Before you start selling on eBay, you need to know the secrets and the tried-andtrue approaches that can make your auction business a success from the start. You’re joining a well-established business community, and one that is proving to be popular and resilient despite (or perhaps, because of) the ups and downs of the economy. To stand out from the crowd and make sales, you have to know how to compete on an equal footing with individuals who have auctioned off hundreds, even thousands, of items over a period of years. You’ve also got to gain the attention, as well as the trust, of bidders from all walks of life and all levels of computer experience. Some are wary of purchasing at auction because they’ve heard stories about sellers who take bidders’money and never ship what they’ve sold. To build trust, you need to present your sales items

- and yourself

- in a professional, businesslike manner and give the impression that you are an expert seller even though you’re just starting out. That’s what this article will do: give you a head start so you can jump right in and sell like a pro.

Learn the Culture of eBay When you’re only a bidder, eBay is all fun. You can shop, find bargains, compete with other bidders, and enjoy the thrill of being the high bidder when the auction ends.When you make the move to being a seller, you have to change your perspective. Selling on eBay can still be fun, of course. In fact, it adds a new dimension to your interactions with the other members of the eBay community. And it can certainly be fun to have extra money around at the end of the month to pay bills or treat yourself to some presents. By changing your perspective, I mean that you need to regard your selling activities as a business, and treat them as such. You’re going to have to do a lot of hard work, whether it means getting up early on a rainy Friday morning to hit the local estate sales, hauling your wares into and out of the house, packing your

merchandise carefully and taking stacks of boxes to the post office, or waiting in line to ship everything out to your customers. You need to be dedicated and keep your ultimate goal in sight: generating a regular source of income through selling on eBay. The following sections help prepare you for what’s in store so you can hit the ground running and start selling (a process described in Article 3).

eBay’s Own Educational Programs When it comes to learning how things work, I’m a big proponent of reading articles, but as a article author, I’m not exactly an unbiased authority on the subject. One good way to learn all about eBay quickly is to read a article like this one and supplement your learning with some live events and tutorials provided by eBay itself. That way, you’ll get the very latest information about changes in eBay’s procedures for sellers, and you’ll get to meet some other sellers in person. eBay’s Education area includes links to tutorials for sellers, seller workshops held on the message boards, and instructions on how eBay works in general. You’ll find it at http://pages.ebay.com/education/index.html.

eBay University You can pick up advanced tips and meet some experienced sellers and eBay staff people alike by attending one of the live workshops eBay sends around the country. The cost to attend is nominal, and you can learn a huge amount in a short period of time. eBay’s education events are organized into different tracks, and each city has a different selection of classes:

- One Track Seminars If you’re just starting out, and you can find a One Track Seminar in your area, you can learn all about eBay in a single day. In the morning, courses are held for beginners, while advanced topics are covered in the afternoon.

- Two Track Seminars If you’re already an experienced eBay user, look for a Two Track Seminar, which lets you take a full day of classes in either the Beginner or Advanced Track.

- Road Shows If you don’t have a lot of time to spend, look for a Road Show, a series of four hour-long courses held in an area.

Power Sellers and Workshops If you can’t attend a live event in your area, you always have access to one of the best ways to learn about eBay

- online workshops held by experienced sellers. When I checked, the titles of upcoming seminars all seemed useful for sellers:

- How to Ship Large and Delicate Items

- Listing Designer (how to make your descriptions more professional, add character, and have fun)

- Outlet Malls

- Catalog Returns and Overstock

Be Encouraged by Success Stories As I write this, eBay is one of the few parts of the world e-commerce that are not only doing well but continuing to grow with leaps and bounds. More and more individuals are taking to selling on eBay part-time, to get a little extra money, or have even moved to making eBay their sole source of income. The amazing thing to me is that people figured out on their own that they could make a living selling solely on eBay, or supplementing other sales with eBay auctions. eBay didn’t market itself as a place where you could create your own eBay business; eBay sellers figured that out by experience. They realized that no matter how offbeat or unusual the item, they could find a buyer for it somewhere around the world. They also discovered that, with a worldwide pool of buyers available, they were likely to get a far higher price online than they could selling through an antique store, flea market, or garage sale. Listen to the stories of the people I interviewed for this article, whose profiles are presented in various articles:

- Bob Kopczynski sells as many as 600 items a month and doesn’t even do it full-time. He works part-time buying at estate sales and selling on eBay, but his wife works full-time and various family members and neighbors help out.

