eBay’s auction site is complex, and has its own tricks and quirks. On top of that, many of the individuals who buy and sell regularly on eBay have been doing so for years and are well acquainted with how the system works. Don’t start placing items up for sale without knowing what’s involved first. Be sure you read eBay’s User Agreement (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html) so you know what you can and can’t do. The following sections provide you with some more rules of thumb.

Set a Time Limit Time plays an important role in eBay sales. First of all, eBay is located in California, so the advertised time when auctions begin and end is in Pacific Standard Time. You have the following options:

- Three-day Three-day auctions work best for things that bidders are wild about because they’re the newest got-to-have-’em item. Three-day sales also work well around holiday time when shoppers are in a hurry to have items shipped to them.

- Five-day Five day auctions are also useful at holiday times when people are in too much of a hurry to buy at a seven-day or ten-day auction. They might also work well over holiday weekends such as Labor Day or Memorial Day. The only real advantage to a five-day auction is that it gives you a little more time to gather bids than the three-day variety.

- Seven-day Seven-day auctions are the “classic” and most popular variety on eBay.

By letting a sale go on for seven rather than three or five days, you give yourself time to get more bids and hopefully a higher price. Seven days gives buyers the opportunity to track a sale during the week and then place their final bids over the weekend, if you schedule it to end then.

- Ten-day Sometimes, one weekend is not enough for a sale. Many eBay sellers advocate the ten-day sales period even though it does incur an extra ten-cent fee.

- Buy It Now Whenever you list an item for sale, you are given the option of specifying a fixed price for it. Anyone who wants to pay that fixed price can buy the item at any time, no matter what the length of the sale is supposed to be. Rather than letting the market determine how high the price should go, you effectively put a limit on your profits by specifying a Buy It Now price. On the other hand, you can use a Buy It Now price to encourage bidders to buy an item immediately at a profit to you.

Build Customer Trust In any kind of e-commerce, the seller needs to build trust and confidence in buyers who never meet them in person. The one-on-one contact that the Internet provides can do a lot toward building such confidence: quick e-mail responses, speedy shipping, and honest descriptions all encourage buyers to check out your sales in future and keep bidding. When it comes to encouraging bids initially, the single best way you can develop trust is to develop a good feedback rating. That can only be done over time, by making a commitment to follow through quickly and honestly on all of your transactions, whether you are purchasing or selling. Any buyer can check your feedback rating by clicking on the feedback number that eBay lists next to your name. Your eBay ID card appears. Your goal is to have the sort of feedback as boomer1967, who is profiled earlier in this article. When it comes to gaining good feedback through selling, the two most important things you can do are things you might overlook at first: packing your merchandise carefully and shipping it out quickly. Because these two tasks are so important.

Provide Clear Images The online equivalent of placing your auction merchandise on a table so prospective customers can preview it before bidding is to open a digital version of the image in your Web browser window. The clarity of the image you see depends on the clarity of your computer monitor and the quality of your computer’s video card.

Because the image is broken down into tiny segments of digital information called pixels, and the visual details have been compressed into special graphics formats used on the Web in order to get them online, you don’t get a perfect representation of the image when you see it online. If you can provide more than one image, so much the better. There’s really no excuse not to present multiple views of an item, since digital cameras make photography so easy. decoray, an eBay seller profiled in Article 10, took five separate images of the head vase. Each image was sharp and well-lit and taken from a slightly different angle. The last image was of the label at the bottom of the vase.

Write Clear Descriptions No matter how clear the images are, there’s no substitute for your own knowledge, much of which is provided by or augmented by research. Part of the fun of creating auction listings, in my opinion, is taking the time to find out something about what you want to sell

- how old it is, how rare it is, and what makes it special. You can do your research at one of the manyWeb sites that describe antiques and collectibles, for instance. One of the best and easiest places to do research, though, is on eBay itself. Just go to the Search page (http://pages.ebay.com/search/items/search_adv.html), check the box next to Completed Items only, enter your search terms, and click the Search button.

You can search through past auctions for similar items. The main thing about auction descriptions is that they need to be complete and honest about any flaws or shortcomings in what you’re selling. You don’t want to get in a dispute with a buyer about a chip or crack in something that the buyer doesn’t discover until the package is unwrapped. Be honest up front, and you’ll avoid such surprises while building trust among your customers. (Besides, if a buyer really wants what you have to sell, chances are a few minor flaws won’t discourage them from bidding anyway.)

Decide How You Want to Be Paid

Watching bids come in on your item, exchanging chatty messages with other sellers in the eBay Café or the other eBay message boards, and researching your sales items can be so much fun that you forget about the real purpose of why you’re starting an eBay business. Why, you’re in this to make money, of course. Remember? The simplest and most effective way to accept payments from your customers is through credit cards. Your high bidder or buyer (for a Buy It Now item) submits a credit card number, either to you or to a payment service, the funds are transferred in a matter of minutes, and you can ship the item out immediately. When it comes to accepting credit cards, you have two general options.

