Discontinued Item to Sell on eBay - Lollia Luminary Dream Candle

I stumbled on this one by accident. I had sold one of these a couple of years ago - found it in a thrift store for $1, new, had never been burned. It sold for about $20. I came across this one at Tuesday Morning marked down to $7. I actually bought it for myself because I liked the scent. Then I looked it up on eBay and found that it has been discontinued / retired and is selling for $30. So much for keeping it. Watch stores like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Ross, and Tuesday Morning for this line of candles.

Happy Selling!

Why All eBay Sellers Should Have a Fair Return Policy

A fair return policy on eBay is critical for building your customer base. Having a fair return policy creates trust between you and your customers. How likely are you to buy something from a stranger on the internet without being able to return it if something isn't right or if you change your mind about it? If you sell on Amazon, you already know that Amazon requires all sellers to offer a 30 day return policy. (If you have not tried selling on Amazon, click here for a great guide that explains it.)

A fair refund policy allows refunds within 30 days. Research shows that the longer the return policy timeframe, the LESS likely customers are to use it. There is no sense of urgency. They forget about it, put the item on a table and it gets covered with other things, and they find it six months later. Consider extending your return policy to 30 days.

Accept returns for any reason, not just if the item is grossly misrepresented, as many eBay sellers state in their return policies. It really doesn't matter why the customer wants to return the item, if they aren't happy, you lose as a seller. The buyer gets the last word, even if they didn’t even read your policy. You are risking negative feedback and losing a customer who will never buy from you again.

Make it clear in your listing that the customer is responsible for paying return shipping fees, unless it is the seller's error. (You sent the wrong item, etc.)

If an item is returned, you can always re-list the item again. Refund the customer’s money, and then go to eBay and find the item in your archived listings. Relist the item with one click, and you are done. You can still get positive feedback from the first buyer, especially if you promptly process his refund and include a professional email thanking him for his business. Make the customer happy and get positive feedback.

Happy Selling!

Guest Post by Norb of Knows eBay

A guest post by a fellow eBay seller with lots of knowledge on collectibles and antiques. Enjoy!

Recently Suzanne asked if I would like to be a guest on her blog. Having seen her insightful comments on Twitter, I considered myself honored with the invitation. First off, let me introduce myself. My name is Norb Novocin, known as KnowsEbay on Twitter and by estateauctionsinc on eBay. With my wife, Marie, we have made our full time living on eBay for the last 12 years. We are considered million dollar Gold Power Sellers, with over 34,000 sales and still 100% positive feedback. We recently finished our first book, “Getting Sold on eBay -- A Treasure Hunter’s Guide To Making Money”, due out in February. Thus, we do think we have a smidge of knowledge about the subject Suzanne asked us to address, “What to Sell on eBay”.

Through the years we have tried many things, before we fell back into the HUGE niche we have found ourselves in, plenty of room for you to jump into it. What we specialize in is antiques, collectibles, the unusual, quirky and just plain different. We acquire our items from a number of sources, auctions, flea markets, yard sales, thrift stores, antique shops, consignments and have even been known to end up with some items from dumpster diving. We try to not spend more than 2 days a week acquiring items, as we need the additional time to get them up on eBay.

We look for items that are genuinely old or unusual and have trained our eyes to spot those. Before we trained our eyes, we found comprehensive books, like Kovel’s Antique and Collectibles Annual Price Guide to be valuable in educating ourselves as to what things are and their value. (We also use eBay’s completed auctions search engine to help value items.)



We tend to look for items that are not inundated on eBay, so once you have acquired it and listed it on eBay, you don’t have to fight a crowd in getting your item seen. When you do find that special item at one of the buying sources we mentioned above, try and follow this simple rule of thumb. Acquire the item at 25% or below the Kovel’s price, or 50% or below the average price on the completed items on eBay. (Don’t work off the top price on the eBay site, its easy to get burned at that way. Instead try and figure out a good average price of what like items have brought.)

