eBay Buying should be fun!

Yay, we are now an ebay bronze powerseller! It has not took very much time to make it here. For anyone wishing to become a bronze powerseller faster, be sure to check out our post on how to become a powerseller in 90 days.

The next step up for use is the Silver powerseller, then gold powerseller. Once you get to gold, things really start to take off. The bonus of being a powerseller with a positive DSR is that you now get discounts on your ebay fee’s. This is very important so you can pass those savings on to your customers so you can move more volume this way.

When starting an eBay business there are a lot of factors that come into play, but we are going to address what to sell on eBay.

The first thing I would do is take a look at your hobbies and try and find out what YOU are interested in. What kind of products are you best suited to sell on eBay?

Now the first thoughts of everyone starting out on eBay is to just find out what sells and copy everyone else. This is good if you are just looking to run with the follow the crowd, but in the LONG run YOU would be much happier finding a product to sell that you:

• Know about
• Trust
• Like to be around all day
• Understand the market

I suggest you sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and write 5 hobbies or things you do for fun. After you have your list head over to terapeak (the best market research for eBay seller) and take them up on their free trial. Then start drilling down those 5 hobbies that you have. Use the category tool to find out how hot that item is, and how big the market is.

From there it just comes down to finding the right brands to sell under those categories. This is easily done by looking at the brands average sell through ratio (ASR). You will be looking for a product that has a 60% or more ASR.

Remember, keep it fun and focus on things that you LIKE and are FUN. This is the true way to suceed.

PS. Starting an small eBay business is fun, but make it a winner by deciding know what to sell on eBay.
photo credit: Scumfrog

Monitoring your eBay DSR

With the recent changes at eBay, you need to keep a close eye on your DSR (Detailed Seller Ratings). With all the other things an eBay needs to do daily, this is just one more thing we need to watch out for. Thankfully there is a new website that will email you when your DSR changes. Taking some of the work out of monitoring your DSR at eBay. DSRWatch is the website, it takes only a few seconds to sign up for it

How to boost your eBay DSR (Detailed Seller Rating)

I did a search on my eBay user id “brightpulse” and here were my results when I ran it:

So according to this I am doing pretty well, however I see a slight weakness in my shipping time. Every product that I ship gets shipped the same day the customer orders it, so the problem is not with me, but with my communication to the buyer letting them know the expected time. So I might update my e-mail when it ships, letting them know the estimated time for delivery based on USPS or UPS. This might help the customer understand that I am shipping the same day they order it.

The other improvement I can make is doing free shipping for more items and building the cost into the items. This way there is no charges there and this would improve this number greatly.

Now on to you, how is your DSR doing? Are you needing to improve overall or just in a certain area. So once you know how you rank it’s time to get to work coming up with a plan to fix it. Here are some ideas for improving your eBay DSR:

• Keep it simple (no one likes things that are too complex)
• Clearly spell out your shipping options
• Provide flat rate shipping
• Only ship to the US
• Make your customer service shine, make yourself the nordstroms of the Internet
• Treat your customers like you would like to be treated
• Consider Free shipping
• Send a quick card in all packages asking buyers to give you good DSR feedback
• Personalize your service (buyers like to buy from someone they can see)
• Put your picture on your listings
• Provide Skype, e-mail, phone number on every piece of e-mails, listings and website (make the customer feel they can contact you at any time, giving the illusion you have GREAT communication, even if you did not need to communicate with them.
• Take more pictures and provide more detail about your items
• Send them a tracking number in their e-mail with quick link to check it.
• Send the customer a follow up email asking them if they got their product OK, and if they have any feedback about how to improve your business

Just remember, focus on improving your experience and the rest will take care of itself.

As a eBay seller I am always looking for new fresh ways to get people from other sites to my eBay auctions. I have created a widget I will be releasing that will allow you to display your feedback on sites other then eBay. I guess it could even be used in your auctions.

Anyways here is a preview of what it will look like. The final version will be different and allow you to enter your own seller id.

With all the problems with google base connector. Many people are asking: How can I get my eBay store items into Google base? Over and over I am hearing people franticly trying to get this information. Here is a step by step guide on how to acomplish this task.

