Friggin' Idiot's Guide to Buying and Selling on eBay by Chad Wyatt - HTML preview

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If Nothing Helps, Who Do I Report It To?

You need to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar and then ‘Contact us’, to contact eBay’s customer service. You might find you have better luck with the ‘Live Help’ function than you do with trying to get sensible responses to emails. PayPal have the same procedure – ‘Help’ then ‘Contact us’ – and offer limited phone support if you need it.

If you run lots of auctions at once, some of your problems might be caused simply by things getting lost and forgotten, because you have no way of keeping track of them. In the next email, we’ll look at how to manage multiple auctions effectively.

Tips for Managing Multiple eBay Auctions.

 

It can be very time-consuming to keep your auctions ticking along, especially if you have hundreds listed at a time. Don’t despair, though: there are a few things you can do to take the weight off you.

 

Use My eBay.

If you want a broad overview of where you are with your auctions, make sure you pay a visit to My eBay occasionally instead of just relying on emails. With my eBay, you can see all your auctions in a big table, and sort by things like the number of bids and the current price. If you want to see which of your auctions currently has no bids, then you can do that.

One of the most useful things about My eBay, though, is the ‘Summary’ view. If you’re not sure what you should be doing next, then this acts effectively as an eBay to-do list: anything you need to be doing will end up here.

Use Selling Manager.

If you’re willing to pay the fee of $4.99 per month, you can sign up for Selling Manager, which is a more effective version of the My eBay ‘Selling’ view. It lets you customise your view more effectively to see the information that’s important to you, see useful snapshots of how things are going, make automated responses to your buyers using email templates, and more.

Selling Manager Pro gives you more features: it keeps track of inventory for you, and lets you relist items in bulk. It will even produce a monthly profit and loss report to help you keep track of the big picture. Unfortunately, it costs $15.99 per month.

Use a Listing Tool.

Even though they’re called listing tools, much of the software out there lets you manage what you’re doing long after it’s been listed, with all the features of Selling Manager and sometimes a few more besides. This programs also often have the advantage of being programs instead of websites, meaning they’re faster to respond and can do more sophisticated analysis.

Remember the ‘Relist’ Button.

After your auctions end each time, there’s an easy way to put the exact same thing back again: the ‘Relist’ button. You can Relist items quickly and easily this way, as long as you don’t want to change in the listing.