How to Sell on eBay | How to Make Money on eBay

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Today, we are wrapping up our series on the 2008 eBay changes and how they affect your ability to make money on eBay. The last topic we are going to cover is that of the upcoming eBay Seller Dashboard.

We have done our best to analyze and give you our thoughts on the 2008 eBay changes, and how we feel they will affect your ability to sell on eBay. Let’s run down what we have covered up to this point:

• The eBay feedback changes, which is one of the biggest, most controversial changes.
• The eBay PowerSeller program changes.
• The eBay Safer Payments Policy.
• The changes to the eBay Search Visibility/eBay Best Match search results.
• And we also touched on the eBay Sellers Strike that was a direct result of the 2008 eBay changes.

To wrap up our discussion on the 2008 eBay changes and how they will affect your ability to make money on eBay, we are going to talk briefly about the upcoming Seller Dashboard.

This May, eBay will introduce what they are calling a personalized Seller Dashboard. This will be a new tool that will let you monitor your eBay account performance, and thus your ability to sell on eBay, in the following categories:

• PowerSeller status
• Account billing status
• Final value fee discount qualification
• Policy violations and risk of restriction
• Buyer satisfaction (based on feedback, DSRs and complaints)

It will be very important to have this above information at your fingertips, as some of these factors directly affect your ability to sell on eBay through search visibility, eligibility for PowerSeller discounts, whether you will fall under the new Safer Payments Policy, etc.

eBay describes the upcoming Seller Dashboard in the following way:

“This Dashboard will give you an at-a-glance look at your standing, and should help you manage your business more efficiently. You’ll basically have the same view as customer support, so there should be no more complaints about not knowing where you stand at eBay.”

Let’s hope that the eBay Seller Dashboard is an easy to understand and useful tool that lets the eBay Seller get a grip on how they stand statistics wise. It is going to be of the utmost importance to keep on top of your standings, as they affect your ability to sell on eBay with all of the new changes.

We are looking forward to seeing how the eBay Seller Dashboard shapes up. We have said it before, and we will say it again: Anything to make our job selling on eBay easier is something that we welcome with open arms.

Image: mulad

eBay just released a very cool, new tool for those that don’t sell on eBay, but buy on eBay. Most, if not all, eBay sellers are also eBay buyers, so this very neat tool will benefit us all.

eBay Desktop is an application for both Mac and Windows that you install on your computer and lets you browse and bid on eBay listings without the use of an Internet browser. This application has been in development for almost two years and it will be updated with more enhancements in the coming months.

What is really cool about eBay Desktop is that it puts a fresh face on the whole eBay buying process. Let’s face it, the eBay website can be hard to navigate and it is anything but pretty. With eBay Desktop, as an eBay buyer, you’ll never have to go to eBay.com again! Now, if they would just come up with something like this for sellers…

We have been playing around with it for just a little bit now, as it was just released yesterday, so there are probably features we don’t know about yet. The only downside to it, that we can see, is it doesn’t appear to support eBay Motors. If you are not in the market for a car, then this application is definitely for you.

Let’s hit some of the highlights of this very easy to use, easy on the eyes, application.

• Very user friendly search function that allows you to fine tune your search through filtering by auction items only, Buy It Now only, specific price range, specific seller and more.
• The search feature suggests additional keywords to add to your search query, further narrowing down the results to exactly what you are looking for.
• You can easily browse the eBay categories in a much better way than on the website.
• Once you have results displayed, you can quickly and easily browse through the results and click on ones you are interested in further exploring. This opens up a clever item description window that displays all of the necessary information.
• You can very easily add or remove items from your watched items list.
• You are able to bid on items and pay for them from within the application.
• You can communicate with sellers from within the application.
• If you are ever outbid, the application will immediately give you a pop-up alert notifying you of this.
• Shows you your recently browsed items in reverse chronological order.

One of the neatest features is the ability to create product feeds for your favorite seller’s items or for your favorite searches. How it works is it automatically creates an updated list of items that your favorite sellers have for sale or search results from a custom search you created. The feed will distinguish items that are new to you. If you want to view the details of a particular item, just click on the picture.

This is a very slick, useful tool that will make buying on eBay more enjoyable. As a matter of fact, it is so slick that we find it hard to believe it was created by eBay!

While the eBay Desktop may not help you sell on eBay, it will certainly help you spend on eBay. Why don’t you download it and take it for a spin yourself? You might find you’ll never go back to eBay’s website as a buyer!

It is February 22nd already. Wow! Time flies when you are making money on eBay.

As we gaze out the windows of our corporate headquarters here in the Valley of the Sun, it is gray and overcast again and it’s certainly a nice change from what seems like constant sun that we get on an almost daily basis!