Most eBay sellers sign up for an account with eBay’s own payment service, PayPal. PayPal streamlines the process of accepting credit card payments: Buyers tell PayPal to debit their credit card accounts, and PayPal receives the payments, subtracts its transaction fees, and forwards the money on to you. If you accept PayPal transactions, you get to add a standard logo to your auction listings, like the one shown in the following image.

On the other hand, some sellers don’t like PayPal because of the fees that it charges. They limit their payment options to accepting checks or money orders from their customers. This process takes longer because you depend on the mail to get you the money. If a personal check is involved, you’re safest if you delay shipping until the check actually clears the bank. Otherwise, if you’re planning to be in business for the long haul, you can establish a credit card merchant account, either with your own bank or with a company that specializes in providing such accounts.

Get the Hardware and Software You Need Before you can step up to the auction block, you need to connect to the Internet, and in order to do that, you need some basic computer hardware and software. Buying and selling through auctions, like other types of electronic commerce, don’t require a super-fast connection to the Internet. Nor do you have to spend thousands for a computer with the latest multimedia bells and whistles. A detailed description of hardware and software you do need is presented in Article 2, but here is an overview of the kinds of things you need to get started.

Buy the Right Computer and Monitor The good news is that buying and selling on eBay don’t require much computing overhead. In other words, if you can get on the Internet and surf Web sites, and if you have enough memory to run an image editing program as well, you should be able to sell successfully on eBay. However, the speed and quality of your computer, monitor, and other hardware can affect your auction experience. Hard disk storage space isn’t an issue for most new computers, which come with hard disk drives that store one or more gigabytes (GB) of data. (A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes (MB).) Any hard disk capable of storing a gigabyte or more should be fine for your needs.

(Many new computers come with hard disks of 10, 20, or more gigabytes these days.) If you’re buying a used computer, beware: Don’t come home with less than a gigabyte of storage space, or you’ll run out of room before you know it. Going online, using a Web browser, and shopping for auction treasures doesn’t require huge amounts of memory, but if you plan to put up goodies for sale, you need some additional software, and each program requires RAM. For example, you may want to do one of the following (all of which require RAM):

- Create a Web page A Web page or Web site can help advertise you or your business, if you have one.

- Capture digital images You’re likely to get more bids if you provide a clear computerized image of your items by scanning them or using a digital camera (see Article 8). Saving the images on your hard disk can quickly consume storage space unless you delete the image files as soon as the sale ends. Running a good image editing program like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements does require a lot of RAM, however. The cost of RAM keeps going down, so you should load your computer with as much as you can in order to streamline the process of creating auction listings, not to mention listening to Internet radio, downloading video clips, and the many other multimedia events that increasingly popular parts of the online user experience.

Pick a Scanner or Digital Camera Hardware requirements for auction sellers are a bit more extensive than those for buyers. You need a way to take images of the merchandise you want to sell and capture those images as digitized computer files. Including a clear, sharp image on your Web site greatly increases your chances of selling your product or service. You have several choices for digitizing:

- Taking photos with a digital camera and saving the image files on your computer.

- Taking photos with a conventional camera and then scanning them into your computer.

- Taking conventional prints or slides and having a photo lab send them back to you on CD-ROM or posting them online so you can copy or reuse them. After you have an image in the form of a computer document, you can transfer it to a Web site to let potential buyers take a look (see Article 8).

Install Web Page and Auction Software For the most part, the software you use to conduct transactions on eBay is the same as the software you use to view sales, bid on items, surf Web sites, and exchange e-mail with others. You don’t need special software to get your sales online, to format auction listings or Web pages that describe you or your business, or edit photos

- but they can help, especially when your sales activity increases. In addition, software that enables you to keep track of your financial activity so you can prepare your taxes more efficiently, apply for loans or merchant accounts, or perform other tasks can make your business life much easier as well. You’ll find out aboutWeb page software in Article 7, digital image editors in Article 8, auction listing software in Article 6, and accounting programs in Article 17.

Become a Power E-Mail User Aside from theWeb browser that you use to create auction listings, e-mail is probably the single most important tool you have as a seller. E-mail is what you use to answer questions, notify bidders that they have won, tell bidders that their item has shipped, and remind buyers when they are slow to follow through on their commitments. When you sell at auction, it’s important to use all aspects of e-mail fully. These include:

- Signature files A signature file is a bit of text that you can append automatically to each of your outgoing e-mails. Such a file tells others your User ID, the name of your Web site if you have one, and any other contact information you want to provide.

It’s a great way to get free marketing for your auction business.

- Attachments Sometimes prospective bidders who are particularly interested in an item will ask you for more information and possibly more detailed photos. Although you should post such additional images on the auction listing itself, you might also want to attach them to e-mails you send to interested buyers.

- Checking your e-mail Get an e-mail account that you can access from the Web; also consider getting a wireless device that you can use to check your e-mail, such as a Web-enabled cell phone or a handheld device, so you can get those messages as soon as they arrive.

- Vacation notices If you’re going to be out of town, make sure your sales don’t end while you are gone. If you are going to be away, be sure to put a vacation notice on each of your auction listings that tells bidders when you’ll be back.