Selling on eBay.. any advice?

[handmaidenofprincesses]

Hi there everyone,

I'm considering selling some of my old Star Wars stuff on eBay :yoda: in the hopes that it might help finance a trip to CA to visit my relatives this summer (with a possible detour to DL for my birthday of course!)

This stuff has been sitting in my basement for ages, so it's not as though I'll miss it... I'm just not sure what to do when selling it. I've never actually sold anything on eBay or any other online site before. I was just wondering if anyone on here had a little more experience and some advice for me before I go and do something dumb :blush:

Thanks in advance!!

[luvmyboys4ever]

1-Do your research on each item on Ebay. If there are many of the same items and they aren't selling, don't bother putting it up. By looking each item up you'll get a feel of what sells and what doesn't.
2-If you know the item will sell for what you hope, start the auction at $0.99. It will bring in more people and hopefully start a bidding war.
3-If you are not sure the item will sell for what you hope, put a reserve on that item!!! There's nothing worse than selling an $80 item for $9.99, believe me...I know :( Classic rookie mistake.
4-Do not charge an arm and a leg for shipping & handling. Customers do not appreciate feeling ripped off. If it costs $1.50 to ship and you charge $6.00, your feedback will suffer.
5-To keep your costs down, use Priority Mail. The boxes, labels and tape are all free and can be ordered off of their website. Then, all you have to buy is the packing material. I find bulk tissue paper is inexpensive and works just fine.
6-Communication is key to every auction. If you plan on making this a way to make extra money, it's important to keep the customers happy.

Hope this helps :)

I started out on Ebay, just selling stuff I had around the house. Now, I list one day a week(5-6hrs) and make between $250-$300 a week. Not bad for a total of 7-8 hours of "work" a week. This enables me to stay home and volunteer and still pay for the not so little things, like a Disney vacation :thumbsup:

[DizneyRox]

You need to develop a profile that people will trust. The first few items WILL sell low until people know you are trustworthy. So, sell the cheap stuff first, it will help get you what you want for the bigger items.

Pictures are good as well as a detailed description of what it is you are selling. Nothing worse than now knowing what you're going to get to keep the bids away.

I don't bother with any of the extra fee stuff ebay likes to advertise. I haven't found it to be any draw to my items. People want what they want.

Finally, I'll go against the grain on the reserve. While it's not fun to let something go for what you WANT, if people aren't willing to pay that, then it's not worth what you want. I'd find other ways/friends to get the price to where you want it.

[pixiesmimi]

Actually getting people to run your bids up is illegal.

List the item starting at the lowest price you will take for it. There is no sense in losing money on it or giving it away. Take pictures with a good digital camera. If you are going to list quite a few things, use a service like Sellersourcebook.com to set up your template with description and pictures and launch on eBay from there. All in all, it is more convenient and cheaper than using the eBay services for templates, pictures, etc. But like said above, do your research first. Click on buy, advanced search, and put in completed auctions along with a descriptive title of your item. It will pull up the items like it that have sold and show you how much each sold for or didn't sell. Use that as a basis for your pricing. Set up a seller's account but also go in and buy some things you are interested in at low prices to get your feedback built up to give you accredidation. The higher your positive feedback, the more bidders or buyers you will get. Be sure and leave a good feedback for those you have bought from or sold to so they will leave you one. Don't leave a negative unless it was just a horrible situation because they will retaliate. Look at other auctions and see how they do their descriptions and pictures, etc. Read some of the tutorials on eBay about getting started. Good Luck! It is addicting. :)

[luvmyboys4ever]

Don't leave a negative unless it was just a horrible situation because they will retaliate.

You can't leave negatives as a seller anymore. Not even a neutral :jaw: It's postive or nothing. Not a good change in my opinion. I should be able to leave a negative if someone doesn't pay...it's the only reason I have ever left one and it's only been a couple of times. It let's other sellers know to watch out for this one, they might not pay.

As an established seller...over 550 and counting :)...I leave feedback after I get a feedback, only because I was tired of leaving 10 feedbacks and getting 1 in return. People get busy and forget. But, I do clearly state that in the auction description, so my buyers are fine with that.

I do agree with selling your least expensive first and buying items to build up feedback.

[NotaGeek]

Be smart about shipping costs. While I agree and as a seller you shouldn' try to supplement the sale price with high shipment, I would really consider boxing whatever you are trying to sell and weight it and use exact dimensions to get a shipping cost ... I have burned myself on shipping and ended up paying almost as much for shipping as I got selling ... not fun.