Here are the selections for this week:

• AuctionBytes has an article about a new View Item page. From the looks of it, if eBay goes with a new View Item page like this one, there will be plenty for eBay sellers to get all up in arms about.
• Are you a music lover? Then you missed your chance to purchase the ultimate collection for a starting bid of a mere $3 Million. Chump change! The auction ended earlier this week with a winning bid of $3,002,150. If the buyer doesn’t cough up the dough, the seller will relist and you will have another opportunity to buy the collection for yourself!
• FindLaw.com recently posted the first part of an article about eBay’s decision to take away the seller’s ability to rate buyers and how defending one’s reputation plays into it. This is an interesting read if you want to get a legal perspective on the situation.
• Only eBay has an excellent analysis of the eBay listing decrease due to this week’s seller strike. Only eBay shows how the listings dropped off as last week’s listing promotion ran its course, but the overall decrease in listings is only 4% from pre-promotion/pre-strike levels. One could make an argument that a 4% drop is statistically insignificant, or it is a result of the strike. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.

That is it for this week. Have a great and productive weekend making money on eBay and we will have more great posts starting Monday!

Image: soylentgreen23

Among the many changes that eBay is rolling out in 2008 is the expanded PayPal Seller Protection Policy for the top-tier of those making money on eBay. We say top-tier because this is how eBay defines PowerSellers. However, we have previously written that it doesn’t take that much to become an eBay PowerSeller.

Beginning this month, eBay is offering expanded PayPal Seller Protection for all PowerSellers that reside in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Hong Kong and have a registered PayPal account in one of these countries. Of course, the PayPal account also has to be linked to the PowerSeller’s eBay account.

The PayPal User Agreement has not been updated at the time of this writing, so the only information that is to be found about these new policies is on the eBay website. Thus, the information in this post is only as accurate as what is on eBay’s website. You will have to wait until the PayPal User Agreement is updated to get the exact, fine details about this policy.

Probably the largest change to the PayPal Seller Protection Policy is that it offers protection for any shipping address, not just a confirmed address. This is huge, since a lot of foreign addresses are not confirmed. However, as far as we can tell, the address has to be the address in the PayPal system, not just any random delivery address.

This coverage is going to be extended to 190 countries around the world, not just the extremely limited number of countries currently covered. This is also huge, since it literally opens up most of the world to this coverage, offering an extra layer of confidence for those selling on eBay and shipping internationally.

Another change to the PayPal Seller Protection Policy is the lifting of the current $5,000 per year coverage cap. eBay PowerSellers will now have unlimited annual coverage. We do wonder how big of a deal this is, because how many PowerSellers have ever come close to the $5,000 limit.

What is the downside to all of this? While we are certain PayPal wants to protect itself at the same time it is offering this upgraded service, they are most likely going to require some sort of delivery confirmation to prove that the item was delivered to the correct address, in order to have items covered by the policy. In addition, there most likely will be a signature requirement.

This means that, in order to be covered by the PayPal Seller Protection Policy, you will have to use a more expensive shipping method that has both delivery and signature confirmations. And if you are shipping internationally, this won’t come cheap.

Of course, we could be wrong about this. We will just have to wait and see what the exact details are once the PayPal User Agreement is updated. They only have 8 days left in the month if they are going to hit the February unveiling date.

The expanded PayPal Seller Protection Policy is a plus in the 2008 eBay Changes. We can all use a little bit of the positive as we wind down the week where eBay sellers are striking.

If you are not already an eBay PowerSeller, go out there and make money on eBay so that you can take advantage of this upgraded policy.

Image: crazyneighborlady

Accepting PayPal payments is pretty much a requirement if you are going to sell on eBay. Yes, you can accept other forms of payment in lieu of accepting PayPal, but PayPal really makes your life easier, and we are all about simplifying as much as possible when it comes to selling on eBay.

We have previously discussed the benefits of using PayPal to accept payments as an eBay seller. We have also explained the three different PayPal account types and why you really should have a PayPal Business Account.

Today, we are going to answer some questions that a loyal reader of ours, Bill, recently posed to us. Not only are we going to answer Bill’s questions, but we are going to throw in some bonus information.

The question arose about how PayPal fees are paid. At the time of this posting, PayPal charges a flat, per transaction fee of $0.30, plus a percentage of the amount received. PayPal charges a higher percentage for payments received from buyers outside the United States. They call these cross-border payments.

You only pay a PayPal fee when you accept a payment via PayPal. What happens is an eBay buyer pays you via PayPal and the money goes into your PayPal account. As the money is being deposited into your PayPal account, PayPal is removing their fees from the transaction. The resulting net deposit amount is what your buyer paid you, less the PayPal fees.

