Now that you’ve started using eBay, know what you want to sell, have started researching and buying it and are comfortable with the whole process, it’s time to start making money!
Unlike most “markets” where research is hard to come by or expensive, eBay makes it incredibly easy to see how the market for your particular products is doing – you can watch other auctions live, and more importantly, you can see everything that happened on eBay for the last 90 days.
If you wanted to open a bakery on the main street of your town and wondered “How many muffins get bought in this town every weekday morning” you’d almost certainly not get a good answer to that.
If you want to sell, for example, dehumidifiers on eBay, you can easily do a search of completed auctions for items like yours and see all kinds of incredible information like how many sold, how quickly, and at what prices. |
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So that is the most important aspect of selling on eBay – doing a little legwork to understand your market.
Also keep in mind that if a relatively obscure item sells for a high price to one person, everyone who has one of those to sell will list it, trying to get the high price. Outrageously high prices for relatively obscure items are often because one collector of something decides in one moment they “need” it – which may or may not influence the general pricing trend.
Also, as a seller, your main concern is problematic, fake, or non-paying bidders.
Ebay allows you to control who can bid on your auctions both through automatic rule-making (you can require bidders to have a PayPal account, for example) or through simply stating your own policies – no bidders with less than a feedback rating of 10, for instance.
You’ll find your own strategy but our general advice is this:
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Check the range of pricing your item or items like it have sold for, and you’re your price/reserve in that range
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Start with low opening required bids, like 99 cents or $1
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Consider avoiding zero-feedback bidders
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Consider avoiding bidders with more than 1 or 2 negatives
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Consider avoiding bidders from foreign countries with a lot of financial fraud, such as Indonesia and parts of Africa (international shipping can be a hassle also, we’d recommend starting with US only auctions)
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Consider requiring a PayPal account for bidders even if you accept or prefer other forms of payment (it means they have a credit card and bank account, at minimum!)
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Use the standard auction lengths, typically one week – unless you have a reason to have a shorter or longer auction.
You can set your auctions to automatically begin at a specific time (currently this will cost you 10 cents per auction) – the advantage is if you have many listings it may easier to have them all close at once each week.
Next: Marketing on eBay
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