Ebay Secrets

eBay® Secrets: How to Create Internet Auction Listings That Make 30% More Money
While Selling Every Item You List
eBay Secrets:
®
How to Create Internet Auction Listings That Make 30% More Money
By: Steven Ellis White
ISBN: 0-9760240-1-2
A BooksOnStuff Publication
Copyright © 2004 Steven Ellis White and BooksOnStuff Publishing

All Rights Reserved. May not be reproduced without permission.
www.booksonstuff.com
eBay, PayPal, and BidPay are registered trademarks of the respective entities.
Copyright 2004 Steven Ellis White and Krug Publishing Page 2 of 67

Disclaimer:
This book will provide you with the techniques that the author has used on eBay
to consistently get bids that were over 30% higher than those received by other
people selling similar products. These techniques have also worked for the
students of the author’s seminars. However, the author and publisher cannot
(and do not) guarantee that the advice presented in this book will produce similar
results in your auctions, and as such, they assume no liability for your use of the
techniques and advice contained in this book.

Table of Contents
eBay® Secrets: _________________________________________________________ 2
Table of Contents _______________________________________________________ 4
1 Introduction _______________________________________________________ 6
1.1 About this book __________________________________________________________6
1.2 Not for Complete Beginners _______________________________________________7
1.3 A Universal Approach ____________________________________________________8
1.4 Checklist #1: The Basics: What you need before you start_______________________9
2 Getting Started ____________________________________________________ 11
2.1 New accounts___________________________________________________________11
2.2 Earning feedback _______________________________________________________12
2.3 Who goes first when leaving feedback? _____________________________________13
2.4 Checklist #2: Things you must do before your first Bid Multiplier auction ________14
3 Creating auction listings_____________________________________________ 15
3.1 Overview ______________________________________________________________15
3.2 Avoid all capital letters___________________________________________________15
3.3 Detailed description _____________________________________________________16
3.4 Lots of pictures _________________________________________________________16
3.5 Use HTML sparingly ____________________________________________________16
3.6 Break up your paragraphs________________________________________________17
3.7 Payment and shipping terms ______________________________________________18
3.8 Do not list more than one of a given item ____________________________________19
3.9 Create the perfect title ___________________________________________________19
3.10 Track the performance of your titles ______________________________________22
3.11 Use bid-boosting, buzz words ____________________________________________23
4 Listing items for sale on eBay ________________________________________ 24
4.1 Options________________________________________________________________24
4.2 Automation tools________________________________________________________25
4.3 Auction duration________________________________________________________26
5 All the Best Auction Secrets __________________________________________ 27
5.1 Overview ______________________________________________________________27
5.2 Start every auction for $1 or less___________________________________________27
5.3 Never use a reserve ______________________________________________________28
5.4 Never mention a price in your listing _______________________________________30

5.5 Charge enough flat-rate shipping to cover your fees___________________________30
5.6 Personalize; don’t professionalize. _________________________________________31
5.7 A final note on this method _______________________________________________32
5.8 Checklist #3: Actions to list an item the Bid Multiplier Way ____________________34
6 E-Mails with bidders ________________________________________________ 35
6.1 Overview ______________________________________________________________35
6.2 Auction winner e-mail ___________________________________________________35
6.3 Payment confirmation e-mail _____________________________________________36
6.4 Winner refuses to pay e-mail ______________________________________________37
6.5 BEWARE OF TROLLS__________________________________________________38
7 Finding things to sell _______________________________________________ 41
7.1 Getting started with things in your home____________________________________41
7.2 Other low-cost options to get started _______________________________________42
7.3 Choosing a focus ________________________________________________________43
7.4 Buy used merchandise for cheap locally_____________________________________44
7.5 Buying items on eBay for resale ___________________________________________46
7.6 Buying bulk on eBay_____________________________________________________48
7.7 Hot Deals ______________________________________________________________49
7.8 Buying from “traditional” sources _________________________________________50
7.9 Drop Shipping __________________________________________________________51
7.10 Big discounts for small orders ____________________________________________52
7.11 Added risks ___________________________________________________________53
8 Packing and Shipping Tips___________________________________________ 55
9 Good and Bad Auction Examples _____________________________________ 56
9.1 The importance of the basics ______________________________________________56
9.2 Good titles make a difference _____________________________________________59
9.3 The Ultimate Bid Multiplier Method Listing _________________________________61
10 Hosting your own photos __________________________________________ 64
11 A last word______________________________________________________ 67

1 Introduction
1.1 About this book
I’ve always hated books that wait until the end to give away the secret. Unless
I’m reading a mystery novel, I find those types of books to be a waste of time.
So, here are the two key secrets:
Secret #1: To make a living selling things on eBay, all you need to learn is how
to sell things on eBay for more money than anyone else. If you can sell things
for more money than everybody else, making a living is easy.
Secret #2: The more bids that you get for the items you list, the higher the
average selling price for the items. In other words, to get more money for the
things that you sell, focus on getting more people to bid on your listings.
All of this might sound like common sense. However, the best way to implement
this approach is the exact opposite of what most people expect. Most people
think they can dive into eBay by taking the Traditional Business Approach.
Here’s what they do:
They find some products to sell, buy some at a good price (or arrange for
drop shipping), and list them on eBay for a “fair” price. Of course to make
sure they fill the demand for their product, they will list ten identical items
at the same time.
It’s a sound business plan. If they sell so many units, and they make so
much on each one, they can quit their day jobs.
And then they sit around and wonder why the products don’t sell. Maybe
they will try lowering the price to sell a few. Maybe they will try different
products. Or maybe they will just give up and go back to their day jobs.
Don’t take that approach. It simply doesn’t work. The solution is to try to sell
fewer products and ask for less money for each product. That is the strategy that
is outlined in this book. I call it the Bid Multiplier Method because the concept
centers on maximizing the number of bids your product receives.
Don’t get me wrong – when I say “ask for less money” I don’t mean that the final
price you get for your product will be lower than it should be, and when I say “try
to sell fewer products” I don’t mean that you will sell fewer products. In fact,
here’s the best part:
By using the Bid Multiplier Method to list your items, on average, you
should get 30% more than an identical item sold on eBay by someone

who hasn’t read this book. And on top of that, you will sell almost every
item you list, as opposed to one out of every ten.
Here’s a real-life example that comes from one of the many people I have taught
this method for selling on eBay. One of my students went to a local pawn shop
and bought an item for $50 and sold it on eBay for $213. Sounds like a great
deal, right? But how often can you find a deal like that? It sounds like it would be
pure luck to find items for $50 that sell for $213!
After the sale, I sat down with this student and we did a “Completed Items”
search on eBay to find identical items that were sold in the past. It turns out the
highest price we could find for the same item (and there were many of them) was
$125. So even if you call it luck to find this item for $50, it was pure skill and
knowledge that sold it for $2131.
Now you are probably wondering if these techniques will work for your item, or
for any other item. They will. I have seen these techniques work for thousands of
items. They work almost every time for 100% of the items. In the few cases
where they haven’t worked, I’ve been able to trace it back almost every time to a
poor choice of title for the auction.2
1.2 Not for Complete Beginners

This book is not for complete novices. There are plenty of books (and free web
pages) available that will help you sign up for an account on eBay and list your
items. As of this writing, eBay has a free tutorial on selling items at the following
site: http://pages.ebay.com/help/index_popup.html?sell=basics.html.
If you have not already bought at least five items and sold at least one on eBay, I
strongly recommend that you do that before going any further with this book.
This should give you a good idea about how eBay works. In addition, you’ll need
to have some positive feedback before you’ll get the best price for the things you
sell. Buyers feel better about dealing with people who have positive feedback on
their eBay record.
The best way to get good feedback is to buy things on eBay, even if they are
small and inexpensive3.
1
There are more details about this specific auction in Section 7.1 “Getting started selling things in your
home.”
2
In Chapter 3, I explain in detail how to pick the perfect title for your auction. Choosing the correct title is
probably the most difficult thing you need to do to make money on online auctions, but it is a skill you can
learn, and there are some pseudo-scientific methods you can use to generate the best title for your item. If
you follow a few simple steps you can get the right title almost every time.
3
I discuss feedback more in Chapter 2, including some techniques to boost your feedback rating.

1.3 A Universal Approach
I focus on eBay for this book solely for the convenience of not having to explain
each concept for multiple auction sites. Also, most readers of this book will likely
be selling their goods on eBay since that happens to be where most of the
buyers are, at least in the United States.
However, all of these techniques can be used on any auction site if you spend
the time to learn how to use each site. Ideally you would research each available
auction site to determine where the best market is for your product, but most
people will probably choose eBay anyway.

1.4 Checklist #1: The Basics: What you need before you start
Here is a checklist with all of the things you will need before you get started
selling things on eBay.
□ A computer. This doesn’t need to be too fancy but you will need roughly
20-30 megabytes of free space on your hard drive for auction photos and
software that you will install.
□ Access to the Internet. Ideally, this will be a fast connection such as DSL
or a Cable Modem, but dialup will work fine. If you have no connection to
the Internet, you can actually do everything that is required at your public
library. It will be much easier if you have access at home, however.
□ An e-mail address. You will need this to be able to communicate with

your customers.
□ OPTIONAL: A bank account. eBay auction buyers overwhelmingly prefer

to pay with PayPal, and getting a PayPal account requires a bank account.
□ Access to a digital camera. If you don’t own one, you can borrow a
friend’s to start out. However you can pick up a really cheap one on eBay
if you need one. It does not need to be fancy—an old 1 or 2 megapixel
camera will work fine. The photos you will put in your auctions are going to
be fairly small anyway.
□ OPTIONAL: Photo editing software. To do the best auctions, you will

need to compress and resize your photos for eBay. eBay will do this for
you if you pay $0.15 per photo, but that adds up quickly. Also, if you do
not compress your photos they will take forever to upload to eBay when
you are creating auction listings. I recommend ACDSee, which is an
inexpensive program you can download from the Internet at
http://www.acdsee.com.
□ OPTIONAL: Microsoft FrontPage (or a similar HTML editing tool). To do

the best auctions, you will need to create moderately fancy HTML pages
for your auctions. FrontPage makes this process easy.
□ OPTIONAL: A web hosting service. There are various free services you
can sign up for on the Internet, but in general the free ones are worth what
you pay for them. Most even have scripts that prevent you from hosting
eBay photos. Some web hosts you might want to look into include
randomdevelopment.com, hostpc.com, excellencehosting.com and

interplug.com. I would strongly recommend signing up for an account that
includes Microsoft FrontPage support, as that will make your listings
easier.

2 Getting Started
2.1 New accounts
Once you’ve taken care of the basics, the last two things you will need to get
started are an account with eBay and an account with PayPal.
PayPal is a service that makes it easy for people to pay you electronically using
credit cards or checks. You can run auctions without a PayPal account.
However it is much harder to do so, since your customers will need to mail you
checks or money orders. With PayPal, the winner of an auction can pay you
instantly online. Part of the reason people buy from eBay is instant gratification. If
they see they must go through the hassle of going to the bank, buying a money
order and mailing it to you before you ship the item, they will probably look to buy
their goods from another seller.
You might also consider signing up for an account at BidPay.com, a site that is
run by Western Union. Buyers can go to BidPay and use their credit card to buy
a money order that is sent directly to you. As soon as BidPay receives payment
they will e-mail you so that you can ship the item before you actually get the
money order, but still rest assured that you have secured payment.
The primary difference between PayPal and BidPay (from the customer’s
perspective) is that with PayPal, the seller pays the associated fees, whereas
with BidPay, the buyer pays the fees. So given the choice, almost every buyer
will want to pay with PayPal rather than BidPay.
That might be okay if the only choice you gave the buyer was BidPay, but PayPal
is also tightly integrated into eBay’s functionality, making it a lot easier for
Jellybeans (our word for people who are not computer- or eBay-savvy) to pay
without having to think too much. When an auction is completed they can click
the “pay now” button and pay with their credit card instantly.
In other words, if you don’t accept PayPal, you will be missing a large segment of
the market (Jellybeans).
eBay and PayPal procedures for signing up change frequently and you will need
to visit each site, read their signup requirements and fill out the forms. To sign up
on eBay, open your browser to www.ebay.com and click on “Register” at the top
(as of this writing).
To sign up with PayPal, go to www.paypal.com and click on “Sign up” at the top
(as of this writing). eBay will process your membership immediately but PayPal
takes a couple of days to verify your bank account information. Typically they

make two small electronic deposits into your account and you must tell them how
much the deposits were.
Be sure and sign up for a PayPal Premiere account if you want to accept
payments via credit card. As of this writing the fees are approximately $0.30 plus
2 to 3 percent of the amount of the transaction. There is no charge to sign up for
a Premiere account.
eBay fees are similar. There is a small fee to list an item, and then (if the item
sells successfully) they will charge a “final value fee” which is a percentage of the
final sales price.
I would recommend not getting too focused on the fees, however, as the method
you will use to buy and sell items makes the fees fairly innocuous4.
2.2 Earning feedback
As I mentioned in the Introduction, before you begin selling things on eBay, you
really should buy a few things. I would recommend buying at least 5 items from
auctions on eBay in order to get your “feedback” up to a level where buyers will
trust you. Five is a bare minimum and you’ll be better off with at least ten.
Feedback on eBay is a rating of how well you have performed on your auctions
in the past. When you buy or sell an item on eBay, the party that you are dealing
with has the option of leaving you feedback, and all the other users on eBay can
see this feedback. It might be a comment like “Great seller, fast shipping, good
packaging and e-mails” or something similar.
When someone leaves you feedback, they can mark it as positive, negative, or
neutral. You are striving for as many positive feedbacks as possible, so buyers
will see that you hold up your end of the bargain. Whenever you see a username
on eBay it will be followed by a number in parenthesis like this:
eBayRightAuctions (23). That number is the total number of positive feedbacks
minus the total number of negative feedbacks (roughly).
To get your feedback up in a hurry, just buy a handful of cheap items (e.g.,
DVDs, collectibles, baseball cards, whatever). Always pay for your items
promptly and leave the seller positive feedback. If they don’t leave you feedback
in return, e-mail them and ask them to.
While getting feedback is important, it’s also worth noting that sophisticated eBay
users will take a person’s feedback rating with a grain of salt because the
feedback system can be manipulated. To “pump up” a feedback rating, some
4
In section 3.7, we go into much greater detail about how you can make sure these fees won’t affect your
profits.

