Once you’ve set the checkout up on your items, buyers will be able to choose which way they would like to pay you out of the options available, and eBay’s checkout will take them through the process step-by-step. This will save you the trouble of having to explain things.
When the buyer pays or agrees how to pay, eBay will send you an item letting you know what happened. If might tell you that the money is now in your PayPal account and you should send the item, or it might say that they’ve put a cheque in the post. Remember to wait for payments to clear before you send anything.
That’s it – the role of the checkout is over. You just configure the checkout; it’s the buyer who deals with it the most. You might have noticed, though, that you can configure the checkout differently for different items. This is sometimes worth doing if you some of the items you sell are worth more than others, and you’d prefer not to accept PayPal for the highly-valued ones, for example.
By now, you might be a little sick of going through the ‘Sell Your Item’ screens each time you want to list something. The next email will show you how to use eBay’s automated listing tools.How to Use eBay “Listing Tools”.
Listing tools automate the process of adding listings to eBay, to stop you having to go through the ‘Sell Your Item’ process every time. There is a surprising amount of choice out there when it comes to eBay listing tools, to the point where you might not know what to choose. Here’s an overview of what’s useful and what’s not.
Turbo Lister.Turbo Lister is a free download from eBay, and allows you to sell on eBay without ever having to actually visit the site. You can write descriptions, save them and list them over and over again – if you want to, you can even do most of your eBay work offline, and just go online for a few seconds to upload it.
You can list in bulk and schedule your listings to start any time. Since this is eBay’s officially supported program, you’re guaranteed that upgrades to eBay’s site will never break it and leave you out in the cold. Personally, though, I find the design quite bad – it’s not really that much easier than just going through eBay directly.
Blackthorne.Also from eBay, this is what used to be called the ‘Seller’s Assistant’. It’s a downloadable program, but it’s more powerful than Turbo Lister is. It lets you do everything in bulk: listing, re-listing, and even feedback. You can export your sales data to an accounting program, and track your auctions while they’re still going on. You only have to enter things like payment choices and shipping details once, and they’re saved forever.
So where’s the disadvantage? It costs $9.99 per month, or $24.99 for the pro version, which also lets you print shipping labels in bulk and manage an inventory.Andale Lister.
If you want to try something that’s not been made by eBay, Andale’s lister is still web-based, but aims to streamline the process.
You can create ‘profiles’ with different selections for your auctions. For example, you could create a ‘Normal’ profile that doesn’t include any of the listing upgrades, a ‘Promote’ profile that includes Bold and Highlight, and a ‘Super Promote’ profile that buys Bold, Highlight and Featured Plus. This makes it easier to choose the set of options you want for each item.
It’s all about saving things you’ve done. Each time you upload a picture, it gets added to a ‘Picture Library’ for you to use again, and you can store an inventory and choose from it to create a listing. You also get nicer-looking templates than eBay provide.
Of course, if eBay had their act together then this is what their own process would be like – but they’re happy for third-parties to make money doing the work instead of upgrading their own site. Andale Lister can cost anywhere between 20c and 4c per listing, as you get discounts for volume.
Now that you’re listing in bulk, you can spend more time trying to attract people to come and bid on your auctions. But how should you be doing your marketing? In the next email, we’ll go through some of the options available to you.
How to Market Your eBay Business.So you want to market your eBay business? Well, you probably won’t have too much luck with traditional marketing methods – they’re just not targeted enough. The best way to do things is to pay for targeted advertising, which comes up when people search for keywords you specify: they’re looking for exactly what you’re selling, and so many of them will click on your ad.
On eBay.You might not have noticed that eBay offer this kind of advertising, but they do. You can pay them for a small ad that will appear above the search results (next to the banner ad) for any keywords you want. Buyers will then be able to click through and get to your eBay store – and you only pay for clicks, not for views. You can also set a budget for how much you want to spend, and your ads will simply stop if they go over-budget.
If you do this, it is best to create very targeted ads for specific products. Buy a specific model of something as your keyword, and write how much you sell it for in the ad – this will be more effective than just advertising across the name of a whole category.
There are some products that this approach simply doesn’t work for, though, and you might be better off spending your money on a more visible Featured Plus listing for your item, especially if you’re trying to advertise on valuable keywords.
Search Engine Ads.If you want to market your business more widely, then you can try to bring in business from outside eBay. The best way to do this is by buying keyword-targeted ads on search engines. With Google AdWords, for example, your ad will appear in their ‘Sponsored Links’ section when someone searches for your keywords. Again, you set a maximum budget and only pay for clicks.
This can be very effective, as you’ve just taken your products to the world outside eBay – imagine someone going to a search engine, typing in what they’re looking for and seeing your store right there! What’s more, if you target this approach to specific models of a product it can be very cheap. Most advertisers try to get as much traffic as they can instead of targeting their ads as specifically as you will be, meaning there won’t be much competition for the keywords.
eBay benefit from this as well as you, since it drives new buyers to eBay as a whole, not just to your site. They actively encourage sellers to go and advertise on search engines by offering you 75% of your final value fee back for each item that someone finds and buys this way. On expensive items, that’s probably enough to pay for the advertising to begin with!
If you’d really like to try a little marketing in the real world, though, you might want to make some flyers. Did you know that eBay can do this for you automatically? The next email will tell you how.How to Use eBay’s “Promotional Flyer” Tool.
If you have an eBay store, then you can print off promotional flyers for it for free.
You might have seen ones that other sellers have sent you – they’re basically lists of items available in their eBay stores, usually bearing this default message: “Thank you for your purchase! Please visit my eBay Store for more great items and friendly, reliable customer service.” If you know what you’re doing, though, you can really make your flyer stand out from the crowd.