eBay Selling

A lot of people wonder whether selling their books, CDs and DVDs is better on eBay or on Amazon. The answer really depends on how much you have to sell and how quickly you want your money.

Because of recent changes to eBay’s selling fees structure, the cost is alomst the same. The main difference is that to sell on Amazon you have to pay an extra .99 per sale. If you pay the monthly $39.95 to join Amazon’s merchant account program, you never have to pay the extra .99. Of course, if you don’t have a lot of items to sell, it will not be worth it to pay the monthlyfee to Amazon.

If you want your money quickly and you don’t mind the extra fee, Amazon is probably the way to go. You can get a direct transfer of your money once per day from Amazon. Media items tend to sell far quicker on Amazon, but often the price is a little lower than you would get on eBay.

So, it really comes down to what your personal needs are. If you have popular titles like bestselling books or movies that have been popular and have been out for a long time, they are usually not worth selling on Amazon. If you have rare items that you want a high price for, eBay is the place to go. Otherwise, just consider how quickly you need to be paid and whether the Amazon ProMerchant account fees are worth it.

Once upon a time, you could sell ebooks on eBay. There was a category for them, and even a subcategory for selling ebooks about selling on eBay. I wrote an ebook compiling everythign that I had learned over the years about how to make a living through the site, how to buy and sell for a profit and how to make sure that you keep making a profit. The ebook was listed a couple of months before the ban took place and it did pretty well until then.

After the site banned the sale of all ebooks, I wasn’t sure what to do with it since I’ve never burned a disc before and don’t really care to. I recently revamped the ebook to reflect all of the new changes in policy and how that has affected the way sellers have to sell on the site. Last week I set up my own site to sell it. And since I don’t have to pay eBay fees for it any longer, I priced it for far less than it had been selling it for on eBay. If you’re interested, you can get the ebook here .

If you’re interested in giving me a testimonial about the ebook, just let me know. I have been collecting testimonials from readers and would like to put several on the site.

If you care about eBay’s listing sale, and 99.9 percent of eBay sellers probably don’t, this is your last day to take advantage of it. The sale ends today, so you have until midnight Pacific time to use it. The sale is only for non-media/collectible/eBay motors/business machine items that are listed for either a one-day auction or a three-day auction. To participate you have to have at least 4.5 on all of your seller feedback ratings. Not interested? I don’t blame you. I can’t see how a savings of a few cents would be worth losing so many days of auction time, but to each his own.

Every eBay seller has had to decide this on a regular basis- is this item really worth selling? To really make that determination, you have to factor in not selling the item. If you have to list it two or three times, is it still a decent profit? If you have extra pictures, any listing upgrades, etc., it might not be worth it to list an item more than once.

Also consider the selling price vs. the fees that you will pay. There aren’t just listing fees- you will owe PayPal fees for the selling price PLUS the shipping price PLUS a flat .30. You may also need to pay for shipping supplies like mailers or bubble wrap. Is it still a profit? Then factor in the time it takes to package and mail the ite. I have items that take me a minute or two and I have had items that took over an hour. When you factor in your time, is it still worth it? If so, list that sucker! If not, there may be other, far better items that you could be listing for a better return on your investment of time and money.

If you haven’t changed your shipping rates yet, today’s the last day- the new rates go into effect tomorrow. I’m hoping that there aren’t buyers out there waiting to pounce on us hapless eBay sellers who have forgotten to get this done, but chances are that there are some waiting in the wings for just such a money-saving opportunity.

If you ship via Priority Mail or Parcel Post, you could be out a lot of money if you have listings that you haven’t changed yet. If you use the eBay shipping calculator, the system should do it all for you. Personally, I hate the shipping calculator because it has been known to have kinks in it andI don’t want to lose buyers based on an eBay system screw up that I know nothing about. But, it it works for you, you’re a lucky seller that won’t have to go through and manually change rates like I will…

Every once in a while, it’s important to take a look at your numbers and see if you’re really doing as well as you think you’re doing. If you’re on the mid-month billing cycle like I am, your invoice is completed today for all of your eBay fees for the past month.