eBay users will buy or sell various free items. There are plenty of sellers offering
things such as recipes or free e-books (that you can find on the Internet for free
anyway). After a transaction like this the parties usually leave each other positive
feedback and “forget” about the payment of one cent that is allegedly due.5
To see examples of this, go to eBay and run this search:
free (ebook,e-book,recipe)
Then click “Sort items by Lowest Price” (at the top of your search results). What
you will find are a bunch of e-books and recipes and such that people are giving
away for free (or technically, for a penny). If you were to buy one for a penny and
leave them good feedback, they would do the same for you. Some of the sellers
even state this in the auction—something like, “Your e-book will be emailed to
you after you leave us positive feedback, and we promise to do the same for
you.” This is called “selling feedback” and is against eBay policies. So I strongly
recommend against buying from anyone who advertises like that.
2.3 Who goes first when leaving feedback?
This question has stumped many an eBay user: should the buyer leave the seller
feedback first, or vice-versa? Typically the buyer should leave feedback first,
because the auction isn’t really “over” until the buyer receives the item and is
happy with it. If you have a problem with an item, send an e-mail to the seller to
try and work it out before leaving negative feedback.
In general, the seller has no motivation to leave you bad feedback if you leave
them good feedback, so it’s probably safe.
On the subject of feedback, I have prepared a bonus report on how to leave

negative feedback without having to fear retaliation by the feedback recipient. To
receive this free report, please send me an email at
eBaySecrets@booksonstuff.com.
5
eBay limits the potential benefit of such fake transactions by not counting more than one feedback rating
that comes from the same user. However, there are enough people “selling feedback” like this, that an
unscrupulous user can “buy” lots of these free items without buying from the same user twice.

2.4 Checklist #2: Things you must do before your first Bid
Multiplier auction
Here is a checklist of the things that you will need to do before you run your first
auction using the Bid Multiplier method.
□ Sign up for an eBay account. To sign up on eBay, open your browser to

www.ebay.com and click on “Register” at the top (as of this writing).
□ Sign up for a PayPal account. To sign up with PayPal, go to

www.paypal.com and click on “Sign up” at the top (as of this writing).
PayPal can take a couple of days to verify your bank account information.
□ Buy at least five items on eBay. Leave feedback for the seller and
make sure that each seller leaves you feedback.
□ Sell at least one item on eBay. You can complete a tutorial on the basics
of selling on eBay at the following site:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/index_popup.html?sell=basics.html.
□ OPTIONAL: Sign up for a BidPay account.

3 Creating auction listings
3.1 Overview
Okay, here’s the meat-and potatoes. To create good listings, just follow these
simple rules:
1. DO NOT USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

a. DO NOT USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN YOUR TITLE.
b. DO NOT USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN YOUR DESCRIPTION.
2. Type out a good long description of the item, where it came from, why you
are selling it, and what condition it is in.
3. Take as many photos of the actual item being sold as you can and include
those with the auction.
4. If you are using HTML, use it sparingly. The best auctions look very plain.
5. Break up your text into many small, well organized paragraphs. If you are
not using HTML, use the HTML <p> symbol to separate your paragraphs.
6. Give the buyer a clear explanation of how you will ship the item, how you
accept payments, and how much shipping costs.
7. Do not list more than one of any given item at a time unless you have no
other choice.
8. Create a title for your auction that will be found by relevant searches.
9. Track the performance of your titles.
10. Use “bid-boosting, buzz words” in your title if any are applicable.
There are even better, more advanced secrets in Chapter 5, but for now let’s just
cover the basics. Here’s a more detailed explanation of each of the above items.
3.2 Avoid all capital letters

If you describe your items with all capital letters, many buyers will go elsewhere.
An even worse sin is to use all capital letters jumbled into just a single

paragraph, and no auction photos. People who list items like that fall into the
“Jellybean” category6.
3.3 Detailed description

Your item description should include everything you can possibly say about an
item, what shape it is in, where you got it, and why you are selling it. Ideally you
would have one paragraph on each of those things. If you don’t have much to
say about an item, tell a story about the item. Some buyers will not bid on an
item if there is not much information in the description. Seeing a longer
description reassures them that the item is valuable to you.
Be honest about the condition of the item. If someone gets an item that is not in
the advertised condition, they will most likely leave you negative feedback.
Almost any other auction mistake is forgivable compared to a deceptive
description.
One of the biggest mistakes so-called “professional” sellers make is to have

three pages of details about the seller and their business, but only one sentence
describing the item. Who thought that this was a good idea? (As if the buyers
can’t tell that it is probably some guy running a part-time business out of his
basement? Remember: buyers come to eBay because they want auctions. If
they want to buy from a business, they’ll go to Amazon or to a store in their
hometown.)
3.4 Lots of pictures
The best auctions have pictures of every angle of the item in different positions.
You should also mention this in the auction, something like “All of the photos on
this page are of the actual item you are bidding on.”
Users find it extremely annoying when someone is selling, say, a Spiderman

DVD and they just steal the photo from Amazon.com instead of taking a picture
of it and putting the picture in the auction.
3.5 Use HTML sparingly

This sounds simple, but you’ll be surprised how many people produce auction
listings that look more like Internet pop-up ads, with all sorts of flashy things and
6
As you recall, “Jellybeans” are inexperienced eBay users. No one wants to buy from a Jellybean because
Jellybeans are much more likely to mess up the sale.

music. Resist the temptation to go fancy. Remember: the best auction listings
look plain.
Here’s a quick list to follow:
1. Leave the background color white.

2. Do not add cutesy animations or cursor-trails.
3. Do not add music to your page.
4. Do not add extra pictures or logos to your page. Do not put a picture of
you and your dog on the page to “build your brand”. Bidders could care
less and are annoyed by that sort of stuff.
5. Use only ONE font (although you can bold or underline it occasionally if
needed). Preferably this is plain old ARIAL, not Comic Sans or something
weird (many users can’t see fancy fonts).
3.6 Break up your paragraphs

Humans like to read text that has lots of white space. To get people to read your
description, your text should be broken up into short, concise paragraphs.
If you are not using an HTML editor (like Microsoft FrontPage), use the <p>
symbol to break up your paragraphs. When you type your description into eBay’s
auction listing page, you will undoubtedly hit the “enter” key to separate your
paragraphs.
Unfortunately eBay does not recognize this as a new paragraph – eBay ignores
it. In order to add a new paragraph, hit enter and type <p> and then hit enter
again. That is almost the only HTML you will ever really need for creating good
auctions on eBay.

Figure 4.6.a Separating your paragraphs.
Figure 4.6.a is an example of how this should look when you type it into eBay’s
auction listing page.
3.7 Payment and shipping terms
Clearly explain how you accept payment and give a flat rate for shipping. You
should always use a flat rate for shipping rather than saying “Buyer to pay actual
shipping.”
Making the buyer pay the actual shipping expense means the buyer has to e-
mail you and wait for a response with a shipping estimate. It’s slow. It’s not
“instant gratification”. Buyers would much rather pay a little more for shipping
than go through that process. As a general rule, guess how much it will cost to
ship to the farthest place you ship, then double it. Make that amount be your flat
rate shipping charge (more on this later).
Also note that most people don’t pay any attention to your shipping charge when
they are bidding. You can make it almost any price and they won’t care.
(However, they might take it out on you with bad feedback if they feel ripped off).
In most cases, they will just bid whatever they were going to bid anyway. So you
might as well charge a few extra bucks on shipping and handling to offset your
eBay and PayPal fees. This way you will end up making at least as much as the

“sold price” minus whatever you paid for the item.
3.8 Do not list more than one of a given item

Suppose you are selling plans for a tree house. The urge to list those plans for
sale twenty times per week will be very strong. However, this tells bidders that
there is nothing to “bid” against. If your starting bid is a dollar and someone has
already bid on it, they will just bid a dollar on the next set of plans.
Also, let’s say you are selling a pair of antique chairs that match, but you are
selling them in two separate auctions. If you list them at the same time, buyers
will have to choose between them. Perhaps one chair is in slightly better
condition than the other – you will probably wind up getting all of your bids on the
“better” chair. A better solution would be to list one chair first and perhaps
mention briefly that you have another one that will be for sale next week. Then
you will sell the first chair and list the second chair. The second chair might have
several people from the last auction bidding on it and driving the price up. In
addition, the bidder who won the first chair might want a matching pair and will
drive the price up further. In this case I would definitely list the “worst” chair first
and follow it up with the “best” chair last.
There are some cases where you have no choice but to list identical items at the
same time. Perhaps you found a really good deal on Spiderman DVDs and you
own a hundred of them (or more) and you need to get rid of them. Or perhaps
you manufacture something unique in your garage and you have twenty of them
to sell. In that case, you should do your best to list as few as possible at any
given time, as well as space them out as much as possible so that you don’t
“saturate” the market.
If saturating the market is absolutely unavoidable, you may need to consider

abandoning the Bid Multiplier Method and use a starting bid that protects you
against losing money on your product.
3.9 Create the perfect title
You have to make it easy for Jellybeans to find your item. Most Jellybeans don’t
know how to search the full text of your auction, only the title. To solve this
problem, you need to expand your title to include every possible search phrase
for your listing. You want your title to include everything that someone might
search for if the person wanted to find the thing you are selling. This is the single
most important thing for selling on eBay.
Unfortunately it is only part science, and part art. You must ask yourself what all
of the things someone might type in to find this item. And then think of all of the
variations of how different Jellybeans might type those things. Some items are

hard to spell and you might need to deliberately add misspellings to your title.
Here is a good example of a well-written title:
Carhartt Carhart 38 x 32 38x32 Jeans Pants NR
Here we have a pair of jeans from Carhartt. Unfortunately many users can’t spell
Carhartt, so the seller added “Carhart” to the title. Also, Carhartt pants are a
cross between jeans and work pants. So the seller put in both Jeans and Pants.
So when the Jellybean comes to eBay looking for a pair of Carhartt pants, they
can type “Carhart pants” and find this listing. They could also type “Carhartt
Jeans” and find this listing.
A master stroke of this title was to list the sizing two different ways. First is “38 x
32” and second was “38x32”. If the seller only listed them the second way, some
users might not find them. For instance, an “advanced” Jellybean might type
“Carhartt pants 38” looking for their waist size. That Jellybean wouldn’t be able to
find these pants if the size were only listed as “38x32”. Neat, huh?
Why is that? Because eBay searches do not include partial matches. If someone
lists an item with “treehouse” in the title, a search for either “tree” or “house” will
not find that item. A smart seller would include both “treehouse” and “tree house”
in the title of their auction if there were room to include both.
The most important weapon you have for determining how to write your title is to
search for your item many times before listing it. You want to pay close attention
to:
1. The number of results that are returned for each search.

