EBay for Dummies (33 page)
Authors: Marsha Collier
Tags: #Electronic Commerce, #Computers, #General, #E-Commerce, #Internet auctions, #Auctions - Computer network resources, #Internet, #Business & Economics, #EBay (Firm)
Snapping up profits
Way back in 1980, when Pac-Man ruled, my friend Ric decided to try his hand at photography. Hoping to be the next Ansel Adams — or to at least snap something in focus — he bought a 1/4 Kowa 66, one of those cameras you hold in front of your belt buckle while you look down into the viewfinder. Soon after he bought the camera, Ric’s focus shifted. The camera sat in its box, instructions and all, for over 15 years until he threw a garage sale.
Ric and his wife didn’t know much about his Kowa, but they knew that it was worth something. When he got an offer of $80 for it at the garage sale, his wife whispered “eBay!” in his ear, and he turned down the offer.
Ric and his wife posted the camera on eBay with the little information they had about its size and color, and the couple was flooded with questions and information about the camera from knowledgeable bidders. One bidder said that the silver-toned lens made it more valuable. Another gave them the camera’s history.
Ric and his wife added each new bit of information to their description and watched as the bids increased with their every addition — until that unused camera went for more than $400 in a flurry of last-minute sniping in 1999. These days, when Ric posts an auction, he always asks for additional information and adds it to the auction page.
What difference does a year make? You’ll learn that the values of all items on eBay trend up and down. In 2000, this camera sold on eBay for over $600; in late 2001, it sold for $455. In the winter of 2003, interest in it was waning; it sold in the $375 to $400 range. In 2009, one sold for $390. Not bad considering everyone is saying film cameras are dead merchandise.
Timing is hardly an exact science. Rather, timing is a little bit of common sense, a dash of marketing, and a fair amount of information gathering. Do a little research among your friends. What are they interested in? Would they buy your item? Use eBay itself as a research tool. Search to see whether anyone’s making money on the same type of item. If people are crazed for some fad item and you have a bunch,
yesterday
was the time to sell. (In other words, if you want your money out of ’em, get crackin’ and get packin’.)
If the eBay market is already flooded with dozens of an item and no one is making money on them, you can afford to wait before you plan your auction.
Know Thy Stuff
At least that’s what Socrates would have said if he’d been an eBay seller. Haven’t had to do a homework assignment in a while? Time to dust off those old skills. Before selling your merchandise, do some digging to find out as much as you can about it.
Getting the goods on your goods
Here are some ideas to help you flesh out your knowledge of what you have to sell:
Hit the books.
Check your local library for books about the item. Study historic guides and collector magazines.
Even though collectors still use published price guides when they put a value on an item, so much fast-moving e-commerce is on the Internet that price guides often lag behind the markets they cover. Take their prices with a grain of salt.
Go surfin’.
Conduct a Web search and look for info on the item on other auction sites. If you find a print magazine that strikes your fancy, check to see whether the magazine is available on the Web by typing the title of the magazine into your browser’s search window. (For detailed information on using search engines to conduct a more thorough online search, check out Chapter 5.)
When the going gets tough, go shopping.
Browse local stores that specialize in your item. Price the item at several locations.
When you understand the demand for your product (whether it’s a collectible or a commodity) and how much you can realistically ask for it, you’re on the right track to a successful auction.
Call in the pros.
Need a quick way to find the value of an item you want to sell? Call a dealer or a collector and say you want to
buy
one. A merchant who smells a sale will give you a current selling price.
eBay to the rescue.
eBay members often offer guidance for your research on the Community Boards and Chats. eBay has category-specific chat rooms, where you can read what other collectors are writing about items in a particular category. (See Chapter 17 for more on eBay’s Chat area.)
For information on how items are graded and valued by professional collectors, jump to Chapter 5, where I discuss grading your items.
Be certain you know what you have — not only what it is and what it’s for, but also
whether it’s genuine.
Make sure it’s the real McCoy. You are responsible for your item’s authenticity; counterfeits and knock-offs are not welcome on eBay. In addition, manufacturers’ legal beagles are on the hunt for counterfeit and stolen goods circulating on eBay — and they
will
tip off law enforcement.
Spy versus spy: Comparison selling
Back in the old days, successful retailers like Gimbel and Macy spied on each other to figure out ways to get a leg up on the competition. Today, in the bustling world of e-commerce, the spying continues, and dipping into the intrigue of surveilling the competition is as easy as clicking your mouse.
Say that you’re the biggest
Dukes of Hazzard
fan ever and you collect
Dukes of Hazzard
stuff, such as VHS tapes from the show, movie memorabilia, General Lee models, and lunchboxes. Well, good news: That piece of tin that holds your lunchtime PB&J may very well fetch a nice sum of money. To find out for sure, you can do some research on eBay. To find out the current market price for a
Dukes of Hazzard
lunchbox, you can conduct a Completed Items search on the Search page (as described in Chapter 5) and find out exactly how many
Dukes of Hazzard
lunchboxes have been sold in the past few weeks. You can also find out their high selling prices and how many bids the lunchboxes received by the time the auctions were over. And repeating a completed search in a week or two is not a bad idea — you can get at least a month’s worth of data to price your item. Figure 9-2 shows the results of a Completed Items search sorted by highest prices first.
You can easily save your searches on eBay. Just click the Save This Search link in the top-right corner (refer to Figure 9-2) to add a search to your favorite searches. Then it’s on your My eBay Favorites page, and you can repeat the search with a click of your mouse.
Figure 9-2:
Use the Completed Items search to find out what an item is selling for. These lunchboxes sold from between $20 and $109.
Sometimes sellers make spelling errors when they write item titles. In the case of a
Dukes of Hazzard
lunchbox, when you conduct a search for such an item, I suggest that you use one of my favorite search tricks, which I featured in Chapter 5. The eBay search engine accommodates for one correction (as in
hazard
and
hazzard
) but when you want to check for two variations, you must input both. Type your search this way:
dukes (hazzard,hazard) (“lunch box”,lunchbox)
. (Be sure that you drop the noise word
of
.) This way, you find all instances of
dukes hazzard lunchbox
and
dukes hazard lunchbox.