1. Go to eBay and click “My eBay”

2. Click “Manage My Store” on the left side of the page

3. Click on “Listing Distribution” under promotional tools

4. Click “Activate your Store listings via RSS. (not sure if this
is needed for Google)

5. Click “Make a file of your Store Inventory listings available”

6. May need to wait at least 12 hours before you continue with
these instructions

7. When eBay provides you with a URL of your Google Base-specific
file, COPY THE URL - looks something like: http://esssl.ebay.com/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g

8. Login to Google Base

9. Click the “Settings” tab

10. Change your Website URL to match the Google Base URL provided by
eBay - again, looks something like: http://esssl.ebay.com/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g

11. Click the “My Items” tab

12. Click on the “Data Feeds” link

13. Click the “New Data Feed” button

14. Type a file name with the .xml extention - should be the name of
your store with no spaces - for example, “mystorename.xml”

15. Change the item type in the drop down menu to “Products”

16. Click the button that says: “Register data feed and continue to
formatting instructions”

17. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the button that
says: “I’m done formatting my file. Continue to upload”

18. If you need to, click the “My Items” tab, then click on the “Data
Feeds” link (or continue to step 19 below)

19. Click the “create” link next to Schedule

20. Choose when and how often you would like Google to upload your
file

21. Type the URL of the file - should match the URL provided by eBay
- the same one used in step 10 above

22. CLICK THE SCHEDULE BUTTON

23. Come back and check to see if your products have been uploaded as
scheduled - login to Google Base, click the “my items” tab, click the
“active items” link. You should see all of your store items listed
(they will not upload auction or fixed price listings) 

With gas prices what they are, there are many people who are wanting to work from home. Lots of people, including myself are turning to eBay to fill this need. When times are tough, this is when people start to think outside the box for ways to generate new revenue.

So now that you are going to start treating eBay as a money making venture, you really need to work on your image. Most eBay sellers do not have an image, sure there are lots of listings and fancy posts, but by and large most eBay sellers spend about 2 seconds thinking up their image. This is where you should be different from the rest.

Everyone out there has a horror story about someone ripping them off on eBay. This is why you need to carefully craft your brand and establish yourself with great feedback and a powerseller status. Becoming an eBay powerseller means that you have done something right, at least long enough to get the status. You want to inspire trust in your customers and being an eBay powerseller is one way to do that.

So lets get into it. By the end of the 90 days you should be rolling up on powerseller.

The first step is to head over to terapeak and see what I can sell all day long on eBay and will be easy for me to supply my customers with. After a few minutes poking around terapeak, I see gift cards are a big seller. So I type in “gift card” in the search and heres what I find out

In 30 days there are 2.4 million dollars worth of gift cards sold on ebay. There are 138 thousand bids during this time. There is a sell through ratio of 75.85%, meaning a VERY high percent of these gift cards sell.

So drilling down a little further, I see that eBay auctions for wal-mart gift cards sell at a 82% ratio, meaning you will have more sucess if you sell those.

After finding out wal-mart gift cards are the way to go, I see what the most sucessful sellers in this category are doing, yes terapeak can actually do this.

Turns out that most of the successful ones are starting their gift cards at .99 cents and creating a bidding frenzy that is boosting beyond the value of the card itself. So remember, this is not a way to make money, simply a way to establish yourself with great feedback and to get a powerseller status in a short amount of time.

So let’s look at the $100 dollar wal-mart gift card. Using this technique, according to terapeak, the average sale price if started at 99 cents is 100.81. Enough to cover the cost of the card, and your eBay fees will be limited a little. But remember, we are trying track our self to powerseller status. So we don’t mind loosing a little money.

So will I qualify for powerseller status after doing this for a short while? Yes, yes and YES!

Now for the best part, you can start to get an eBay discount as a powerseller, making things even juicier when you get around to selling whatever product line you want to start with.

According to eBay’s page, here are what they say is required to become a powerseller

As you can see, it will cost you a little bit, but overall if you are going to make eBay your choice for selling in a global market, it will be worth the cost in the long run.

You also can recoup the cost by allowing everyone who visits your auction for a drawling for a $100 dollar gift card. More how to do this later on.