If you want to buy something great online, you better join eBay and check the site. I’m sure you’ll come across some great products at great prices too!  Here’s the step to buy something on eBay:-

1.   If you are not yet an eBay member, join eBay now, because you have to be a member in order to buy.

2.  Once you’ve become a member, either visit eBay’s front page and type the name of product or item that you desired in the search box or browse through the listings by category to shop for the item you have in mind.

3.  If you come across any item that you like in the search results, click on the ones you’re interested in and read the listing descriptions in detail. Check the price, seller quality and feedback received, shipping information, terms, and most importantly, the product description to make sure that the item is the one you want.

4.  When you’re ready to bid or buy, either place your bid or Buy it Now.

5.  If you bid on an auction rather than purchasing with Buy it Now, monitor your bid in My eBay (your personal eBay page) to check that you win.

6.  If you are the winning bidder, make sure to complete the transaction by making your payment via PayPal or whatever other means you’ve agreed to by bidding on the item.

7.  Once you’ve received your item and are satisfied with it, leave feedback giving your opinion of the transaction.

I’m pretty sure that you will win too coz everyone is a winner!

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.

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 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?

Now, here’s a tip which I found to be really important.  Before you start selling items, especially expensive ones, you must make sure that you have at least gathered 20 (some advised this to be 50) or more feedback score.

Your eBay feedback score says a lot about the type of seller/buyer you are. An increased score with a high percentage of positive feedback indicates that you are an honest person and that the transaction will go smoothly.

No doubt, there are few instances where a newly registered eBay member who had been able to sell a product worth $500 or more, on her first auction.  Yet, the logic is this:  Most people in eBay won’t buy from anyone with zero or minimal rating of feedback.  Imagine that you make a payment to someone who is relatively new to you and new in the market, and that someone then closed his eBay account without sending you the item you have already paid for and runaway with your money.  Of course, eBay will refund you the money, but that will only happen once it has completed all its investigations satisfactorily.  Sometime, this so-called investigation takes a month to complete!

So, please do so if you are all eager to start selling things on eBay.  But a personal advice is it would be wiser if you concentrate on getting and increasing your feedback score.

Here is a cost-effective way to boost your feedback rating:

1. Go to ebay(dot)com.  Look for ‘Advanced Search’ which should be at the top section of the site.  Click it.
2. Fill in a relevant keyword or select a relevant category, for example: ‘Books’.
3. Go down further and you will see ‘Price’ section.  Fill in: from $0.01 (or you may leave this field blank) and to $0.01.  This will tell the search robot to only list items with maximum price of $0.01.
4. Go down further and check the section ‘Show results’.  Check for ‘FREE SHIPPING’ under the ‘Shipping options’.  However please re-read the auctions as there are some who state free shipping still add shipping costs.
5. Feel free to experiment with the advanced search.  But I believe the steps revealed above should be adequate to provide you with a listing of items costing $0.01 or so for us to bid.  Remember the goal is to collect feedback!
6. Basically, for a dollar, we should be able to have 100 feedback.  Politely ask the seller to leave feedback for you. If you have bought and received an item and left feedback for the seller, and not received feedback in return, contact the seller and politely ask him to leave you feedback. Most eBay sellers will understand and will give you one promptly.

[ Tips: Based on my on-going experience, it is better to buy only one item from one distinctive seller in one month. This is because, although we bought 10 items and subsequently received 10 feedback from that particular seller, the feedback score will only count as ONE feedback since the purchase is made from one seller.]

[ More Tips: At the same time, try to start by selling inexpensive items first, but BEWARE of the fees involved.  If you don’t do it properly, you may end up incurring losses after deducting the eBay fees involved. But, if you do it right, you will be able to start writing the long awaited ‘goodbye note’ to your boss sooner than you think.]