You will notice we have been very vague on what items to go after specifically. That is because you don’t really know what you are going to discover when you go seeking items. Through the years we have found anything and everything and in turn have listed it. Returning customers love the eclectic and the surprise of never knowing what they will find. Some of our fun highlights, A Fully Mounted Buffalo Head, (It went to Germany.), The Keys To The End Of The World, (Russian ICBM Nuclear Bomb Launch Keys – you know the pair that the guys have to insert and turn at the same time to launch the missiles.)The United States Cold War Museum bought these. A Broken Bat Nailed together, ended up being a used game bat, used by Stan Musial. Found it at a Dr.’s estate sale for five bucks, it sold for $3,750 on eBay.

As you can see, we have been all over the map, just finding the genuinely old, the unique, the quirky and profiting from it. You can do it too. Just set your heart and mind to learning to recognize the unusual and get out there and start. Good Luck!!

Prepare Now for Holiday Selling on eBay

eBay selling is a challenge all year. Here are a few ways to boost your holiday sales.

Use Buy It Now on all auctions from now until Christmas. Decide on what you will accept for a BIN price.People procrastinate. Offering BIN will result in more sales. (Just do your research and make sure you have your BIN price set high enough.)

Add Best Offer to all store inventory items. You don't have to accept the offers, but you will give your customer more options, appear to be a more flexible seller, and be able to capitalize on more opportunities to sell your items.

Know the shipping date deadlines. Visit the USPS website to see a chart with all of the shipping deadlines for the various services.

Stay focused on operating your business. Complete your income producing activities first before getting caught up in holiday activities like baking, shopping, wrapping, and decorating. You still have a business to run.

Stay caught up with your shipping. It is very tempting to want to list more and more items when sales are hot. You don't want forget the customers who have already paid you and are waiting for their product. The USPS is slow enough over the holiday season - don't risk a neutral or negative because you aren't keeping up with your shipping.

Set your limits. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. Remember you are going to have to pack and ship everything in addition to listing, running your business, and preparing for your own family's holiday. Holidays are supposed to be enjoyable so avoid adding more stress.

Happy holiday selling!

Rank Higher in eBay's Best Match - Free eBook

eBay's default method in which search results are returned is called Best Match. The search results appear rather random - not in any particular order. However, the algorithm that eBay uses to create this order is somewhat of a puzzle. Instead of sorting results by ending time, price, distance from buyer, or another more obvious method, eBay uses its own "secret" algorithm to determine the order that buyers see search results presented. The challenge as a seller is to figure out how to get to the top the search results, Best Match. Some things we know:

Free shipping place you higher

Auctions appear before store inventory items

Item specifics - the more of these you fill out (those little boxes you check regarding style, size, brand name, etc) the higher your listing will place

Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs -those little yellow stars) - the higher your DSRs, the higher you place in Best Match

There are many more factors. Douglas Feiring has updated his eBook, Best Match Made Simple. The recent update came out on November 17, 2009. Click here to download the FREE 131 page eBook for more information about how to place higher in Best Match, and increase your visibility and your sales.

Also, click here for a 10 minute radio interview on eBay Radio with Griff and Lee regarding 5 ways to place higher in Best Match.

Have a great day on eBay!

5 Ways to Increase Profits on eBay

I joined Griff and Lee Mirabal on eBay Radio this week and discussed "5 Ways to Increase eBay Profits." This segment is about 10 minutes long. These are easy things you can actually do on a daily basis. Increasing profits is not always about finding inventory at the lowest price - there are many other strategies for cutting costs to increase profit. Click here to hear the audio segment.

Happy Selling!

How to Use Twitter for eBay Marketing - Part 3

Are you getting active on Twitter? Make this a daily activity. (15 minutes or so a couple of times a day. Don't get sucked in for hours.) When using social media for business, they key is to do a little bit every day. Keep following people. Some will follow you back. This segment will focus on how to "tweet" correctly.

One of the biggest things to keep in mind about Twitter is that it's a conversation. The fun is talking to one another. Reply often and be a real person with VALUABLE information to share. Everyone knows something they can share. Be nice, be professional, be sympathetic, be funny, and just be REAL. You don't have to just talk about your eBay store, I mean, you have other interests, right?

Don’t post updates from your eBay store, or otherwise, non-stop. Maybe a few a day, scattered here and there. I try to post mine at least an hour apart. Twitter users will stop following you if you update too often. Don’t be annoying. You can use TweetDeck to automate tweets at future times.

You want to entice your followers to click in your links and check them out. But make sure that your links are to quality information or something they can really benefit from, or people will stop following you.

Talk TO people, not at them. Interact with people by giving them an @ when you see something interesting on your feed. Maybe you will see a question you can answer. Maybe you will see a local news story that you can comment on. Or something makes you laugh. Give the user an @ reply and talk to them.

Click here to see the rest of the posts in the Twitter for eBay series.

Flipping eBay Auctions - I Really Do This!

You might remember my post a few weeks ago about "Local Sources for Inventory, I Really Use Them!" Now I am going to show you another cool way to make money flipping auctions. You can do this from home, in your pajamas, 24 hours a day, without ever leaving your chair.

The purpose of this exercise is to find good, expensive items that will sell well, that are very badly presented by people who don't know what they are doing. Find it, buy it, present it better, resell it.

1) Think of an item you have sold that brought you a good profit, or maybe one that you read about here on my blog. Let's use cycling jersey as an example. (That is on my "things to look for list.")

2) So I put "cycling jersey" in the search box on eBay and got thousands of results. Now, sort them by "ending soonest." We don't care what is going to happen 5 days from now, look for items ending in the next few hours.

3) I found this listing, with many fatal errors. Click on the photo to enlarge it an look at these issues:



a) no brand name in title
b) the keyword "cycling" not used in title
c) no measurements of garment given on listing
d) background of photo is distracting and unattractive (ok, it is really awful)
e) no returns accepted (affects your sales!)
f) shipping time is 7 business days (I can do better!)

According to my Hammertap research, I can sell this same item for around $20. I can buy this item for $8.99, retake the picture, rewrite the listing, and make a profit of about $10 for about 15 minutes of work. $10 for 15 minutes of work equals a pay rate of $40 an hour. That is called working smart instead of working hard. $40 an hour working from home, in my pajamas if I want. I use a free auction sniper program to set up my bids and walk away. (There is a reason not to bid until the last seconds, which is what a sniper program does.) This takes me about a hour a week and I make several hundred dollars a month with this technique.

I do this weekly and many times make 3-4 times what I paid for a item, just because I present it better, do the research, use more powerful and popular keywords, ship faster, and have more accommodating customer service policies.

This strategy is also called eBay Arbitrage. I found a great eBook that explains exactly how to do this. Some people do this full time and it is their only source of eBay inventory. Click here to check out the eBook and add this technique to your eBay bag of tricks.

Happy Selling!

Looking for Estate Sale Finds to Sell on eBay?

Are you into estate sales? Or maybe you want to learn about estate sales, but have no idea where to start? Some people just love the thrill of the hunt and looking and all that old stuff. It can be fun.

AuctionZip is a cool website that provides information on local estate sales and live auctions. Just enter your zip code, and you will get a calendar like this:

Then, click on the links on the calendar to find out where and when the auctions take place. It will look like this:

Then, click on the auction you are interested, and you get all the details, including an inventory of what will be there. It looks like this:

Now for the best part. Click on VIEW PHOTO GALLERY (if offered), and you can preview what is going to be up for sale. It looks like this:


So, for example, I see they have a lot of vintage books. I am not a book expert. I also see that they have some vintage gas station maps. I know about those - they can go for between $50 and $100 on eBay depending on the year and where they came from. This is where you will spend some time researching the items before you go to the estate sale to figure out what you should spend and how much you can sell the items for. I call this eBay recon (reconnaissance).Exploring in order to gain information. And you can do this from home. So check out AuctionZip.com to see what is happening in your area. You might find some real gems hiding out there.

Happy Selling!

eBay Seller Success Story - Camel Hair Coat

Tammy sent in this success story:

"Hi Suzanne, I wanted to give you an update on the Camel hair coat I e-mailed you about earlier this month. I paid $7.99 for it at the Goodwill thrift store, it was in mint condition and sold it on eBay for $244.00!! Here is the link if you'd like to share it on your blog. (By the way... I would have never known camel hair was something to look for if it wasn't for listening to your podcasts! Your information has helped me greatly.)"



Men's Camel Hair Coat

Wow, outstanding sale!! Yes, camel hair is a great find and sells very well on eBay. For those new to my blog, click here to check out my podcasts, especially the episodes regarding selling thrift store finds and used clothing. There is a huge demand for gently used items on eBay.

If you have a seller success story you would like to share, send it in to me at ebaycoach@yahoo.com.

Happy Selling!





Learn more about selling used thrift store items on eBay - check out my colleague Brigitte's book - Thrift Store Goldmines

eBay Certified Provider Workshop - November 17

Doba is hosting an eBay workshop on November 17 at 11 AM PST. The workshop is titled, "Enhancing Your Holiday Sales with Up-Sales and Cross-Sales."

Join Ginger Leishman of Doba, an eBay Certified Provider providing drop shipping services, as they discuss how eBay sellers can use drop shipping as a means of selling complimentary items for increased sales on eBay.

If you are not familiar with drop shipping, it is a supply chain management technique where the seller does not keep products in stock, but transfers customer orders to the wholesaler or middle man who ships out the product. Doba is eBay's recommended drop shipper. Click here for a free 7 day trial on Doba and check them out.

Twilight Saga - New Moon Giveaway

The movie New Moon opens on Friday so this fun giveaway is just in time! The winner will receive the New Moon book and one tube of DuWop Lip Venom V. Lip Venom V is a shimmering crimson lip stain suspended in a venom-laced liquid lip conditioner with a super potent bite (watch out!), and contains argan, avocado, olive oils and vitamin E. Retail value of this giveaway is $27. Great gift for your favorite vampire or Twilight fan.

To enter, just leave a comment below. For extra entries, help me promote this giveaway by doing any of the following:

(Please remember to put an email address in your comment, or make sure it links to a place where I can easily find your email! I need a way to contact you if you win.)

Post on your blog
Post on Twitter
Post on Facebook
Post on a forum or group (Facebook, Yahoo Groups, etc)
Stumble this post
Digg this post

Be sure to leave a comment for each extra that you do, and your email address so I can contact you if you win! Good luck!

Vintage Item to Sell on eBay - Raggedy Ann & Andy Bedding

Crystal sent in her success story:

"Raggedy Ann and Andy Crib set. This I just took a chance on, but bought this 11 piece set for $14.99 and sold it for $50.00 just a few hours after I listed it."




Raggedy Ann and Andy 11 Piece Bedding Set

Crystal's cost = $14.99
eBay sale price = $49.99
Profit before fees = $35

Great sale, Crystal.

This post is in honor of my childhood friend, Tom, whose birthday is Thursday, 11/12. Tom claims that I threw his beloved Raggedy Andy in the creek when we were kids. I have no memory of this. I guess I was mean back then. Happy birthday, Tom!





Learn more about selling vintage items on eBay - check out my colleague Brigitte's book - Thrift Store Goldmines

eBay Not Generating Enough Cash? Try These Ideas!

Money making opportunities are all around us, if we pay attention to them. In many cases, the key to making money is to be prepared when others are not. Think ahead, anticipate needs, and make money.

I was looking around Jim Cockrum's My Silent Team on Friday, and found this guide in the Bonus Pool: "101 Emergency Cash Generators." I am always skeptical about these kinds of things, so I downloaded the 176 page eBook and started reading it. I couldn't put it down. These ideas are fantastic, and stuff you can really do - most with zero start up costs. And I am already trying some of them. Here are some examples.

Emergency Cash Generator #21: Rain, rain, don't go away. This one is great for parents who have kids in outdoor sports like baseball, soccer, or football. Go to the dollar store and stock up on rain ponchos for $1. Always keep them with you. When you are sitting at the ball park for an 8 hour softball tournament, and it starts pouring rain, pull out your stash of rain ponchos and start selling them to unprepared spectators for $3-$5.

