One of the secrets to making money on eBay is to reduce your costs, fees
and expenses. Here are ten eBay secrets to help you make more profits on
eBay. Many of these are very simple and easy to implement. If you do all of
them your savings can really add up and your eBay profits will increase.
1. Save eBay Template and Scheduling Fees
There are two fees paid by almost every eBay seller that you can
reduce or avoid altogether. The first is the template fee. You want your
auctions to look good, so eBay provides pre-designed templates but they
charge 10¢ every time you use one. The other is the scheduling fee. eBay
charges 10-cents when you schedule an auction to list at a specific time.
Unless you can create and launch your auctions at exactly the right time of
day, almost every seller uses this service. You can avoid or reduce these by
using an auction management service to launch your auctions and host your
photos. I use an auction management service called
Vendio.
For $9.95 a month, you get a free web store and Vendio gives you
the template and scheduling for free as part of that fee. Since you save 20¢
with each listing, after you make 50 listings per month you are saving
money. And you get other features as well including inventory management,
custom messaging, auto feedback posting and the Vendio Scrolling Gallery to
show off all your listings.2. Pay your eBay fees using a credit card with a cash back program.
This is not exactly an eBay secret, but it is amazing how many people pass
up this free source of money. Check your credit cards to see which ones
offer a cash back program. Using these types of programs can result in
between 1.5% and 3% credits back to your card. Some sellers prefer to get
airline points, but personally I always go for the cash. I have a card that
pays a 2.5% cash-back credit. Last year it saved me $726 in fees.
3. Control Your Insertion Fees
Pay attention to the tiered pricing in your eBay Insertion Fees. Pricing
an item between $0.01 and $0.99 will cost 10¢. Pricing an item between $1.00
and $9.99 will cost $0.25. And items between $10 and $24.99 cost 50¢ to
list.
Analyze your costs here and determine if it is more cost effective to set
your starting price in the lower tier to save money on your insertion fees.
Assuming your item sells, pricing the item lower will cost less in fees than
pricing it in the higher tier. Here is a link to the eBay fee schedule:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html
4. Use listing Upgrades Selectively
Listing upgrades can get expensive. A
major eBay secret is to experiment with anything that costs money to make
sure it works. eBay charges hefty fees for bold, highlight, enlarged photos,
and other upgrades. Run listings with upgrades and without and determine if
the upgrades have any effect on your sales. The Bold listing upgrade tends
to work the best for me, whereas I rarely use the other ones. On the other
hand, when I tested my bold feature on my auctions, I found there were two
categories of product where it didn't matter. Cancelling the bold listing on
those categories saved me over $600 a year in listing fees.
5. Use the new eBay Fixed Price Listing Feature
You can now list an unlimited number of items at a fixed price for 30
days for 20¢. The final value fees are higher in some categories and cheaper
in others but items in fixed price listings come up in search whereas eBay
store listings do not. and best of all you can list an unlimited number of
items in a fixed price listing for just one low listing fee
6. Open an eBay Store
Running all auctions gets expensive. eBay store subscribers pay lower
listing fees for both fixed-price listings and auction listings. Basic
store subscriptions start at $15.99 per month. Although there is a monthly
fee for an eBay store, in the long run the lower listing fees can easily
offset this. Be sure and use your auctions to cross sell to your store by
placing links in your auctions to your store listings.
7. Save Non-paying Bidder Fees With Mutual Cancellations
If
you've sold an item but can't go through with the sale, or the buyer refused
to complete the sale, you can cancel the transaction in the eBay Dispute
Resolution Center and you may receive a credit on your Final Value Fee.
8. Always file Unpaid Item Disputes
You will see these on your
eBay Selling Manager if a buyer has not paid for an item within 7 days.
After filing the Unpaid Item Dispute, the buyer might pay. If buyers don't
pay within another 7 days, eBay will refund your Final Value Fees. However,
you want to be a little careful doing this when your feedback score is low
as these buyers often leave you a negative feedback anyway. I think its
better to use number 7 above as once a transaction is cancelled, the buyer
can no longer leave feedback.
9. Use Free Relist Credits
On average, about one-half of all
auction listings result in a sale. eBay will give you one free relisting
credit on auction listings that do not sell. You can relist unsold items by
selecting the "relist your item" drop down on the unsold items module on
you're My eBay Page. If the relisted item sells, eBay will credit the
Insertion Fees back to your account.
10. Major eBay Secret, Watch your packaging costs
A key eBay secret of
professional sellers is Don't over-package your items. The more packing
material you use, the more your item will weigh. More weight = more
postage. In some cases, reducing your packaging by just one ounce can mean
the difference in a few dollars per package.
Packaging materials can get expensive. Check with your local gift shop,
kitchen shop or Radio Shack. These stores will often give you boxes and
packing material for free so they don't have to recycle it.
When shipping items USPS Priority Mail, we use the paper Tyvek envelopes
instead of a box if a product in not highly breakable. Boxes weigh more than
the envelopes, and cost more to ship.
If an item weighs less than 14 ounces, then use First Class instead of
priority or parcel. You can purchase your own poly mailers and use First
Class for these lighter items. Poly mailing bags cost a few cents when
ordered in quantity. You won't have to spend the minimum $4.90 to ship an 8
oz item just to get the free Priority Mail supplies.
