Secrets to selling on ebay?

Everything else
21

Thanks for all the advice, esp. Shift6!

So the main bullet points seem to be:

-Work on the title and layout, with lots of pictures, try to link to bigger pictures (hmtl ack!).
-Be very descriptive and precise with all terms and shipping details.
-No raping.
-Start seven day auctions so that they start and end of early evening Sundays.
-Try to work in as many keywords early as possible.
-Again, no raping.

Do you add a handling charge normally or is that considered poor form; ie, shipping is whatever, handling tack on 2$ extra? Or just bite the 15min of time?

And also,
-No raping. Can’t i throw in a little Ivan Kupala?

22

You first have to see if like items are selling. If you search and don’t find any monitors or NICs for sale, chances are you won’t sell yours even with 7 day auctions, excellent keywords, titles, and no raping.

23

Don’t hate. It isn’t broken, it’s in “test mode”. Anyone with some time and electrical know-how will probably be able to fix it, especially with the included tech manual. If not, there’s a $20 kit called a “get well kit” which Tempest enthusiasts know about, and which fixes most documented Tempest problems.

Besides, the guy with the winning bid is local-ish. So he’s not going to have a $200+ shipping bill and can be more aggressive on his bid price.

Separate or together; hard to say. The key is what other people are doing, and how much they are getting in each case.

I prefer Fedex whenever possible, USPS otherwise, but I personally give the buyer the option. If they want to pay $15 extra for UPS or whatever, that’s fine. Shipping the arcade games is the obvious exception to this. Heheh.

I’d be happy to PM you my “template”. All the html is already in there, you just need to edit the content. Note that if you use IE, eBay has a separate editor tool that comes up and you have to hunt for a “raw” html one to use my code. Or if you use Moz/Fox, it will be the normal one. :)

Large and detailed descriptions are best. Also be honest with the flaws in the item if there are any. People know they’re buying used shit (unless you say it’s new in box or something) so just tell them where the wear and tear is. Seriously, 99% of the people on eBay are nice enough.

A good overall rule, yeah, although I’m a “Monday night” fan. But getting the weekend in there right near the end is huge.

Well the eBay search engine doesn’t sort results by relevance, the way an internet search engine does. The important point is getting the most relevant key words in the title. For instance, if I was selling a P4 (someone in this thread mentioned it), I’d try desperately to fit all these into the title of the auction: “P4 3Ghz Pentium4 Pentium 4 Intel CPU x86”. In fact, that would be a decent title. It looks kind of weird, but people are used to seeing it. I don’t waste those precious 55 characters with “L@@K!!” and other nonsense. :)

Then (what I do) in the body get those words again plus anything related. Also get common variations on spelling (such as hyphenated words; include a non-hyphenated version and a compound version). Some people also use common misspellings, but to me it looks sloppy so I don’t do that.

Depends. If I’m selling say a manual or booklet, I ship it in a nice, padded brown envelope from OfficeMax. Those fucking things run $1.50 each (even in packs). So if it costs $5 to ship the item to the winning bidder, I’ll tell him $6.50. I don’t think that’s immoral, but I also don’t charge for “my time” or anything. Heheh.

Now when I ship my arcade games, they go out on palletes and covered in bubble wrap, tape, cardboard, etc. Most of this I scrounge from behind Home Depot and such, although I always buy bubble wrap and tape. One time I also bought some strap-downs from Home Depot to keep it tight on the pallet. When I quote shipping to the buyer, I include the Forward Air price plus the cost of the bubble wrap (and the straps, as applicable).

Well it’s pretty hard to “rape” someone as long as you fully disclose everything up front, but what noun said specifically about shipping is true. What I do is weigh the item I’m selling plus the shipping container. I then use fedex.com or whatever and find out how much it is to ship that item, ground service, to the farthest place in the US from where I live (Miami is a good target for me). This will give me some price, say $8.74. I then include the price of packing material, if it applies, and round up to the next dollar. So if shipping + packing would be $10.24, I quote $11 as the standard shipping price, with the caveat that I only looked it up on Fedex. I think people are fine with that.

But there are people who sell small, light items or books/videos (which get a discount rate if you use USPS and tell them it’s media material) at total bullshit shipping rates. When I’ve seen one I was interested in buying, I’ll e-mail the guy and just say “how much is shipping to my zip code if you use USPS at the media rate?” Either I don’t hear back at all (forget bidding on that item) or I get a new rate and I’ll bid.

24

Thread necro!

I have not used eBay in at least ten years, and when I did I only bought stuff, never sold. So… I noticed I have a 1988 paperback in vg condition that I bought at a used book store for a buck, and it is selling on eBay for $50 or more. (It’s this book, but this is not my listing).

So since I have no real interest in actually ‘playing’ this, I thought I’d make a few bucks profit. Any tips on how to post/sell this? Things to beware of? I am not sure if the 16-year old advice in this thread still applies.

25

I don’t trust Ebay much these days, it seems to be either just regular vendors using it, or scam artists, but very few amatuers trying to unload something. That being said, I’ve been considering trying to sell my original boxed set of DnD manuals, along with Blackmoor, Grayhawk and (is it?) Eldrich Wizardry? All in good condition. But there’s no way they sell for what gets listed on there. I figure what people ask for things, and what they really sell for, are two very different things.

26

You can always filter to completed listings and see what shows up. For that book the price is right, but the sales volume is… low.

Benny’s right though, eBay isn’t really catering to the small time sellers these days. And with the combined eBay + Paypal fees you’re making about $42 on a $50 sale before shipping costs. Not factoring in that eBay sides with buyers nearly 100% of the time so if you get someone who wants your book for free well… they’ll probably get a free book. Though for a niche buy like that I’d imagine it’s less likely.

If you have a local site to post it on I’d go that route first. Personally if the book sells for $50 on eBay and you’d be getting $35-40 after it’s all said and done I would be happy to sell for $30 locally and not deal with all that hassle. YMMV of course.

27

When I got into disc golf recently I started selling rare discs from mystery packs, there wasn’t that much to it. The platform handles pretty much everything, though if you want to be efficient pirateship.com is the cheapest way to get shipping done. I buy quite a bit of stuff from eBay as well, and as long as you aren’t expecting something crazy it’s pretty good. I did try to buy one thing that I knew very well was 99% a scam since it was half the price it should be, and when it was all said and done eBay credited me back with no fuss.

28

This is the way I’ll go, thanks. It also occurred to me that BGG marketplace might be a place to try, it is a gamebook after all.

29

Everything on Reddit is called Exchange or Swap, you can probably search and find Litrpg Swap or somesuch. I buy and sell there as well, and generally speaking it works fine. I would hesitate to sell something like a Rolex, but that book is too specific to be a scammer target.