- Don Colclough decided to close his antique store and sell full-time on eBay when he realized he could make his own hours, save on travel time, and get more buyers online than ever came through the front door of his store.

- eBay seller decoray sold an antique photo of a tavern for more than $700; he estimates that he’s sold as many as 10,000 separate items on eBay, shipping as far away as Africa.

- Sheila Schneider has had a hard time finding regular employment as an interior designer in Portland, Oregon, but she’s been supplementing her income nicely through eBay. Need more inspiration? eBay regularly features its own sellers on the Member Spotlight page, http://pages.ebay.com/community/people/spotlight.html. You’ll also find member profiles in the eBay newsletter, the Chatter, http://pages.ebay.com/ community/chatter/index.html

Beware of eBay Scams and Shams This article doesn’t present a glowing picture indicating that selling on eBay always goes smoothly, and that problems never occur. On the contrary, eBay’s very popularity attracts an assortment of swindlers, cheats, and outright crooks who seek to victimize buyers and sellers alike. If you’re aware of the potential pitfalls and know how to avoid them, chances are you’ll run into very few problems during your career as a seller. When you hear about eBay in the news, you usually hear about the weird, often illegal, things that people put up for sale on the auction site. The more notorious things are quickly removed by eBay itself. You should avoid breaking the law or eBay’s own rules for sellers by reviewing the lists of questionable and prohibited items. That’s not to say you can’t put odd, quirky, or downright weird things up for auction on eBay. A check of the odder eBay categories, such as Slightly Unusual, Really Weird, Totally Bizarre (which are under the Weird Stuff category, which is under the Everything Else category), or the Other subcategory under theMetaphysical category will cure you of that notion right away. The important thing is that you should watch out for typical scams that plague eBay buyers and sellers alike, such as:

- Deadbeat bidders These are individuals who refuse to pay for what they have bought. You run into these folks far less often than you might think, however.

- Scam artists eBay members regularly get junk e-mail from individuals who claim to be representatives of eBay or the payment service PayPal, and who try to trick members into giving them their passwords or other confidential information. The perpetrators can then “hijack” the user’s eBay account.

- Shill or fake bidders Some of the bidding activity on your merchandise may be fishy. An article on the Auction BytesWeb site (http://www.auctionbytes.com/pages/abn/y02/m04/i05/s01 ) reported on programs that reward customers for clicking through to the eBay Web site, registering, and bidding on auctions. Shill bidding is a prohibited and dreaded practice conducted by some disreputable eBay sellers who agree to run the price up on auction items so high bidders have to pay more than they would otherwise.

eBay Bestsellers Making the Move from Bidder to Auctioneer Like many eBay sellers, Jo Stavig (eBay User ID: vintagevisionjo) is no stranger to antiques and collectibles, or even to putting her wares up for sale. She rented space in an antique mall in Chicago for several years, but she wasn’t happy with the 10 percent commission the mall charged on each sale, and things just weren’t selling fast enough.

When she cleaned out her mall space, her home became filled with boxes full of twentieth-century memorabilia. With the holidays coming, she became convinced that it was time to make the move from being a buyer on eBay to starting to sell. “I had some silver, crystal and glass items that I was nervous about taking to the mall because I didn’t have a locked cabinet there (you had to pay extra for that),” says Jo. “I had some inventory left over when I moved out of there, and now I had the problem of where to put it all. It seemed that eBay would be a more cost-effective way to sell and reduce my collection.” Even though she had sold merchandise, and was used to buying on eBay, Jo still found the process of becoming a seller “somewhat intimidating.” She had to make a series of decisions about how to ship, whether she would ship overseas, how to accept payments, and whether she would accept returns. Next came the issue of how to take photos, and where to store them online. Then the technical preparation

