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"eBay Selling Coach" - 5 new articles

1. 5 Ways to Increase Profits on eBay
2. How to Use Twitter for eBay Marketing - Part 3
3. Flipping eBay Auctions - I Really Do This!
4. Looking for Estate Sale Finds to Sell on eBay?
5. eBay Seller Success Story - Camel Hair Coat
6. More Recent Articles
7. Search eBay Selling Coach

5 Ways to Increase Profits on eBay

I joined Griff and Lee Mirabal on eBay Radio this week and discussed "5 Ways to Increase eBay Profits." This segment is about 10 minutes long. These are easy things you can actually do on a daily basis. Increasing profits is not always about finding inventory at the lowest price - there are many other strategies for cutting costs to increase profit. Click here to hear the audio segment.

Happy Selling!

How to Use Twitter for eBay Marketing - Part 3

Are you getting active on Twitter? Make this a daily activity. (15 minutes or so a couple of times a day. Don't get sucked in for hours.) When using social media for business, they key is to do a little bit every day. Keep following people. Some will follow you back. This segment will focus on how to "tweet" correctly.

One of the biggest things to keep in mind about Twitter is that it's a conversation. The fun is talking to one another. Reply often and be a real person with VALUABLE information to share. Everyone knows something they can share. Be nice, be professional, be sympathetic, be funny, and just be REAL. You don't have to just talk about your eBay store, I mean, you have other interests, right?

Don’t post updates from your eBay store, or otherwise, non-stop. Maybe a few a day, scattered here and there. I try to post mine at least an hour apart. Twitter users will stop following you if you update too often. Don’t be annoying. You can use TweetDeck to automate tweets at future times.

You want to entice your followers to click in your links and check them out. But make sure that your links are to quality information or something they can really benefit from, or people will stop following you.

Talk TO people, not at them. Interact with people by giving them an @ when you see something interesting on your feed. Maybe you will see a question you can answer. Maybe you will see a local news story that you can comment on. Or something makes you laugh. Give the user an @ reply and talk to them.

Click here to see the rest of the posts in the Twitter for eBay series.

Flipping eBay Auctions - I Really Do This!

You might remember my post a few weeks ago about "Local Sources for Inventory, I Really Use Them!" Now I am going to show you another cool way to make money flipping auctions. You can do this from home, in your pajamas, 24 hours a day, without ever leaving your chair.

The purpose of this exercise is to find good, expensive items that will sell well, that are very badly presented by people who don't know what they are doing. Find it, buy it, present it better, resell it.

1) Think of an item you have sold that brought you a good profit, or maybe one that you read about here on my blog. Let's use cycling jersey as an example. (That is on my "things to look for list.")

2) So I put "cycling jersey" in the search box on eBay and got thousands of results. Now, sort them by "ending soonest." We don't care what is going to happen 5 days from now, look for items ending in the next few hours.

3) I found this listing, with many fatal errors. Click on the photo to enlarge it an look at these issues:



a) no brand name in title
b) the keyword "cycling" not used in title
c) no measurements of garment given on listing
d) background of photo is distracting and unattractive (ok, it is really awful)
e) no returns accepted (affects your sales!)
f) shipping time is 7 business days (I can do better!)

According to my Hammertap research, I can sell this same item for around $20. I can buy this item for $8.99, retake the picture, rewrite the listing, and make a profit of about $10 for about 15 minutes of work. $10 for 15 minutes of work equals a pay rate of $40 an hour. That is called working smart instead of working hard. $40 an hour working from home, in my pajamas if I want. I use a free auction sniper program to set up my bids and walk away. (There is a reason not to bid until the last seconds, which is what a sniper program does.) This takes me about a hour a week and I make several hundred dollars a month with this technique.

I do this weekly and many times make 3-4 times what I paid for a item, just because I present it better, do the research, use more powerful and popular keywords, ship faster, and have more accommodating customer service policies.

This strategy is also called eBay Arbitrage. I found a great eBook that explains exactly how to do this. Some people do this full time and it is their only source of eBay inventory. Click here to check out the eBook and add this technique to your eBay bag of tricks.

Happy Selling!

Looking for Estate Sale Finds to Sell on eBay?

Are you into estate sales? Or maybe you want to learn about estate sales, but have no idea where to start? Some people just love the thrill of the hunt and looking and all that old stuff. It can be fun.

AuctionZip is a cool website that provides information on local estate sales and live auctions. Just enter your zip code, and you will get a calendar like this:

Then, click on the links on the calendar to find out where and when the auctions take place. It will look like this:

Then, click on the auction you are interested, and you get all the details, including an inventory of what will be there. It looks like this:

Now for the best part. Click on VIEW PHOTO GALLERY (if offered), and you can preview what is going to be up for sale. It looks like this:


So, for example, I see they have a lot of vintage books. I am not a book expert. I also see that they have some vintage gas station maps. I know about those - they can go for between $50 and $100 on eBay depending on the year and where they came from. This is where you will spend some time researching the items before you go to the estate sale to figure out what you should spend and how much you can sell the items for. I call this eBay recon (reconnaissance).Exploring in order to gain information. And you can do this from home. So check out AuctionZip.com to see what is happening in your area. You might find some real gems hiding out there.

Happy Selling!

eBay Seller Success Story - Camel Hair Coat

Tammy sent in this success story:

"Hi Suzanne, I wanted to give you an update on the Camel hair coat I e-mailed you about earlier this month. I paid $7.99 for it at the Goodwill thrift store, it was in mint condition and sold it on eBay for $244.00!! Here is the link if you'd like to share it on your blog. (By the way... I would have never known camel hair was something to look for if it wasn't for listening to your podcasts! Your information has helped me greatly.)"

Men's Camel Hair Coat

Wow, outstanding sale!! Yes, camel hair is a great find and sells very well on eBay. For those new to my blog, click here to check out my podcasts, especially the episodes regarding selling thrift store finds and used clothing. There is a huge demand for gently used items on eBay.

If you have a seller success story you would like to share, send it in to me at ebaycoach@yahoo.com.

Happy Selling!





Learn more about selling used thrift store items on eBay - check out my colleague Brigitte's book - Thrift Store Goldmines

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