The buyer can choose to either accept or reject your offer. If they decline, that’s the end of it, and you pay nothing for making the offer. If they accept, then things work exactly the same way they would if they’d won the auction – you pay a final value fee, they pay you, and you can leave feedback for each other as normal.
Making a second chance offer on all your auctions can be a great way to make extra sales. You will probably find that about 50% of the buyers you make offers to will take them up, and you save the effort of relisting the item and paying another insertion fee.
The only disadvantage is the time that it might take you to send so many second chance offers, but the chances are it will be time well spent. If you find that it doesn’t work for your particular kind of items, though, don’t keep pushing it – just re-list the item and let people bid again. It might be that the buyers for your items just aren’t the negotiating type – or perhaps they hope that the next one will sell for less.
By now, you’re probably starting to make a success of your eBay business – I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far! But the chances are you still want a few more strategies to increase your profits. Well, in the next email, we’ll take a look at what you can discover from taking a good look at your competitors’ auctions.
What You Can Learn from Competing eBay Auctions.If you’ve a savvy businessperson, the chances are you’ve already taken a look at your competitors’ auctions. What you might not have realised is just how much you can learn if you know what you’re looking for.
To begin with, don’t bother looking at listings that haven’t ended yet – you don’t know what’s going to happen with them. Instead, use the advanced search page to search for listings that sold. Just go to the advanced search page, type in the keywords that you know will find your competitors’ items, tick ‘Completed listings only’ and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Set it to sort by ‘Price: highest first’.
This will show you auctions competing with yours that have recently finished, starting with the ones that sold for the most (ignore any with prices in red – they didn’t sell). Go through and take a look, paying special attention to the following points:
Titles. What information do the top sellers of your item put in their titles, and what do they leave out? If your titles are very different to theirs, it might be time for a rethink.Descriptions. You’ll probably notice that the highest sellers haven’t just copied text from the company’s website or an Amazon.com review – they’ve gone to the trouble of writing a little about the item, and about themselves. Learn from their example.
Pictures. I can almost guarantee you that the listing will have very nice pictures – not catalogue quality, but good enough to see what you’re getting. With items of any significant cost, you’ll probably find more than one photo from different angles.
Style. Is it written conversationally, or in terse businesslike language? The way you should write entirely depends on what the market seems to like – and the market seems to like what the top sellers wrote.
Time. It’s pretty easy to ignore this as a factor without meaning to, but pay attention to when the top selling items’ auctions began and ended. This might give you a few clues about the best to catch buyers who will bid highly on your item, and then you can schedule your items accordingly.
Price. If your competitors are selling using Buy it Now, you can see what the maximum is that they’ve managed to sell for recently, and set your own Buy it Now price slightly below that.Shipping. Look around to see the sweet spot for shipping. If you can figure out a way to get your shipping costs lower than the highest sellers, then this is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself in the market.
Once you see what works, you can start to emulate your competitors – of course you can’t just copy them completely, but you can structure your auction similarly and make sure it includes the same information.
If you want your items to do even better, then start stocking the items in your category that are the most in-demand. We’ll show you how to tell what’s selling and what’s not in our next email.How to Determine What’s Really Selling on eBay.
If you want to make the most money you can on eBay, then you need to know what sells. But how can you find that out?
The Manual Way.
If you’re just starting out, you might find it easier to simply go to your category, tick ‘Completed listings’ in the left-hand menu, and then click the ‘Show items’ button. Sort them by highest price first, and there you have it: the items that sell for the highest prices. In most categories this will change often, but it’s still useful to know – if you think you can get an item quickly for less than the kind of prices it is selling for, then go for it.
eBay's search interface can be slow and hard to use, however, and you’re unlikely to discover everything you could learn this way. There’s more than one way to do things, though.The Statistical Way.
If you’d prefer to do a little hardcore statistical analysis to determine what’s selling and what not, then don’t worry – you can do that too.
eBay make all their market data available to third-party developers through what’s called a ‘programming interface’ – this basically means that you have a wide choice of programs that can take market statistics from eBay and analyse them for you. Type ‘ebay analysis’ into a search engine for a long list.
In my opinion, some of the best eBay statistics tools out there are made by Andale (www.andale.com). Andale are one of the oldest and most established sellers of services for eBay. However, their solution is web-based, and you may prefer to buy a piece of software that you can install on your computer, such as AuctionIntelligence.