- where to load your photos from, how to take photos. Her husband Steve helped by taking photos with his mini DV (digital video) camera, then touching the images up using the sophisticated graphics program Adobe Photoshop. “I put together a couple of backdrop fabrics on a drawing table, and I have a couple of clip-on lights that I can manipulate.” She signed up for PayPal, one of several payment methods that enabled her to sell overseas. She decided to take personal checks. Finally, she was ready to go online with her first sales. “It was exciting. I found it more exciting as a seller than as a buyer. At the end of an auction, watching a new bid suddenly come up was really something.

My first really exciting sale was a set of six nineteenth-century silver-plated forks that I bought at a rummage sale for 10 cents each. They went for $78. I knew they were that good, but I didn’t think they were that good!” “I have not come up with a bad check policy. I haven’t gotten a bad check yet.” Jo uses the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS’s) Priority Mail for most of her shipping, and orders boxes through the USPS Web site. She emphasizes the importance of packing and shipping with care. “You can never use too much packing material. I thought I knew packing really well, because I worked in an art gallery, but found out I did not. There was a breakage on something that arrived in two pieces. I refunded part of the sales price. The buyer didn’t send it back. If something gets broken, filing a claim with the post office is really difficult.” In Jo’s first four months as a seller, she has sold about 100 lots, including “bunches and bunches of Christmas ornaments. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time doing it. I’ve been doing freelance interior design, and other types of consulting, so it definitely helps with bills.” Jo’s main piece of advice: “It’s worth spending some time as a browser and a buyer first before you sell. I purposely tried to accumulate some feedback as a buyer and got a feedback rating of 30 before I went out there as a seller.”

The biggest benefit, she concludes, “is being able to get rid of all that stuff all around the house! Also, being able to sell things in a more timely manner, things that would have been sitting around in the mall for months without a buyer. I’ve enjoyed the contacts with buyers, which can seem amazingly personal. In mall space, other people were selling for me, and I had no contact with my customers. Now, on eBay, people will write me back, saying things like ‘I love the way this looks, this is better than it could possibly be.’ That’s been an unanticipated benefit of it for me.”

Do Your Research Before you start selling on eBay, do your homework. Know which kinds of sales attract lots of bids and which turn out to be duds. Scan the message boards to get an idea of the kinds of problems sellers tend to confront, so you can watch out for them yourself. In order to succeed, any business needs to come up with a business plan, and online businesses are no different. A business plan doesn’t have to be an elaborate production. The most important things are to make sure what you want to sell, determine where you want to sell it, and verify that there’s a market of buyers for the kinds of merchandise you want to put up for auction. The sections that follow provide you with some other tips for planning your eBay business.

Learn by Bidding Few, if any, people start out selling on eBay without having bid on some items first. You can open an account and start selling without any other experience on the auction site, but I don’t recommend it. The best way to get a feel for how transactions proceed and are completed is to bid on and purchase something yourself from a reputable seller. Perhaps the biggest benefit of bidding and buying before you start selling is the fact that you are able to accumulate positive feedback simply by following through with payment in a timely manner. You get some stuff you need or want, hopefully at a bargain price, and you get the feedback that you can then use to help you attract bidders when you start to sell. When you get to a feedback level of 20 or 30, people can tell you’ve used eBay for a while and are likely to be a reputable seller. At that point, you can start putting your own items up for auction.

Pick Items that People Want It doesn’t do any good to put items up for sale that no one wants, that don’t get any bids, and that only consume the time and energy required to photograph and list them. Rather than trying to sell new dolls that were distributed at fast-food restaurants a few months ago and that aren’t hard to find, try to sell older, limited edition dolls, preferably in their original packaging. Take a few minutes to look through the categories in which you have chosen to list your merchandise to see not only what’s desirable, but what items turn out to be dogs on the market. You might be better off giving the undesirables away to charity or on eBay’s Giving Board (http://chatboards.ebay.com/chat.jsp?forum=1&thread=59). eBay puts out a number of publications for buyers and sellers in especially popular areas, and they contain tips on what constitutes a good sales item. This newsletter has tips for people who sell antiques: http://www.ebay.com/antiquesnewsletter/Vol1Issue6.html.

