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eBay Tips and Tricks

Welcome to www.LetsHaveFun.biz the shop for skill toys!

eBay tips from a Powerseller

I am often asked for help and advice in starting up on eBay and so I thought I would jot a few notes down as they occur to me.

Picture Manager

THOU SHALT NOT SUBSCRIBE TO PICTURE MANAGER! Do not subscribe to eBay's Picture Manager. I made this mistake and deeply regretted it! Picture Manager is an eBay service whereby eBay will host (store) your images on their web servers, so that you can insert them into your eBay pages and listings. It works fine, and by all means, make use of any free Pciture Manager space that you might be given.
However, you can host your own images MUCH cheaper. And it is not hard. Picture Manager charges around £60 per year to host 50 megabytes of files. You can easily get hosting for a massive 750 megabytes for around £43 per year (try http://www.fasthosts.co.uk who are my web hosts). Once you host your own photos, a whole world of possibilities opens up to you. For starters, you are now in a position to buy a URL (web site name such as www.LetsHaveFun.biz for around £15 or so) and host your own web site or shop.
Not only is Picture Manager expensive, it is also NOT very user friendly. When you load a picture onto Picture Manager, eBay kindly renames the file to a seemingly random file name. To use your image you must use this filename. You do not have the ability to change the filename. So if you later change your image, you have to manually edit the HTML code of every reference to this listing, since eBay Picture Manager will rename the image when you reload it :-(. I learnt the hard way: I accidentally deleted a logo from Picture Manager and correcting this took ages. I decided to add a watermark to all my pictures but replace the existing pictures took an age. I now host my own pictures and have full control of their size, location and name. It makes managing your pictures much easier in the long run.

Royal Mail Business Collection

Don't queue, arrange a collection! Once you are selling regularly, you will soon tire of the daily trudge to the post office to send your mail. It costs money (driving and parking) and most importantly, it costs you time. For about £1 a day you can arrange a week-day business collection by Royal Mail. You can then ensure your orders are dispatched very promptly. Sellers offering a prompt dispatch of goods get a good number of repeat customers, trust me! About 10% to 15% of my customers are return customers.

Royal Mail Smartstamp

Don't lick - print! When your volume of sales increases it is well worth subscribing to Royal Mail SmartStamp. Basically for a modest monthly subscription, this software lets you print your own stamps on labels (you know the kind, the type with the strange barcode). The software is easy to use and prints the appropriate stamp for your specified weight, destination and mail type. Your account is debited as you print and it saves loads of time!

Accept Cheques and Postal Orders

Accept different forms of payment Give the customer choice: let them pay by means other than Paypal. I accept cheques, postal orders and NoChex and I would estimate this generates an extra 5% oftrade. Remember you don't incur transaction fees when cashing cheques and postal orders.

Commercial Bank

Get a good bank account! Your bank will probably not be too happy with you if they suspect you are using your personal current account for business purposes. It is also easier to maintain good finacnial records if you keep your business transactions separate form your personal finances. The Alliance and Leicester and other banks offer fees-free commercial bank accounts. Nice and easy to use the A&L account can also be accessed from the internet. Update by Pete July 2006: one downside I have discovered with this account is that they make a hefty charge if you pay a third party cheque into your account and it bounces. If the bounced cheque is from a buyer on eBay, it is next to impossible to recover this bank fee from your customer. And if you do try, you risk getting a neg (negative feedback).

Buy a Domain

Buy a Domain Name Plan ahead. Search for and buy an appropriate domain name. Use this name in eBay, particularly to name your eBay shop. This way, you establish a consistent 'brand' identity across both eBay and on the Web and you may be able to direct some customers to your web site store. Thus my eBay store is called LetsHaveFun and my web site is www.LetsHaveFun.biz.

Open a web store

Sell on the web as well as on eBay Use the domain you have to feed customers into your eBay store. When established better, the time will come when it is worth the time and investment to buy or build a web store. I used Actinic and found it to be very good. The initial outlay is quite high but the increased custom is paying this investment off. Update by Pete, May 2006 My web store has been open about 4 months now and it already accounts for about 40% of my turnover! Slightly more profitable than ebay yet I am able to price lower than on eBay because I have no eBay fees to pay in relation to these sales. With the rising eBay fees it is increasingly important to use other sales avenues.

Use Turbo Lister

Make use of eBays tools Turbo Lister is free and enables you to produce better listings, quicker and to use listing templates. Easy to use, it is well worth getting used to. I never list in any other way than using Turbo Lister. Well worth learning.
Selling Manager Pro is not free but is worth the monthly fee if you are trying to make a living from eBay.

