• Welcome from Brian McGregor 
• Inspirational Quote of the Day
• News and Views
• 6 Ways to Turn eBay Viewers into Bidders and Buyers
• WARNING! Taking Care of Your Customers' Needs can Grow Your eBay Business
• Taming the eBay Search Engine (Guest Article)
• A Gift from Me to You
• Someone's auctioning what? Unusual items currently available
• Finally
• My Products Catalogue
• Back to Newsletter Archive

Hello and welcome.

A particularly warm welcome to you if you're a new subscriber. It's good to have you as part of the family taking my eBay newsletter.

Well, today is Halloween.

I thought it might be interesting to see how much fellow eBayers were making of this particular event by selling related items.

I wasn't disappointed. On both UK and USA eBay, there were over 4,000 auctions still live for Halloween items. That isn't bad, when you remember Halloween is here in a matter of hours!

Judging by the number of Halloween auctions which are still live, I would guess in the few weeks there will have been tens of thousands of auctions for Halloween products.

Which brings me to the point.

If you sell on eBay, you could do worse than take your lead from the stores on the High Street. These stores pay marketers and retail analysts small fortunes to make sure they don't miss any of the popularity bandwagons.

You can tell what is selling now, just by looking in shop windows. Whatever a specific promotion is being given an unusual amount of expensive space in the store, you can bet your bottom dollar they expect to make a lot on this investment.

I know it probably won't be possible to get hold of the specific products being promoted so that you can sell them. But think outside the square. If you can get your hands on anything which is related to the products which stores are marketing hard, you could be on a winner.

I've mentioned several times before about creating your own report or ebook product. Your report can simply be a Word document, which you attach to an email to your eBay buyers. Why not an ebook on the the latest hyped product which the stores are promoting? This could be the perfect opportunity.

If you do create something like this based on a popular High Street item, you will definitely have loads of eBayers finding your auction. And some WILL buy your report.

Look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Brian
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1. At Last - Some People are Sentenced!

I'm usually a reasonable bloke. But I do get irate when people use eBay to con money off other people. You here about cases from time to time. Like the young guy on last week's "Tonight with Trevor McDonald" program. He had swindled about a hundred eBayers by taking money and delivering nothing! He's due for sentencing this week.

eBay did themselves no favours by fielding the representative they did on this TV programme! If you saw the programme, you'll know what I mean.

But this young lad was a novice compared to 3 Romanian eBayers. A British judge has sent them to to jail for between 2 and 4 years for conning around 3,000 eBay members out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was the same scheme. Take the money, deliver nothing and hide behind the anonymity of eBay. When you get suspended by eBay, open another eBay ID and start again!

The shame of all of this is that we know it won't stop criminals targeting eBay users.


2. Unbelievable, but True!

Whether you have 20/20 vision, or wear glasses or contact lenses, you won't believe your eyes.

This is nothing to do with eBay, but it's worth seeing.

Honest, it's the weirdest thing....

Just go to the web page, and follow the instructions. I didn't believe it either it, until I saw it.

Here's the page:

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html



3. Correction

While I'm on the subject of something not being exactly as it seems, I have to thank Mark for putting me right on something.

I've mentioned OnSpeed before. This is the software that enables a PC which is connected on dial-up, to have broadband upload and download speeds.

Mark informs me that OnSpeed does not work on AOL browsers.

I'm happy to make this clear. And thanks again to Mark for the email.

4. Speaking of the Company that Gave us OnSpeed...

You'll probably have heard of auction sniping. This is where you use an automated service to place bids on an item you desperately want to win on eBay.

Sniping is used by many eBay buyers these days. This is quite simply because it works, and will always beat manual bidding on items which are in demand.

The news today is that the company who wrote OnSpeed have now launched Onbidder. Onbidder is the newest eBay sniping service available on the internet.

If you want to make sure you win the items you're bidding on, I suggest you try Onbidder.

