Here are a few steps that you can take to find saleable and ‘wanted’ items on eBay:

Start with a well-known list. Some of the hot sellers on eBay are:

•    Baby Clothing
•    Books
•    Car Accessories
•    Cosmetics
•    Coupons
•    Jewelry
•    Kitchen Supplies
•    Health and Beauty Products
•    Bags and Purses
•    Gift Baskets
•    Costumes
•    Toys
•    Skin Care Products
•    Sunglasses
•    Sewing Patterns

Use “eBay Pulse”:  You can make the use of a tool called eBay Pulse to know more about things to sell on eBay.  This tool helps the sellers to find the keywords that have been searched by buyers the maximum times.  You can sort the list to the top five or ten searches to discover the items that sell well on eBay.  Now, filter out the things that you want to sell on eBay and make sure that you focus on the ones that are sold and brought more.

Use “eBay arbitrage”:  You may find the hot sellers on eBay using a method called “eBay arbitrage”.  eBay arbitrage is a technique of finding the poorly listed auctions due to any wrong reason such as incorrect description, incomplete information, wrong categorization and many other reasons.  You can get in touch with wholesale suppliers and drop shippers to end your search for the things that sell on eBay.  With the help of this technique, you can find the items easily and get them shipped directly to the buyers, thus making money.

Items of your interest:  the easy way is to start you research work with items of your interest and profession. Thereafter, you have to make a short-list, select and refine the items that sell well on eBay using the above methods. What types of products are of interest to you, the potential seller? For example, some individuals might collect certain items or have an interesting hobby. These areas could be a starting point to help you to determine what you might want to sell.

Once you have a few ideas of what items to sell, test the eBay market. Set up an eBay and PayPal account. Don’t invest a lot of money for products. Sell items that you might already own or purchase one to three items of a product in different styles, colors and attributes. Then set up your auction. By testing and purchasing a small amount of product, you are lowering your financial risk of having a lot of inventory in case your item doesn’t sell. Doing a test auction will allow you to see how long it might take to sell this particular product as well as seeing how many visitors look and bid on your auction.

Questions to ask yourself are:  If the product is being sold, is the market oversaturated? If there seems to only be a few people selling your product, what can you do to make your product stand out from the others?  Can you package it with another item or simply sell a wider selection of color, styles, scents or hard-to-find items? And most importantly, what are the items being sold for? Is it enough for you to make a profit?

One of the easy ways to make extra money is through eBay. You can save money buying almost everything on eBay at attractively reasonable prices and/or you can make some extra income by selling items that you no longer need, or build your own business. It is like a yard sale that gets potential buyers from every country in the world and it is not too difficult.

Selling on eBay is hassle free because we can work from home, which is both flexible and comfortable. You don’t need to travel to work at inhumane hours, facing the challenge of daily traffic jams and the 9-5 rat-race atmosphere. You also have no bosses – whom will tell us what to do and when to do the tasks. This means we’re not working to contribute to anyone else’s success but our own.

Today, the eBay community includes over a hundred million registered members from around the world. People spend more time on eBay than any other online site, making it the most popular shopping destination on the Internet. And do you know that, on any day, there are millions of items listed on eBay.

People come to eBay to buy and sell items in thousands of categories from collectibles like trading cards, antiques, dolls, and house wares to practical items like used cars, clothing, books and CDs, and electronics. Buyers have the option to purchase items in an auction-style format or items can be purchased at a fixed price through a feature called Buy It Now.

People from all over the world buy and sell on eBay. Currently, eBay has local sites that serve Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

EBay offers a wide variety of educational tools, features, and services that enable members to buy and sell on the site quickly, safely, and conveniently. These services include online payments by Pay Pal, tips on safe trading, and the Developers Program for community members who would like to develop their own technology solutions.

Those selling products on eBay, is easy for the customer to choose. The sellers then they divide themselves into classifications of manufacturing, wholesaling/distribution, or retailing. Add to these the sub-divisions, large vs. small products, durable vs. consumable products, etc., and the differences grow, and grow, and grow. And all sellers, no matter what classification they fit into, believe that the others’ arenas for selling are always easier. But not everyone sells products on eBay. There are those who sell services. It is said that selling services is the largest and fastest-growing segment of the economy.

Buying and selling on eBay is safe and trusty because the company is responsible for keeping the marketplace a safe, well-lit place for people around the world to trade with one other.

You can find lots of items on eBay.  On the other hand, no matter what you’re selling, eBay is actively promoting your items to potential buyers through integrated marketing, merchandising, and advertising campaigns.

