10 Tips for your eBay business
eBay is great if you are just starting out and want to avoid the expense of setting up an ecommerce website in the interim period. It attracts huge amount of visitors looking for a diverse range of products and you can be up and running in less than an hour!
- Test the market, eBay is a great way to test your product before going through the expense of setting up an ecommerce website, but to ensure your listings get any traffic you must ensure that your pricing strategy is correct and that you experiment with a variety of different listing formats. Try www.Terapeak.com to analyse what is being sold on eBay at the minute and for what price.
- Set up a shop, it is estimated that by setting up a shop you can increase your sales by approx 15%, to start with you can use eBay’s tools rather than going to the expense of hiring a designer to do it for you. Shop costs vary significantly, at the time of writing this article a Basic shop costs £14.99 per month, Featured - £49.99 per month and an Anchor shop £349.99. Each shop offers its own advantages but to start off with a basic shop will be sufficient. If you plan to have a large amount of listings then you will find it becomes financially viable to pay the higher fixed monthly rate. Should you business grow it is a wise idea to create a professional looking shop such as: http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/BuyJeansOutlet which cost around £200, well worth it I am sure you will agree.
- Use Selling Manager Pro, this designed to organise your sales and you are able to automate a variety of tasks such as confirmation of winning an item to informing a customer when an item has been dispatched. If you subscribe to a Featured Shop or above this service is included in the package otherwise it costs £4.99 a month, but well worth it, if set up correctly it will maintain stock and sales records and notify you when running low on a particular product.
- Use Multi Variation Listings, this is a relatively new addition to eBay and is to date only available in certain categories, for example if you were selling jeans you are able to list different colour and sizes in one listing not only will this save you huge amounts of time (as you no longer have to list everything separately) but also save you money in terms of listing fee’s. eBay also base search position on the popularity of an item by looking at conversion rates, so it stands to reason the more variations offered in a listing the higher your conversion rate and consequently the higher it will appear in the search listings.
- Photographs, your pictures should be clear, and large enough so that the customer can fully identify what they will be purchasing, if they are blurry or lack definition it is likely that your sales will be effected, also if you have a shop there is no additional costs to upload 12 images so you might as well take full advantage!
- Power Seller & Top Seller Status, these have undergone some significant changes over the last 12 months. Power seller status is awarded when you reach a certain level of monthly sales and maintain a good feedback status. If you meet the highest feedback rating you will be awarded Top Seller status, this entitles you to some hefty discounts and is well worth it. The criteria is continually evolving so it is best to look on the eBay site to see current qualifying criteria.
- Feedback, is where eBay really stands out, customers can not only leave a commnent but can grade you out of five based on their experience shopping with you, this is linked directly to the level of discounts you can achieve and more importantly will inform potential customers what kind of service they can expect should they decide to purchase from you. Feedback has no changed so that only the buyer can leave negative feedback to ensure a fair and robust system.
- Titles & Best Match, as with everything on the web, titles are key! eBay now use an algorithm that looks not only at the title but also at ‘best match’ which as mentioned above is based on popularity and conversion rates. It is worth experimenting with your titles by listing the same product but with slightly different titles and try and measure the outcomes. It is also important that you have sufficient detail in your item description including your refund/exchange policy and any specific item information that may increases your chances of making a sale.
- Buy it Now and Auction Listings, these are the two main forms of listing, both have different benefits and it is sometimes a wise idea to use a mixture. Auction listings are when a buyer can bid on an item to a price point they are willing to pay, the advantage of this style is that they are likely to receive more traffic as they move up the search ranking as they move closer to the auction end, the disadvantage of course is that you might end up selling the item for less than you would like, you can of course set the starting price higher but this will impact on your listing fees and also potentially effect visitors. Buy it now is very much like any other ecommerce site, the price is set and the customer pays for the item immediately, it is important to note that your listing may not appear very high up on the search listing if your title is inappropriate.
- Paypal, this is the ideal and safe manner to accept payment through eBay, it is not the cheapest method but it is certainly the most efficient. You can set up an account within minutes and then follow the instructions to verify your account; this will remove any restrictions that might be placed i.e. sending and receiving limits etc. All payments can be transferred into your account within 2-3 days and you are protected against fraudulent transaction as long as you follow PayPal’s seller protection guidelines.