eBay: how to sell #6

Last time on eBay: how to sell, we successfully listed our first item for auction and, like all the best soap operas, were left wondering what happens next.

Will Jeff finally discover that Molly has been cheating on him with her hunky personal trainer? Will this be the last straw for their already shaky marriage?
(Ed. - Hold on, I think you have the wrong manuscript here…)
[Comment: Sorry. That’s the puff for my daytime soap I’m pitching shortly. I’m not sure how that got in there.]

Typically, an auction will last seven days, so don’t get too alarmed if you don’t receive any bids straight away. It may be a few days before you get bids at all as most people tend to hang back from placing bids until much nearer the closing time so as not to drive the price up. Often the busiest period for bidding will be in the last two hours of an auction and in most cases right up until the last few seconds as bidders try to outsmart and outclick one another to place the successful bid.

Until recently my personal best was winning an auction with 8 seconds to spare. Now, however, I’ve managed to pare this down to two seconds. The reason being that bidders place a maximum bid and you’re trying to figure out what that might be. By leaving it to the last few seconds to place a higher bid your opponent does not have enough time to respond with a counter bid.

Once an auction is under way sellers cannot afford to veg out in the meantime. There’s the email inbox to monitor for questions from potential buyers. It is a good idea to check your eBay email morning and evening to pick up enquiries about your listings. These email messages turn up at the inbox of the address you used to register with eBay and via the My eBay message centre.

Questions should be replied to promptly and fully. When you respond via the My eBay message centre the reply form includes a check box to post the question and answer within the body of the listing for other users to see. If the question is relevant and the reply unequivocal, it’s usually a good idea to post Q and As to the listing. This will do two things: help expand your description and field the same question from other bidders.

You will know yourself which questions and answers add to the sales information and which serve to confuse matters or make you sound like a shady character. Regardless, good communications makes for sales and positive post-sales feedback from satisfied customers.

To an extent, sellers do get a heads up on how their auction is going even when there are no bids. The My eBay control panel shows an overview of each item for sale and this information includes the number of people ‘watching’ an item. This is a measure of the number of times users have clicked the Watch this item on your listing.

Usually, the number of watchers is a fair indication of interested parties, but this does not always translate into actual bids. Some watchers may simply be window shopping. Others may have an item just like yours and want an idea of how much it might be worth. Four or more watchers are normally a good sign of a potential bidding war brewing. But, like most things, this can’t be taken for granted, humans being what they are.

Occasionally, things do go wrong with an auction through no fault of your own and it is important to deal with these issues as quickly as possible. A case in point was a side repeater, a wing-mounted indicator, I successfully auctioned off when conducting the research for this series.

The bidder settled via PayPal, so I dug out the item from the box under my desk to package it up. To my horror, a crack had suddenly appeared in the orange lens. I could only conclude that the change of temperature from a cold drafty garage to a computer-warmed office had done for the aging brittle plastic. A 3 cm hairline crack on the inside of the lens was plainly visible but luckily hadn’t penetrated all the way so probably wouldn’t cause it to leak.

Even so, there was no way I was merrily going to pop it into the post and get a load of grief and possibly negative feedback over £2.80 or so. I decided to take a picture of the lens as it was now and post that on a web page. Via the eBay email system, I contacted the buyer and explained what had happened, apologised and inserted a link to the new picture. I also offered her a refund should she decide she no longer wanted the item.

Within a few hours she got back saying she really needed the side repeater so could I send it anyway and consider a partial refund. Very reasonably, I felt, I refunded a pound off the postage and packaging. This still left me with the closing price and enough to cover the postage and the cost of the PayPal refund. The packaging for this eBay selling experiment was being cobbled together from whatever bits and bobs I could find in cupboards and my waste paper basket. (Yes, thinking big has always been a weakness of mine)

Getting back Quentin Tarantino-style to the plot, what happens when an auction ends?

Sellers who use eBay’s Turbo Lister software can set this up to automatically generate invoices as soon as the auction ends. Otherwise the seller has to send the invoice manually by clicking on a link within the eBay email announcing that the item has sold.

Something like 80 per cent of all eBay sales are paid for using PayPal, so in these instances the seller is emailed by PayPal, an eBay sister company, when the closing price has been settled. If the buyer is not paying by PayPal they contact the seller through the eBay email system indicating which of the other payment options offered they intend to use. Next most popular after PayPal are personal cheques followed by banker’s drafts and Postal Orders. Although it is possible for buyers to pay by credit or debit card using the PayPal electronic payment service, some sellers give buyers the opportunity to pay by card over the phone instead.

Whichever way they choose to pay, the next step in the sales process is fulfilment. The likelihood is that you’re up to speed with posting your stuff already, so there’s no need to labour the point too much here.

The only observations on this issue are always retain proof of postage and mark on the back the item and the buyer’s name and address. Sometimes, even though you list an item as for UK sale only, sellers will receive enquiries about their items from overseas. If this happens, either say no or advise them as soon as possible about the postage costs to their country and certainly before they go ahead and make a bid. To be avoided at all costs is an auction that ends with an overseas buyer pulling out due to prohibitive shipping costs.

A successful bid, it should be noted, is a legally binding agreement to buy. Whether this is always enforceable is another question despite eBay dispute resolution procedures. After all, leaving negative feedback for a non-payer is little consolation for a lost sale.

Rules of engagement for auction selling and buying are well covered on the eBay site itself, so check them out there. Also to be recommended for sellers is the eBay Community section. This part of the site hosts forums and knowledge banks to help sellers make the most of their selling experience on eBay. There’s no need to feel out on a limb, chances are that any problems you run into have been encountered before and the answer can be found in the eBay Community forums. These, together with the knowledge bank pages and FAQs, are a mine of information containing sound selling tips and eBay advice. And the added extra is that you will be meeting other eBay sellers who know what you’re going through and are prepared to share the benefit of their first hand experience.

Not only that, there’s the possibility of making some useful contacts with whom to share traffic by setting up cross-promotion. This works by adding links to each other’s auctions. For example, for the classic Saab 900 parts selling research, it may have been possible to link up with someone who exclusively sold parts for the new shape model.

And that’s it: selling on eBay made easy. Like many things in business, you won’t know until you give it a try.

 * If you missed the earlier parts of the series, use these links below: