HTML, which doesn’t take very long,
and using it to create your own template.
In the long run, this will save you a lot of time
and frustration, as you will be able to create
the exact look and feel you want for your auctions.
However, if you don’t have the time to learn HTML,
you can either purchase a template online for a
dollar or less or you could have one professionally-
created to fit your specifications at elance.com.
Not only will this save you additional auction fees
on Ebay, but it will boost your credibility as a
seller, potentially raising the amount of bids you
receive–and subsequently increasing your profit-margin
The third and last method I will go over involves
improving the mechanics of your auction, so you can
pull just as many customers as a featured listing
would, but without using one.
This is actually quite simple. All you have to do
is carefully construct your title to accomplish the
following two goals: 1) include as many targeted,
high-traffic keywords as possible; and 2) form a
coherent and compelling message that will entice
these new streams of traffic to click through to
your auction.
If you can achieve a better balance than what you
have right now, you will notice an enormous boost in
traffic. In fact, it can easily be the difference
between 25 auction visitors and 250!
Some people make a full-time income buying from the
auctions that get 25 visitors and then reselling with
this tactic, which gets them 250.
By now, you know what you need to do to cut a serious
chunk out of your eBay seller’s fees. Put this to work
in your auctions – and you could be seeing that
breakthrough I talked about in a matter of weeks.
