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?

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.

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!

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.

The reason is obvious: a dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part.

But What If…

But nothing! There is no situation where you, as a seller, should get into any dispute with a buyer. Here are a few common situations and how to handle them.

They say the item never arrived: Politely asks the buyer to wait a few more days to see if it turns up, and then email you again if it still hasn’t arrived. If it still hasn’t arrived, you should assume it was lost in the post somehow and offer to send a replacement if you have one, or give them a full refund otherwise. You should be bothered so much on how much it will costs you. Are you serious about selling on eBay or not?

The item has been damaged in the post: You must offer to replace it or take it back for a refund without hesitation.

They say the item doesn’t match the description: Resist the urge to email back with “yes it does, you just didn’t read the description properly”. Take the item back for a refund, and edit your description if you need to, to make any confusing points extra clear.

I’m sure you’re spotting a pattern by now. Offering a refund will make almost any problem go away, and it really will cost you less in the long run. Remember, one piece of negative feedback will stay with you forever, while having a 100% positive rating is like owning a bar of solid gold.

You should always handle customers’ complaints before they complain to eBay – in fact, you should email them pre-emptively to ask if they have any. Going through the dispute process is time consuming, reflects badly on you and is downright unnecessary.

Are you still not convinced? Think this would only work with cheap items? Well, you see, the higher the price of the items you sell, the more your reputation is worth to you. Let’s say you were selling $10,000 worth of items each week, for example, and making a $1,000 profit per week overall. You might think that refunding one customer’s $1,000 purchase would be a tragedy, losing you your whole week’s profit. It’s far better to look at it this way: if you don’t give that refund, then not only will you lose the next week’s profit, but you’ll probably lose a few weeks’ profit after that too. Now which option looks better?

At its heart, your item description is an ad. Without making it too obvious, you should be writing a sales copy. You’re trying to get buyers excited about your products, and that’s usually hard – but on eBay, if you have the right thing to sell and give enough details, the buyers almost excite themselves.  Here are some tips on what kind of information that you can add in:-

Technical Details

Include every technical detail you know, including the item’s manufacturer, its condition, how big it is, where and when it was made, its history, and anything else special about it. Don’t be too boring, though: the best descriptions are written in friendly, conversational language, and show a real knowledge of the item. Whatever you do, make sure you tell the truth.

Remember that most of the people who’ll be buying your item will be just as knowledgeable about it as you are, if not more – this is their hobby, and they’re experts. Don’t feel like you need to explain the basics of the item: just go into as much technical detail as you can. As a rule, don’t write anything in the description if you don’t know what it means, as the chances are someone will, and if you’ve got it slightly wrong then you will look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Interesting Details

You might find that you enjoy writing a few things about how you got the item, why you’re selling it, and who you think might like it. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it gives your auctions some character and a personal touch, and can make people more likely to trust you. People might wonder what you’re doing selling 500 iPhone casing all at once, and if you tell them the reason, then they’ll feel reassured that nothing dodgy is going on. If you’re selling them because you’re having a baby and you need the space, just say so.

Write as Much as You Can

Leave nothing out of your description, even if that seems to you like it makes it cumbersomely long. There is no way you can be too thorough: someone, somewhere will appreciate that you took the time to write the extra information.

Don’t assume that anyone who wants extra information will email you to ask a question: many buyers are shy and won’t do it. Think of questions that buyers might have and add the answers to your description, as people generally tend to ask the same questions over and over again.

Each time a buyer does email you with a question, you should both answer their question and update your description so that it will include the answer next time. If people ask questions that are answered in the description, try putting these parts of the auction on a line alone, or in bold, to make them easier to notice.

Hmmm… I think that should cover this topic. What else should you put in the description…? Perhaps add in more pictures of the item you are selling.  Besides that…? Any more ideas, anyone…?

Wait to Bid

If you bid, then everyone can see you’re interested – and that might make them interested too. Leaving the item alone for as long as you can bear will make it look less popular, and keep the price down so you can come in at the last minute and get a bargain.

Make an Offer

If the seller is selling an item using ‘Buy it Now’ and it still hasn’t sold when the auction is about to end, use eBay’s ‘Best Offer’ service to make them an offer on it. The chances are they’ve listed the item two or three times before, and they’ll be so annoyed at the prospect of re-listing it yet again that they’ll accept your offer just to get rid of the thing.

Conspire with Other Buyers.

You might not have thought of this, but if there are two auctions for the same item and only you and one other buyer are bidding, why not get together and work out a ‘you take this one and I’ll take that one’ deal? This avoids you raising the price on both auctions just to get one each. If you make a few friends, you can even work together on auctions long-term, taking it in turns to bid.

Be Snobbish.

Send the seller emails asking questions about the condition of the item, and making it very clear that you are a discerning buyer and will only accept things of the highest quality. This will make them feel better about selling you their item for less.

Don’t Feel Guilty

There really are too many sellers on eBay now, to the point where you can get common items at very low prices. Long-term, this will probably force those sellers out of business, but that’s the way a market works – it’s supply and demand.

Buy in Bulk

When auctions are slow, many sellers will have had the same stock for a long time. If you offer to take ten things offtheir hands all at once then you can almost name your price – the chances are that they’ll fall over themselves to give you a good deal. If you come back again and buy another ten items then they’ll love you even more.

The longer you spend on eBay, the more experienced you’ll become – and the greater the chances are that you’ll stumble across an auction for something very odd, and quite unexpected.   Try it yourself, you’ll be amazed!