2. The number of bids on the various items that are returned that are similar
to yours.
The key here is to look for a search that produces a large number of results and
that returns many items similar to yours that have lots of bids. When trying to list
your item, you should completely ignore the amount that the items are selling for.
You only want to pay attention to the number of bids. When you find a good
search, use those keywords in your title. Steal the best titles from other people if
you have to.
When you find a search that produces either a) lots of results or b) a fair number
of results but the results have lots of bids, make sure the words you were
searching on are included in the title of your auction.
The number of bids is paramount for a couple of reasons. First, it gives you an
idea of the number of people who found these items. That’s important because if
there are lots of bids on an item similar to yours, it must have a good title. Steal

the important keywords from that seller.
Second, the number of bids is more important to the Bid Multiplier Method of
listing because your auctions are probably going to sell for much higher than the
average on eBay. The pricing of other people’s items has no bearing on the
amount that you will get for your items. By concentrating on bids only, you will
have a much better idea of how your item will perform when you list it.
This rule goes for everything on eBay. Any sort of sales research you do should
focus on the number of bids, not the item price. The only time you should bother
looking at the item price is if you are trying to find something to buy for resale,
and even then you shouldn’t focus on it too hard. If you are buying your items
correctly you should be paying almost nothing for them compared to what you
will sell them for on eBay. But if you are considering adding a new product line
(for example, you sell used books and want to start selling used cameras) you
might need to look at prices of cameras on eBay to get a feeling for what you
should be paying for your used camera gear.
This is still not a great indicator though, because using the Bid Multiplier Method
to sell will almost always get you a (very high) premium for your items.
One of my biggest auction mistakes happened when I forgot to run these “test
searches” before listing an item. A girlfriend of mine had a pair of jeans that didn’t
fit her anymore and she asked me to sell them for her.
I looked around on eBay and decided they should sell for between $30 and $50.
So I put together a great listing with plenty of photos and a detailed description.
But they only sold for $13.
For a long time I couldn’t understand why they sold for so little, but I kept working
at it and discovered that my title was to blame. Here is the actual title I used for
that auction:
Abercrombie & Fitch Flared Girls Jeans Size 8 NR
The problem with this title was that I used the word “girls” instead of “womens”.
Apparently there is some sort of order to women’s clothing sizes, but as a single
guy I wasn’t aware of it and I listed a pair of jeans that were actually a women’s
size as girl’s jeans instead.
Later on I sold a pair of similar jeans for $38 that had “womens” in the title
instead.
This example clearly illustrates the importance of a good title, and it

demonstrates the three rules to having a great title:

(1) Do your research.
(2) Understand your product and your audience.
(3) Steal the best keywords from the competitors who have the most bids.
To go back to the “treehouse” example, if you didn’t have room in your title for
both “treehouse” and “tree house”, what should you do? First run a search for
“treehouse” on eBay, and check the number of results that are returned. Next,
run a search for “tree house” and check the number of results.
As of this writing, there are 301 results returned for a “treehouse” search, and
556 results returned for a “tree house” search, which leads me to believe that
both of them are important keywords and you should try to include both if
possible. Sometimes you run a test where one search produces 25 results and
the other produces 5,246 results. In that case you probably want to give more
weight to the second term you searched for.
Now scroll through the results for each of your searches. Look for items that are
similar to yours, and check the number of bids. If you are selling a set of tree
house plans, look for similar plans among each of your searches. If you see any
listings that have lots of bids compared to the other items, check the title of their
auction and see how they spelled it. If the items in your “treehouse” search have
very few bids, but the items in your “tree house” search have a number of bids
(at least for items similar to yours) then you should probably put “tree house” in
your auction title rather than “treehouse”.
3.10 Track the performance of your titles

When you list your items on eBay you can choose to put a counter at the bottom
of your auction listing. The counter will show you how many people have visited
your page (what we call “page hits”). I highly recommend using a counter on
every auction, solely for the purpose of gauging the quality of your auction title.
Visitors to your auction won’t know if the item is any good until they click on it.
After that, the visitor may or may not decide to bid on the item, but it is up to your
title to bring the traffic into your auction.
If you have 200 hits at the end of your auction, you can compare this to other
completed items that are similar to yours. If everyone else has 100 hits, you did a
good job. If everyone else has 600 hits, then you did something wrong and you
might have gotten too low a price.
Many of my students keep a running log of the items they have sold to help
improve their accuracy in the future. At the end of each auction just jot down
details on the item, the title, the number of hits, the number of bids, and the final
price.

3.11 Use bid-boosting, buzz words

There is another way to increase the effectiveness of your title. After you get
done picking out all the best keywords to add to your title, there are a few buzz
words you might want to throw in. It might seem cliché, but I’ve seen a noticeable
increase in final bid prices when you include words such as Rare, Vintage,
Antique, Classic, etc. These words affect the bids enough that I refer to them as
the bid-boosting, buzz words.
To add some emphasis, you might want to put your buzz words into capital
letters, but “rightcase” the rest of the title7. In other words, use a mix of upper-
and lower-case letters for the bulk of the title, but then add “VINTAGE” in all
caps, like this:
Genuine gold-plated cubic zirconium necklace RARE
Adding keywords like these might feel a little sneaky. But if the keyword
accurately applies to the item, I highly recommend including it because these
keywords will almost always increase the number of bids.
Here are some of Webster’s definitions:

• “Vintage” can mean either (1) “outmoded or old-fashioned”; or (2) “of
old, recognized, and enduring interest, importance, or quality.”
• “Rare” can mean either (1) “seldom occurring or found;” or (2) “marked
by unusual quality, merit, or appeal.”
• “Antique” can mean “existing since or belonging to earlier times.”
Having shopped in “vintage clothing” stores before, I would say that any type of
old clothing should probably get the “vintage” keyword. And, of course, any type
of thing that could be classified as an antique should probably get the antique
keyword.
If you aren’t sure what buzz words you should use for your item, you can figure
the best out by searching for items similar to yours on eBay. Then steal the buzz
words from the auctions with the most bids (as long as the buzz words accurately
apply to your listing).
7
Please note that putting the bid-boosting, buzz words in all caps is the only exception to the “DO NOT
USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN YOUR LISTING” rule.

4 Listing items for sale on eBay

4.1 Options
Listing your items on eBay is a complicated game. There are a dizzying number
of options (paid upgrades) to choose from. But there is one simple rule for how to
choose among them – don’t buy any upgrades unless you have to.
Ideally you will do your own picture hosting instead of paying eBay to host them
for you. If you don’t have a web site that you can store your pictures on, you can
pay eBay $0.15 per photo to host them for you (as of this writing) and the first
photo is free. However more photos generally make better auctions, so I would
recommend signing up for a web site hosting service that will give plenty of
storage for less than $10 per month. There are also several free services out
there, such as geocities.com, but I would recommend finding a service that
works with Microsoft FrontPage.
Many students of the Bid Multiplier Method will start out using eBay to host their
photos, but soon discover that the cost is too high and switch to their own picture
host. Using your own picture host is a little harder then letting eBay do it, but it is
worthwhile to learn in terms of auction profits. Remember: the more pictures the
better, so adding lots of photos will cost you $0.15 each if eBay is doing the
hosting.
The only two options I recommend purchasing for your auction are a Gallery
Photo, and a Scheduled Start Time. The gallery photo is a miniature picture of
your item that shows up next to your auction title during a search. It is helpful for
customers to see what you are selling before they click on your item. A gallery
photo costs $0.25 extra, and is probably worth the price to make your listing
more attractive.
The scheduled start time allows you to type in your auctions any time you want,
but have them actually launched by eBay at the most advantageous time. If you
are using a 7-day auction, your auction will end 7 days after the start time, at
exactly the same time that it started. You will get the best price for your item if
you end on Saturday or Sunday between approximately Noon and 8pm (more on
this later). So it is advantageous to start your auctions in those time frames.
However, it is a pain in the neck to have to type in all of your auctions quickly
around the time that you want them to start. By default eBay will launch your
auction as soon as you submit your auction listing, but a scheduled start time will
only set you back a measly $0.10. It’s worth it.
The standard eBay insertion fee is $0.30, so if you add $0.25 for a gallery photo
and $0.10 for a scheduled start time, you get $0.65. All of the other options that
cost money, in my opinion, are not worth the expense unless you are selling a

very expensive, or a very high profit margin item. If you are selling a Mercedes
Benz on eBay you might want to spring the extra buck for a “bold” listing. ;)
4.2 Automation tools
At some point, if you plan on making a living from online auctions, you will
probably become overloaded with the work of keeping track of your auctions,
starting and ending times, photographs, feedback, packing slips, etc. If you get to
that point, you probably need some sort of automation tool to help you out.
There are several good automation tools for use on eBay. Many of these tools
charge a percentage of the final bid your items receive. (I prefer to stay away
from those myself, because the fees add up fast).
One tool that stands out is Mr. Lister from Auctiva.com. This tool is used by the
biggest seller on eBay, “jayandmarie” who sell CDs with a $0.01 starting bid.
They have about 150,000 positive feedbacks now.
Mr. Lister is free from Auctiva.com. It is a standard Windows application that

makes auction listing easier, especially if you are going to use just one photo in
your item, or if you have a tendency to sell the same item over and over using
the same set of photos. For example, if you are a John Deere dealer, and you
have 10 models that you sell on eBay, you can create 10 standard listings and
paste them into Mr. Lister and use them over and over again. It is a very handy
(and free) tool.
If you only plan to display a single photo in your auctions this tool might be for
you, since Mr. Lister will upload it to eBay and let eBay do the hosting, and your
first photo is free. Mr. Lister also supports uploading the photo to your own web
site to do your own hosting, but you still need to create the HTML to reference
the pictures. More on this when we get to the advanced auction techniques later.
Auctiva.com also offers several other online auction tools that require payment or
subscription. I highly recommend looking at their other offerings if you are selling
large numbers of items.
Another very popular automation provider is andale.com. As of this writing they

do not charge a percentage of your winning bids but instead charge a flat-fee for
automating a certain number of auctions. For example, if you sell 1,100 items per
month the fee is $89.95 to use their “Lister” tool.
Andale also has a great e-mail tracking system to handle your incoming e-mails
from bidders. Andale automatically keeps track of which items each bidder is e-

mailing you about and whether you have replied. And it lets you create e-mail
“templates” so you don’t have to type the same e-mail over and over each
month. A very handy tool for $5.95 per month (unlimited usage).
Another good feature of Andale is the detailed pricing reports. They can be used
to get an idea of what the “hot” products are and how much they are selling for.
For $2.95 per month you can use their pricing tools as much as you want.
When you add all of these tools up they might get a little expensive, but Andale
also offers service “bundles” that include discounts for multiple products that you
can use. Visit their site (http://www.andale.com) for the latest pricing and details.
4.3 Auction duration
When you list an auction you must choose the length of your auction. Three, five,
seven or ten days. There is an additional $0.10 fee for a ten day auction. Most
beginning eBay sellers want the longest auction possible to get the most amount
of exposure for their item. While there is some truth to this, and it “feels” obvious,
it probably doesn’t make any difference.
I have experimented with all of them and I find no appreciable difference in

auction lengths. I usually pick a five day auction, but most people choose seven.
If time is running short and I want to get an item up soon I might choose a three
day auction (depending on the day I want it to end, of course).
Almost all of the action on your item will come in the last couple of days of your
auction, and probably in the last few seconds of your auction due to bid snipers
(people who bid at the last second, hoping to win the item with a sort of a sneak
attack). So why bother waiting a whole week when you only need the last couple
of days? This is especially true of items that sell for under $50. The higher the
value of the item, the less incidence of bid sniping.

5 All the Best Auction Secrets

5.1 Overview
Well here they are, the deepest darkest auction secrets. You have already heard
many of them: good description, lots of photos, fixed shipping price rather than
“buyer pays all shipping costs”, no ALL CAPS, one font, plain listing, and good
titles based on number of bids, not prices.
There are a few more that deserve their very own chapter in this book.
1. Start every auction for $1 (or less, if applicable).
2. Never under any circumstances use a reserve price.
3. Never under any circumstances mention what you think the item is worth
in your auction.
4. Charge enough on your shipping to pay all your fees.
5. Avoid looking like an eBay “business” seller. If possible (and accurate),

present your item as if it is something your family bought for their own use.
A little more detail on each of those things…
5.2 Start every auction for $1 or less
There are so many zillions of reasons to start an auction for $1 (or less) that I
can’t list them all, but I will try.
1. Buyers want a good deal. When they see an item for $1 they are more
likely to bid on it.
2. Buyers are intimidated by high starting bids, even if the starting bid is way
below the value of the item. It feels like such a commitment to bid $30 for
a $100 item.
3. Buyers never want to let someone else get a good deal on an item, so if
they see a $100 item that someone else is winning for just $1, they will
want to bid on it just to steal it from the other bidder.

