Posts Tagged ebay business

Dealing with competition on eBay is one of those things that you will never avoid, but a small business can flourish on the mega-auction website as long as you are willing to work with the competition rather than against it.

Competitors can actually be a good thing; seriously, they help us know what the price of an item is and how we can work around it to get the customer.

Pricing an item on eBay is fairly simple. Before you even begin your own auction listing go back and use the advanced setting to see what the item has sold for in the past. You can do this by doing an advance search and searching for closed bids only. You will see a list of items that have sold recently that are just like yours. You will want to look at the bidding history of those auctions as well.

Once you have an idea of what the items has sold for you can go back and search for the products that are still open. You will see how many similar products are out there and how they are moving. Research is always an important part of the game.

When you begin your auction listing consider what you can offer that other buyers are not offering. One big issue with eBay, in my opinion, is the insane shipping prices that some sellers offer. I tend to keep shipping low ($3.00-$10.00 depending on the item) or offer free shipping. Free shipping will garner a great deal of attention and more people will bid on your auction as shipping costs are considered “added” expenses to many bidders. When there is no shipping cost to calculate bidders are more likely to place a bid and go higher on their price than they would if they had to calculate shipping into the equation.

I have one wholesale sneaker seller that I constantly buy from on eBay. I buy from that company because there is a free shipping policy. I like to know my money is going directly to the product and not to overzealous shipping and handling fees. I know I am not alone in that either.

I have also found that auctions need to correct amount of exposure time to do well on eBay. I’ve seen many sellers fall victim to setting their auction time too low. If you offer a 3 day auction the odds of many people seeing it are low. Setting an auction at 7 days gives it a much longer exposure time.

The same can be said for an over infiltrated market. Around Christmas time this year a great deal of people were selling Wiis on eBay. A lot of the auctions never made it to the first page. You need to time your auction correctly so it won’t be ending at the same time as other auctions. If 30 other auctions are ending within 10 minutes of your auction the odds of your listing getting to the front page is slim and let us be honest here, most people never click past the first page.

An eBay business is a great way to make money and it can be extremely successful but you know how to use your competition and time your listings accordingly for the business to really take off. Many don’t do well on eBay because they don’t follow some basic logic rules.