This works differently than how eBay charges you fees. eBay fees are due once a month and will accrue in your seller account during the 30-day period. You then receive an invoice from eBay at the end of your invoicing period and have a certain number of days to pay the invoice. PayPal never sends you invoices as they take their fees out immediately.

You will need a minimum of a PayPal Premier Account if you are selling on eBay, as this is the minimum account level which accepts credit cards. Your personal PayPal account won’t cut it if you are selling on eBay, so you will be forced to upgrade when you start selling. There is no charge for this. All you are doing is upgrading your account type.

As you can imagine, if you are doing any sort of volume selling on eBay, your PayPal account should be fairly healthy. Fortunately, you have the option of opening a PayPal Money Market Fund, which is currently yielding 3.62%. This is far more than the average checking account and we have seen it in the 5% range when interest rates were higher.

The PayPal Money Market Fund is free to you and simple to sign up for. Once you are signed up for it, your PayPal balance will start accruing interest. You don’t have to do anything special to your balance. Just let it sit there and grow, until you need to use it.

You can transfer your PayPal balance at anytime to a separate bank account. If you do this electronically, it is free. Otherwise, you can have PayPal cut you a check for a nominal fee. Not sure why you would choose the check option when electronic transfer is free and fast.

You can sign up for a PayPal Debit Card to gain access to the money in your PayPal account. It, too, is free and as an added bonus, you receive 1% back on all purchases made via the PayPal Debit Card.

Here is how we use our PayPal account. All of the payments we receive from our eBay listings go into our PayPal account. We have a PayPal Money Market Fund on the account, so we accrue interest on our PayPal balance. We use our PayPal Debit Card to make purchases for our business and we electronically withdraw money, as needed, to our business checking account. We keep a fairly healthy PayPal account balance to take advantage of the interest we accrue, as our business checking account doesn’t pay any interest.

We pay all of our vendors with our PayPal Debit Card, so we get 1% back on all of our inventory purchases. This can add up to a rather large number throughout the year.

Notice how we said that we only use our PayPal balance for business purchases and to transfer funds to our business checking account? That is because all of the money in our PayPal account is business funds, not personal funds. The way we get money into our personal accounts is via our salary. This is because we are running a real business.

This should clear up some questions about how PayPal works for those that sell on eBay. If there are any additional questions, feel free to write a comment (you may also use the ‘Contact’ link at the top of the page if you are not comfortable leaving a comment) and we will do our best to answer any questions.

Image: crazyneighborlady

Having your eBay listings visible to potential buyers is a must for anyone who is trying to sell on eBay. After all, if the buyer can’t find your listing, how in the world do you expect them to make a purchase from you?

The eBay search results that we are familiar with show the items ending soonest first as the default setting. This is all about to change come March 2008. eBay’s Best Match search results will become the default sort method site-wide and will include the following:

• Increase exposure for sellers with Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) 4.6 and above and at least 95% customer satisfaction in the last 30 days.
• Decrease exposure for sellers with low customer satisfaction or Shipping & Handling DSRs.

As you can see, eBay listing search visibility is now going to be tied to customer satisfaction. Per eBay:

“Customer satisfaction is reflected in a combination of DSRs, Feedback and fewer complaints filed of an item being “significantly not as described” (SNAD) or “item not received” (INR).”

eBay seems to mean business when it comes to having satisfied buyers. Apparently the eBay buying experience has sunk to such a low that eBay is keeping those that sell on eBay on a short leash when it comes to customer satisfaction.

The last 30-day timeframe seems to be what eBay is really concentrating on to determine what kind of a seller you are. This can be good and this can be bad.

Let’s assume, for a minute, that you have a really bad month when it comes to DSRs for whatever reason. This will cause your last 30-day DSR ratings to tank and you will pay the consequences by loosing visibility in search, getting caught up in eBay Safer Payments, and anything else that eBay is going to link with your last 30-day DSR ratings.

However, since the ratings for the last 30-days are the ones that count, you should be able to easily pull yourself out of the hole you are in, assuming buyers can find the items you are selling and you are able to satisfy them so they give you high DSRs.

Clearly, the best strategy would be to never get one’s self into a “customer satisfaction hole” in the first place. That would be the “obvious” statement of the day!

So, eBay will be tying the visibility of your listings directly to the satisfaction of your customers. Or, rather, the satisfaction of your customers as relayed to eBay via the DSR ratings.

