Other Selling Sites If you want to skip the auction format, there are a few sites let you sell your merchandise at a fixed pricekind of like selling an item with a Buy It Now price or in an eBay Store. Amazon ... [full story]

Other Online Auction Sites While eBay is far and away the largest online auction site today, it's not the only one. You can use several other online auctions, many of which feature lower fees than you pay to eBay. (Some even ... [full story]

Utilizing a Prepackaged Storefront The easiest way to create an online store-front is to let somebody else do it for you. Several of the big auction services' sites offer prepackaged web storefronts you can use to sell both auction and nonauction merchandise. ... [full story]

Building Your Own Merchant Site from Scratch Prepackaged storefronts are fine, but if you want a truly full-featured web storefront, independent of stock layouts and generic checkout systems, you'll need to build your own e-commerce website from scratch. This is a ... [full story]

Earn Referral Fees There's an added incentive for spreading your eBay Store URL around to as many websites as possible. That's because you earn eBay credit when you refer people from other sites to your eBay Store. Earning credit is as simple ... [full story]

Promoting Your eBay Store One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don't promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for ... [full story]

Promoting Your eBay Store One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don't promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for ... [full story]

How to Set Up an eBay Store Opening your own eBay Store is as easy as clicking through eBay's setup pages. There's nothing overly complex involved; you'll need to create your store, customize your pages (otherwise known as your virtual storefront), ... [full story]

The Costs of Running an eBay Store Naturally, opening an eBay Store costs money. (eBay isn't in this for the betterment of mankind, after all.) You pay a monthly fee to be an eBay Store merchant, choosing from three subscription levels, ... [full story]

Do You Qualify? Just about any seller can open his or her own eBay Store. All you have to do is meet the following criteria: Be a registered eBay seller, with credit card on file Have a feedback rating of 20 or more, ... [full story]

Benefits of Opening Your Own eBay Store Why would you want to open your own eBay Store? Well, it certainly isn't for casual sellers; you have to set up your own web page and keep the store filled with merchandise, both ... [full story]

What Is an eBay Store? An eBay Store, like the one shown in Figure 27.1, is a web page where you can sell fixed-price items that are not currently up for auction on eBay. Your eBay Store also contains all the ... [full story]

Obtaining Additional Exposure with eBay Express eBay Express (express.ebay.com) is an odd bird. As you can see in Figure 26.1, eBay Express is eBay's attempt to provide a fixed-priced marketplace for buyers intimidated or otherwise put off by the online auction ... [full story]

How to Become a PowerSeller The main eBay PowerSellers page (pages.ebay.com/services/buyandsell/welcome.html) offers more information about the PowerSellers program. This is also where you go if want to become a PowerSeller. But the thing is, you can't become a PowerSeller just by asking. ... [full story]

Linking from Other Sites to Your eBay Auctions One of the best ways to promote your eBay auctions is to include links to your auctions on as many other websites as you can. For example, if you have a separate web ... [full story]

Adding Photos to Your Item Listings When you have your photos properly edited, it's time to add photos to your item listings. The easiest way to add a photo to an item listing is to use eBay's picture management services and ... [full story]

Taking Effective Photos Taking an effective product photo takes a bit of effort; it's not quite as easy as snapping off a quick Polaroid. To take quality photos of the items you intend to sell, you'll need a decent digital camera ... [full story]

Ready-to-Use HTML Templates Let's look at two examples of graphically appealing ads created with simple HTML codes. You can use these codes exactly as printed in your own listings. Just copy the codecharacter for characterinto the Enter Your Own HTML tab ... [full story]

Creating Better-Looking Item Listings Now it's time for the fun stuffmaking your item listings look more attractive. Yes, we're talking style over substance, but style draws the eyeballs. So let's look at the various ways you can make your listings stand ... [full story]

Writing an Effective Item Listing You can't neglect the basics. It's a fact that the better written and more effective your listing title and description, the more successful your auction will be. It's just like advertising copy: Great copy produces the ... [full story]

Choosing Listing Enhancements When you're creating an item listing, eBay provides all sorts of listing "enhancements" you can use to make your listing stand out from the millions of others currently running. All of these listing options cost extra, above and ... [full story]

Selecting the Right Pricing Option As you learned way back in Chapter 1, "So You Want to Start an eBay Business...," when you have an item to sell, you can choose to sell it in one of several different ways. While ... [full story]

Picking the Right Category Picking the right category sounds simple, and it used to be a bigger deal than it is today. When eBay was a lot smaller, potential buyers used to browse through the various categories to see what was ... [full story]

Choosing a Different Start Time eBay also lets you choose a specific start time for your auctionwhich, of course, also becomes your auction's end time. By default, an eBay auction starts as soon as the item listing is placed, so if ... [full story]

Selecting the Right Auction Length The first option we'll examine is one that, in most configurations, doesn't cost you a thing. eBay lets you choose from five different lengths for your auctions: 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 days. The first ... [full story]

Selling Internationally Even though most U.S. sellers sell to U.S. buyers (and most Irish sellers sell to Irish buyers, and most Japanese sellers sell to Japanese buyers, and so on), eBay is a global marketplace. This is a good thing because ... [full story]

Other Tricks for Improving Item Sell-Through Starting price and end time aren't the only factors in determining auction success. Let's look at a few other tricks you can use to juice up your close rate and selling price. Offer a Discount for ... [full story]

Determining the Best Days and Times to List Another big factor in how successful your auction will be is when your auction startsbecause that affects when your auction ends. If you start a seven-day auction at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday, ... [full story]

Setting a Pricing Strategy The first thing you can do to affect the results of your auctions is to set an initial bid price that attracts the maximum number of bidders. It's a tricky process, though. Set your price too high ... [full story]

Another Option: Software Tools Many eBay sellers prefer to manage their auctions offline, on their own timewithout being tied to a single service. If you're more of a do-it-yourself kind of seller, you might want to check out some of the ... [full story]

eBay Selling Manager Pro As you just read, eBay Selling Manager isn't perfect. One of its biggest problems is that you pretty much have to manage one auction at a time; it lacks features that let you manage multiple auctions in ... [full story]

eBay Selling Manager eBay Selling Manager (pages.ebay.com/selling_manager/) is another official eBay auction management toolthis one web-based, not a separate software program. When you subscribe to Selling Manager, the Selling tab of your My eBay page is transformed into a Selling Manager ... [full story]