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!

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 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…?

Going full-time as an eBay seller is living the dream: making a real income, working from home, being your own boss and all the rest of it. It’s the promise of a million scams, and it’s finally come true – at least for some.

What they don’t tell you in the success stories, though, is that becoming a full-time eBay seller is by no means for everyone. You really, really ought to try it part-time before you even consider taking it up full-time, and even then, caution is advisable.  Before you burn your suit, here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself.

Q1:  How Much Do I Earn From eBay Now?

Work out how many hours a week you spend doing eBay-related things (be honest here), and divide it by the average amount of profit you make in a week. If you were doing full-time hours, would you earn as much as you earn now?

Q2:  Do I Have a Good Job?

Think about what you might lose if you give up your job to focus on eBay. If you’re in a well-paid job with good promotion prospects then it’s well worth reconsidering: you might get a few years down the line and wish you’d stayed in your traditional job, as you’d probably be the CEO by now.

Q3:  Would I Really Make Much More Money?

Unless you’re selling a large quantity of small goods, most of what you do on eBay will be waiting for auctions to end – and you can wait at work just as easily as you can at home. This is why whether you would make more money on eBay really depends on what kinds of items you’re selling – for low value items, going full-time could be a good move. For high-value ones, the chances are you’ll hit the limits of how much money you have to invest in inventory long before you hit the limits on your time.

Q4:  Is my Home a Good Place to Work?

Quite apart from anything else, you might find that the dream of home working is more of a nightmare in reality. People can start to depend on you to get things done that need to be done during the day. If you have a wife and children then they can resent the fact that you’re in the house but refuse to have anything to do with them for large parts of the day. Giving in to any of these things and stopping work for a while will cause your profits to fall.

Q5:  Can I Survive if it All Goes Wrong?

In the end, would you be able to get by if you had a month or two where you sold literally nothing? Or would you be desperately looking around for a job and cursing the day you ever discovered eBay? That’s the real test.

If you made it through all these questions, then I guess you’re cut out for the eBay life – and even if you didn’t, you’d be surprised just how far you can get part-time.

Be specific:  If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you should type something like ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ in the search box rather than just typing ‘harry potter’.  You will get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell it wrongly: It is a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings.  Chances are that fewer people will find these items- and so they could be cheaper.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’.  Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results.  If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it will work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’.  For example, if you want to search for a 1970s toy, you could search for ‘toy 197*’.  197* will show results from any year in the 1970s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (” “), then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks.  For example, searching for “Revenge of the Fallen” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Revenge in the Village of the Fallen Leaves”.

Exclude words:   Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results.  For example: “Star Wars” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Star Wars but not posters or photos.

[Tips: Anyway, if you have time then don't forget to browse. Once you have found the category relating to the particular items that you like, why not click 'Browse' and take a look through the whole category- you might be surprised by what you find.]

[Note: This article is a guideline as to give you some basic reference.  The intention is to share the experiences and knowledge so hopefully we would all be successful making money online with eBay.]

The basic fees involved are:  INSERTION FEE and FINAL VALUE FEE.

When you list an item on eBay, you are charged an Insertion Fee. If the item sells, you would then also be required to pay a Final Value Fee.  Insertion Fee is calculated on a sliding scale based on the minimum bid (your auction starting price), your fixed-price, or the reserve price.

So, how much are the fees involved?  It depends…! The basic fee structure depends on the style and the product category.  If you sell media items (i.e. Books, Music, Video Games,  DVDs & Movies), then you’re charged a slightly lower insertion fees.  Take a look at the following table for eBay’s insertion fee structure.

If you’re running a reserve-price auction, eBay bases its insertion fee on the reserve price, not the starting bid. eBay also charges a fee to run a reserve-price auction.  Here’s an example on how a reserve price affects your insertion fee. If you set a starting bid of $1.00 for an item but your reserve price is $500.00, you’re charged a $4.00 insertion fee based on the $500.00 reserve price plus a $5.00 reserve fee (1 percent of the reserve price).

eBay has a different fee structure for items that are listed as fixed-price sales:

• Fixed-price sale insertion fee: $0.35
• Fixed-price sale insertion fee for media: $0.15

This is quite a bargain, so if you have multiples of a single item and know what you need to get for them, a fixed-price sale is a great way to go!

In addition to the insertion fees, when your item sells, you also have to pay a Final Value Fee based on your item’s closing price. The table below outlines the Final Value Fees for most items.

Final value fees*

* These Final Value Fees do not apply to motor vehicles, real estate, or items listed in certain subcategories of the Business and Industrial category.