It comes with a 14 day money back guarantee, so you can make sure Onbidder does what it claims.


5. Get Your Own Ebooks to Sell on eBay, Last Few Places!

I was glad to see quite a few readers took up the opportunity I sent out recently. This was to get hold of readymade ebooks which you can modify, and put your name as author, and then sell on eBay.

The service I told you about provides 3 new ebooks every month. You get copyright to the ebooks so you can change them in any way you wish. And you can add your name as the author.

In addition, you are supplied with a sales page which becomes your eBay auction description, a thank you (download) page plus all the necessary images.

What appealed to me about this particular service is that they are building themes of products.

What this means is that each ebook supplied is within a specific theme. For example, let's say there is a dog theme. The ebooks supplied might cover dog owning, dog health and fun activities with your dog.

The beauty of this is that when someone buys an ebook from you on dog owning, they can be followed up with an offer of other ebooks within the same theme. Knowing they are interested in dogs, means that a single sale can lead to several others.

If you've ever thought about selling information products on eBay, but didn't feel you've the time to produce an ebook of your own, or to produce a powerful auction description page, this is a real alternative.

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, there is a limit to the number of people who can take up this service. The limit is nearly reached, so if you want to consider it, I suggest you do it today.

Here's the link:
www.easynicheproduct.com

If you're looking for more ebooks and software to sell on eBay, you may find the following package useful. It looks to me as if this represents the best value available today on the internet.

Here's the link:
www.intensivegiveaway.com


6. Selling Affiliate Products on ebay

I recently published an article on how to sell affiliate products on eBay. It appeared here in this newsletter.

Now, I thought I knew all about affiliate selling!

I was wrong!

I am a novice.

This guy is the King of the affiliate experts.

And he's offering everything he knows here.

There's no surprise that this is called the Affiliate Secret Weapon.

Picture this….

Your auction is rolling. You're getting bidders viewing your auction and checking it out. What you now need is for the visitor to place a bid, or Buy it Now.

Here's a few things you can do to help that happen.

1. Pictures on your auction

First of all, if you're using a picture of your item, make it of the highest quality you can manage. Don't accept anything that is slightly fuzzy or blurred. With digital
cameras there's no excuse not to get a pin-point sharp image for your auction. Highest quality also means taking care of background and lighting.

Don't accept second best for your pictures on your auction. If you do, you may just lose some prospective bidders and buyers.

2. Add an About Me page

With 168 million members, it really pays to try and get personal with your potential eBay bidders. One way which helps you to achieve this by creating an About Me page.

You can convey the positive elements about you. This could be your background, your expertise, your honesty - anything, provided it is displayed professionally. By building up the feeling of trust, you can bridge the difference and turn a visitor into a bidder.

Creating an About Me page is easy.

If you're registered on UK eBay, go here:

If you're registered on eBay.com, go here:

3. Sign up for Square Trade

Building upon the trust issue, becoming a Square Trade member and displaying the Square Trade logo on your auctions will also help. The Square Trade seal actually means you are committed to quickly resolving any disputes that arise. Most eBay members believe Square Trade is a general seal of approval in doing business with this seller.

Not for nothing do so many PowerSellers become Square Trade members!

You can find out about Square Trade here:

4. Spell out your terms and conditions

If you're a seller, there's nothing worse you can do than leaving your buyer wondering about certain elements of your auction. This is particularly true in the area which is terms and conditions.

In your auction you should clearly display your shipping prices and times, refunds and replacements policy, insurance options etc. By covering these fully, your visitor is less likely to click off your auction wondering how you would handle damaged delivery or whether your shipment is insured etc.

5. Displaying feedback

You and I know that we can click on the number beside a member's ID to see their feedback. But not everybody does!

Remember, 112,000 people join eBay every day.

So, display a selection of your feedback within your auction page. If you've a 100% rating, mention this too.