4. Because of all of the above, you will get more bids on your item than the
next seller on eBay.
5. Jellybeans, once they start bidding on an item, become attached to it,

especially if you have a quality listing. They think “HEY! THAT’S MY ITEM
AND YOU CAN’T TAKE IT FROM ME!” And they will try and outbid the
other bidder, even if they bid more than they had originally planned.
6. By listing a $100 item for $1, you will attract many, many people who are
bidding a small amount, but by the time the auction ends, they have
already achieved “mental ownership” of the item.
7. By starting the item at just $1 (or less) it will make you appear less like
some sort of business “selling” a “product” and more like a regular Joe
that is selling some extra stuff on eBay. This is important, see section 6.6
below.
8. By starting your auction at $1, buyers will recognize that the market gets
to determine the value of your item, not you. To buyers, this “feels” much
more like they are getting a deal, even if they end up overpaying.
9. By starting your auction at $1, you will let the market decide the value of
your item and the value of your auction. If you listed your item properly,
the market will always value your item higher than the average eBay
seller.
10. When a buyer sees an item that should be worth $100 that has a starting
bid of $30, they will wonder if you think that it’s only worth $30. The bidder
will wonder if the item is broken or so severely used that you listed it for
$30 with high hopes. By listing at a dollar, the bidder will be able to tell by
looking at the description that this is a “real auction”.
5.3 Never use a reserve
Again, there are a zillion reasons to use no reserve on all of your auctions. Here
are a few:
1. Buyers hate bidding on items that have a reserve. There is an element of

uncertainty to it that they do not like. They aren’t sure if their bid will cause
your reserve to be met, which means they don’t know if they will get it.
2. Buyers don’t want to invest the time bidding on and watching an item
where the reserve isn’t met because it distracts them from the “real” deals
on eBay. If the reserve isn’t met, they think, “Gosh, I wonder if the idiot

who listed this item thinks it is worth $200 instead of $100. This can’t
possibly be a good deal.”
3. If the reserve has already been met, it signifies to the user that they will be
paying more than you wanted for the item. So now you are telling the
bidder that they will be paying too much if they bid on your item. What an
insult!
4. By using a reserve, you are telling the bidders what you think the item is
worth. If you let the bidders decide what it is worth, they will almost always
pick a value higher than you would have.
5. Bidders resent it when you won’t tell them how much you want for the
item. It makes them feel like they are at a car dealer trying to get a price
for a new car. This is frustrating and annoying instead of fun and exciting.
6. Recent changes in eBay’s listing fees have made it more expensive to list
items with a reserve. The higher your reserve, the higher your listing fee.
Before I go on, let me say that this is probably the hardest thing to convince
people of, but it is the single most important “secret” for selling things on eBay.
Having a high starting bid (anything over a dollar) or a reserve is practically
bidder-repellant.
To illustrate my point, let me tell you about a car I sold on eBay. A few years ago
I went to my local Dodge dealer and bought a brand new Dodge Viper. If you
aren’t familiar with Vipers, suffice to say that they are a very expensive sports
car.
After about three years, the economy turned south and my “real life” business
started to dry up. I was still making big payments on that car and I really wanted
to get rid of it. I called car dealers in my area and asked what I could get for it as
a trade in, and they all quoted me $10,000 to $20,000 less than I owed on it.
I looked into selling it on eBay but almost every Viper auction ended with no bids.
I watched dozens of Viper auctions end with no sale, and they would reappear
on eBay within a couple of days. I was just about to give up hope, but then it
occurred to me that the people selling Vipers on eBay were just doing it wrong.
So I listed my Viper on eBay for $1 with no reserve. Shocking, isn’t it? Everyone I
talked to about it said I was nuts. But I was sick of making that very big payment
every month, and I was ready to get rid of it, even if I lost a few thousand on it.
It turns out the car sold for more than I owed on it, and I ended up with enough
left over to make a (small) down payment on my next car.

And that’s how the Bid Multiplier Method was originally born, really. I had been
selling things prior to that using the same techniques, but selling the Viper with a
dollar no reserve auction proved that it can be done for almost anything.
After that I refined my techniques and developed a standard auction format that I
like. I shared my secrets with anyone who would listen, but again, most people
said I was nuts. Those who did give it an honest try have had fantastic results
and are still using these techniques today.
5.4 Never mention a price in your listing
There are some rare exceptions to this, but as a rule you should never mention
any price in your auction listing. Buyers are smart enough to figure out what they
think the item is worth. Just let them. If you mention any price in your auction you
are guaranteed to get less than that amount, because buyers want a bargain. If
you say it’s worth $100, then buyers will only want to pay $90 for it. If you don’t
say anything, they will bid against each other to get it.
The major exception to this is when you have an item that has a retail price that
is outrageously high, you managed to get the item for much less, and the item is
extremely hard to find (so bidders may not be able to find out the retail price by
searching for it on the web.) An example of this might be a custom-made item,
such as a hand-woven rug, or a piece of rare art.
Even in that case, however, I would try to include enough details in the auction
(maybe even a link to the manufacturer’s webpage that shows the retail price) so
the buyer can track down the retail price themselves rather than display a price in
the auction.
5.5 Charge enough flat-rate shipping to cover your fees
If the shipping costs $5 for an item, and your eBay fee is $3 and your PayPal fee
is $3, then your flat-rate “shipping and handling” charge should be $11. Bidders
rarely look at the shipping charge before they bid. If $11 seems drastically too
high to you (for a very small, light item), try $9.50 or $10.
Because the seller pays the PayPal fee and not the buyer, many sellers do not
accept PayPal credit card payments. This is a major mistake for several reasons.
First, most buyers want to pay with a credit card. It’s much easier than mailing a
check or going to the bank and buying a money order to send you. Second, the
“instant gratification” factor favors PayPal payment. Third, PayPal was bought by
eBay some time ago and it is now very tightly integrated with eBay’s checkout

feature. Jellybeans find it very easy to pay for items with their credit card through
PayPal.
Shouldn’t you make it as easy as possible for the buyer to give you money? To
me, the answer seems obvious. But you’d be surprised how many sellers make it
very difficult for auction winners to pay for their item.
Don’t get hung up on fees. You will just pass these costs on to your winning
bidder through your flat rate shipping and handling charge. Look at similar items
selling on eBay to get a feel for what others are charging for S&H, then set your
S&H as high as you think you can comfortably get away with. Most bidders
simply will not notice or care about the S&H charges.
5.6 Personalize; don’t professionalize.
eBay is currently poisoned with plain old fashioned businesses selling stuff
instead of auctioning it off.
As of this writing, if you search for “Spiderman DVD” on eBay you will find
dozens of sellers with a starting bid of $19 and a “buy it now” price of $26.50.
These aren’t auctions; they are just the same old junk you see when you go to
the supermarket. Those prices are “plus shipping” of $10. If you go look up the
price on that same DVD at amazon.com, you will find it for $14 plus shipping.
Buyers recognize this scam. They don’t like it and won’t stand for it. People use
eBay to find good deals on stuff, not to just buy things the old fashioned way.
Auctions, when done properly, are exciting. They are not just an ordering
process. Buyers can tell the difference between an auction and a sale. And
they prefer an auction.
The key is to set a tone in your auction that personalizes the item. You want to
mention things like your family bought this item, used it gently (or not at all, if you
are selling a new item) and now have no use for it, so you are selling it. For
example, a perfectly good pair of pants, worn a few times but now outgrown. Or
a used book that you bought new and read, and now want to sell.
Even if you are selling something that is new in the package, you want to avoid
looking like a business that sells those. It is much better to suggest that your wife
bought it for you for your birthday and you didn’t like it.
You will appear on eBay like just another user selling some stuff that is taking up
space around the house, and bidders will be jumping over each other trying to
bid.
Of course, it’s also important to do this without lying or deceiving the buyers.
That type of thing almost always catches up to you. However, you can almost

always find a tone that doesn’t sound like you’re a huge corporation but still is
honest.
This is one case where a feedback rating that is too high can actually hurt you. If
you have thousands of positive feedbacks, you are obviously running some sort
of business. Buyers probably won’t believe it if you put an item up that says “My
wife bought me this brand new television and I decided I didn’t like it, it’s still new
in the box, never plugged in” and you have a feedback rating of 20,000.
Surprisingly, I’ve found that having a feedback rating under 500, and preferably
under 100, is about as high as you want to go with the Bid Multiplier Method. Any
higher than that and you will start looking like a business, so you might want to
set up a new eBay account and divert some sales to it.
The concept of not looking like a business is one of the single hardest things to
convince my students of. No one believes me until they try it themselves. If you
are currently selling things on eBay and trying to make your listings look
“professional” like you are some sort of real business, put together just a single
auction as a test run using the above rules and see what happens.
Chances are good you will discover that you end up getting more bids and a
higher final price.
5.7 A final note on this method
I realize that this list of “secrets” sounds ridiculous. They are counter-intuitive to
the way you are supposed to sell things for a profit (“Buy low and sell high”). But
they work because bidders get emotionally attached to good deals, and they
don’t want to let it go even if the deal isn’t so good anymore.
Here’s another way to think of it: traditional economic models are built on the
idea that when a given product is in scarce supply, its price tends to go up.
Similarly, if there is great demand for a given item, its price tends to go up.
On eBay there is an additional element to the puzzle – the demand for, and
scarcity of, a well listed auction or a “good deal”. If you are selling a very
common item, say, a Spiderman DVD, you will be competing with about a
hundred other sellers of the same thing. Who will the buyers buy from?
In the “old” model, the buyers should go to whoever has the best price, or the
lowest shipping charge, or whatever.
But in the “new” model, the buyers may flock to whoever has a really good listing.
You combine that with offering the best price (dollar no reserve) and you will
attract both buyers who are looking for the best price and buyers who are looking

for a good listing (lots of photos, good description, etc.) For example, if you offer
a DVD for $1 with no reserve, when everyone else offers it for $15 or has a
reserve.
Obviously, only the first bidder can get the “one dollar” deal, since the next bidder
will bump the price up to $1.25, and then $1.50, and so on. But it’s a long way
between $1 and where the deal starts to be not-so-good. And some of those
bidders have already made up their mind that they want this one, instead of
another one. They just keep bidding till they win the item. That’s what the Bid
Multiplier Method is about.
I had one student who absolutely refused to believe that these methods would
work. He thought I was nuts. But I convinced him to try it, so he went through his
garage and picked out ten items that he was about to take to the dump. They
seemed utterly worthless to both of us. He ended up selling those items for over
$200, and from then on he was hooked.
Before you decide that this method is ridiculous, rummage around your garage
and find some things to sell that you won’t care if they only fetch a dollar. Take
the time to clean the items up. Do good listings with the right keywords, photos
and descriptions. List those items for $1 with no reserve and see what happens.
You might be pleasantly surprised.

5.8 Checklist #3: Actions to list an item the Bid Multiplier Way
Here is a checklist of actions you should take before listing any item on eBay:
□ Write a solid auction title that will be found by buyers.

□ Do multiple searches for similar items so that you can understand
your audience and determine the words that generate the most bids.
□ Consider multiple spellings of important keywords.
□ If appropriate, include the bid-boosting, buzz words (e.g., RARE,
VINTAGE, or ANTIQUE) in the title.
□ Write a thorough description.

□ THE DESCRIPTION IS NOT IN ALL CAPITALS.
□ The description describes the item in detail, including where it
came from, why you are selling it, and what condition the item is in.
□ The description does not include unnecessary text about you or
your business.
□ The text is broken into multiple well-organized paragraphs, but you
haven’t overused HTML.
□ The text includes a clear explanation of how you will ship the item,
how you accept payments, and how much shipping costs (and the
shipping and handling charge covers your fees).
□ The text does not say how much you think the item is worth.
□ The text has been personalized rather than professionalized.
□ Include multiple photos of the actual item.
□ The photos are taken from multiple angles.
□ The photos are set up at your web hosting service and are linked to
correctly in the description.
□ The photos are of the actual item that the person will be buying.
□ Choose the right set of options for your item.
□ Select a counter to track page hits.
□ Choose an end time for the auction between 12 PM and 8 PM on
Saturday or Sunday. If necessary, pay to have a scheduled start
time so the auction will end during these hours.
□ Choose a 3-day, 5-day, or 7-day auction (but no longer than this).
□ Pay for a gallery photo of the item.
□ Set the starting price for the auction at $1 or less.
□ Do not use a reserve.

6 E-Mails with bidders

6.1 Overview
You will have to send a few e-mails to your bidders. Sometimes someone will e-
mail you a “Question for seller” regarding one of your items. This is the reason
you want to have an Internet connection at home, so you can respond to these
questions quickly. If it takes you two days to respond to a question, the bidder
might think you aren’t responsive and won’t want to do business with you.
Needless to say you should always be polite and courteous when responding to
questions.
You will also want to put together some “boiler plate” letters that you can use to
send to winners of your auctions. Here are some sample letters that I use for the
most common situations.
6.2 Auction winner e-mail
Many times Jellybeans win an auction and then don’t know what to do, so they
wait for you to e-mail them instructions. Most people will pay for their purchase
instantly within an hour of the end of the auction. But in the event that you have a
few people that don’t pay immediately, you should send them something like this
to “prod them on” so to speak. eBay will automatically send out an “End of
auction” e-mail at the end of the auction that includes the winner’s e-mail
address. You should just reply to this e-mail, but change the TO: address to the
winner’s e-mail address instead of eBay’s address.
Hi there!
Congratulations on winning this auction. I hope that

you enjoy this item very much. If you have any
questions or comments, please don't hesitate to
contact me at [fill in your email address here].
I ship all of my items by UPS or USPS the day after

payment is received. So if you pay for the item by
tonight at midnight it will ship tomorrow morning.
The amount due is $xxxxx including all shipping

charges.