Emergency Cash Generator #37: Trash Runner. Teenagers can do this one. Talk to the senior citizens in your neighborhood about hiring you (or your teen) to take trash cans to the curb on trash day, and bring them back to the garage once trash has been picked up. Some seniors just aren't physically able to drag the trash cans to the curb. This works well if a person lives on a steep hill or has a long driveway. Also works for the able-bodied lazy person or neighbors who travel a lot. Charge $5-$10 a month per household. Teens can do this on their way to and from the bus stop or after school.

Emergency Cash Generator #71: Christmas (holiday) Gift Wrapping Service. Stay at home moms, this one is for you! Some people are overwhelmed by all there is to do at holiday time. Many people (myself included) would gladly pay someone to wrap their gifts. The target market here is single, divorced, or widowed men. You supply the paper, bows, and boxes, and the customer gives you the items with a list of who gets what. Buy your paper at the dollar store or at Sam's or Costco, get free boxes from Sam's, Cotsco, or grocery stores. Advertise (place 1/2 page flyers or business cards) this business at places that men frequent like dry cleaners, automotive repair shops, barber shops, driving range, the gym, or coffee shops. You can wrap the gifts at home, on your schedule, in your pajamas.

This eBook is full of ideas like these, and even some eBay tips I was not aware of. You are covered by the author's 8 week 100% no hassle guarantee: If you are not satisfied with "Emergency Cash Generators Version 3.0" for any reason, just email the author at jjones@business-ideas.biz within 8 Weeks of receipt and he will refund your money. No questions asked.

The author says, "Money making opportunities are all around you. But it is up to you to accept these opportunities when they present themselves." Click here to give it a try. Take these ideas and run with them. You have nothing to lose, and there is money out there waiting for you.

Source for eBay Inventory - Woot

Ok, so what is Woot? According to the website, "Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own." It is a good place to get stuff to sell on eBay. Here is how it works. Go to woot.com and look for the daily deal. Today's deal is Razer Salmosa Gaming Mouse for $13.37. Here is a screen shot of the deal:



Ok, so what, right? I don't even know what this item is (my 13 year old would) or if it is a deal. So I searched on Google, and found it at Walmart for $38.73. See here:


Razer Salmosa 3G Gaming Mouse at Walmart

Good, we have determined this is a deal. Now, let's see what it sells for on eBay using my very favorite research tool - Hammertap. And, drumroll please, looks like we have another hot one! 87% sell through rate.



Sell through rate = 86.67%. This means that if you listed 100 of these, 87 would sell.

Average sale price = $46.71

Click here to see the completed listings on ebay for this product.

You can see that I did the search today, November 8, right after checking the daily Woot. Woot will only let you order 3 of the daily deal item. But if you check the daily deal every day, you can rack up some great products and many sell exceptionally well on eBay. In theory, if I ordered 3 of these and sell them for a $15 profit, I've made $45 on just this one item - and I didn't even have to leave my chair to do it.

Now I am going to lecture you. If you are not using Hammertap, you are missing opportunities to access this kind of information on a daily basis. Why wait for me to tell you what's going on? You could have already figured this out for yourself in about 2 minutes, and ordered your 3 gaming mice to sell on eBay. Hammertap only costs $19.99 a month, is easy to use, and provides valuable information that your competitors don't see. This is a business investment. 20 bucks a month can help you make hundreds, or even thousands more dollars in profit. Click here to take the 10 day trial and see for yourself. Information is power, so get your information from Hammertap.

Happy Selling!

Clearance Item to Sell on eBay - 100% Sell Through Rate

I found Nicorette Commit Lozenges on clearance at Publix this morning while I was doing my grocery shopping. I ALWAYS check the clearance section no matter where I am, you never know what gems are hiding in there. The box of Nicorette Commit lozenges, Cappuccino, 72 count, 2 mg, was marked down to $12. Regular retail price is about $40. You may remember a post a while back about Nicorette orange flavor gum that was discontinued and was a hot item for a while.