Sometimes it seems like the amount they are charging for the amount of sales you did seems like too much. If you’re really wondering, there are a few factors to look at.

The first of these are your eBay fees for the month. Write those down and add to them a flat .03 of all of your sales and shipping, plus .30 for each sale to cover your PayPal fees. Then, add in what you paid for the items if you bought them specifically to sell. if you use envelopes or mailers that you have to buy, add that in as well.The sum of all of these number is how much it cost you to sell for the month. Did what you brought in take care of that?

Look at your raw sales figures for the month. You can do that in My eBay by setting it to the one-month view. Take that number and subtract the number you figured. There may be less there than you thought. The reason for this is that PayPal takes a pretty big cut, and eBay’s final value fees have risen considerably over the last two years. You also have to factor into your sales figures all of the items that you listed but that didn’t sell. Those fees add up too, and they can take a bite out of the amount that you did make.

If you don’t like what you see once you do this, you need to drastically change your eBay selling strategy. You may need to sell something different, raise your prices or find a different product distributor.

I got a neutral feedback yesterday. This makes my first neutral or negative feedback in two years. It’s irritating, particularly since the customer was such a jerk to begin with. But, how much does a neutral really affect sales?

I think that often, one single neutral or negative feedback doesn’t do a heck of a lot. Most buyers are reasonable people who realize that one crank doesn’t spell doom for everything that a person sells. There have also been 11 glowing positives since that neutral, so it is being buried very quickly.

The question now is the proper protocol for responding. I might have responded in kind back when the feedback system was fair. I have been seeing sellers leave positives for buyers with angry language in the positive to try to turn it into a negative. I don’t believe in doing this. I think that most people look at the scores and don’t read the individual feedback words. If I were to go the “green negative” route as some people call it, the buyer would simply get a shiny new positive feedback and a better feedback rating number. No thanks. I’ll simply flip them the bird from my position here at home and leave the situation as it is.

In one of the worst decisions since Skype, eBay has ditched the traditional after-Christmas listing sale in favor of a horrific jumble of rules and regulations that is passing for a sale. I did notice that the sale had some “category exclusions.” I assumed they were probably eBay Motors and business machinery since the listing prices are so much higher in those categories. WRONG! Here’s a list of the categories that are excluded from the listing sale that only applies to one and three-day auctions and only then if you have high enough feedback:

• Media (books, video games, movies and music)
•  eBay Motors (understandable)
• Business and Industrial Capital Equipment (again, understandable)
• Collectibles (!)

Why in the world would they exclude media and collectibles listings? Aren’t they trying to encourage new listings? Fourth quarter sales were flat last year- wouldn’t an influx of new listings kind of, you know, help eBay? Even if they make almost nothing from the media listings, since they already cost less, people are likely to relist the items again and again since they have already made the listing. They might also relist them at fixed price to take advantage of the 30-pday pricing. That means more listing, more listing fees and more items for sale to bring in buyers. Nice job, eBay.

Thanks, eBay! Not only do we not care about those pesky free listing days anymore, we definitely love having some people excluded from the paltry sale that we did get. But, dear readers, it actually does get worse. I was so taken aback by the feedback exclusions of the current listing sale that I failed to notice one small thing- it also excluded 7-day auction listings. That’s right- not all auction listings by not all sellers are on sale! The sale price of 50 percent off listing fees only applies if the auction is a one or three-day auction. Wow. Way to get generous there, eBay.

I am really irked that there was no after-Christmas listing sale this year, but now eBay has thrown us all a bone. Actually, they have thrown it to some of us. In eight years of selling on eBay I have literally never seen a sale that excluded people on the basis of their feedback. What is the reasoning here?!

If you have any detailed seller ratings (DSR) of less than 4.5, you can not get the sale discount. However, if you have never sold before and have no ratings, you can. So, basically, if you had a bad couple of ratings and have below 4.5 for one of the DSRs, just open a new account and list to your heart’s content, I guess.