Auction Tips and Tools

Auction Tips

Auctions have become a huge shopping destination. The variety of products along with low pricing is some of the reasons that attract customers to entertain this kind of shopping lifestyle. Hence, selling products via online auctions is not a bad idea after all. Furthermore, you could potentially make a good extra income doing something that you love.

Here are few tips about selling your items on auction:

Investigate the products with marketability before investing money on them.
Try to get an idea about the average final bid for the product you want to sell, that will give you an idea about the amount of potential profit you could earn for your items.
Use your own pictures of your actual product when uploading your listing online that will make your listing real and authentic, and remember a picture is your advertiser, so make sure to have an attractive picture in your listing.
Content has to be clear just like your picture, try to keep the content as short as possible.
The start bid should be your wholesale price + shipping, the reason behind that is if there was just one bid, you don't loose much.
Try to provide free shipping, customers like that.
Order packaging from USPS for free, so you don’t have to pay a dime to pack your items.

The graphs shown below illustrate the top three most popular categories

Figure1.1: Electronics

Figure1.2: Fashion Handbags

Figure1.3: Collectibles

Auction Tools

eBay by far is one of the most popular online auctioning sites, so, choosing eBay for your online auctioning business is a very good start. Now, you will need to know some of the tips and techniques that will give you an edge over your competitors.

Tips # 1

Before you purchase products from you suppliers, you will need to know what sells and what doesn’t on ebay, and more importantly how much it sells for.

To know how much a particular item was sold on ebay in the past seven days, go to ebay => advance search, you will see a screen similar to the one shown below:

Type in your product, make sure to check completed listings, and hit search. You will see the items that were sold with the final bid value, if an item didn't sell, it will show it as well. Now you have an idea of how much your product o interest was sold for. Also, you can see the best closing date to upload your listings.