If you have buyers that just don’t understand the concept of DSRs and how important it is to rate sellers truthfully and accurately, the eBay seller is going to suffer. This could become a big mess, but we will assume that most eBay buyers are competent and honest enough to give accurate seller ratings.

Of course, with the new, enhanced Best Match rolling out site-wide next month, the item display/sort algorithm will still take into consideration the same things that it does today, including the item end time. eBay is just adding additional factors into the mix and you may, or may not, see your listing exposure change as a result of these new factors.

What does this all mean to those that sell on eBay? It means that you need to step up your customer service a notch and do everything within your power to make sure that you have happy customers. Obviously, there is only so much that is in your control, but you have to excel at what you have control over.

Selling on eBay is getting a bit more interesting with the new changes that are rolling out. Ultimately, the goal is to have a better buying experience, which should result in more customers for the eBay seller. Looks like it is time to put your nose to the grindstone and perfect your techniques on how to sell on eBay.

Image: pinkmoose

Happy President’s Day! For those of you working for the government or a financial institution, enjoy your day off. Today would be a great day to continue learning how to make money on eBay.

We have mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating. Product sourcing is the most challenging aspect of running a successful eBay business. You will always be on the lookout for product to sell to keep ahead of the competition and to continue to make your business viable. This is truly the most challenging part of making money on eBay.

Fortunately, there are several, very good, high quality resources available to you, the eBay seller, which will help you with your product sourcing. A couple of them can be found on our Resources page, which is a page full of eBay seller resources that we have personally used in our eBay selling business.

Today, we are going to highlight Lisa Suttora and WhatDoISell.com. Lisa is an eBay Certified Service Provider and offers an excellent program for those interested in learning more about how to make money on eBay.

Some highlights of her program include:

• A step-by-step system for building your business on eBay
• Listing strategies
• Selling strategies
• Product trends
• How to locate product sources
• How to find a successful niche
• A discussion forum to connect with fellow eBay sellers
• And much more to help you become a successful eBay seller

Lisa has been a featured speaker for the past three years at eBay Live and really understands what it takes to become successful selling on eBay. Her program at WhatDoISell.com has the potential to lift you from a wannabe eBay seller to a successful eBay seller. If you have been looking for a little added boost, then you need to check out WhatDoISell.com.

If you feel that WhatDoISell.com has something to offer you, we have an added bonus. If you use one of the links on Lizard Wisdom to WhatDoISell.com, you will receive 25% off of their new Business Premium package. This is a heck of a deal if you are thinking about utilizing their services!

As we previously stated, product sourcing and finding the right niche is the hardest part about making money on eBay. If you get good at this, then the rest is relatively easy. Any product or tool that will make your life easier when it comes to making money on eBay is something worth checking out!

Image: chascar

Happy belated Valentine’s Day to everybody! Did anybody have any success cashing in on this holiday while making money on eBay?

The weather here in the Valley of the Sun is overcast and 60 degrees. A nice change from the normally blue, sunny skies. Let it rain!

Here are the selections for this week:

• AuctionBytes published the results of a recent survey of eBay sellers which asked them about the eBay change announcement. Not surprisingly, the majority of eBay sellers see the changes as anything but positive.
• Lest you forget, Monday is the start of the great eBay strike of 2008. Fortune Small Business has yet another article about it, which mentions that professional eBay sellers are not participating in the strike. Go figure.
• Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor held their free webinar this week where they discussed how to deal with the 2008 eBay changes. He posted on his blog about the best practices to keep your shipping and handling Detailed Seller Ratings high. This is a very interesting read.
• Last week, we reported about a Pennsylvania eBay seller who was under threat of being fined by the State of Pennsylvania for being an “auctioneer” without a license. Seems that after intense media attention, the state is backing down, at least for now.
• Ex-eBay seller Bargainland has had a string of bad luck at their Memphis warehouse. First, it was hit by a tornado and then it caught fire.

That is it for this week. Have a great and productive weekend making money on eBay and we will have more great posts starting Monday!

Image: sco

One of the issues you face when you are learning how to sell on eBay is how to create the best listing title for your items. Having an optimized listing title is incredibly important, as this is how buyers find your listings.

To create an optimized title for what you sell on eBay, you have to think like a potential customer and try and figure out how they are going to be searching for your item. Since item titles are what show up in the default search results, you have to make sure your item titles have the keywords customers use to search for what you sell on eBay.

Of course, you have to abide by eBay’s rules about what you can and cannot put in your listing title. Beyond that, you should make use of every single one of the 55 characters eBay gives you for your listing title and stuff it full of keywords that not only accurately describe what you sell, but are the keywords your customers use to search for the items you offer.