My preferred method of payment is via PayPal.com. If
you choose PayPal, make your payment out to [fill in
your email address here]. Alternatively you can just
use the eBay checkout feature and choose PayPal as
your payment method. If you would prefer a different
method of payment, please let me know how and when you
will do so.
Thanks very much for your business and I hope to be

able to serve you again!
Yours truly,
[fill in your name here]
Note the fact that I tell them the amount due on a separate line from the rest of
the letter, so it stands out. Also, I tell them that if they hurry up and pay, it will
ship tomorrow (instant gratification!).
6.3 Payment confirmation e-mail
Here’s the letter I send out after the winner pays for their goods:
Hi there,
Thanks for your lightning fast auction payment! I will

be shipping your item via UPS or USPS tomorrow
morning. I will e-mail you the tracking number (if
any) tomorrow evening.
If you have any questions, comments, or problems with

this item, please don't hesitate to contact me at
[fill in your email address here]. I will work hard to
make sure you are happy with your purchase.
Thanks for buying from me and I hope to do business

with you again some day!
Yours truly,
For your records, I will be shipping:

To this address:
On this letter, I fill in what I will be shipping (the title of the auction) and the
person’s address at the end, so we all agree on what’s going on. The winner
might say, “Hey wait a minute, that’s my old address… oops!” This gives them a
chance to correct any problems before I ship.
Also, if someone takes a week to pay for their item, I will change the first line of
this e-mail to simply, “Thanks for you auction payment!” instead of “lightning fast
payment”.
6.4 Winner refuses to pay e-mail
Occasionally, you will probably run into some bidders who decide they don’t want
to pay for their item after they have won. They will tell you their grandmother
died, or they are in the hospital, or whatever. Here’s the letter I send out to non-
paying bidders. If I simply don’t hear from a winner at all, I’ll try sending more
gentle e-mails first; then I’ll send this out after about two weeks. If they e-mail me
and tell me they aren’t going to pay, I’ll send this email out in response
immediately.
Hi there,
As I am sure you are aware, selling items on eBay

costs quite a bit in fees, and by not carrying through
with your end of this deal, you will ruin my auction.
I would much rather you simply pay for the item. I
will give you until [enter a date here that is one
week from today’s date (e.g., Friday, January 17th,
2004)] to remit payment for it.
After that date if you have not paid for the item I
will leave negative feedback on your account and I
will file a non-paying bidder alert with eBay.
I'm sorry this sounds harsh, but this is the standard

procedure for non-paying bidders according to eBay. By
filing a non-paying bidder alert with eBay I will be
allowed to re-list the item with reduced fees.
I sincerely hope that you will carry through with your

end of this arrangement and am sure you will be very
happy with this item.

Please note that you are specifying a date for them to pay by instead of leaving it
up in the air. Give them a date at the end of the week (at least 3-4 days from
whenever you send this letter) and let them sweat it out. So far, every time I’ve
used this letter, the bidder has simply paid up with no further effort.
Remember, the goal is to get paid for your item, not to get into fights with
Jellybeans. Always be kind and polite. And if they still won’t pay after sending out
this letter, leave them negative feedback on the 90th day.
6.5 BEWARE OF TROLLS
If you use the Bid Multiplier Method of listing auctions, and you list an expensive
item (let’s say $100 or above, for this discussion) you will encounter a special
type of Jellybean that I like to call a Troll.
Trolls lurk in eBay and wait for expensive items to be listed for a dollar with no
reserve, and then they send e-mail to the seller asking them how much the seller
wants for the item, offering to pay it if the seller ends the auction early. You are
perfectly allowed to end an auction early if you want to, so there is nothing really
“wrong” about this as long as the auction is still handled through eBay. There is
an explanation of eBay’s policy regarding this issue at
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/solicitation-offsite-sale.html. Here is an
excerpt from that page:
“…it is acceptable for a buyer to email the seller and ask to end the item
early at an agreed upon winning price.”
When you get one of these e-mails, you will feel the extreme urge to reply to the
Troll and say “Okay, I’ll take $60 for it.” Because you knew you only paid $25 for
it, and it’s a good deal. And since you have an eager buyer, why not go ahead
and take advantage of it?!
Resist the urge. You will almost always make more money by just letting the
auction run for a dollar and taking normal bids on it. I have seen dozens of “Troll”
offers and I have never seen a troll win one of those auctions. Not one.
Which means that the Trolls are just looking for a bargain, like everyone else.
That isn’t so bad, but don’t let the bargain be at your expense. Getting Troll e-
mails means you did a good job putting together a quality auction, and people
are interested in your item. You will almost always get Troll e-mails in the first
couple of hours of your auction, before you get any bids. You will be watching
your items nervously on eBay, refreshing the screen every 5 minutes to see if

anyone has bid yet. Then you will get the Troll letter and you will be emotionally
torn apart. “What do I do if no one bids on it? I better jump on this offer!”
That’s what the Bid Multiplier Method is about. It’s up for a dollar. No one will let
anyone else get away with a “steal”. People will bid on it when they find it. Give it
some time. If you have done your research properly, found items that have plenty
of bids (not necessarily high prices), then your item will do well.
The Troll is simply looking for the guy who found an old stereo in his attic and
doesn’t know what it’s worth. The guy puts it on eBay for a dollar because he
actually thinks that might be all it is worth. When he gets an offer from the Troll,
he is overjoyed that someone wants it. Don’t fall for it.
Incidentally, I have never seen a Troll actually send an offer. They always say,
“How much would it take to end this auction early?” Because they don’t know if
you know how much it is worth. They don’t want to tip you off if you have no clue.
Here is the “Troll Repellant” e-mail that I send back to Trolls.
Hi there,
First let me say thanks for your interest in my

auction, and thank you very much for your kind offer
to purchase the item outright.
I get a lot of requests to buy my items outright, but

I generally don't do that. The primary reason is that
I am quite emotionally attached to my things, and I
think they are worth much more than they actually sell
for. I've found that the solution to this is to list
them for $1 with no reserve and let the marketplace
figure it out. If I list my items for what I think
they are worth, they will be overpriced and just won't
sell.
Of course everybody has their price, and you should

feel free to make an offer for the item, but
experience tells me that what I will take to end the
auction early is MUCH higher than you can buy it for
just by bidding on the item.
I do genuinely appreciate your interest in my item and

I hope that you do not take offense at this response.
I hope that you bid on and win this auction. Good
luck!

After sending this e-mail out to a Troll, I have never gotten a reply back.
Sometimes they bid on the item, but they never e-mail back an offer, and they
never win the auction, because Trolls are cheapskates.
Of course you shouldn’t get upset at the Trolls because they are genuinely
complimenting you on your listing. Take it as a sign that you are doing things the
right way. Just don’t give in to the urge to name a price. Let the marketplace
figure it out.
And, by the way, you might just run into a non-Troll who makes a genuinely
stupendous offer, and you might decide to end early. If that happens though, I’d
still be suspicious because that means your item might be some rare collectible.
In that case I’d wait a day or two to e-mail the guy back and see what happens
with the auction. Chances are it will go through the roof all by itself.
But that’s just me; I’m a suspicious guy.
One more note on Trolls – if you send the Troll my Troll-Repelling letter, and they
e-mail you back what appears to be a “fair” price (based on your eBay research
from beforehand) you should still resist the urge. Remember, the Bid Multiplier
Method of doing eBay auctions produces much better final prices than the
average auction. If the average widget is selling on eBay for $100 and you get an
offer of $100 (plus shipping, of course) for yours, you might be tempted to throw
the rules out the window. That’s not a good idea. Yours will probably fetch over
$130 if you’ve done a good quality listing.
The first few times you resist the urge will be hard. Just trust me, it’s worth it.

7 Finding things to sell

Now that you know how to get more money for the things that you sell on eBay,
the challenge is to find enough good things to sell. Depending on your financial
situation, there are different techniques that you can use to make money.
If you don’t have any money to invest in your business, there are techniques that
you can use to get started with no cash.
Once you have a little bit of starter cash, there are many things that you can buy
that will make you $10 to $30 per auction. However, these things tend to be a bit
too much work to produce a serious second income. So, I recommend
specializing in an area in which you can make $50 or more per auction.
7.1 Getting started with things in your home

You can get a good business rolling on eBay with starting capital of about $300,
assuming you already own a computer, digital camera and Internet connection.
That’s enough money to “prime the pump” so you can make enough money
selling items to buy some more to sell. But what if you don’t have $300 to start?
Turn your junk into cash
There are things all around you that you could easily sell on eBay. However,
most people don’t recognize the gold that surrounds them because much of it
looks like junk. There is a reason for that: your junk is another person’s treasure.
To find these potentially profitable items, simply go through your garage and
closets like you are preparing for a garage sale. Identify all of the things that you
haven’t used in the last year and are unlikely to use in the year ahead. This
means everything: clothes that no longer fit; old sporting equipment that you’ll
never use again; books that you haven’t touched in years; old movies; extra
telephones; any old electronic equipment; decorations; knickknacks; old
furniture; gifts that you received but will never use; etc.
These things are doing nothing for you except creating clutter, but they can
provide the money you need to get started with eBay. Just use the techniques
outlined before about how to create your listings and you will be well on your way
to having a second income from eBay.
Sell things you get for free

Once you’ve found this junk, start looking for things that you’ve gotten or
regularly get for free.
What? Selling free things on eBay? It’s all a matter of being creative.
For example, I recently bought a new car. About a week after I got the car, the
car manufacturer sent me a very fancy welcome package that included an
interactive CD ROM and a booklet about the car’s features, and some other fluff.
I was about to throw it away but then I decided to sell it on eBay.
It was more of a gag than anything else, but it did sell for $1, plus $7.50 for
shipping and handling. So I got $8.50 for something that I got for free. First class
mailing was around $2.50, which left me with $6, minus eBay and PayPal fees.
That left me with about $5.
That’s 5 free dollars I didn’t have before. If you can sell 60 free items for $5 each,
you’ve got $300.
Get money for old catalogs and manuals
Go through your old filing cabinets. Old catalogs that you got for free are worth a
lot of money on eBay. I’ve seen old stereo catalogs sell for $30 that were free
from the manufacturer 30 years ago.
Another novel source of quick cash is product manuals. For some reason, old
product manuals sell pretty well on eBay. If you have some lying around, run a
search and see if people are buying the product manuals you have. This is
particularly true of stereo manuals for some reason, but it probably applies to just
about anything electronic.
7.2 Other low-cost options to get started

If you somehow manage to run out of things around the house to sell to generate
some starter cash, there are a couple other easy, low-cost options you can try.
Find and sell old DVDs
DVD movies sell fairly well on eBay, but I have stayed away from that market
because I can’t find a good place to buy used DVDs locally. You can buy used
movies from your local video rental store, but the problem there is that they are
always in the worst condition, and usually have rental stickers on them.
DVD movies that are former rentals will sell, but they won’t fetch a great price.
Since the rental store is already charging a lot for them, you probably won’t make
much.