So here is the research. Whenever I find something like this, I check it out on Hammertap to see the sell through rate and average sale price. When I searched for the terms NICORETTE LOZENGE 72 CAPPUCCINO, I got these results:



Then, using Hammertap, you can go to this screen and see the actual listings:



Hammertap is a couple of days behind, because the data is extracted from eBay and sent over - it isn't like looking at completed listings that are up to the minute. So you always want to check completed listings, too. Here is listing for this exact item that ended yesterday, November 6:



See the listing here: COMMIT Lozenges--CAPPUCCINO FLAVOR--72ct--2mg Each

Now you may ask, "How did you know to buy it?" I kind of already knew that the stop smoking products are expensive, and this seemed like it had been marked down quite a bit. I went up to customer service and asked if they could tell me what the regular price was, and they looked it up - regular retail is $44. I asked if this flavor had been discontinued, and they said they didn't know. The expiration date is 5/10, the package is sealed, so I took a chance. I will let you know how it goes, and please let me know if you find any or learn if this product is discontinued. If it is discontinued, it will probably be selling for much more in the future.

Happy Selling!

Super Hot Toy Tip - Little Tunes MP3 Player

Little Tunes MP3 Boom box is going to be sale at Tuesday Morning starting on Friday Nov 6 - Sun Nov 8. Original price, $69.99, sale price $19.99. (Click here to see the ad.)

According to Hammertap, the sell through rate is a whopping 87.5% with an average selling price of $41. Here is the data:



And here is a completed listing for a Little Tunes MP3 Boom Box:


The listing closed on October 18. Click here to see the listing.

For more hot holiday tips like this, be sure you are subscribed to my blog! See the subscription button on the sidebar.

You may also want to check out Hammertap so you can do this type of research yourself when you see items on sale. Click here for a 1 week free trial to see just what Hammertap can do.

Happy Selling!

How to Use Twitter for eBay Marketing - Part 2

Ok, so now you have a Twitter profile and you are following some people. Let's go over the Twitter lingo so you will understand the site and what everyone is doing there.

Following. These are the people whose tweets you've selected to read; their tweets appear in your "feed" or "stream."

Follower. This is someone who is reading your tweets.

The @ symbol. Put this before any other Twitterer's username to refer to them. Why? It creates a link to their profile automatically, which is handy for your followers to track conversations or look at people you're referring to. So when you are set up on Twitter, give me a shout out: @ebaycoach Hi, I made it to Twitter!

The hashtag (#). A hashtag is a method to pull together global Tweets around some particular topic. So you may see something like, #ebay, #followfriday, #giveaway, etc.

RT or Retweet. The same as forwarding an email; re-sending a tweet sent by someone else. Include the @username of the person who authored the tweet. You are basically saying "I like what this person said, I want to pass it on, and let the person know I liked it and passed it on." Great use of this feature: Missing child alerts.

Ok, so now you are set up on Twitter, and understand some of the lingo. Let's start finding customers. Let's say you got lucky and found some Zhu Zhu pets and have them listed in your store. Go to the search box on the right, and put in Zhu Zhu Pets. You want to find people who are talking about them. You will find plenty of sellers, but look for those who can't find them, want them, etc. The search box looks like this:



And here is someone looking for Zhu Zhu pets:



Now, open another window with your eBay store, pull up the item you want to promote, and look for the SHARE button on the right hand side below your seller info. It will look like this:



Click on the SHARE ON TWITTER button, and the item will pop into your update window on Twitter. It will look like this:



But wait, you aren't done yet. Remember the potential customer we found who was looking for that item? Let's give her the @ sign so she will see your Tweet. So now, your tweet looks like this:



Not only will that customer see your tweet, but anyone else who searches for the keyword will see it, and your followers will see it.

So, play around with that and stay tuned for part 3 coming up in a few days. (Click here to see all the posts in the Twitter for eBay series.)

Happy Selling!



eBay Store Critique - $19.95, Money Back Guarantee