Have patience

eBay is not a get-rich-quick option eBay has to be the most competitive, reactive and ever-changing market out there. It will take you a while to turn a profit. You will have to work very hard and hour-for-hour, the rewards are not spectacular. On the plus side, you can enjoy flexible working hours, and have great fun being your own boss.
Avoid any 'get-rich-quick' type schemes or ebooks.

Accounts

Keep good records It is vital to keep very good records, not just for the tax man but for your own sake. Accounts don't just tell you about the past, they can predict the future and tell you where you are going. Good records will also help you to ensure all your orders are sent out, that you do not duplicate orders, help you manage your stock, and are vital when setting prices.
Initially I used Excel to manage my accounts but after a month or so it soon became apparent this was inadequate. So I invested in Quickbooks Pro, and recommend this to anyone looking to set up a small to medium sized business. It has a nice friendly user interface, a good user community, is robust and easy to use, yet customisable. It does not (unlike some other accounts packages) make you purchase expensive stationary. Plain old white paper is all you need to print all your needs.

Promote a charity

Use eBay for other means! As you may know, I had a heart transplant that saved my life. I am immensely lucky and grateful, and I have been using eBay to send out organ donor information, to promote the need for more registered organ donors in the UK. This is, if you will excuse the pun, something very close to my heart. If you are selling on eBay, why not use this opportunity to promote your favourite cause, charity or simply to raise awareness?

Like what you sell

Choose something to sell that you have some knowledge of, or at least an interest in. It will be more interesting for you and give you and edge over the competition.

Skills required

Skills Ok, lets cut to the important question here: can anyone sell on eBay? I think so, yes, But not everyone will succeed. My career background is in IT, programming, and web development. At a younger more naive age I also tried my hands at accounts. Dull at the time but proving very useful now. I am educated to degree level and have many years of work experience in outfits ranging from small startups to large corporations. My work has generally been very customer-focused, giving me an appreciation of 'customer care' which I am applying to eBay.
I am not trying to 'blow my own trumpet' here! I am just trying to tell you what skills I think I have needed to have, to be reasonably successful on eBay. If you are thinking of giving it a go, my last piece of advice would be to give it 110 per cent. Don't approach it in a half-hearted way, or it will show. Still want to try? Then GO FOR IT! Good luck, and have fun!

Investment and budgeting

How much does it cost to start an eBay business? I think there is a lot of scope here. You could invest very little capital indeed and slowly build up your business. If you want more immediate results and plan on selling as a full-time or part-time occupation, the initial outlays can be quite high. I initially invested about £10,000 in stock and capital equipment. On top of this the monthly running costs can be quite a bit higher than you might anticipate.

The capital equipment that I purchased early on included:
1. A bloody good PC with a large hard disk and backup facilities. Remember the computer is your gateway to the market. The quicker it is, the quicker you can work. Backup facilities are essential. At some point you WILL need to recover data!
2. Internet software and backup software (Norton Systemworks including Norton Ghost for automated backups, and Internet Security software). Keep your PC secure.
3. Accounts software (Quickbooks Pro) about £200 I think - worth shopping around for.
4. Web shop software. I went for ActinicCatalog, cost about £315.
5. Postal Scales - eBay purchase, about £22
6. Years prepaid Royal Mail Business collection service incl Saturdays about £375.
7. Photographic equipment including a decent digital camera, tripod, lighting and light tents to take product photos. About £400. Mainly from eBay.
8. Decent printer with scanner, fax, copier (I went for the HP Officejet 7310, purchased on eBay, £250).
9. Decent chair - you will be sitting at a PC for long periods, make sure your workspace is comfortable.
10. Shelving units for storage of stock. Also purchased on eBay, I must recommend the metal shelving units sold by BigDug.co.uk. About £300.
11. Domain names. £30
12. Label Wizard Business Software. Prints super address labels in a friendly, quick way. £20 on ebay.
13. Warehouse materials such as envelopes, packing tapes, bubblewrap, Jiffy bags etc.
14. Broadband internet connection and subscription.

On-going costs include:
1. Electricity annd heating. You will probably be working from home and this will increase your consumption. Put a proportion of the costs down in your accounts.
2. Internet broadband. I managed on dial-up for a while, but Broadband pays for itself; it is so quick it saves me time and thus money.
3. Internet hosting with MySQL database about £70 per year (I chose Fasthosts).
4. SmartStamp subscription - this is a Royal Mail service and costs about £5 per month to print your own stamps, Saves time and effort. Recommened - excellent software calculates your postal costs and prints a stamp. Postal charges automativcally taken from your account. Beats sticking stamps on all day.
5. Packing materials. Bulk buy to save money. I use Zignig who have never let me down and are very competitive.
6. eBay fees. These will be a MAJOR monthly cost. It is easy to list too many items and lose money. Use shop listings as much as possible to reduce costs.
7. Printing supplies. Printer cartridges are quite expensive.
8. PayPal and postage fees. These are significant. They account for about 30% of my expenditure.
9. Customs Duty and VAT. If you are importing goods you will end up paying import duties, carrier handling charges and customs VAT. Make sure you include these costs when setting your prices. They an additional cost of goods sold.

