How To Sell On eBay™ - A Basic Tutorial

There are a variety of ways to get your ad noticed by the people that would be interested in buying it. You can use the Usenet Newsgroups, e-mail or a personal web site to tell people about your items that are up for auction.

Usenet is the bulletin board area of the Internet. People post messages concerning just about any topic that you can think of. There are separate boards for each subject. You can search the newsgroups by typing in a word that should appear in its heading. If you’ve got Internet Explorer, just go to the top where it says "GO" and click on "NEWS". Follow the instructions from there. Netscape Navigator has a similar feature that you can use to access the newsgroups.

You can post a message to any newsgroup, but remember that it is not always proper etiquette to post a for sale message in some groups. Look through the group first and see if there are other for sale messages.

Of course, there are some newsgroups that are set up for the sole purpose of buying and selling. Many of these have the word marketplace in their heading, so you can search for that to see what kinds of bulletin boards are available! E-mail! What a concept this is! It’s a great way to target your prospective buyer, especially if you specialize in one type of merchandise. After all, someone who bought a Star Trek figure from you in the past will most likely be interested in another Star Trek item in the future! Make sure you let them know where to look for your new auctions!

The other thing you can do is build an email address database of your own when you see people looking for items that you may have. If you are searching a web site or newsgroup and find someone with interests related to your products, cut and paste their e-mail address into a database, which you can use to send out e-mail about your products!

Finally, you can set up your own web site. It may not get as many hits as the auctions at eBay™, but it’s a good place to list items that are harder to sell, or that you want a set price for! Your own web site will give you total control over the environment. And, although you probably will get only a fraction of the traffic that eBay™ does, you can leave the items up for as long as you want, and you can set your own price. If you want a higher price, and are willing to wait for it, you can be successful running your own web site.

We’ve talked about getting free web space before, from such companies as Geocities, and these can be fine to use for a small web site to list a few products with your e-mail address. If you decide to get a little more involved, you may want to go out and find a company that rents web space that you can use. Most offer a small site for about $15 to $25 per month. These sites will offer you the ability to use a custom domain name, i.e.. www.mycompany.com, and will offer things like e-mail, on-line support, shopping cart programs etc.

An eBay™ ad generally gets the most attention on its first day posted, and in the hours before the auction ends.  I have found there are certain really optimum times to begin and end an auction.  In my experience Saturday and Sunday afternoons have the heavies viewer traffic on eBay™.  So, I suggest that you post your auction on Saturday or Sunday between the hours of noon and 3:00 p.m. (prime time viewing hits its peak between 3-4:00 p.m.   Allow it to run a seven day course so that it ends during these same high exposure viewing hours. 

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