With more than a billion listings for items to be sold on eBay, it can be a difficult marketplace for new sellers to penetrate into. If you’re planning on selling your things on eBay in order to make a decent profit then there are a couple of things you should know first. There are various strategies that you can follow in order to increase your odds of getting noticed and making a profitable sale.
You just have to remember that there are some variables like your pricing, counteroffers, shipping costs, and readjustments on prices that you’ll have to be mindful of. Once you master these things and develop a good understanding of what sells and what doesn’t, you’ll be making non-stop sales in no time. Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the key tips that you should remember in order to be a successful seller on eBay.
1. Utilize The Free Listings
When you sign up on eBay as a seller, you’ll be offered a number of free listings in order to sell your stuff. Most of the time, free listings are more than enough, but you have to be judicious about how you use them. Even if you’ve exhausted all of your free listings, you should hold your horses as eBay offers some form of promotion or offers to encourage the sellers to list more products. You should wait for a few days and keep an eye out for any possibility of gaining free listings before you pay for them, you have to understand that even eBay wants you to list more since this is how their business model operates.
2. Learn To Price Your Items
When new sellers list any item for sale, they usually don’t do the necessary research about the pricing and end up slapping on a price that they feel is justified. However, this is a sure-shot way to sell nothing or even worse, selling at a loss. It’s your duty as a seller to do adequate price checking before deciding on the final price of your products. Once you start comparing the prices that people are actually paying for the items that you’re selling, you’ll be able to consistently price your products right to churn out profits.
3. Play Around With The Listings
The time when you initiate your listings and the time when your auction ends is one of the key factors that can get you a lot of lucrative bids on your stuff. The timing is usually different depending on the time of the year, any upcoming festivities, or any other factor. You have to make sure that your listing gets the maximum number of views whenever you post it. Just remember that people are usually very active on Sunday evenings and moderately active on the weekdays, you should avoid the times during the weekend when people might be out shopping. You can go a step further and even try lowering your product’s price before the listing ends so that more potential buyers are attracted to it.
Photo by Merakist
4. Utilize SEO
For most beginners, this might come as a surprise, but SEO doesn’t only apply to search engines like Google. You can and you most probably should optimize your product’s description according to SEO guidelines before it goes live on eBay. SEO involves adding relevant keywords to the text so that your product can reach out to the targeted audience. You should also try to include long-tail keywords so that your product can have an even wider reach. It’s important that you study and research what SEO is since it can get a little complicated if you’re new to it. Optimizing your descriptions after conducting the proper keyword research will help you to rank higher on eBay than other sellers which will help you sell more products.
The above-mentioned tips are actually just the tip of the iceberg as there’s a lot more to learn and implement if you wish to dominate eBay and sell your stuff. Since eBay is its own enclosed ecosystem, you’ll have to learn its rules and how it works. Once you’re familiar with all the variables that combine together to affect your sales, you’ll be able to utilize the platform for gaining maximum benefits. There’s perhaps no other online platform larger than eBay for you to sell your products to such a wide audience. If you follow the above points, you’ll have at least a head start in selling things on eBay and the rest will come with time and practice.
Main Photo by Roberto Cortese
About the Author/s
Tom is a lifelong New Jersey resident, Rutgers and FDU alumni and the publisher of The Digest.