These automated programs will almost do everything for you, and come with help and tutorials. You should be aware, however, that eBay charge them for the data, which means that they will never give you their programs for free.
Keep Your Finger on Pulse.If you want a quick, big-picture snapshot of what people are looking to buy on eBay, then go to http://pulse.ebay.com. This is a page where eBay list the top 10 most searched for words, and the top 5 largest eBay stores.
Looking at it, it’s easy to spot current trends. For example, right now all of the top stores are selling media items, either books or music. That suggests that these are good things to be selling, at least if you want to shift volume. Right now the word ‘ipod’ is at number 4, and ‘ipod mini’ is at number 6 – there are a heck of a lot of people out there looking for a cheap iPod or iPod mini. If you could find a good supplier for them then you could make a lot of money.
If you’re having trouble finding suppliers, though, don’t worry: there’s more than one way to get hold of things to sell on eBay. The next email will give you a few tips.10 Great Ways to Source Low Cost Products for eBay.
So you’re having trouble finding stock cheaply enough to sell it for a good profit? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Garage sales. The chances are you’ve gone most of your life seeing ads for these and ignoring them. Start going to as many as you can. You won’t find good things at every one, but when you find one person with good stuff, make them an offer for the lot – they’ll be so happy about it that you can get a real bargain.
Markets. If your area has a market, then go there and look around for anything good. You could buy it there if it’s cheap enough, or try to make friends with the market traders and find out who their suppliers are.
Pawn shops. Pawn shops don’t usually know what to do with the junk they accumulate (unless it’s jewellery, of course). Generally, they put their stock out on the shelves haphazardly, hoping that someday someone with a little money will just happen to come in, search around and buy wildly obscure things. Get them to offer you a discount for bulk.
Real auctions. Go to a real auction, as the chances are that you can resell things for more than they will sell them. After all, they only have a few hundred people in that room – you have a few million to sell to!
Local newspapers. Place an ad in the local paper that reads “I pay cash for [your item type]”, with your phone number. If you can afford it, make it a big display ad, so it’ll be noticed.Ad boards. Get one of those little ads in the grocery store.
Friends. Ask your friends if they have anything they’d like to sell you, and ask them to spread the word to their friends.
Become known. Give out business cards, mention to people what you do. The chances are that you’ll come across someone who’ll say “Oh, really? I’ve got a load of [item] I don’t want”.
Shops. This might be a little surprising, but some real shops even sell things more cheaply than they sell on eBay. Take a look around your local deep discounter, and pay special attention to any shop that takes trade-ins from customers. The chances are they take a loss on trade-ins as a promotion, and are dying to get rid of that stock.
And finally: eBay! When you’re looking at the completed items view, you’ll notice the massive range of prices that items can sell for on eBay. Try taking the highest-priced item and searching for it on its own, then sort by lowest price first: I can almost guarantee that you’ll see an auction for the same item where it sold for almost nothing. The trick is to find these flawed auctions before they close, win them using a bid sniping service, and then turn around and resell the item.
After all that trouble, though, when do sell the item you might find that a buyer leaves you a feedback rating you just don’t think is fair. The next email will show you what to do about it. How to Dispute Unfair Ratings on eBay.So you’ve done everything you can to keep your buyers happy – but still someone’s left you negative feedback! You don’t think it’s fair, either because you fixed the buyer’s problem, or they never gave you a fair chance to fix it. What can you do?
Communicate.Tell the buyer that you don’t think that feedback was fair, and give them a list of the things you’ll do in exchange for them withdrawing it. You can offer refunds, replacements, or even to ‘compensate them for their time’ (that means bribe them), depending on how desperate you are. If they agree, you can go through the mutual withdrawal process detailed below.
Respond.Leave a comment under the negative feedback explaining what happened – this at least minimises the damage it will do to your reputation if anyone looks at it. Remember that you can more-or-less write whatever you want, as there is no facility for the buyer to respond to your response – and anything you write will show up on their ‘Feedback Left for Others’ page! If you’re a little devious, you can make them look very bad.
Retaliate.However much you’re not supposed to do it, you really shouldn’t let a buyer leave you negative feedback without leaving them a negative in return. Be polite and factual, saying something like “buyer did not give me a fair opportunity to fix their complaint” (note that this is one of the reasons why you should always leave feedback second, or not at all). This might not be the ‘nicest’ way to do business on eBay, but it’s the only realistic way to protect your flawless reputation.
