Find Your Inner eBay: Expert offers tips for selling on the world’s top auction site

June 30, 2007  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on July 2007 Perhaps you’ve heard of a little thing called eBay.

Jokes aside, the world’s leading auction Web site is also the No. 2 biggest overall online seller (behind amazon.com). And in recent years, more and more furniture retailers have been harnessing eBay’s power to sell their products, with increasingly impressive results.

So it’s no surprise that interest was high when speaker Mary Liz Curtin presented “A Shopkeeper’s Guide to Selling on eBay” at High Point Market’s Retailer Resource Center this spring.

Curtin knows what she’s talking about. Besides being an eBay consultant and columnist, she’s in the home furnishings business, as co-owner (with her husband Stephen Scannell) of furniture/gift store Leon & Lulu (leonandlulu.com).

“eBay is a marketplace where honesty, trust, efficiency and loyalty are rewarded,” she said as she cited some facts about the site:

• eBay currently has 193 million subscribers.

• The average annual spending per eBay buyer: $631.

• The number of people currently making a full- or part-time living selling on eBay: 724,000.

Curtin said that even though the site does huge business, it actually owns nothing; all of its merchandise comes from sellers who ship directly to customers.

Getting Started

If you’ve yet to take the eBay plunge but are interested in selling on the site, Curtin recommended you go to its Seller Onramp area (eBay.com/startselling) for free expert help on setting up shop.

Seller Onramp will guide you as you place your first product listing. Curtin passed along these tips to keep in mind as you do:

• DON’T USE ALL CAPS in your titles. It seems like you’re shouting at potential customers. Titles should be direct and include words that you think customers will enter when doing searches—your item titles are not the place for creative language, although adjectives indicating attributes such as “beautiful” or “elegant” may attract potential buyers. Also, make sure the spelling is correct in your titles and listings, so shoppers don’t miss them in searches.

• Don’t sell anything that even refers to a protected species—for example, “tortoise color” would be a no-no, as eBay flags any product that may be made from such species.

• Look at your competition’s eBay auctions. See what they’ve done. Then try to do better, with more detailed and compelling listing text, more attractive visuals, and more thorough information on your sales policies.

• Ship to as many locations around the globe as possible—especially Canada. The more places you can ship, the more people you can sell to. Keep shipping fees reasonable (you can set either a flat shipping rate or base your fee on location), but don’t set them so low that you lose money on them.

• Establish return policies, and stand by them.

• Start your auctions with low opening prices. This attracts people to bid. If your starting amount is too high, it will scare off bidders.

Picture It

Photos are a key element of selling on eBay, Curtin said.

Her advice: get a decent digital camera to take good, clear photos of your products, but make sure the digital files are 600 x 800 pixels or smaller, or else they’ll load slowly (or not at all) on shopper’s screens. Use a tripod to ensure quality images.

Curtin also recommended setting up a picture gallery (for a small additional cost) showing your products from various angles, and include close-up shots of key points. Close-ups are also useful if you’re selling a used product and there are any stains, nicks, dents or other damage. Honesty is always best when selling on eBay, and photos will build trust between you and your customers.

Paying the Price

Once your auctions are up and running, hopefully people will bid. Once they do, they’re locked into eBay’s terms that they must buy if they’re the winning bidder. That means once you have a bidder, you have a sale (unless you set a “reserve”—a minimum price, unknown to bidders, that must be reached before you’ll sell the item).

Another option is to set a “buy it now” price—a set price you’ll sell your item for instead of taking bids.

But however you sell on eBay, once you do, you’ll have to get paid. To do so, Curtin strongly recommended going with eBay’s payment system, PayPal, saying, “PayPal is the way business is really done on eBay.” She said you should expect to pay about a 2.8 percent fee per sale for PayPal transactions—roughly the same as credit card fees.

It’s worth the expense. PayPal has security measures in place to protect both buyers and sellers from getting ripped off. PayPal and eBay also have strong measures in place to prevent phishing by identity thieves.

Building Your ‘Bay Biz

Curtin suggested furniture retailers consider establishing their own eBay stores—an area on the site unique to your business where you can list your items and customize the appearance to present a unique online presence, a virtual version of your store.

However you go about your eBay business, she emphasized that “It’s absolutely essential that you do what you say you’re going to do or your buyers will slam you” by leaving negative feedback that will deter future buyers.

As with anything in retail, eBay is all about keeping the customers satisfied as you, in Curtin’s words, “let the personality of your store shine through.”