Improve Your eBay Sales - 3

So, how can you improve your sales results on eBay? - Lots of time could be devoted to this, so I'm going to try to tell you in a series of articles about some of those ways. Let's pick some areas for improvement:

1. Search for similar items for sale

2. Completed Listings

The first thing you need to do is to put into the eBay search box (on the home page, top left) about four words or less describing your item. Make the first word the most important and obvious, then progressively use less important words. Don't use small non-descriptive words like 'the' or 'it'.

If too many results come back, try to describe your item a bit more accurately, or use more search words. Alternatively, if you reveal no searches, reduce the number of search words, or describe the item more generically.

If your item is very specific or unique, this search idea may not work, but selling rare or unique items on eBay may not be your best bet. Sometimes it works, sometimes not!

This will tell you whether other people are trying to sell the same thing as you are. Quite often they are. Look at the current price and the number of bids. If there are no bids, then either the auction still has a long time to run, or more likely, the seller is greedy and wants a lot for his item. There could also be a whole host of other reasons.

It is probably better to see if a similar item to yours has sold in the past. To do this, we look at 'Completed listings'.

In the 'filters' section on the left hand side of the page, there is a section labelled 'Show only'. Click the 'Completed listings' box and the browser will automatically search for only those items that have finished listings, whether they have sold or not. It is very important for you to see if there are any items like yours and more importantly, whether they sold (in green) or not (in red) and at what price.

From this information you can work out how much to start selling your item for and how much to expect for it. In my other articles I suggest a starting price of 99 pence to attract as many potential buyers as possible and get the bids going.

If there is someone selling the same item, you need to look at their description to see if you have forgotten to mention any key points and then write more about the item than they do! Is your item in better condition than theirs? Use a similar but competitive starting price to theirs and try to take more and better photographs than they have. This will hopefully give you the edge and you will then get more bids.

You may want to wait until that other seller has finished their listing, so you can be the only one selling the item. Sellers do come online all the time, so waiting isn't always the best policy.

Remember that this is only a guide and the amount you get may be substantially less or even more, especially if you have the perfect situation of two people fighting over buying your item and putting in more and more bids.