You obviously need an outstanding eBay item description to go along with your optimized eBay listing title, but the title is your first opportunity to capture the attention of a prospective customer. So the great question is how do you create the optimal eBay listing title that will drive customers to your product, and ultimately buy what you are selling?

Fortunately for the eBay seller, eBay Research Labs has a wonderful, free tool to help us in our quest for the perfectly optimized eBay title. This eBay tool is entitled “Optimize Your eBay Listing Title’s BayEstimate” and can really help you create great item titles that will help you sell more on eBay.

The idea behind this tool is that you enter your existing eBay item listing title, or a title you are thinking about using, and submit this title to the tool. The tool will then give you a whole bunch of statistics regarding the keywords that are currently in your title. These include the search popularity of certain words in your title, how many other item titles use the individual keywords in your title, and what the tool calls the “BayEstimate”.

The BayEstimate is a number percentage that tells you how a certain keyword or keyword phrase is estimated to perform for you. Anything over 80% suggests a high likelihood of success, while less than 40% means you might want to choose another keyword or keyword phrase.

The tool also gives you keyword suggestions to compliment the keywords already in your title, with a desirability ranking for each suggested keyword. You can click on any of the suggested keywords and then the tool lets you add the selected keyword to your title wherever you want it to go. The stats for your newly revised item title are updated to show you what effect adding the keyword will have on your BayEstimate, etc.

The tool will also give you category suggestions based on your item title. This will greatly help you to decide if you are using the right eBay category to sell on eBay.

This is a pretty clever tool, since it allows you to quickly add, or subtract, particular item title keywords and gives you immediate feedback on your selection. However, since this is an eBay Research Labs tool, the documentation is a bit sparse, so you have to play with it for a bit to get the hang of it.

Take a look at this tool and see if you can’t improve some of your item titles. Most of us could use some help with our item titles and we are all for something that helps us be better at selling on eBay.

Image: elsie

Today, we continue our discussion of the 2008 eBay changes and how they affect those that sell on eBay. We are going to talk about the upcoming changes to the eBay safe payment policy.

January 2007 saw changes to the eBay payment policy that required new eBay sellers to either offer PayPal or a merchant credit card as a safe payment option. This move was to offer more protection for buyers when dealing with sellers with little or no track record.

March 2008 is going to see this policy expand for those selling on eBay. In addition to those new sellers with less than 100 feedback, the following people making money on eBay will have to offer PayPal or a merchant credit card as a “safer payment option”:

• Sellers with more than 5% dissatisfied buyers in the last 30 days.
• Sellers who list items in the following higher risk categories and sub-categories: gift certificates, video games, cell phones, computers and consumer electronics.

In other words, if you sell on eBay and have little experience, or are what eBay deems to be a problem seller, you are going to be forced to offer a payment option that allows buyer protection. If you don’t like this, then quickly get some feedback or clean up your act.

But more importantly, if you sell in a category that eBay deems to be higher risk, then you will not only have to offer a “safer payment option,” but your payments may be subjected to a 21-day PayPal hold. This is really going to put certain sellers in a bind if they make money on eBay using one of the higher risk categories.

If your payment is held by PayPal, it will be released when the earliest of the following occurs:

• The buyer leaves positive feedback
• 3 days after confirmed item delivery (US domestic transactions only)
• 21 days without a dispute, claim, chargeback or reversal filed on that transaction

The good news is that there is a way to make sure that PayPal does not hold your payments. Your payments will not be held if you meet all of the following requirements:

• eBay tenure is greater than 6 months
• Total feedback score is more than 100
• Dissatisfied buyer percentage is less than 5%
• Detailed Seller Rating is greater than 4.5
• Total Detailed Seller Ratings received is more than 20 in the last 12 months

As you can clearly see, it is possible to never have your payments held, even if you sell in what eBay says is a risky category. Not sure if this has ever been brought up on the eBay Discussion Boards, as rational discussion seems to be easily lost amidst the noise of disgruntled sellers.

This payment hold applies to those that sell on eBay to customers in the United States and internationally. The good news is that if you have a PayPal Money Market Account, you will accrue interest on any payments that are being held, even during the holding period.

Hopefully, we have shed some light on the subject of the revised eBay safe payment policy. On the surface, you can see why eBay sellers are getting their feathers ruffled about this change, but if they bothered to take a moment to actually investigate the changes, sellers would see that the changes will affect only a small percentage of sellers.

Don’t let these changes get you down, especially if you are just learning how to sell on eBay. Educate yourself and filter out all of the noise regarding the upcoming changes. This is a good lesson in taking what you hear on the Internet with a grain of salt. It always pays to look into a situation yourself.

Image: luzbonita