By creating value you are justifying the cost, and thus telling the customer exactly what they are paying for.  And by explaining every feature and function of your product, you are giving reasons for the visitors/viewers to buy your product.

Why should someone buy a product from you, when they can buy it somewhere else? Because you are convincing them by giving them reasons to buy- that is by creating value, through your thorough clarification on the features, functions and benefits of the product that you offer.

Remember, more often than not when a person clicks on your listing they already have the desire to purchase the product that you are selling.  They want what you’re selling- otherwise they would not have searched for it.  So, when viewers click on your listing, they have the desire to purchase what you are selling and you will have their undivided attention.  They are ready to buy and they are now on the edge of taking the next most important action: to buy from you… all you have to do is to convince them that they are making the right decision!

In many examples, sellers assume that everyone who visits their listings already knows everything there is to know about the product, so they write a brief description with no explanations of what all those features and functions actually mean. What they don’t realize is that they are losing a lot of money in the form of bids.  Most of the visitors actually want more details, and some get confused after reading the descriptions (in cases where the features of the products have difficult, technical names for instance). The confusion leads to doubts, and doubts lead to feeling of discomfort.

Even though other sellers might be selling the same thing, their description is much more detailed and informative.  The description also gives reasons for buying the product, and build up its value.  So who do you think would get more bids, the seller with the brief description or the seller with the detailed listing?

The answer is obvious, the seller with the detailed description seen more valuable and has the upper hand.  Product listed with all those great features and functions explained are viewed as more valuable in the eyes of the visitors.  It will also be associated with the feeling of desire and comfort, while the product with the brief description might bring feelings of confusion, frustration and doubts.

When you write your description of the item you are putting up for sale on eBay, be sure to describe it completely. Some potential buyers/bidders may find your auction through the search engine, so use as complete and descriptive headline with good keywords too- this will make your listing easy to find.

Try to leave no stone unturned – if I neglect to mention some crucial piece of information, bidders are most likely to steer clear due to uncertainty.  If  I’m selling a computer game, forgetting to mention if it’s for a PC or Mac will spawn a lot of email enquiries.  It will attract the wrong bidders who own Mac’s buyijg my PC game.  If the (Mac) buyer is not able to use it later on.. hmmm… think about the negative feedback that I will get.

Tip @ 2: A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

Photos make you and your item credible.  The better you are with your camera, the more bids you’re likely to get.  Take several photos of your important aspects or angles of the item, flaws, defects, if any.  If your teapot has crack in it be sure to take a picture of that as well.

Tip @ 3: Remember to Say Thanks

Send a ‘thank you’ note/receipt email to your customer (winning bidder) every time they pay.  Include your eBay username and other contact information so that they can contact you if they need to.  Kindly ask to leave feedback in your email.  Include a convenient link to the feedback forum, and 9 out of 10 times, they will drop a good word for you.

Selling on eBay is a great way to clear out your closets and make some extra cash, but you won’t earn as much as you could until you learn to master the eBay selling process.

Make Sure the Price Is Right

Take a look at your pricing, and what other people are charging for similar items. If you start your listing with a price that’s too high, people are never going to bid on it. Likewise, if you set an unreasonable reserve, you’ll never meet it, and you’ll be stuck with your item forever.

eBay is like a gigantic online garage sale. People don’t expect to pay full price, and they’re looking for good deals.  If you don’t provide good deals, your stuff won’t sell.  Start with a low price, and set a reasonable reserve to ensure your item sells.  If you can’t afford to sell your item for less than you paid, you probably aren’t going to sell it on eBay.

Photos, Photos, Photos
People want to know what they’re buying.  Buying on eBay isn’t like going to your local store; you can’t pick up an item, hold it up, feel the materials or evaluate the color.  If you’re selling electronics, buyers only have your word for it that the electronics are in good condition.  Good photos provide something for your buyers to evaluate.

Try to make sure your eBay photos clearly show the product you’re selling, and aren’t cluttered with a lot of other extraneous stuff.  Don’t take a photo of the video game box you’re selling on a cluttered tabletop; clear a space and lay out your item nicely, centered in the shot, and make sure your photo shows it accurately.  Don’t try to hide flaws; tell buyers about flaws up front, and show them in photos, or they’ll come back later and leave you negative feedback.  If you’re selling something in unopened condition, you can take a picture of the sealed package.

User Ratings Provide Important Information
When people buy from you on eBay, they want to know that they’re not going to get ripped off.  They want to know that you’ve described a product accurately and that you’ll ship it in a timely manner.  Ratings are a way for buyers to evaluate your reputation as a seller.  If you’ve got poor ratings, you’ll have a hard time selling things on eBay.