There is a clever piece of software which enables you to show your latest feedbacks on your auction. This means that as your feedback grows, the software will automatically pick up the very latest entries. You can read about it here:

http://www.platinumpowerseller.com

6. Take payment in many ways

I mentioned earlier that eBay currently has 168 million members. As you may know, eBay owns PayPal. In eBay's accounts you will find that there are 86 million PayPal account holders. According to my calculations, 49% of eBay members don't have a PayPal account!

In your auctions, therefore, make sure you accept PayPal, but also indicate that you accept payment in other ways. You could accept cheques, money orders, cash (yes, some people are happy to send cash in the post!).

Also, not many people seem to realise that you can now pay by credit/debit card via PayPal. You don't need to open a PayPal account to use this facility. Explain this in your auction, and you may get extra sales from buyers who want to pay by credit/debit card.

I hope this list helps you to convert more eBay viewers into eBay customers.

Your auction has concluded.

You have a winner.

The next step is to ensure you get paid so you can despatch the item, and your buyer and you can place feedback.

Your real objective, apart from selling the item, is that you find yourself with another happy eBay customer.

Here is how I recommend you proceed at the end of a successful auction…

1. Congratulations email

As soon as possible after the end of the auction, send the winner an email congratulating them on their win.

In this email, it must be clear which item you’re talking about. To avoid any possibility of confusion, it is useful to insert the item’s auction title and eBay auction number in both the subject of your email and in the body.

After congratulating them, inform the winner of the price they are to pay you. Detail shipping costs separately, and include this in the total due.

Explain the methods of payment you will accept, and how they should go about making payment by each one of these. For example, tell them your PayPal email address, and the name to make a cheque payable to etc.

Tell them when the item will be shipped in relation to each payment method. Also confirm the method of shipment and how long delivery is scheduled to take.

Mention that they should contact you if they have any questions.

2. When payment is received

When you receive payment, send an email to your buyer thanking them. Don’t forget to include the item title and eBay auction number in your email subject and body.

Confirm to them when shipment will take place, and in what form (mail, courier etc). Tell them how long delivery is anticipated to take, so they have an idea of when they can expect the item.

Mention that they should contact you if they have any questions.

3. Delivery on the way

Package your item well, and ship it out. Inform your customer that you have sent the item. It is always good to know that the item is on its way.

If you’ve used a recorded delivery or courier service, it would be useful to tell your customer of any Tracking Reference. In this way they can trace the progress of the delivery themselves, without having to refer to you.

4. Feedback received

You can expect your buyer to leave you feedback after they have received the item. If this doesn’t happen, politely email your customer requesting them to leave feedback for you if everything was all right with the item.

Once this is received, you can leave feedback for the buyer.

The simple message in all of this is that if you treat your buyers in the same way that you would like to be treated, you will soon have a growing number of contented eBay customers.

Article by Kirsten Hawkins

If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay – and the more you know about how buyers find you, the easier you’ll find it to be found. Here are a few golden searching rules.

Be specific
If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly
It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – you might find a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.

Get a thesaurus
You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories
Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to look at results in that category only. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse
Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches
You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order
If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words
Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” –(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or
If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

Don’t get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though: a surprising number of eBay users don’t search at all, preferring to look through eBay’s category system and save their favourites in their browser.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit www.auctionseller411.com for more great tips on how to make the most from eBay and other online auctions.

Here's a useful software product. It's called Desktop eBay.

As the name implies, it sits on your desktop and you can immediately switch to it whenever you want.

When you switch to Desktop eBay, you can perform searches as if eBay itself was open on your PC.

Desktop eBay saves you from loading/unloading eBay, just to perform searches.

It's lightening quick. And there's no advertising.

If you want to read more about Desktop eBay, and download it, please go here.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties.

I wonder if you get a guarantee with this? Imagine the pain if it goes wrong!

This needs a few more seconds in the toaster for me!

I notice he'll post these to Japan. Strange!

Now if it had been Diet Coke....

If you're a Chelsea fan, this is for you

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.