A Professional eBay Auction in 5 Simple Steps

When a user browses through the vast amount of listings for a particular item on eBay what makes them choose one seller over another? There are a number of factors that can affect their decision, the most obvious being price and the seller’s feedback. But assuming that these are similar, as they often are in highly competitive situations, what sways a buyer? The description, or lack of in some cases.

A professional looking description will get you one step closer to a sale, so to help you on your get that sale, I have produced a list of 5 simple ways you can improve your description.

Check your spelling

If you can’t even spell the item that your selling right, why should a buyer trust you to deliver the item? A poorly spelt description looks rushed and is also one of the major signs of a scam (since many scammers are based in non-English countries). Take care over your spelling and you might see that extra sale coming in.

Turn off Caps Lock

There’s nothing worse than a description written entirely in caps. If you must use caps, use it only to emphasise a word or phrase, not an entire sentence. Personally, I prefer using bold, its more noticeable, and in my opinion less annoying.

Just because you can use different colours for text doesn’t mean you should

If you give people a feature, there’s always going to be someone who uses it just because it’s there. What those people don’t seem to be able to understand is that you should never change the font colour every sentence. Text colour should used uniformly over a description and should be easy to read over any background colour you may have.

Have a decent picture

A decent picture is a must, and it gives you the opportunity to show any blemishes. Don’t try to avoid pointing out these blemishes, it’s a lot better for everyone involved if it’s clear what exactly is wrong with the item, whether it’s a scratch, mark or fault. If a buyer does not know the extent of a problem, then they will probably not risk their money with it.

Use a template

A template can give your description some organisation, as well as some aesthetic goodness. Don’t underestimate the effect of a good template, though I’d advise not going with eBay’s own templates, since all they do is add a border and do not help with the layout.


So there you are, 5 simple ways to make your eBay auction more professional. You’ll probably find that you’re already doing most of them, but if you happen to be guilty of neglecting one of these, I’d advise that you fix that right away.

Selling on eBay - How to Save Money

To get this blog started I'll post an article that I've recently written on how to save money when your selling on eBay:

Selling on eBay - How to Save Money

Everything in this article is perfectly legit and this article simply serves as a guide to avoid unnecessary fees on eBay when selling an item.


Image Hosting

With that out of the way I’ll move onto my first money saving tip. First of all I’d suggest going with a free image hosting service such as Pict.com instead of using eBay’s own image hosting. You can then add these pictures to your auction by selecting the Self Hosting tab when you go to add a picture to your auction. This might not save you much money in a single auction, but it will allow you to add as many pictures to your auction as you like, without having to keep one eye on the price of all these photos. The more a buyer knows about a particular item, the safer they feel buying that item, this is one reason why writing a detailed description, describing the item, boosts sales.


Auction or Fixed Price?

This next method involves a bit of effort on your part since you need to check the fees page on eBay. Load that page up and compare the differences in fees between fixed price listings (buy it now without the auction) and auctions.

You’ll see that eBay charges different insertion fees (the amount it costs to list the item) for auctions and fixed price listings and also charges different amounts for the final value fee (the amount of money eBay gets from the price the buyer paid).

You’ll also see that they even charge different amounts depending on what sort of item your listing. If you want to sell a computer in a fixed price listing, you’ll be paying 6% of the final value for the first $50 ($6), 3.75% of the next $950 and 1% there after.

Compare this to selling a video game in a fixed price listing where you’ll be charged 15% of the final value fee for the first $50 and 5% after that. In this case you’ll be far better off to go with an auction where there’s a fee of 8.75% for the first $25 and 3.5% for the next $950.


Avoid Paypal for local pickup items

For local pickup items, paypal is both unnecessary and costly. Paypal charge 2.9% of the transaction amount for the first $3000 (3.4% in the UK) and if you can avoid this charge by getting customers to pay in cash on collection, then you can save yourself a lot of money.

Before you do this though you need to consider the buyer’s preference for paypal since paypal offers protection for the buyer, so I would recommend you still keep paypal as an option for your buyer but offer some sort of discount for paying in cash (obviously less than what paypal would charge you).


Don’t Place a Reserve Price Unless it is $200-$285

Put simply, reserve prices are almost useless and unnecessary. If you don’t want to sell your item below a certain price then don’t start the auction below that. That said, if your reserve price is between $200 and $285 then you can save money by starting the auction at a very low price and putting in a reserve price rather than starting an auction at that price.


Use Free Templates

This goes hand in hand with the first point: use a free alternative to eBay’s own tools. Free templates look more professional than eBay’s own and often allow you to break down your description into different sections easily.


Look at eBay’s Fees page

Finally, if you’re really serious about cost cutting, then it would be a good idea to take a look at eBay’s fees page for yourself and decide what features you really need for your auction. For example, if your selling a lot of items in auctions do you really need them to last 10 days? Especially when most of the bidding comes in the last couple of hours.

I hope this article has been of some use to you, if it has don’t forget to tell someone about it.

I wrote this article to help promote my site ebay-template.com. I've submitted it to several article directories, with only articlesbase having processed it so far. I don't expect to get many visitors to my site from those articles, but hopefully the links will be useful in boosting my ranking on google.