To ensure positive feedback, describe your items accurately.  If you sell a shirt that has a big hole at the bottom, you’d better tell your buyer that the shirt has a hole or your buyer is going to leave you negative feedback. Don’t tell people that they’re getting something new if they’re not getting something new.  Ship items promptly upon payment, and communicate with buyers quickly.  You’ll watch your rating rise as you get positive feedback.

Have you found out everything you possibly could about your items? Try typing their names into a search engine – you might find out something you didn’t know. If someone else is selling the same thing as you, then always try to provide more information about it than they do.  It’s a free market competition on the go!

Do you monitor the competition? Always keep an eye on how much other items the same as or similar to yours are selling, and what prices they’re being offered at. There’s usually little point in starting a fixed price auction for $100 when someone else is selling the item for $90.

Have you got pictures of the items? It’s worth taking the time to photograph your items, especially if you have a digital camera. If you get serious about eBay but don’t have a camera, then you will probably want to invest in one at some point.

Are you emailing your sellers? It’s worth sending a brief email when transactions go through: something like a simple “Thank you for buying my item, please let me know when you have sent the payment”. Follow this up with “Thanks for your payment, I have posted your [item name] today”. You will be surprised how many problems you will avoid just by communicating this way.

Also, are you checking your emails? Remember that potential buyers can send you email about anything at any time, and not answering these emails will just make them go somewhere else instead of buying from you.

Do your item description pages have everything that buyers need to know? If you’re planning to offer international delivery, then it’s good to make a list of the charges to different counties and display it on each auction. If you have any special terms and conditions (for example, if you will give a refund on any item as long as it hasn’t been opened), then you should make sure these are displayed too.

Have you been wrapping your items correctly? Your wrapping should be professional for the best impression: use appropriately sized envelopes or parcels, wrap the item in bubble wrap to stop it from getting damaged, and print labels instead of hand-writing addresses. Oh… and always use first class post – don’t be cheap.

Do you follow up? It is worth sending out an email a few days after you post an item, saying “Is everything alright with your purchase? I hope you received it and it was as you expected.” This might sound like giving the customer an opportunity to complain, but you should be trying to help your customers, not take their money and run.

Being a really good eBay seller, more than anything else, is about providing genuinely good and honest customer service. That’s the only foolproof way to protect your reputation. Maintain the integrity and professionalism and the money will flow in.. Believe it!

That’s why you should always check the seller’s reputation, or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise or mitigate that risk.

How to Check Feedback Ratings

On each item’s description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title SELLER INFO. This contains the seller’s name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any “eBay star-rating” they have earned.

Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red, shooting green and silver shooting star. Anyone with a ’shooting’ star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.

[ Notes: ]

If you click on the seller’s name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation – their ‘member profile’ page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.

What to Look For

You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn’t always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.

Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others’ experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.

Hope that the tips provide some extra precautions for us to mitigate the risks in our ventures.   Till then…. Best of lucks in your eBay business!

If you’ve ever bought anything on eBay (and the chances are you have), then think about your own behaviour. Buying from a seller with a low feedback rating makes you feel a little nervous and insecure, while buying from a long time seller with their reputation (good feedbacks) in the thousands doesn’t require any thought or fear – it feels just like buying from a shop.

A Bad Reputation Will Lose You Sales

In fact, a bad reputation will lose you almost all your sales. If someone leaves you negative feedback, you will feel the pain straight away, as that rating will go right at the top of your user page for everyone to see. Who’s going to want to do business with you when they’ve just read that you “took a month to deliver the item”, or that you had “bad communication and sent a damaged item”? The answer is no one!

Your next few items will need to be very cheap things, just to push that negative down the page. You might have to spend days or even weeks selling cheap stuff to get enough positive feedback to make anyone deal with you again.

It’s even worse if you consistently let buyers leave negative feedback – once you get below 90% positive ratings, you might as well be invisible.

You Can’t Just Open a New Account

Besides eBay’s rules about only having one account, there are far more downsides than that to getting a new account. You literally have to start all over again from scratch.

You won’t be able to use all the different eBay features. Your existing customers won’t be able to find you any more. Your auctions will finish at a lower price because of your low feedback rating. Opening a new account is like moving to a new town to get away from a few people who are spreading rumours about you.

A Good Reputation Will Get You Sales

When a seller with lots of positive feedback tells me something, I tend to believe them. They can be selling a pretty unlikely item, but if they guarantee it is what they say it is then I trust them – they’re not going to risk their reputation, after all. This is the power of a reputation: people know you want to keep it, and they know you’ll go to almost any lengths to do so.

