College v2

Part One: Beginer’s Guide
Part Two: What doesn’t sell / what to buy
Part Three: Your tips
Part Four: Later this week

With the previous two supplements in this eBay series I’ve gotten a bunch of comments from you guys about what you think about selling on eBay. I figured I would compile them all into one post. One common thought my recommendation to close things on Sunday. So here they are unedited with a response from me where necessary.

JD from Get Rich Slowly found that books don’t sell well, and comics only sell when rare or limited:

I once sold my entire Cerebus collection (which was not a complete run, but close) and only got about $100 for it.

Frank from Jami and Frank found that by adding RARE to a title, it can up the value:

How about adding *RARE* to the title of your listing. This got me $30 more for the Google Cryptex.

Bojangles’s thoughts on antiques:

Hello, eBay is the place to BUY antiques NOT to SELL them. If you know what your selling you will never get a good value on eBay – if the item is of any value try a major auction house. However, many people on eBay sell items without knowing anything about them, or just enough to describe them without knowing how much they may be worth. MANY good antiques can be found on eBay. eBay is also a good place to SELL MODERATELY PRICED COLLECTIBLES and over rated “granny” items such as Royal Doulton Dolls. It’s amazing what people will pay for some items, really.

Ravin disagreed with my theory that auctions do better on a Sunday night:

The comment about having the auctions end on a Sunday evening is actually quite interesting, because I’ve found that that’s when I’m able to get stuff cheapest.

Hebchop from http://www.jacobheberlie.com/ recommends searching for misspellings:

I have a friend who searches for misspelled titles to find bargains that never get viewed by the superspellers of the world.

Optophobia’s site: Fatfingers.com helps you search for typos.

Andrea reccomend’s embeding your pictures in your html to save money:

You can embed lots of pictures in your html rather than pay ebay to upload them – ebay gives one free & charges for the rest. It takes a little bit to learn this, but is NOT difficult.

I’ll let gogogo speak for himself:

Sunday evening may well be a peak time for ebay but bear in mind that there will be both an increase in buyers AND of auctions/competition so it’s not clear it’s the best time to end an auction. I’ve found Sunday, Monday, Thursday evenings to be good.

It’s also not true that a 0.99 starting price is always the best policy. This is only true if your item has a lot of demand. Many times if there are only a few buyers interested and you list the item at near retail you will eventually get a buyer willing to pay that price – you may need to relist a few times. If you had starting it at 0.99 it may be that only one buyer happens to be interested at the time of the auction.

Moreover, if you have more than one item that will generally have few buyers and you list at 0.99 and it sells at that price, you’ve then set a precedence. People who search for completed listings will now perceive the item to be worth 0.99 – not good.

One goal of this blog was to help people exchange tips about college. While eBay is not exactly college related, college students have the ideal timetable to sell things on eBay. I hope these tips were of help and “stay tuned” for the next installment!

[tags]ebay, ebay tips, fatfingers.com, college tips[/tags]