Keep in mind that there is a slightly higher Final Value Fee for fixed-price listings, based both on your closing price and the type of item you sold, but a fixed-price listing can stay on the site for as long as 30 days! Go to eBay.com Fees page for more information.

[Good News: As part of its marketing strategy, eBay has announced that for every 30-day period, your first 5 single-quantity auction-style listings to be listed on the site will enjoy an insertion fee of $0.00 for eligible categories. These $0 insertion fee listings also have a final value fee per listing of 8.75% or $20, whichever is lower.]

Once you have registered for FREE to become an eBay member, then you need to also register for a PayPal account.  Most  eBay members prefer to make and/or receive payment using PayPal.  So, if you don’t have a PayPal account, then it might affect your eBay business.

[ Brief Info: PayPal was founded in 1998 and taken over by eBay in 2002. PayPal is an online banking and money transferring service that is popular with many e-commerce businesses. Because of its ease of use, PayPal has become the preferred method of payment for a majority of online traders. Besides being compatible with buying and selling merchandise, it is also an effective way to give donations and send money to other users. Joining is free and takes little time to create an account.]

Now, follow these steps to get a PayPal account:

(1).             Open an internet browser, type ‘paypal.com’ and press ENTER.

(2).             Look for ‘SIGN UP’ button and click it.  You will then be directed to a page that looks like the one below.

(3).             Choose your ‘Country’ and select your preferred ‘Language’.

(4).             You are able to choose among 3 categories: PERSONAL, PREMIER or BUSINESS.  Select PREMIER as it is the suggested category to buy and shop online!

(5).             Fill in the relevant fields:

• Email address ( Note: You will be using the email address you keyed in  to log in to PayPal),
• Create your own password.
• Name and contact information and provide a valid email address. Without an email address, you cannot use eBay.

(4).             Cclick on ‘Agree and Create Account’.  Once you have completed the initial creation of your account, you will be prompted to confirm your email address in order to verify your identity and validate your account. Open your email and access the PayPal email that has been sent to your inbox. Click on the link within the email and you will be redirected to a confirmation page, indicating that your PayPal account is now active.

What you need to do now is to login to your eBay account, go to Account section and fill in the required information to LINK your eBay account with your PayPal account.

An extra note:  To sell on eBay, you need to fill out the Credit Card or Checking/Savings account information in your PayPal account in order to get it verified.  This is a form of insurance that eBay uses to prevent fraud. This prevents fraudsters from posing as buyers to sell nonexistent merchandise to their accomplices using stolen credit cards. eBay has taken great lengths to protect its buyers and sellers from fraud, which makes it one of the safest sites on the Internet.

I hope my explanation is comprehensive and easy to follow.  More importantly is for you to find that to register for a PayPal and eBay account is really EASY and SIMPLE process. Try it, it’s FREE and it’s FUN too!

The first thing you have to do before can sell on eBay is to create an eBay account. It’s free and fairly simple to complete.

[ Things To Prepare :  An email address ]

So, follow theses steps to register on eBay:

(1).    Go to ebay(dot)com.

(2).    Click on “Register”.

(3).             Fill in the relevant fields. You will need to enter your contact information and provide a valid email address. Without an email address, you cannot use eBay.

(4).             Don’t forget to tick the relevant box at the bottom, to indicate that you agree to accept eBays’s User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

(5).             Once you have finished entering your information, eBay will send you a confirmation email that you have to respond to in order to activate your new account.

Tips on choosing your very own eBay User ID.

Choosing your eBay User ID is one of the hardest things to do when joining eBay because it is the name that connects you to your products. Your User ID is like your business name.    So, try to come up with something special taking these tips into consideration:

(a).              Choose an eBay ID that is unique and easy to remember.  For example: AmazingTOYS.  However, be mindful that if such name has already been taken up by other eBay member, then you would not want to have AmazingTOYS888 because it would look like you are trying to copy their idea.

(b).             Your eBay User ID should brand your primary product to help you increase sales. Let’s say you intend to  mainly sell books, so you would want to choose a name that contains the word BOOK like GreatBOOK as a good example. A bad example would be BOOK90210 because having those numbers on the end are meaningless and hard to remember.

(c).              Should you intend to sell a wide variety of products and you don’t really have any single item that would be a good choice to use in choosing your ID, then you could use your real name and add keywords like “valuedeals” for example JayValueDEALS. Or you could choose a name that reflects your personality like SweetSmile or FriendlyTrader.

Welcome to eBay my friends.  Remember, it’s FREE to register!