Don’t be worried: retaliatory feedback is not against eBay’s rules, however much it should be. Anyway, you’re not just doing this for revenge – it’s essential for the next step.Try for a Mutual Withdrawal.
Since the buyer probably won’t want a negative response or feedback comment on their record, you can do a simple “I’ll take away my negative if you take away yours” deal. This is called mutual feedback withdrawal, and the process can be started at this page:
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MFWRequest.
This will cause eBay’s system to send an email to your buyer, asking them if they agree to withdraw their feedback in exchange for you withdrawing yours. You should get them to agree before you press the button, though, because you can only use it once per transaction.
Use Dispute Resolution.You and the buyer can take your feedback dispute to SquareTrade, where you can both give your side and they will cancel feedback that they feel is unfair – they are far more responsive than eBay. Be aware that this costs about $20, but it has the advantage that if the buyer doesn’t respond to the process then their feedback will be removed automatically.
Of course, at some point you might find yourself with an even worse buyer than one that just leaves negative feedback – they might refuse to pay, or harass your other buyers. Our next email will tell you how to get in touch with eBay's ‘Safe Harbor’ team, and what they can do for you.
How to Get Help from eBay’s SafeHarbor Team.SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If a buyer does something they're not supposed to, then it's SafeHarbor you should be reporting it to.
Non-paying Buyers.
This is the most common rule buyers break -- it's all too easy for them to just change their minds and try to get out of the auction. eBay, however, regard every auction as a contract. They will punish the buyer for you if they don't go through with their end of the deal, by giving them a ‘strike’ against their account. A buyer who doesn’t consistently doesn’t pay for items they win will probably get banned.
To report a non-paying buyer, you need to file an ‘Unpaid Item’ dispute, which you can do here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CreateDispute. All you need is the item number. Once you do this, eBay will send the buyer a reminder that they must pay for the item they won, wait a while, and then take action against them. You must wait 7 days before you can file a dispute.
This isn't that helpful to you, of course, since in most cases you still won't get paid for the item or have anyone to post it to: it is a rare buyer who responds to eBay's threats and pays up just to avoid a little warning from eBay. You will, however, at least get a refund of your final value fee and be able to relist the item for free – and you can send a second chance offer to someone else if you want.
Auction Interference.If someone ends up with a grudge against you, then you might find that they start emailing your bidders and telling them that you’re a scammer, they should cancel they bid, they shouldn’t deal with you, and so on. You might even find that you have unscrupulous competitors who will try this tactic to get buyers to bid on their auctions instead!
SafeHarbor will investigate this for you – the procedure to report it is to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar, then ‘Contact us’ from the menu. This can be a bit of a maze: you need to choose ‘Report problems with other eBay members’, then ‘Problems with buyers’, then finally ‘User is emailing buyers to warn them about seller or item’. This will then let you send SafeHarbor an email.
Feedback Extortion.You might find that someone tries to intimidate you into giving them something using the threat of negative feedback – in its crudest form, this could be as simple as “Pay me $20 or I’ll leave you a negative comment”.
To report this to SafeHarbor, you should also use ‘Contact Us’, making sure you attach all the emails you have that prove the extortion happened.You know, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Maybe you’re not be having all that many problems with the buyers you do get, but you seem to be having a problem with items that just don’t sell. Never fear: the next email will give you some hints on what could be going wrong.
Top 10 Reasons Why eBay Auctions Fail.Are you finding that auction after auction fails to attract any bidders or buyers? It happens to the best of us sometimes – take a good look at these things to see if any of them could be making your bidders avoid you.
The starting price was too high: People don’t want to have to make a high bid before anyone else has – you should always start your auctions low and let the bidders bid them up.The fixed price is too high: If you’re just selling with Buy it Now, then of course your items won’t sell if they’re too expensive. Try reducing the price a little each time the item fails to sell.
No picture: Most buyers are reluctant to bid on something without a picture, and that goes even more for high-value items. Think of it from the buyer’s point-of-view: would you want to bid on an item when you’ve no idea what it looks like?
You had a reserve: Reserve prices scare away buyers like you wouldn’t believe, not to mention costing a percentage of your final sale price. Avoid them like the plague.Bad spelling and grammar: If your titles are spelled wrongly, then no-one will find your auctions. If your descriptions are incoherent, then no-one will know what you’re talking about. Always run your text through a spelling and grammar checker before you put it up on eBay.