If you have a used DVD that you can put on eBay and describe it as “a movie my
wife and I bought new and watched once,” it will sell like crazy. You might even
get more for it than you paid if do a good job. But if it has scratches all over it
when the buyer gets it, he or she will want to return it.
Find and sell clothes from thrift stores
Look through the local Salvation Army or Goodwill store to find used name-brand
clothing in good condition. Compare what you found to similar items selling on
eBay. Remember to look at the bid counts, not the prices. If there seems to be a
good market for what you’ve found then buy it and list it.
There are always a few name brands of clothing that sell really well on eBay, but
those brands change periodically, depending on the season and on what’s
popular at the time. So keep an eye on the clothes that are getting lots of bids
and then go down to your local Salvation Army and buy those. If you do it right,
this “business plan” is unstoppable.
Unfortunately the down side of this technique is that you will probably have a
hard time finding enough of the best items, because those are the items people
want to buy. Your best source will be Salvation Army-type stores that are located
in or near very rich communities. If you don’t live near one of those, it will
probably be worth your while to drive to one to do your shopping.
Small items are not the Holy Grail
Please note that all of the above ideas are good and will make money. However
they will all make small amounts of money, which means you will need to sell
thousands of DVDs and such in order to make a living. Unless you have a very
good source of these things, you should only do them long enough to get going
on better things.
Think of it this way: if your goal is $35,000 per year ($632/wk) you can run 63
auctions per week that net $10 each, or 10 auctions per week that net $63 each.
Packing, shipping and listing will eat up all your time if you are running 63
auctions per week, not to mention finding the time to buy 63 items per week.
7.3 Choosing a focus

Once you’re ready to invest in finding the items that will make you more profit per
auction, there are a number of options available to you. The easiest option is to
visit garage sales, second-hand stores, flea markets, the Salvation Army, and

anywhere else you can think of to get cheap used stuff8. There are hundreds of
types of items that you can find at these places that will sell on eBay.
If you have experience with antiques you are bound to do well on eBay. If you
find a rare antique deal, put it on eBay instead of trying to sell it to your local
antique store.
Any types of electronics sell well as long as you test it and make sure it works. A
good example would be if you found a used-but-good cordless phone that is the
latest thing (as I write this, Panasonic 2.4 GHz phones are popular). You can
sometimes find them at a Salvation Army for $5 and sell them for $30 if you
clean them up properly.
Essentially, what it boils down to is this: buy used, name-brand anything and sell
it on eBay, after doing the proper research.
These types of places sell hundreds of different types of things, and it’s
impossible to be an expert in every area. So, I tell my students to choose a
focus. You need to find a type of product to become an expert on, preferably a
type of product that sells well on eBay.
Of course, what you buy is up to you. I would highly recommend sticking with (or
at least starting off with) something you are already familiar with. If you read a lot
of books, start by selling used books, but only buy books that are getting good
bid counts on eBay. If you are into stereo equipment, start there.
If you are into computers, try focusing on that. There is a large section below
about getting good deals from technology wholesalers, so if this type of product
interests you please keep reading.
7.4 Buy used merchandise for cheap locally

If you only have a few dollars to start out with, you can easily get started by
buying and reselling things that you find in your community. There are a number
of places where you can find inexpensive, used products that would sell well on
eBay. Pawn shops, flea markets, thrift stores, and garage sales are all good
places to find cheap goods.
As always, you should clean up any item you are going to sell before taking
pictures for your auction. Dust it off; wipe it down; coil the cord up neatly; do
whatever you need to do.
Pawn shops
8
If you can find good deals on new items, go ahead and try them. However, dealing in used goods will
generally have a better return on investment, lower risk, and require less capital.

Visit the pawn shops in your area. As I mentioned in the introduction to this book,
a student of mine recently went to visit a local pawn shop. In the glass case they
had a Fluke 87 multimeter. This student works with electricity during the day, so
it caught his eye.
When he got home he checked eBay and found lots of bids for Fluke 87’s. The
average price varied widely (depending on the quality of the auction, of course)
but the low end looked like $100, and the high end looked like $125. He went
back to the pawn shop and bought it for $50.
He sold that Fluke 87 on eBay for $213 plus shipping of $14.50.
Thrift stores
I mentioned earlier that Thrift stores (like Salvation Army or Goodwill) can be a
good place to find name-brand clothing to resell when you are starting out.
However, you can also find other types of products there that might make you
more money per auction. I like to pay especially close attention to the electronic
products that are sold in these stores, as you can often find big sellers for cheap.
Garage sales
If you can find the time to go garage sale shopping, you can find some hidden
gems. At a garage sale, it is not uncommon to find people who are willing to sell
things for practically nothing just so that they can get the things out of their
house. These people are happy to sell things for far less than they are worth.
I have a friend who is really good at garage sales. He has a rare ability to make
ridiculously low offers for things and have them accepted. He says he goes to
garage sales and finds a good item marked “$200” and offers $20 for it. The
owner usually puts up a fuss but they dicker and he ends up paying $30 for it. If
you have a talent like this, you should be selling those items on eBay.
Flea markets
Flea markets are a good source for antiques and other collectible goods, and
many times the item doesn’t have to be a valuable antique to sell well on eBay,
as long as it looks like it is. I am not talking about advertising it as a valuable
antique (lying, that is). Just put your old looking item up, and if it’s an antique,
say so in the listing’s title. Old tools, barn implements, etc., sell fairly well on
eBay. There are plenty of collectors of that sort of stuff, and also people who are
decorating their log cabin who want to buy things like that.
Wrought-iron anythings sell pretty well on eBay for the same reason; people like
to use fancy knick knacks for decoration. Be sure to do your eBay research

before you buy anything, however. It is easy to end up owning plain old junk
instead of valuable junk if you aren’t careful.
7.5 Buying items on eBay for resale
This is a highly advanced, but very lucrative technique, and you probably should
not attempt this until you have some good eBay experience under your belt.
There are a couple of different techniques for buying things from eBay that you
plan to turn around and sell on eBay. The first is to look for undervalued items,
and the second is to buy wholesale/bulk items that you can break up and sell in
small quantities.
The first technique works like this: look for the lousiest auctions that are selling
items that are selling well elsewhere on eBay. I have a student that buys vintage
stereo gear, but only when the auction is in all capital letters and has no pictures,
or very few poor pictures. Then he just cleans the gear up, puts together a very
nice auction using the Bid Multiplier Method, and makes good money.
This particular student has a high degree of familiarity with vintage stereo
equipment and can fix them if they show up broken. So I wouldn’t recommend
you try this yourself unless you are willing to get stuck with a bum piece of
equipment.
Another problem with this technique is that lousy auctions often mean lousy
products. Occasionally my friend buys a stereo that has scratches all over the
front of it. In those cases he cleans it up the best he can, advertises it as having
the scratches, but tries not to accentuate it too much. He usually even makes
money on those units.
Another good way to find undervalued items is to use many different methods of
searching for the item. If you are searching for a Spiderman DVD, you might try
these searches:
Spiderman DVD
Spider man DVD
“Spider Man” DVD
Siderman DVD
Spierman DVD
Spidermen DVD
Spidreman DVD
And then if that doesn’t produce anything interesting, try going directly to the
eBay category “Entertainment > DVDs & Movies > DVD > Drama > Other” and

thumbing through there to see if anyone has listed a Spiderman DVD but
misspelled it in a way you didn’t think of.
Not hip to categories? Browsing eBay by categories gives you access to a

goldmine of misspellings, typos and other mistakes that will be undervalued by
Jellybean buyers. All you need to do is go to www.ebay.com and click the
“Browse” button at the top. eBay will show you the various categories of items
instead of you searching for individual items.
If you drill down far enough in the categories you might find just what you are
looking for, and also find some interesting mistakes. All the people who did not
take the time to figure out the right title for their item (so that people can find it
when searching with the most obvious search words) will stick out like a sore
thumb. Those are the items you should be looking at buying.
Several years ago I had a friend who built a wet bar in his basement. For his
birthday I decided to buy him a neon beer sign to hang at the bar. At the time,
there was a series of Budweiser commercials that was very popular and featured
a pair of lizards. There was a particular neon sign featuring that lizard that my
friend wanted, but they were all selling for over $300, and that was a little more
than I wanted to spend.
So I went to these categories and looked around:
Collectibles > Breweriana, Beer > Signs, Tins > Budweiser

Collectibles > Lamps, Lighting > Neon
I found one auction for the very sign I was looking for, but the word “Budweiser”
was misspelled as “Budwieser” and there were no bids. I ended up buying it for
about $100.
After that I could have easily turned around and sold it for $300-$350 but I
wanted to give it as a gift. This is exactly the sort of thing you should be looking
for if you want to buy things on eBay and re-sell them.
Another interesting item came up when a student of mine was selling an old
video game machine on eBay. He had a game console and three games, so he
put up four separate auctions.
His game deck sold for about $60 and each of the games sold for about $10.
Around that same time, another seller listed an identical console with ten games
included (in a single auction).
However this other seller didn’t know how to do a good auction. He listed it with a
starting bid of $45 and a “Buy it Now” of $75. His auction didn’t get a single bid.

Obviously we felt a little curiosity about it, so we looked at that seller’s past
auctions. It turns out he had tried to sell his bundle at least 3 previous times, and
he kept lowering his starting bid by $5 or $10. He couldn’t understand why it
wasn’t selling, so he just kept lowering his price and starting over.
We had a good laugh at that guy’s expense, making fun of what a Jellybean he
must be since he couldn’t sell his unit with ten games included for less than the
price of our game unit with no games included.
We laughed and laughed, only to realize that we were the Jellybeans. We should
have bought that unit and resold it with a good quality auction instead of sitting
around laughing at him. I kept my eyes on that seller for a while but he never re-
listed the item again. He probably took it to the dump and paid to get it out of his
misery.
So those are the types of items you want to find if you are buying things on eBay
to resell. But there is another way to buy things on eBay for resale, and that is
buying bulk.
7.6 Buying bulk on eBay
In general I don’t recommend this technique unless you have a lot of selling
experience, as it is very easy to get ripped off or stuck with a lot of something
you can’t resell for a profit. However, I have seen sellers doing it successfully
(and making lots of money from it). Put in some time selling through lower-risk
methods before you pursue bulk items. Also make sure you have some space
available in your garage to store a lot of items before you order a pallet of Circuit
City returned items.
Do a search on eBay for “Pallet” or “Pallet electronics” and you will find a large
number of sellers selling pallet loads of store-returned electronic merchandise,
such as stereo equipment, DVD and VHS players, microwaves and the like.
Stores sell these returns off in pallet loads without sorting them, usually by the
pound.
You can pick up a whole pallet of mixed returns for about $500-$5000 plus
shipping. It’s not hard to imagine that someone selling these items with the Bid
Multiplier Method would be able to do well. However…
You should be careful about who you buy bulk goods from using a technique like
this. The best thing you can do is carefully research the seller’s feedbacks, and
try to find a buyer who bought a similar pallet. Then email that buyer and just ask
them if they were happy with the pallet load. There are many sellers of bulk
pallets like this that have poor feedback ratings because they will pick out the

best items first, and then resell the pallet and state that it hasn’t been picked
through, inventoried or sorted.
You can often find these sorts of products being sold on eBay by sellers who are
trying to look like a business. They say things like “Department store returned
telephone, may be missing some items, it lights up when plugged in but item has
not been tested.” These people are buying bulk returns and reselling them on
eBay.
Generally these auctions would sell for higher prices if the seller would just take
a few minutes to test the item properly, clean it up, and indicate which
accessories come with the auction. Those are the sorts of things that would
increase the value of your auctions if you decided to try buying a pallet of goods.
A variation of this technique is to buy liquidation-type merchandise from

professional liquidators. These might include department store returned items,
shelf pulls, job lots, open box items, etc. If you can find one in your area you will
save a bundle on freight, but don’t let distance stop you from trying to find good
bargains on bulk merchandise.
Good suppliers will change from time to time in this arena because the
merchandise changes frequently. You should expect to pay anywhere from $500
to $5000 per pallet of these sorts of goods.
To find suppliers of bulk goods like this, you might try running a search on
Google for “liquidators” or check the Google directory for business-to-business
liquidators at
http://directory.google.com/Top/Business/Wholesale_Trade/Liquidators/ . This
should get you a relatively good quality list of suppliers to choose from.
I can’t stress enough that when buying bulk items in this manner you should try
to get references from previous customers whenever possible, especially when
you are dealing with a new supplier.
7.7 Hot Deals
There are several significant forums (message boards) on the Internet where the
users sit around and post “hot deals” they’ve found while shopping on the net.
You should read these every day and look for outrageous deals that are too good
to pass up (many times free).
The first important one is FatWallet.com and the second is Anandtech.com.

FatWallet covers all types of products while Anandtech covers mostly
technology-related items. There are other forums out there, but these are
probably the two biggest.

Every now and then someone posts a discount coupon code for Dell.com that
allows you to buy the latest and greatest computer for only $150 plus tax. Go
ahead and buy one and sell it on eBay. There are enough Jellybeans out there
(who missed the original sale) that you will probably make some good money
doing it.
Another option is to keep an eye on local sales. Very frequently a new

department store opens up and has limited “1 day specials” to bring in
customers. Many of these sales can produce excellent bargains for an astute
eBay seller.
7.8 Buying from “traditional” sources
This is a tricky one – almost every seller on eBay wishes they could sign a deal
with Sony to distribute Sony electronics. Presumably that would give you the
right to buy products at prices low enough that you could make a profit on them.
Unfortunately if you don’t sell a million DVD players a year, Sony probably won’t
talk to you. You’ll end up buying from a distributor in New Jersey, and when you
get the price list you’ll be able to find better prices online anyway. So what’s the
point?
In general, I don’t recommend buying products from traditional sources to sell

using the Bid Multiplier Method unless the product is in big demand (meaning the
product is already getting good bid counts on eBay) and you can get a really
good price on it. For most people this will not include new digital cameras,
televisions, DVD players, etc.
However you can sometimes find good deals at factory outlets, for example. Buy
a few fancy name-brand items and sell them on eBay for a profit. You can do the
same thing if you are planning to visit another country – find out what you can get
in the duty free shops or directly in the foreign country to bring back with you.9
But these are hardly “traditional” sources.
I had a friend who used to sell automotive parts, which is typically a very
competitive business. He was very small-time, but he had a “secret” – he lived
next door to the president of an OEM automotive parts manufacturer, and this
neighbor was able to get him good pricing even though he didn’t buy much. If
you have a similar secret weapon, don’t hesitate to take advantage of it.
9
Of course, research the applicable customs laws before doing this so that you don’t get hit with hundreds
of dollars of import duties when you bring the goods back into the country.