Pick the Category In Which You Want to Sell eBay started out with only a handful of categories in which to sell items. It’s since grown to about 8,000 different categories. Yes, it’s true, bidders often find what they’re looking for through keyword searches that bypass the category system altogether, but it still matters where you sell your merchandise. Do a search of eBay’s current or completed auctions to find items that resemble what you have to offer, and see what categories they were listed in. Because there are so many possible categories, it’s quite possible that what you want to sell could fit in one or more categories. If that’s the case, you only have to spend a few dollars more for the extra listing fee that enables you to list something in more than one category. “If you’re not sure which category is best, or if an item has two groups of collectors, try to sell it in two categories,” suggests eBay seller decoray, who says he’s sold more than 6,000 items on the auction site. Although the fee for listing an item in two categories is $5.00 instead of the $2.50 for one category, the extra investment is worth it. It pays to think the way your prospective customers think, he says.

Get Registered Just as you had to register with eBay when you started to buy, you have to register to become a seller as well. Even if you already have an eBay User ID and password and have accumulated feedback as a buyer, you still need to create a Seller’s Account. That way, eBay is able to maintain a record of your contact information if they need to contact you. eBay also requires you to put your credit card name on file so they can deduct Final Value Fees, listing fees, and the other fees that go along with getting your auctions online. To start the process, click the Sell button in the toolbar that appears near the top of virtually any eBay page. Click the seller’s account in the phrase “Create a seller’s account.” Follow the steps shown on subsequent pages to set up your account. You’ll be asked, early in the process, to enter your credit card information and your billing address. This might seem a bit off-putting, but don’t worry. eBay only uses this information to charge you when it comes time to pay your seller’s fees

- not when you register.

Pick a Good User ID Perhaps you already have a User ID that you use for bidding on eBay. Even if you do, when you start an eBay business you might want to consider changing it. Why? Your name is part of your identity, and therefore, it’s part of your business identity as well. Names that are frivolous, silly, or potentially offensive might turn away bidders. Whether you are creating your first User ID or thinking about changing, consider the following:

- Make your ID reflect your business. If you sell buttons, for example, try to work the word “button” into your name.

- Don’t use your e-mail address. For one thing, you don’t need to, as buyers and sellers can find you by clicking Ask seller a question from one of your auction listings. I made the mistake of using my e-mail address as my User ID, and I was flooded with junk e-mail.

- Don’t use the @ or & symbol

- other letters, numbers, and symbols are okay.

- Don’t use blank spaces; if you need to separate two words, use a single underscore character (SHIFT-HYPHEN).

- Don’t use a URL as your User ID.

- You aren’t allowed to use the word “eBay” in your User ID.

When you create a new User ID you get an icon that looks like a miniature pair of sunglasses next to your name. The icon tells other eBay users that you changed your User ID or obtained a new User ID sometime within the past 30 days. Remember that, if you ever have second thoughts about a User ID, you are allowed to change it 30 days after you create it. Changing your User ID doesn’t mean you lose your accumulated feedback. eBay carries your feedback from your previous ID to your new one.

Create a Secure Password Passwords are the most basic level of security on the Internet, and, when used by themselves and not protected by encryption or other means, one of the least secure. You can improve the inherent security of the eBay password you create by following a few simple principles:

- Don’t use a word in the dictionary. Some hackers use password-cracking software that looks up all of the words in a dictionary to try to uncover just this sort of password.

- Don’t make it too short. Hackers also try to crack passwords using “brute force” attacks that generates a vast quantity of random characters and submits them to the computer at very high speed. Keep your password between six and nine characters.

- Don’t make it too long and complicated. You won’t be able to remember it, or you’ll easily mistype it.

- Use a recognizable phrase, like My eBay Auction Business, and use the initials MEAB. Mix the characters into upper- and lowercase: mEAb. Add a number that is meaningful, such as your street address: mEAB1553.