eBay Selling

I hope that your Halloween goes well and that people continue to buy even while trick or treaters ring their doorbells. Since Halloween is now here, the official Christmas season will kick off once the last trick or treater vacates the porch and runs home to gorge on candy.

Christmas items will be big from now through the middle of December, and they should take everything else with them. I’ve mentioned before that eBay is not expecting a big holiday season this year because of the recession, but people do have to buy Christmas items and they will be buying gifts.

My sales have been lower this fall than possibly any fall I can remember, but I’m hoping that people catch on that buying gifts on eBay is usually cheaper than buying them in a big retail store. Buying on eBay can save Christmas shoppers money, and that’s important for everyone right now. Here’s hoping that people realize this and start buying.

eBay learned nothing by overpaying for Skype when it had nothing to do with their basic business model. The company has suffered ever since, and has had to lay off hundreds of employees. But, heck, why should that stop them from buying another unrelated company?

eBay is now paying almost a billion dollars for Bill Me Later, the Internet’s equivalent to a check cashing store. For exorbitant fees, people can use it to defer payments on things. I’m guessing that now, in the middle of a credit crisis, eBay is thinking that they can integrate this with eBay. Then, people will use the service to finance small purchases so that they can pay more for them in the middle of a recession. Oh, eBay. You so crazy!

eBay recently announced their low expectations for Christmas sales. Their fourth quarter sales are expected to be lower than they had previously expected. sales for the quarter are expected to be only slightly higher than their third-quarter sales.

That’s really pretty bad. Fourth quarter sales of most businesses are a larger percentage of their yearly sales. eBay usually makes out like a bandit in the fourth quarter because of Christmas sales. This does not bode well for sellers who rely on their Christmas sales for their income or to pay for Christmas gifts.

But, to keep it in perspective, even if the fourth quarter is as bad as they say it will be, eBay will still earn over $2 billion.

eBay announced this week that it will not longer allow sellers to sell ivory on any eBay site. I haven’t seen anything that specified that the ban is only for new ivory items, so I believe that anything at all made of ivory, even antiques, are banned.

The banning is intended to protect elephants by taking away a popular market for ivory items. But, ivory in general is being banned, so I’m assuming that ivory from other animals is also banned. There used to be quite a bit of mammoth ivory on eBay, and I actually think it might be a shame if that’s gone. It’s not as if the ivory was endangering the species…

My sales are up from the summer months, but they are certainly not what I would have expected from the fall months. I mainly sell niche items that sell slowly in the summer and gain quite a bit of speed in the fall and winter. But, I haven’t sold a thing in two days now and I’m wondering how much the economy is to blame for this.

I shopped on eBay this week for some DVDs that I wanted and couldn’t believe how low the prices were. I also checked the completed prices and was astonished. Prices seem to be in the bargain basement for a lot of categories right now. People are more afraid to spend right now than they were last year at this time.

If you’re a seller and you depend on your eBay sales, it may be time to diversify and to lower prices. Lowering prices will bring in sales, though you will have to sell more items. Try to sell items in three or four categories to give yourself a more diversified inventory.

If you’re having good luck with the new design, great! I, however, hate it. It’s sucking up far too much of my time that is already stretched too thin. Too many features were lost in the redesign and I have found the new system relatively useless. I finally decided to opt out of the whole thing until the new design is mandatory for everyone.

If you want to opt out, there’s a tiny link at the top right that will let you do it. In just a few seconds you can get out of the useless, puffy design that is now plaguing society and get back to business.

If you’ve been wanting to try eBay Motors but didn’t want to deal with making the car available to buyers all over the country, there is an eBay Motors listing sale that might be right for you. The local listing sale is for cars to be sold within 100 miles of the seller. The sale allows the car to be listed to the local audience for a $15 fee. The sale requires sellers and buyers to conduct the transaction in person, as the listing is really a classified listing that will be available within a certain area. Here are the details on listing vehicles locally.

Most items that you sell on eBay will require a picture or two. If you have only one picture, it doesn’t cost a cent to let eBay host it and feature it on your listing. If you have more than one picture, however, the fees can quickly add up. Each picture after the first is an extra .15 on top of the listing fees. And if you want the picture super large to show detail, it’s even more.

Photobucket is a completely free way to host pictures, and they make it easy to use their site-generated code on eBay. You don’t have to know anything about HTML- all you do is upload the photo to Photobucket and they generate a code that is compatible with eBay. You then copy and paste the code on your listing and you have a free photo.

Apparently eBay was about to enforce a site-wide rule about making return policies mandatory. The rule was about to go into effect when we were offered a last-minute reprieve. If I’d known about it, I would have been annoyed about it, but that annoyance also gets a reprieve. The new rule is being put off until after the holidays.

Do you have a return policy? If so, you’re not alone. More and more people are getting return policies because they’ve been pushing them pretty hard on people for the last two years. Personally I don’t have one and I won’t have one until it becomes mandatory.

Why? Funny you should ask. Actually, I don’t think that it’s necessary for a reputable, long-time seller to have one. I’ve been selling for a number of years and have about 6,000 feedbacks. If there is a need for a return, I’d like to take it on an individual basis and I’d like to be trusted that I will do the right thing. I do not want to advertise that I will take a return on an item because that is an invitation to buyer’s remorse returns that come two months after the sale for no reason. But, if I say the policy is that I don’t take returns, I look like a seller who won’t negotiate and won’t take the individual transaction into account. Either way, the seller loses. Thanks, eBay!

They’ve laid off 10 percent of their workforce, and apparently the remaining 90 percent are dedicated to making unnecessary changes. Case in point: the hysteria that eBay has for listings with free shipping is getting even more fanatical.

There is a new feature coming soon that will allow eBay to remind buyers about the free shipping they had for an item. When the buyer is leaving feedback, the new feature will pop up to remind them that, hey! You had free shipping on this, remember? Woo hoo! And then hijinks will ensue as the buyer realizes he was about to leave a 4 for shipping costs rather than a 5. At least, that’s what eBay hopes will happen. The whole stupid thing is being unveiled as a way to get better feedback for people who offer free shipping.

What will actually happen, though, is likely that the buyers won’t leave any rating under the “shipping cost” heading because, um, there wasn’t one. Nice try.