7.9 Drop Shipping
First let me say that before you try using drop shippers to supply your products,
you should read the section below on the risks of selling new products with the
Bid Multiplier Method. You need to do careful research on the products you
intend to sell, and I also recommend running some test auctions before going all
out.
There are plenty of sellers on eBay who use drop shipping to make money. I
haven’t tried using a drop shipper in conjunction with the Bid Multiplier Method,
but if you want to take the chance you can give it a try.
In case you aren’t familiar with drop shipping, a drop shipper is a wholesaler who
will ship your order directly to your customer for you (usually for a small fee). So
you sign up with the wholesaler and list items from their catalog on eBay. When
the item sells, you collect payment and then send the order to the wholesaler,
who ships the product to your customer.
There are drop shippers available for almost any type of product you can think of,
but it’s tricky to find good drop shippers. There are hundreds or thousands of
“scam” drop shippers out there. Most of them charge you a “set up fee” and then
send you a photocopied catalog that includes a handful of no-name-brand,
cheapo import products that cost way too much.
There are also many people out there who sell lists of drop shippers, but those
usually work out even worse. The lists are old and outdated, when you get in
touch with an alleged supplier they tell you they haven’t drop shipped in 20
years, or whatever.
So I’m going to give you a few reputable drop shippers here for free. You can
usually browse their catalogs online and see if the pricing is any good, and you
don’t have to pay a setup fee to get their catalog.
• D&H Distributing Company, http://www.dandh.com

• Brooke Distributors, Inc., http://www.brooke.com
• Real Electronics, http://www.realelectronics.com/
• PickSend Distributing, http://www.picksend.com/
I have worked directly with D&H Distributing in the past and have found them to
be reliable and reputable. I haven’t worked with the rest directly so I can’t give
you a full review for each of them. They are probably worth talking to if you are
looking for drop-shipping suppliers.

7.10 Big discounts for small orders

As a “small fry” seller you are likely to get the worst pricing from any distributor
you call. In fact the prices are probably going to be on par with deals you can find
on the Internet. If you can find those deals so can most Jellybeans, so why would
they bid higher for your item?
If you have done a good auction you can earn a premium for your items, but the
margins will still be smaller than if you buy used goods cheap and turn them
around the same way. So if you want to sell new items, particularly consumer
electronics, you need better margins through lower costs for goods.
A very good way to do that is to join a buying consortium. One of the largest
buying consortiums around is The ASCII Group (pronounced “askey”). Their web
site is at http://www.ascii.com. They negotiate contract pricing with various
distributors on behalf of their over 2000 members. Which means you can get top-
notch pricing on computers, electronics, DVD players, etc., just by joining.
One of the distributors that has a contract with The ASCII Group is D&H
Distributing, which (you may remember from the previous section) is also willing
to do drop shipping directly to your customer. D&H carries plenty of consumer
electronics brands such as Panasonic and Sony so you should definitely be able
to find some of their products you can move.
You might also want to check with Ingram Micro (http://www.ingrammicro.com/)

and Tech Data (www.techdata.com). As of this writing, Ingram Micro has a
contract with ASCII but Tech Data does not. Both of these distributors have a
wide range of products (they are primarily technology-focused), including name-
brand computers.
Even though Tech Data doesn’t have a contract with ASCII as of this writing,
they will probably try to match Ingram Micro prices, and if you tell them you are a
member of the ASCII Group they will probably just give you better prices
automatically. It’s worth a try.
The ASCII Group has “contract pricing” arrangements with several other
distributors (mostly of technology-related goods) and it’s probably worth getting a
catalog from each vendor after you join, just to try and find things that sell well on
eBay.
As of this writing, ASCII Group membership is $95 per month with no long-term
commitment. You can join for a few months and then cancel if you want to. Last
time I looked over the ASCII-level pricing with Ingram Micro it was definitely
worth the price of ASCII Group membership, especially if you are planning on
starting a full-time business selling on eBay. You don’t have to be a huge seller
to get the good pricing on technology products.

You can learn more about ASCII Group membership at http://ww.ascii.com . You
probably should tell them you are an independent computer reseller if they ask.
Also, the distributors that have contracts with the ASCII Group will probably
require that you have a business license before they work with you.
7.11 Added risks
Here’s the problem: when you purchase products from wholesalers/drop

shippers, even if you get a decent price, you may not cover the cost of the goods
if you use the Bid Multiplier Method. That’s the reason why sellers have high
starting bids and/or reserve prices – to cover the cost of their goods. They don’t
want to accidentally sell an IBM notebook computer worth $1000 for only $500. It
wouldn’t take many of those “deals” to put you out of business.
There are a couple of solutions to help you offset these risks, but you need to be
very careful in employing them. My suggestion would be that if you are dead set
on selling new products (instead of used products you bought on the cheap), you
should try one or two test auctions to see how they go before you go nuts selling.
Remember, with the Bid Multiplier Method you should still get a 30% premium for
your items compared to other sellers. But many times bid “snipers” will come in
and bid on your item in the last 10 seconds of the auction, and you won’t know if
you got the right price for it until after the auction is over. So do your research
carefully. Make sure the item is getting plenty of bids on eBay. Make sure your
distributor (or you yourself) has the item in stock. Make sure the price you pay for
the item is less than the price you expect to get for it.
Your first line of defense is always your research. Examine completed auctions
for the products you want to sell carefully and determine if you can do better with
a quality listing, no reserve and a dollar starting bid. This is the easiest way to
determine whether you will make money on a given product.
The last line of defense that you have against a losing auction is to end the
auction early. This is allowed according to eBay rules, even though it is annoying
to the bidders. Just wait until the last few minutes of the auction (if possible)
before canceling, because the price might go up dramatically at the end.
NOTE: A line of defense used by some unethical sellers is known as “shill

bidding”. Shill bids occur when you have a friend of yours bid on your item for
the minimum amount you would want for it. Shill bidding is illegal and it is
against eBay rules, so I definitely do not recommend it. I’m only including this
information for your curiosity, and so you can watch out for it in items that you
are bidding on (instead of selling).

Shill bidding works like this… Suppose a seller buys a DVD player for $100 and
lists it on eBay for $1 with no reserve. The day before the auction ends the bid is
only up to $60. The seller has their “shill” place a bid on the item for $100.
Because eBay has automatic bidding, the bid on the item only goes up to $62.50
or so. Now they let the auction finish like it normally would, so if bid snipers come
in at the last minute and drive the price up, they might make out okay. If not, their
friend “wins” the auction but they don’t really sell it to him. They wait a few days
and leave each other positive feedback and move on.
While this might sound tempting to try, it is fairly easy to get caught shill bidding if
you do it more than once or twice. It will look awfully suspicious if another user is
winning all of your auctions. There was even a case a few years ago where the
FBI investigated and prosecuted a handful of sellers who were caught shill
bidding. So this is something you should definitely stay away from.
Remember, your best defense against losing money on an item is to do your

research before you start and only sell items that have lots of bids. And
preferably, you should be buying lightly used items instead of new (whenever
possible) in order to get the best prices.
One more note about selling new products: the products that sell well on eBay
will change over time. If you find a great deal on a digital camera and make tons
of money on them, you shouldn’t necessarily order 100 of them for resale.
Technology goods can become outdated very quickly as new products are
released by manufacturers. Running test auctions on new products will help you
keep track of which items will perform well for you.

8 Packing and Shipping Tips

Packing and shipping are the bane of an eBay seller’s existence. If you are
selling a large volume of goods, you can probably work out a discount rate with
UPS or FedEx Ground service where they will give you good prices and stop by
your house every day to see if you have anything to ship. However you have to
be pretty big for that and most of us are left having to run to the UPS Store or the
US Post Office 3-4 days a week.
Another problem is packing material. If you ship UPS Blue or Red, or USPS
Priority Mail, or any other “premium” method, the shipper will usually give you
packing materials for free. The US Post Office makes a great (and free)
cardboard box that fits most average items. You can get them free at your local
Post Office, but only if you are shipping your item via Priority Mail. If you want to
use the less expensive Parcel Post, you’ll have to get your own packaging.
Since you are charging a flat rate shipping charge, it is to your advantage to send
the item the cheapest way you can. I recommend pricing out the various
methods available to you for the “average” item that you sell, and stick with that
at the beginning. For example, if you sell lots of books your best price is probably
going to be USPS Media Mail. If you sell larger-but-lighter items your best price
is going to be USPS Parcel Post, UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. Get the best
prices, figure out how far you need to drive, and make the best choice you can.
After that, you need to figure out how to package your item. You should try to find
ways of scrounging free boxes and packing material when you can (for padding,
crumpled up newspaper works fine most of the time). But if you are selling in
volume you will probably get sick of it sooner rather than later.
The next step is to shop for new packaging material, since shipping UPS Blue or
USPS Priority is probably not worth the added cost to get free boxes. You can
get fairly good prices from a company called ULINE (http://www.uline.com).
Surprisingly, you can usually find better prices for packing materials directly on
eBay. Find an item you want from the ULINE catalog and search for it on eBay. It
seems to me that most of the time you can get 20-30% off by buying the item on
eBay instead of directly from ULINE.

9 Good and Bad Auction Examples

Due to copyright restrictions, we aren’t allowed to print exact duplicates of eBay
auctions in this book. So these examples are not copied and pasted directly from
eBay, but they are very similar to actual auctions that have appeared on eBay.
Some of the “good” auction examples are actual auctions run by my students
that are reprinted here with permission. All of the photographs included in this
chapter are copyrighted by their respective owners.
For the most part, you can automatically assume any auction with a high starting
bid (higher than a dollar) or a reserve is a bad auction, so for this chapter we
won’t be focusing on that issue too much. Since these examples are based on
real auctions, I’ve included the starting bid and reserve status for comparison
purposes.
9.1 The importance of the basics
Here’s an example of a bad auction. This was for a piano stool that one of my
students was trying to sell (before I met him). Fortunately for this student, the
reserve was not met and the item didn’t sell.
Title: Chas. Parker Piano Stool
Starting bid: $100 (Reserve not met)
Number of bids: 2
Highest bid: $132
Hidden reserve price: $150
Shipping: Buyer pays all shipping costs
Description:
This is an original Chas. Parker co. of Meridan, CT claw and glass ball solid
mahogany piano stool. It is swivel height adjustable and measures 19" high at
the lowest adjustment and the seat diameter is 14 1/2". It is all original, including
the finish, and has a very nice patina. It's in very nice condition, there is an
imperfection in the finish on the seat, the glass balls are nice with no chips or
cracks.

There were a couple easy errors made here, such as the high starting bid and
the reserve price. Less noticeable are the lack of good photos and the “one big
block of text” instead of separate paragraphs. Another problem is the lack of a
fixed shipping price.
Let’s see how this same auction went after this student agreed to try the Bid
Multiplier Method of listing items.
Title: Antique Mahogany Chas. Parker Piano Stool
Starting bid: $1
Number of bids: 21
Highest bid: $195.80
Hidden reserve price: (no reserve)
Shipping: Flat rate $25
Description:
I acquired this stool from an old retired pastor in South Royalton, Vermont, who
told me his father, also a pastor in Vermont, used this stool to play hymns for the

congregation on the church piano.
This is an original Chas. Parker co. of Meridan, CT claw and glass ball solid
mahogany piano stool. This is the same Charles Parker who produced those
very collectible shotguns in the 1800's. It is swivel height adjustable and
measures 19" high at the lowest adjustment and the seat diameter is 14 1/2". It is
all original, including the finish, and has a very nice patina.
It's in very nice condition, there is an imperfection in the finish on the seat, the
glass balls are nice with no chips or cracks. Good luck and thanks for looking.
This second piano stool auction is a very good example of the Bid Multiplier
Method. The description could be a little longer, and there could be a few more
photos showing close-up details, but overall this is an excellent auction (in my
opinion).
Adding the word “antique” to the title is helpful to give antique shoppers a reason
to look at the item. And in general, if you call something an antique its price will
go up somewhat regardless of what type of old junk it is.
You can see that by listing a somewhat valuable antique for a dollar with no
reserve, it attracted many more bidders than the first auction, and as a result
they drove the price up.

