Once your sale goes online, you’ll probably want to keep an eye on it just to see when the bids come in, and to check out exactly who bids on it. This is when all your hard work pays off. You’ll need to check your e-mail in order to field questions from interested customers. If you receive several questions that are in a similar vein, you may want to edit your description to include the answer as additional information. Even while your sale is ongoing, you can change the item’s category or add additional text or photos any time you want.

Can You Edit Your Description? It’s a good idea to read your description closely and make sure it’s accurate before you post the listing online. That’s because changing your description isn’t a straightforward matter

- at least, not after bids have been received on that item. After all, the people who place bids might take offense if the description changes and other bidders can act based on new information they didn’t have originally. The Adding to Your Item Description page mentioned earlier only lets you add to a description. If you want to actually edit an auction listing, click the revise link on that auction page. This lets you change everything about the auction. However, if bids have been placed on that item, clicking “revise” will not let you edit the actual auction listing unless you cancel all the bids. If you don’t want to cancel any bids, you can only add to the description, not change the original.

Close the Deal When the sale ends, in some ways a new round of work begins. In this case the work ends with a couple of big rewards, however: you receive payment, and you get positive feedback for your good customer service. In order to get those rewards, you need to begin by contacting your high bidder or buyer promptly

- within the hour after the sale ends, if you can, but at least within a day. eBay sends the buyer a stock e-mail notification that the sale has ended and the person is the high bidder. You should follow quickly with your own e-mail, in which you congratulate the winner and provide them with directions for paying you. You’ll need to find out how the buyer wants the item shipped (if you offer two different shipping options, such as Priority Mail and Parcel Post). You’ll also need to know where the buyer lives so you can calculate the exact shipping cost

- virtually all shippers charge based on weight, the size of the package, and the distance to be shipped. After payment comes in, before you celebrate, send out an e-mail acknowledgement to your bidder to let them know that you have received the check, money order, PayPal account transfer, or credit card payment. More importantly, you need to tell the customer when you’re shipping out the merchandise. It’s a good business practice to send out your merchandise the same day that the payment arrives, or the day the payment clears your bank. (Most banks will let you know if a check is cleared either by phone or in person.) Try not to wait more than a week until after the payment clears, or you risk having your buyer leave you negative feedback.

Resell an Item Hopefully, most of the items you put up for sale on eBay will actually go to a bidder or Buy It Now buyer. However, you’ll probably put up some items that don’t attract any bids at all. That doesn’t mean you need to give up selling the item. You attract more (or higher) bids at a later date by providing better images, changing the title or description, or going with No Reserve

- removing the reserve price altogether. You can relist your item if the following applies:

- You didn’t receive any bids on a regular auction and you did not hold a Dutch auction.

- Fewer than thirty days have passed since the closing date of the first auction.

- You didn’t receive any bids that met your reserve price if you originally held a reserve price auction. eBay does charge you a second insertion fee if you relist your item, but if your item sells the second time you put it up for sale, eBay will refund you the second insertion fee. (But if it doesn’t sell the second time, you still need to pay the second insertion fee.)

Paying eBay’s Seller Fees How does eBay make the money that made it one of the most successful e-commerce operations in recent years? It makes money from people like you who sell items on its site and who are charged fees. You need to pay a fee before the sale, called an insertion fee, just to list an item for auction. You must pay the insertion fee whether or not the transaction is successfully completed.

After your item sells, you pay eBay a commission called a Final Value Fee. The final value fee isn’t a flat fee, but is calculated based on the final sale price or the type of item sold.