Hi All, just a few points that came to mind when writing my e-Book, I was browsing the Masterclass forum and read the posts on time management. I though I would share some of the things that I found useful as my eBay business grew and how I have managed to save myself time.

As my business grew I found that it was taking me an almost inordinate amount of time just to manage my listings. So I started to use some of eBay’s free tools, this has helped me to automate a large part of my business.

If you are selling the same item over and over again, then the tool you need is Turbolister2. Turbolister2 allows you to import your active listings as well as your completed listings from eBay. You can delete duplicates or use the powerful design editor to change the listing and create a new variation on the existing listing. Its great advantage is that you can upload all you listings with a few mouse clicks and it will even work out your costs for you. You can download this for FREE by clicking HERE

Another great time saver is Selling Manager. Selling manager is a simply awesome sale management tool. Selling Manager replaces all you’re my eBay links with Selling Manager links, this takes several hours but it is all done for you so there are no worries. At first the interface will look overwhelming but you will soon get used to it. One of the great timesavers is that you can leave bulk feedback with just a few mouse clicks. This is also FREE upgrade now by clicking HERE.

A more advanced version with more features is called Selling Manager Pro, this is a subscription service at appox £5 per month. It has lots of additional features such as the ability to generate detailed selling reports and free listing scheduling. However unless you are dealing in very high volume Selling Manager will be good enough for most peoples needs.

Rob

Having a good eye catching image is the first step in getting prospective buyers to look at your eBay listing. In this case a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

Make sure you have a good clear picture or pictures, many people have digital camera these days so getting a good picture should not be a problem. Even phones with built in camera produce a very good quality digital print. Take the time to get the picture just right, this could by the difference between selling the item and not selling it. No need for mega high resolution photos a good 640×480 pixel image is good enough.

Lots of digital cameras come with bundle image manipulation software that allows you do manipulate and enhance digital images. You will find this very useful to crop and edit your listing pictures. You won’t need anything sophisticated such as Photoshop or similar. I have for many years used Paint Shop Pro which was given away as a cover disk, but there are many free packages such as Serif, Irfan view etc. Try out a few and see what suits you best.

Good lighting is essential as a poor picture will not attract prospective buyers to open them. A low cost photo booth can be a useful investment if you are photographing a large number of items. These are quite cheap and can even be bought in my local supermarket; you then have your portable studio. Use what you have to advantage; I sell in the natural health and beauty market and use a tree stump located in my garden as a surface to place my items for photography. The back drop of the trees also re-enforces the natural message.

Clothing items can be simply photographed flat or on a hanger or if you have access to a mannequin all the better. Jewellery items can be photographed flat on a piece of fabric or on a bust if you have one of these. But don’t go to the expense of buying expensive props when you are starting just use what you have available.

Rob

As a follow up to my posts on wholesale products. There is a little known route that can be taken, used by the most savvy traders on eBay. This route allows you to obtain products for sale cheaply, they are completely unique to yourself and no one else will be selling exactly the same product(s).

It is called private label products and this is how it works; how often have you seen a supermarket own label product that is virtually identical to a brand label? All the time. Food producers often produce a generic product that can be rebranded using a supermarkets own name. Or if minor changes are required for a new recipe or to make the product cheaper as in “value products” or “smart price” then a minimum batch order is required to make the product viable to resell.

There are wealth of suppliers/manufactures that will allow you to rebrand their own generic products using your own name and labelling. This makes the product unique to you. This is particularly so in the health and beauty markets. Your product is uniquely yours you have no direct competition as such as no one is selling exactly the same product as you. You can compete with the big sellers selling branded products.

Here’s how to do it. Use Google or similar search engine to look for private label manufacturers. Often for a small fee they will rebrand there standard labelling to produce your own unique brand. One of the companies I know charges a flat fee of just £20 to do this per product. You simply state “own labels” when re-ordering the product. Photograph the product, write a good description and this product is yours.

Before the £-$ exchange rate took a crash, I bought in non labelled products from the US and simply added my own labels to the product. I had these labels printed at my local printer very cheaply. The product is uniquely mine and exactly the same as every other seller using the same manufacturer. I have also managed to source similar product in the UK to those I was importing just a few months ago. Why not try the search yourself? You may be surprised at what you turn up.

See you soon

Rob

If you intend to trade as a business on eBay as opposed to an individual you need to choose your ID with care. A little forward thinking goes a long way; would you buy a health care product from wayneluvstracy27? What about from total-healthcare? It’s a no brainier really. Total-healthcare gives a professional image immediately and it describes and defines the business focus from the start, wayneluvstracy27 does none of these things.