9.2 Good titles make a difference

This auction illustrates the extreme importance of a good title. Below is a bad
auction example even though it follows all of the rules of the Bid Multiplier
Method.
Take a look at this auction and see if you can spot what is wrong with it.
Title: Uncle Sam Americana Coin Bank Metalware
Starting bid: $1
Number of bids: 0
Highest bid: 0
Shipping: Flat rate $11
Description:
My uncle Mort had this bank. He was a World War Two veteran that loved
America and Americana items. He was on the shore of Normandy on D day, and
made it home with minor injuries. He was a platoon sergeant and received a
purple heart. He fought to keep America free. God bless uncle Mort.
This is a hand painted iron mechanical Uncle Sam coin bank. It is very heavy.
You place a coin in Uncle Sams' hand, push the button and he drops the coin in
his U.S. bag. His mouth closes, his arm lowers, and the bag opens and the coin
drops in. There is an eagle raised with an "UNCLE SAM" banner on the front of
the base. On the sides of the base it's raised with the word "BANK" on both
sides. It has the original iron plug on the bottom as well as the words "classic
iron" engraved in it. It measures 11" high from the bottom of the base, and the
base itself is 4 1/2" wide and 3 1'2" deep.
It is in excellent condition, the paint job is very nice and it works flawlessly. Good
luck and thanks for looking.

What we have here is a case where a single word in the title makes a huge
difference. People who are shopping for this type of item frequently look for a
certain type of item to the exclusion of others.
In this situation the item did not sell. The seller re-listed the item a week later with
a listing that was identical to this one. The only change was adding the word
“mechanical” to the title, so it read like this:
Uncle Sam Americana Mechanical Bank Metalware
By making just that one tiny change, this item attracted four bids and sold for
$20.49.
As I mentioned earlier in this book, I had the same experience with a pair of
jeans by changing the title from “girls jeans” to “womens jeans”.
The way to defend against this sort of mistake is to search for items similar to
yours, pick out the items that have a high number of bids, and make sure you
have all of their best title keywords in your title.
Over time it is almost guaranteed that you will list at least one item with a lousy
title, and it will receive many fewer bids than you were expecting (perhaps no
bids at all).
In that case the easiest solution is to do your title research again and find any
words that you were missing. Then end the auction early due to a mistake in the
listing (this is one of the reasons you can choose when ending an auction early)
and re-list it with the new title. There is no shame in ending your auction early to
fix a problem with your keywords, and it can earn you an extra $20 or more.

9.3 The Ultimate Bid Multiplier Method Listing

If you are anything like me, you flipped directly to this section when you saw it in
the table of contents. By all means, feel free to take a look at what I consider to
be the “ultimate” auction format.
However, please keep in mind that many of the features of this auction will not
make sense until you have read through the rest of this book. If you try to copy
this auction format without understanding why I think it is the best, you will
probably make some serious mistakes, and then wonder why your item isn’t
selling.
In my opinion, the best auctions look very plain. I’ve tried all sorts of gimmicks to
make auctions look fancier, but those listings never seem to sell as well as
listings that use the format you are about to see.
Also note that if you want to use this format for an item, you must host the photos
on your own web site. The auctions above use eBay photo hosting, but for this
format you will have to do it yourself. I’ll explain how after you see the listing.
Title: Bugs Bunny and Taz Allstars Mens baseball shirt Med.
Starting bid: $1
Number of bids: 18
Highest bid: $28.50
Shipping: $7.50
Description:
Bugs Bunny and Taz (Tasmanian Devil) Warner Brothers Allstars Baseball
Shirt, Mens Medium
I got this shirt as a gift and it's a little too small for me. I had to wear it and wash
it a few times to be polite, but it is very new and there is nothing wrong with it.
The person who got it for me bought it at the Warner Brothers Company Store.
This shirt features Bugs Bunny and Tas on the back with the number one (1).
The front says "ALLSTARS" and there is a small insignia in near the bottom of
the front that says "Acme Allstars 54, Looney Tunes Players Association." The
label inside reads: Warner Brothers Studio Store, size M, 100% Cotton.
There are no rips, stains, holes, or anything else wrong with this shirt. There are

no missing buttons and everything looks new.
I am currently in the process of selling lots of my family's near-new, name-brand

clothing, so if you are looking for good deals clothes for you or your family,
please view my other items. I start ALL of my auctions at $1 with NO RESERVE.
Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions (click my username
above to send me an email.) I will be happy to take extra measurements or shoot
additional photos if needed. Thanks for viewing my item!
All of the photos on this page are of the actual item you are bidding on. Click the
thumbnails to the left for a larger view. As you can see in the photos, this shirt is
in excellent condition.
Shipping will be $7.50 flat rate in the continental United States.
This item will be professionally packed and promptly shipped at the end of the
auction, via UPS Ground or USPS Priority Mail.
For payment, I accept Cashier's Checks, Money Orders, PayPal, and BidPay.
For PayPal payments, I only ship to CONFIRMED addresses. If you want me to

ship to a non-confirmed address, please pay using BidPay instead (click the link
below).
As you can see, this auction looks very plain indeed. Each of the photos shown
are thumbnails and if you click on them they take you to a larger, 1024x768
version of the picture (hosted on my web site).

Note that the shipping information is highlighted at the bottom of the auction. All
of the details for payment and shipping are covered here, in a manner that is
easy to read. It jumps right out at you as being nicely organized.
Another interesting feature of this listing is that about three quarters of the
information presented is about the item, not the seller or the auction terms and
conditions, or whatever. I’ve seen ten page auction listings that literally only
contain one sentence about the item being sold. That isn’t the way to do it.
Don’t go out of your way to look like some sort of big fancy business, even if you
are one. You are simply selling a product at an online auction site like anyone
else, and the buyers don’t care about your fancy graphics skills.

10 Hosting your own photos
This book is not intended to be an HTML primer, so I am not going to get into too
many specifics about how to create your auctions in HTML by hand. In general, I
use a tool such as Microsoft FrontPage to create my auction listings in
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode. Then I look at the HTML
that FrontPage creates for me, and copy the relevant portions over to the eBay
item listing tool.
To do this, you will need your own web hosting space. There are plenty of free
web hosts on the internet (such as Geocities) but most of them have special
code to block photos on their servers from showing up in eBay auctions. Even if
they do allow you to host photos for your auctions, they almost always have
ridiculously low bandwidth caps, which means halfway through your auction all
the pictures disappear.
So I would highly recommend getting a reliable web host that you pay for. There
are many available for less than ten dollars a month that will work just fine.
When you choose a web host, it will be much easier for you if you pick one that
offers FrontPage support. This means that you can create an auction listing in
Microsoft FrontPage and then publish the listing, along with all of the photos
attached to the server very easily.
The first step is to resize the photos that you are going to include in the auction.
These should be 800x600, but sometimes I use 1024x768 instead (when I want
to show a lot of detail). The photos should be in JPEG format and compressed10
to reduce the image size so they download quickly.
The next step is to open up a blank web page in FrontPage, and create your
auction. I generally start out by adding a table with two columns and as many
rows as I need (roughly one row per photo, as you can see in chapter 11.3).
Drag and drop the photos that you want to add to your auction into the left
column, putting one photo in each row.
You will notice that FrontPage adds the photos in their original size, which is
much too large for an eBay auction. Right-click on each photo you add and
choose “Auto-thumbnail”. This will automatically shrink each photo to postage
stamp size and set up a hyperlink back to the original size photo for you.
Type your description in to the column on the right. I usually put my shipping and
payment information into the bottom cell on the right and change the background
color of that cell to a light shade to make it stand out.
10
I usually set the compression to 65% quality on my JPEG images.

When things look the way you want them to, save your work and publish it to
your web site with FrontPage. Refer to the FrontPage help if you are unfamiliar
with publishing in FrontPage.
Now there are a couple of small problems you’ll need to watch out for. The first is
that FrontPage sometimes saves your pictures using unqualified URLs. What this
means is that if your website is krugpublishing.com, a fully qualified image link in
HTML would look like this:
“http://www.krugpublishing.com/ebay/shirt1.jpg”
But FrontPage will usually save this link like this:
“shirt1.jpg”
The reason is that it will work just fine if the web page and the photo are on the
same server. But we are planning to store the web page on eBay and the photo
somewhere else.
To fix this problem, click on the HTML tab at the bottom left corner of your
auction page in FrontPage. This will show you the HTML that FrontPage created
for you. Scan through the HTML and look for any file names that don’t have the
full “http://krugpublishing.com” part in front. If you find any, just add it to the
filename by hand.
To make sure you have the right fully-qualified URL, just copy the whole thing
(such as http://krugpublishing.com/shirt1.jpg) over to a browser and paste it in. If
your picture shows up in the browser, you’ve done everything correctly. Be sure
to try this test after you use FrontPage to publish your site, since it won’t be there
yet if you don’t.
The other problem you need to avoid is copying too much HTML from FrontPage
into eBay. As you scroll through the HTML, you will see a tag near the top called
the body tag. It starts out with “<body”, (sometimes) followed by a bunch of text
on the same line, which is always followed by a “>” character. Near the bottom of
the HTML you will find a tag marking the end of the body that looks like
“</body>”.
What you want to do is copy everything between those two body tags over to
eBay’s auction listing tool (see figure 12.1). Do not include the two body tags in
your copy.

Figure 12.1 Copying HTML between the body tags in FrontPage.
Once you paste the relevant HTML into eBay’s auction listing tool, make sure to
click “Preview description” at the bottom of the tool to make sure you did
everything correctly. Make sure all of your photos show up as expected before
you continue.
That’s pretty much all there is to creating auction listings with FrontPage and
hosting your own photos. By using these techniques you can save a lot of cash
on photo hosting, especially if you like to include lots of photos in your auction.

11 A last word
So, that’s the Bid Multiplier Method. Using the techniques outlined in this book,
anyone should be able to make thousands of dollars per month in their spare
time.
And when I say anyone, that includes you. You’ve already taken the first step by
gathering knowledge, but the next step is more critical. In order to make any
money with this knowledge, you need to put it to use. Sell something. Sell
anything. Try it out. You’ll be surprised by good it feels to know that you are
working for yourself and making a tidy profit at the same time.
Lastly, I would love to hear from you. Please let me know how these techniques
work for you. If you have suggestions on how they can be improved, please let
me know. As a teacher and an author, there is nothing more satisfying than
hearing from a student who has put my teaching to use. You can email me at
eBaySecrets@booksonstuff.com.
Best of luck. I hope to hear from you soon.
Steve White
PS As I mentioned earlier, to get a free bonus report on how to leave negative

feedback without having to worry about retaliation, please just send me an email.
About the Publisher:
At Krug Publishing, we believe that learning never ends and that knowledge
should be shared. Krug Publishing helps people get their expertise out of their
heads and into the hands of the people who can benefit from it. We believe that
almost everyone is an expert in some area or passionate about some topic.
When people share their expertise and passion, the entire community benefits.
If you are an expert in any area, please contact us to learn more about how we
can help you to produce, market, and sell your knowledge. Send a brief email to
bryon@krugpublishing.com, and we will get in touch with you to discuss how we
can work together.

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Ebay Secrets

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eBay® Secrets: How to Create Internet Auction Listings That Make 30% More Money

While Selling Every Item You List

By: Steven Ellis White

Copyright © 2004 Steven Ellis White and BooksOnStuff Publishing

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1.2 Not for Complete Beginners

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1.3 A Universal Approach

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□ An e-mail address. You will need this to be able to communicate with

□ OPTIONAL: A bank account. eBay auction buyers overwhelmingly prefer

□ OPTIONAL: Photo editing software. To do the best auctions, you will

□ OPTIONAL: Microsoft FrontPage (or a similar HTML editing tool). To do

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2.2 Earning feedback

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To see examples of this, go to eBay and run this search:

2.3 Who goes first when leaving feedback?

On the subject of feedback, I have prepared a bonus report on how to leave

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□ Sign up for an eBay account. To sign up on eBay, open your browser to

□ Sign up for a PayPal account. To sign up with PayPal, go to

□ OPTIONAL: Sign up for a BidPay account.

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3 Creating auction listings

1. DO NOT USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

9. Track the performance of your titles.

3.2 Avoid all capital letters

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3.3 Detailed description

One of the biggest mistakes so-called “professional” sellers make is to have

3.4 Lots of pictures

Users find it extremely annoying when someone is selling, say, a Spiderman

3.5 Use HTML sparingly

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Here’s a quick list to follow:

1. Leave the background color white.

3.6 Break up your paragraphs

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Figure 4.6.a Separating your paragraphs.

3.7 Payment and shipping terms

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3.8 Do not list more than one of a given item

If saturating the market is absolutely unavoidable, you may need to consider

3.9 Create the perfect title

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Carhartt Carhart 38 x 32 38x32 Jeans Pants NR

1. The number of results that are returned for each search.

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Abercrombie & Fitch Flared Girls Jeans Size 8 NR

This example clearly illustrates the importance of a good title, and it

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3.10 Track the performance of your titles

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3.11 Use bid-boosting, buzz words

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