Use eBay!

Buy on eBay! If you are going to sell on eBay, why not shop there too? It adds to your all-important eBay feedback score, and is usually cheaper too.

Do open an eBay shop. You can then take advantage of the cheap shop listings. Don't get sucked into using the Picture Manager service just because you get a few megabytes of storage space free with your shop, it is far better to host your own photos.

Don't over-list on eBay. This is a common mistake (I made it too) and can result in your listing fees being far higher than the income they generate. Remember that sales of shop inventory Good Til Gone items are the most profitable since they have the lowest fees. Use the eBay advanced search to look at products that have finished to see (a) whether they sold, (b) how much they sold for and (c) the volume of sales in the time period shown. This will help you judge whether (a) the market is saturated, (b) the profitability of selling the item, and (c) how much stock you might reasonably expect to sell. .

A few words of Caution!

Do not expect instant returns
After 9 months of selling on eBay I am still paying off my capital investment. I have not withdrawn any 'wages' yet, every penny of profit is reinvested. I do not expect to turn a profit sufficient to let me draw a regular wage for the first year of trading. I do not expect my accounts to show any significant profit for the first year. But I expected this, and am in it for the long run.
It is hard work
I spend a good deal of my 'spare' time researching products, learning how to use software, doing my accounts etc. eBay selling is a time-eater. Only do it if you enjoy it!
You work from home
Working from home is a plus in many ways. Play your music, take a break when you want. But you need to be pretty self-diciplined too. The post MUST be got ready for collection. You MUST be in for the collection. You must restock as you sell. So you MUST be in when a wholesale delivery is expected.
It is menial
Having made the sale, you have to pick the order, pack it, weigh and stamp it, fill in any Royal Mail paperwork (International Signed For, Recorded Delivery books etc) then dispatch it. This can quickly become mundane. Unfortunately, the more sales you make, the more of your time will be spent doing the less interesting tasks. Catch 22!
It is very competitive
eBay is a highly competitive marketplace and reacts quickly to price changes. Some competitors can be pretty ruthless. They will resort to underhand tactics to try to protect their business. You may find eBay contacting you to report some breach of their many policies, for which you could lose your powerseller status, have fees imposed, have to revise your listings, lose feedback, or be othewise chastised. This is more often than not the result of a competitor reporting you to eBay. Keep everything you do within the eBay policies and guidelines or expect to get caught. Good luck though, there are a myriad of policies that are all too easy to breach.
It is all down to YOU
You are running your own business. The buck stops with you. . Any mistakes are down to you and there is no-one else to blame. It is your money that you stand to lose if you cock up.

The benefits

Flexible working
I look after my 2 kids and pick them up from school etc. Selling on eBay gives me the flexibility to do this.
Rewarding
Selling on eBay gives me tremendous job satisfaction.
Your success is in YOUR hands
You are running your own business.You are the boss. You answer to nobody. You wear what you like. You do not have to attend endless meetings. You will never have to work for or with someone you do not like. You can work ethically and with a conscience. No office politics. No 'blamestorming'. If the sun is out, you can take a break, without asking. Need a holiday? Just shut your shop and go. No 'annual leave' entitlements to worry about! Better work-life balance.
You gain greater control over your own life. You enjoy a far better work-life balance. No daily commute to work! No traffic jams, delayed trains, or cancelled bus services.

The Tax Man

Register as a Sole Trader If this is to become your business, you need to be legit. You will need to register as a sole trader and declare your income. If you don't, your competitors might do so for you. VAT You don''t need to register for VAT unless your annual turnover exceeds a certain limit (presently about £60,000 pa).

International Trade

Speak every language You will get contacted by customers from all over the world and this can be quite daunting. Especially if you are as weak at foreign languages as I am! But sure enough, the internet comes to the rescue with some free translation sites. My favourite is http://world.altavista.com. Bookmark it now! Now, as long as they do not phone up... ;-)

Copyright 2008, New Heart Trading. LetsHaveFun.biz is part of New Heart Trading, run by Peter Thake, a registered Sole Trader. Established in 2005, based in Hampshire, UK. All images and trade names are used with permission. VAT Registered 901 9153 46.

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