Jul
23
Just Starting Selling? Start Small!
Filed Under Sellers' Insights
Here’s a question I recently received on my Half.com article:
I have never sold anything on eBay. I have bought a few things in the past year. From my vantage point it is very confusing with different parts of eBay and alternative sites like Auctiva offering such different things and not one of them having clear cut directions. I have spent hours on Turbolister 2 trying to list books. I could not figure out how to list selling in the US and in Canada. The live eBay help disconnected five times. Then I went to auctiva and wanted to list there but they don’t have the stock photos of the books. I have over 100 books to list and don’t want to have to photograph each of them. I went to half.com to list the books after your recommendation and found that there is no stock photo there. In other words eBay provides some services in some parts of their auctions but not in others. What in the world is going on. I am so confused I don’t know what to do. I am ready to give up my efforts to sell on eBay. I was trying the books first since they were relatively easy to list. Also Half.com doesn’t have descriptions like Turbolister. Can you use Turbolister for half.com? Just wondering? Will sales be better on eBay or on Half.com? I only wish I could buy the books that are suggested but cannot do that until I make a few dollars. I am simply overwhelmed.
Maureen
The beauty of eBay, Half.com and other auction sites is the freedom to learn what works for you and your target audience without your mistakes costing you too much in terms of time, effort and money.
However the key is to start small. It’s easy to become overwhelmed when you attempt to accomplish too much your first time at the plate. I made the mistake of trying to auction off a 200 comic book collection on my first attempt at selling online. I spent a significant amount of time posting auctions that received no bids. Overwhelmed and frustrated, I didn’t attempt to sell again for another six months.
I had no idea what my the customers in my niche were looking for, and what an effective work flow was for me - given my resources in terms of time, money for listing services, and computer equipment.
Then I began to experiment, on a small scale, with different auction sites (Yahoo! was viable back then), different pictures, different descriptions, different closing times, different categories and different items to sell. I discovered what worked for my customers and, more importantly, what worked for me. After I had an effective technique, I increased the number of listings I had active on eBay and Yahoo!. I also continued to experiment and refine my techniques based on my successes and failures.
So in your particular case Maureen, I wouldn’t try to get all 100 books listed at first. Try a couple on eBay (Start using the standard “List Your Item” eBay page if Turbolister is giving you problems). Try a couple on Half.com. You’ve read what I say the advantages are… now decide for yourself. Post some with pictures. Post some without. If digital photography is a pain, try scanning the book covers. Grouping several related books into lots and listing them together might be easier for you and provide more value to your customers. The key to not getting overwhelmed is to start small, and learn from your mistakes (and accept that you will make some).
Good Luck!
Related Posts:
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URI
One Response to “Just Starting Selling? Start Small!”
Leave a Reply
One key to sales is the ever-important feedback. People can feel a bit nervous about a new seller. First of all, putting all of those items on auction being a new seller can be quite costly. You can open an eBay store at no cost for the first 30 days, and the listing fees are MUCH cheaper there. Another thing is to watch your asking price as well as your shipping costs - I noted one seller on a different forum asking others to check their unsold items and tell them what they were doing wrong, as all of their items ended without one bid. Well, first, the prices were too high. Their shipping rates would make a person think these were interplanetary costs. Not to mention that their wording on things such as their return policy was rather harsh.
But as many others have noted, feedback seems to be an important key. You may want to consider offering some items that you can let go rather cheaply, just to get things moving along and to generate some feedback. Put out some things you can sell that will basically cover the shipping charges and eBay and PayPal fees - in other words, you’re basically giving stuff away, but it’s generating feedback - okay, it’s BUYING feedback. Some folks in the past have done things such as sell gmail invites for a penny (before they opened up gmail to everyone without an invite). This generated some real fast feedback for them. It doesn’t matter WHAT, exactly it was they sold - people see the little green (positive) circles, see comments like ‘nice’ and ‘fast delivery’, and most won’t bother to look at the exact items sold. Another thing to keep in mind in that regard is to make some purchases yourself, which will also generate feedback - sure, that feedback will be from sellers, but it’s better than sitting on a zero feedback score - at least it shows you have prior activity on eBay, which will make folks feel at least a bit more comfortable and not get the idea that you might be some ‘fly by night’ trying to score some quick cash and then disappearing.