[luvmyboys4ever]

Be smart about shipping costs. While I agree and as a seller you shouldn' try to supplement the sale price with high shipment, I would really consider boxing whatever you are trying to sell and weight it and use exact dimensions to get a shipping cost ... I have burned myself on shipping and ended up paying almost as much for shipping as I got selling ... not fun.


Exactly!!!! Buy a small digital scale on Ebay or where you find the best price! For $30, including S&H I got a scale that weighs up to 45 pounds and as little as a gram. Worth every penny and has lasted years on one 9volt.

[beksy]

I've never sold anything on e-bay but I have bought quite a bit (I'm more of a buyer than a seller unfortunately and my house shows it!) so I can tell you what, as a buyer, will draw me in and what turns me off. I agree that pictures are a must. If there are two sellers with the same item but only one has a pic, I'm going to go with the one with the picture. Also, I'm a sucker for the low starting bids and once I've started, I stay with that instead of looking around for other sellers with that item and have gotten into bidding wars because of it. I really like it when the seller will combine shipping even though they have it figured so they still (usually!) come out ahead. It just seems like they are doing me a favor and I'm more likely to go back to them. I don't like it when the postage is obviously marked up and if its by too much I look elsewhere. Finally, the one thing that I don't do is bid on items with a reserve. It's just my personal preference but I want to know how low the seller is willing to go instead of watching the bidding to see when the reserve has been met and find that it is out of my range and I've been wasting my time so if the seller has a reserve price I don't even bother. Again, these are just my personal preferences as a reformed e-bay shopaholic! Currently all my extra money is tied up in school and Disney trips so I'm reformed for awhile! :blush:

[Ian]

You can't leave negatives as a seller anymore. Not even a neutral :jaw: It's postive or nothing. Not a good change in my opinion. I should be able to leave a negative if someone doesn't pay...it's the only reason I have ever left one and it's only been a couple of times. It let's other sellers know to watch out for this one, they might not pay.

As an established seller...over 550 and counting :)...I leave feedback after I get a feedback, only because I was tired of leaving 10 feedbacks and getting 1 in return. People get busy and forget. But, I do clearly state that in the auction description, so my buyers are fine with that.

I do agree with selling your least expensive first and buying items to build up feedback.I totally agree. In fact, I've scaled back my eBay selling simply because I feel like I have very limited fallback if I get a non-paying bidder. I've got a feedback rating over 1,200, but I just feel like eBay really doesn't do enough to protect their sellers ... the folks who do, after, generate all their revenue.

But anway ... all the advice given above is terrific. I especially recommend building your feedback rating before attempting to launch into any sort of big scale selling. People aren't going to pay top dollar from a seller they don't have confidence in.

Maybe you have a friend with good feedback who could sell for you? There are companies out there that will sell things for you, but they normally take a huge chunk of the profits so I'd recommend avoiding them.

Also good advice is to make sure you cover yourself on shipping costs. If it's a reasonable sized item and doesn't weight too much, then Priority Mail is a great idea. I think you can mail up to a pound for like $4 or something, with 2-3 day estimated delivery. I use Priority for almost everything and the free packing materials are a big help in keeping costs down.

But be careful ... oversized or odd sized items can really cost an arm and a leg to ship. I've gotten burned on that a few times, once notably when I sold an animation cel that was pretty large. I charged $30 for shipping, but it ended up being too big for USPS to ship (well ... they would have but they wanted something like $120!!). I ended up having to pay UPS and it came to almost $90! :eek:

Oops ... live and learn ...

It's also very good advice to make sure you know exactly what the going rate for a given item is. Sometimes, during the listing process, eBay will even give you the average of the last 10 items like yours that sold. That only works if they can readily identify it, though, so you may have to do that legwork yourself first.

Honestly, the best thing you can do is protect yourself in terms of how much you get for each item. There is nothing more frustrating than having to sell an item to someone for $8 when you know most of the like items have sold for $50. It happens more than you'd think, trust me.

I've had the best results with setting the opening bid price at 99 cents and letting it fly, but that doesn't work for everything. For bigger ticket items with limited appeal, where a bidding war is unlikely, I typically set the opening bid about 10% less than what I hope to get for the item. Sometimes I'll actually do a fixed price listing, though.

You started off on the right foot by asking for help. If you follow the advice you've gotten here from everyone, you'll be fine.