This is true even to the point that I would sooner buy something for $50 from a seller I know I can trust than for $30 from someone with average feedback. It’s worth the extra money to feel like the seller knows what they’re doing, has all their systems in place and will get me the item quickly and efficiently.

You really will find selling on eBay so much easier, and there’s only way to get a good reputation: make sure you please your customers every time. But some customers can be, well, just a little difficult to please though. So, take it as a challenge…

The Right to Receive Your Item

Maybe the seller never sent the item, or maybe it got lost in the post. Whatever happened, you paid for the item. If it doesn’t arrive in the post as described, you have the right to a replacement or a refund, whether it’s the seller’s fault or not.

The fact that you bought something on eBay doesn’t mean that you don’t have the exact same rights that you would have if you bought it in a shop (these rights are pretty much the same all over the world). Plus, under eBay’s rules, the seller isn’t allowed to change their mind about selling you the item: once the auction ends, it becomes a contract – you must buy and they must sell, or face eBay’s penalties.

The Right for Your Item to Be as Described in the Auction

Sometimes sellers don’t wrap items properly, and so they get broken. Occasionally they write descriptions that are misleading or just plain wrong to begin with, leaving out vital details that would have caused you to change your mind about buying. If this happens to you, you again have the right to a replacement or a refund.

So How Do I Use My Rights?

First, you should take it up with the seller – most will be responsive, as do not want to have their reputation damagedwhen an upset buyer leaves negative feedback for all their future buyers to see. If that doesn’t work, report them to eBay.

While eBay don’t have many people handling complaints, they do have a relatively effective set of automatic process to handle common problems buyers and sellers have with one another.

Finally, if that doesn’t work, then you should seek advice from consumer groups in your country, and as a last resort from the police. You should never have to get this far, though: problems on eBay that can’t be resolved easily are extremely rare.

Don’t Be Too Quick

Remember not to get too annoyed and be unfair to the seller: nice sellers have agreed to give me refunds for undelivered items, only for me to find out a few weeks later that they were being held for me at the post office!  Always try your best to communicate and think of everything that might have gone wrong: eBay works best when buyers and sellers sort out their problems together, instead of reporting each other to the authorities straight away.

More often that not receiving what they paid for, buyers have an altogether different problem: they knew what they were paying for, but didn’t realise that what they were paying for was overpriced, low quality or a scam. So, learn all the tricks and open up your eyes so as not be ripped off by those one or two dishonest sellers on eBay.

So, how is everyone doing? Have you seen any improvement in your eBay business?  I hope so.  For me, there have been ups and down.  But, overall I think I am getting the hang of it.  I felt that this year will be a great year to make a success in my eBay ventures.

Enuff said… let’s share the next tips:  How to outdo the other bidders in order to grab items you like in an auction.

eBay isn’t just an auction and a marketplace. Often it can feel quite a lot like a game. Like any game, you can get ahead if you think strategically, using your head to outwit the other buyers and get the best price. Here are a few things you can try:

Beat Them by a Few Cents

Outbid people by a few cents instead of a few dollars – if they don’t check back before the auction ends, then you will be the winner. To avoid people using this tactic on you, though, always bid strange, hard-to-guess amounts instead of round numbers.

Play Dirty

If you know when the auction ends, you can get in there at the very last second and outbid your rivals. The chances are that they won’t have the time to sit in front of the auction waiting for it to end – as a rule, he who stays wins. If someone else does retaliate at the end of the auction, though, try not to get carried away in those last few seconds and end up paying too much!

Take Risks

This is a strategy for the braver eBay buyer. All of the advice you will see for eBay beginners tells you to buy items that have good pictures, clear descriptions, trustworthy sellers and all the rest. If you’re brave, why not take a risk and do the exact opposite?

Many buyers won’t want that item from the seller with a feedback rating of 5, no picture and a one-line description. If you take a calculated risk and bid anyway, you might be able to make a tiny bid and win by default. There are people on eBay who make their living from winning auctions like these, taking good pictures of the item, writing a good description and then reselling it at a huge profit. Be careful, though: do this for long enough, and you will inevitably lose your money at some point. It’s especially unwise to try it with very high-value items.

Avoid Bidding Wars

There are few things on eBay that are so rare that you’ll only see them once and never again. There are usually quite a few sellers who have an item. What’s more, they will generally have more than one to sell, even if they haven’t listed them all at once. Always check your seller’s history to see whether they sell your item all the time – and if they do, then wait for the next one instead of bidding to the skies.

Shop in the Summer

This is simple, but effective. Summer is the quiet season on eBay – almost everything sells for less. While everyone else is out enjoying the sun, invest a little time to find some real bargains.