Too much for shipping: You might be expecting people to pay more for shipping than they’re prepared to. Give them a few cheaper options that will take longer, or use cheaper materials.Negative feedback: If you got negative feedback on your last transaction, expect things to be slow for a while. Try selling cheap things for a while to get your account back in good standing.
Nasty terms: Don’t write things all over your auction like “I will only accept returns in PERFECT condition” or “Serious bidders only, no timewasters!!” This is entirely unnecessary and just makes you look difficult to deal with.
No PayPal: Many buyers simply avoid any seller who doesn’t accept PayPal as a payment method – they can’t be bothered with the hassle of anything else. Even if you don’t like PayPal, you should accept it if you want to business on eBay.
The items were bad. You will have to accept that there are some items no-one wants – perhaps they were hyped to begin with, but now people had heard that they’re useless and stopped buying. Before you come to this conclusion, though, check everything else you can, and check if anyone else is managing to sell it. If you’re sure, try to return the items, and buy in some new stock.
When selling on eBay is so much trouble, you might start to wonder: should I just go and sell my stuff somewhere else? In the next email, we’ll take a look at the various alternatives to eBay that have sprung up over the years.
Should You Run Auctions on Other Sites Besides eBay?eBay doesn’t have very many competitors, and the ones that there are remain small by comparison – that’s part of what makes eBay so powerful for niche items. If you’re selling more common things, though, you might like to list auctions on other sites besides eBay, to increase your potential customer base and avoid some of the occupational hazards of relying on eBay for all your business. But which ones are worth bothering with?
Yahoo! Auctions.Yahoo Auctions wins in one big way: selling there is free. There are no listing fees or final value fees. What’s more, Yahoo is still one of the biggest sites around, and gets plenty of traffic to its auction site. The site benefits from Yahoo’s experience in providing good, categorised searching, and the site is easy to use all round.
The rub, though, is that dodgy buyers and sellers are even more rampant on Yahoo than they are on eBay, and that’s saying something. Sellers on Yahoo Auctions can expect to run into far more non-paying buyers than they would on eBay. Also, the site is plastered with text ads, which get in the way, and the design in general leaves a lot to be desired – but then, so does eBay’s.
uBid.uBid’s model is to offer more security for less flexibility. They pre-screen everything: sellers must be registered businesses and buyers must pre-register a credit card. It takes some of the ‘Wild West’ feeling out of selling – but it also takes away most of the fun.
On eBay, you have complete control over what you’re doing, while selling on uBid feels like you’re just a faceless supplier for a big company. Searching for anything vaguely non-mainstream will come back with no results, to the point that it will quickly get frustrating for your buyers. If you’re just selling common consumer goods for the money, though, then by all means do it at uBid.
Amazon Auctions.Amazon Auctions is an underused auction site. The design is quite bad, and searches don’t turn up many results. The payment system is the same one people use to buy things from Amazon itself, though, which seems more secure that PayPal.
You might be more interested in becoming an Amazon Marketplace seller, which means that you can list your items on their main pages for people to see when they click the ‘Used & New from…’ link. This can be a good way to make a few sales, as you can simply keep your inventory updated at your Buy it Now prices and someone will occasionally buy something. You don’t even have to write a description or upload any pictures. This is probably a better thing to be using than Amazon Auctions.
To sum up, registering your items at a few other auction sites could get you a few extra sales – but compared to eBay, they’re all very unimpressive, and have nowhere near as many users.If you’re trying to think of ways to expand your business, then there might be a shock in store for you with what I’m going to tell you next. Did you know that your eBay income is taxable? But stay calm – the next email will explain everything.
Is Your eBay Income Taxable?The income you get from selling items on eBay is just like the income you get from any other business: it is taxable, at least in theory. In practice, many get away without declaring profits from their eBay sales just because they’re hard for the government to track. If you want to be strictly within the law and legit, though, you should be paying tax.
Income is Income.If you make money from it, then it’s income – and if it’s income, then it’s taxable. There is a question of scale involved, though, where the more you’ve sold, the more important it is to declare your eBay income. If you don’t, you risk getting yourself into all sorts of trouble.
There are some rules for deciding whether your income counts as taxable or not. If you depend on the income you get from eBay, spend a lot of time on it, or just act as if you are running a business, then you need to file a Schedule C tax form and pay tax as a business.