Maximizing Your eBay Sales

Hot to maximize your eBay sales?

Promoting Your eBay Auctions

If you've followed all the instructions and advice throughout this book, you should now have your eBay business up and running and generating a steady stream of sales. But no matter how much revenue you're generating, you always want morewhich is what this is about. A sure-fire way to make your auctions more successful is to promote them, and there are lots of ways to do that. We'll look at some of the more efficient ways to promote your auctions and hopefully help you increase your traffic and your selling prices.

Displaying More Powerful Photographs

Showing a picture of your product in your item listing greatly increases your chances of success. It also helps to increase the average selling price of your item.

Managing product photos is an important part of any successful eBay business. You need to learn how to take good photos of your products and how to insert those photos into your item listings. It isn't hard, once you get it figured outbut it does require some small degree of photographic skill and mastery of a photo editing software program. So clean off your camera lens and get ready to shootit's time to learn all about photography for eBay!

Creating More Successful Auction Listings

In the preceding two chapters we discussed various ways to improve your auction sell-through and selling price. The factor that many users neglect, however, is the auction listing itself. Create a better auction listing, and you'll close more sales at higher prices.

To make a more powerful auction listing, you need to pay attention to both content and style. That is, the words you write and the way you present those words (and pictures) on the page. You want to write more powerful words and present those words in an appealing fashion. Do so, and you'll notice the results.

Choosing the Most Effective Listing Options

In the preceding chapter we discussed things you can do to increase your auctions' success rates. Well, eBay offers you several other ways to draw attention to your auctionsalthough not all of them are terribly cost effective.

We'll examine each of eBay's listing enhancements (bold, highlight, gallery, and so on), as well as a few more basic listing strategiessuch as how to determine the right auction length and category. You can select any of these options when you're creating your auction listing.

Be careful when selecting these options, however; each enhancement you select increases your costs, and you can't run a profitable business if your costs are too high!

Increasing Sell-Through

In theory, eBay is a perfect capitalistic marketplace, where the price of an item is driven by the interplay of supply and demand. Experienced eBay sellers, however, know that there are things they can do to improve chances of selling any particular item and to drive the final selling price to higher levels.

Improving your success rate on eBay isn't as simple as it might be with a traditional business, in which advertising and promotion tend to do the job. On eBay there's really no equivalent of traditional promotion; instead, you can affect your results by manipulating your initial bid price, the day and time that your auction ends, and various other listing enhancements. The process is subtle, but with noticeable results.