If you have chosen a bad ID or you now want to trade under your personal ID, you can still change it. However if you have a lowish feedback score if might be worth starting a new eBay account and starting from scratch. Buyers will check out your recent feedback. They may not be as willing to part with there hard earned for that exotic skin cream you are now selling when the last item you sold was your Barry Manilow greatest hits CD. It’s all about perception, of you and your services. You may well be operating from your kitchen table but that does not mean that your service is not as professional as other sellers.

When I am choosing an ID I try to avoid the use of the underscore _ simple reason, if you wish at a later date to register a domain name the same as your eBay ID (recommended) look at the following examples: www.pet_parlor.co.uk (there really is an underscore in this domain name) or www.pet-parlor.co.uk see the difference?

Why would you want to register your eBay as a domain name? If you are even moderately successful someone will get there before you. It’s all about thinking ahead. Should you wish to setup a website to backend sales then you already have the domain name and your eBay ID as reinforces for each other.

Having established that most wholesale lists are rubbish (I hope) what about other sources of supply?

The following are tried and trusted methods of obtaining stock to resell at a profit. As with all things remember, RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH, check out the wholesale prices against those online, it goes without saying you should be looking for products that give you an excellent mark up on your buying price.

Use eBay itself, use wholesale, bulk or job lots as a search word, simply break up the package and resell at a profit. This is where the research will pay off, as you need to eliminate those items that are sold as a job lot simply because there is no profit in selling the items separately.

“Trade Sales” what you see is not always what you get. Make sure that these are genuine trade sales and not some outfit (cowboy?) masquerading as trade selling to the public. When I was in the computer trade I attended several auctions of computer equipment, these were advertised in the computer press and were a complete rip off. Over 50% of the equipment was non working junk. How I managed not to bid on the lot of 50 non-working CD-ROMs I will never know, but someone did. I suppose it could have been the generous warranty of 24 hours, I will never know. This stuff was auctioned at prices in excess of what you would pay legitimately at the computer fair at the leisure centre taking place at the same time only 10 minutes walk away.

Public auctions selling bulk, liquidated or bankrupt stock. A good source of stock, however many auctions take place on weekdays making it very difficult for those of us in 9-5 jobs to attend many. Two other problem are also associated with auctions, they are incredibly time consuming, waiting around for the lot or lots to come up to auction with no guarantee that you will win the auction. Each item needs a description writing for it and each will need a photo for the listing. This is a long and tedious process.

Would it be much easier if we could continually sell the same item over and over again? One description, one photo and sell the same time and time again. Where can you find this information? All will be revealed in the next mildly exciting instalment.

See you soon

Rob

Why are most wholesale lists rubbish? Here’s why. Ok, let’s make some quick money, let’s feed the appetite of all those eBayers or potential eBayers and show them where they can find products for resale.

Here’s the recipe on how to do it:

• Look at the main categories on eBay, look at the “hot markets” in each category (a few hours work).
• Find suppliers in these categories by using Google.
• Select a dozen or so suppliers in each market then copy and paste their URL into a word document.
• Repeat process for each “hot” market (a few hours)
• Decide you have so many wholesalers you can produce several lists. More money!
• Write a listing or sales page saying you are about to reveal all the “Secret Suppliers”.
• Sell all the lists on eBay as “The Best Wholesale List 2009” or “Secret Sources Revealed At Last” or “The Sources Other Traders Don’t Want You To Know About”. Pretty nifty titles?

Great recipe, you can update this several times a years and still keep on selling the same stuff, but nifty titles do not a wholesale list make. Hey this would this be a great idea for your first information product (only joking John). The problem with these lists is they have no discrimination. The only thing I have done is to copy and paste the URL, I have not checked out the prices or the products. Anyone can do this and many do. I checked out the number of wholesale lists available for sale on eBay on 22/3/09 there were154 listings for sale. As I said with the majority of these lists there is little real research that has been done and frequently the “wholesale” prices are higher than eBay, Amazon or even online discount stores.

So buying a list and expecting to make decent money from it may not be the solution, in most cases you will find it a waste of your money. The wider internet is also awash with dubious lists, so how do you go about obtaining legitimate sources of product that can be resold at a profit? Here are some starters for 10:

• Yell.com will bring up your local suppliers; most large cities have wholesale districts, so you will never be too far away from a source of supply.
• Use Google or Yahoo to search for wholesalers, result approx 26,000,000, so we can take a look at some of these in more detail.

Next time let’s take a look at wholesalers and other sources of supply in more depth.

Rob