EBay for Dummies (70 page)

Knowledgeable veteran eBay members generally answer posted questions as best (and as quickly) as they can. The answers are the opinions of members and are certainly not eBay gospel. But you get a fast and honest answer; often you get more than one response. Most questions are answered in about 15 minutes. If not, repost your question. Make sure that you post your question on the appropriate board because each board has a specific topic of discussion.

If a new policy or some sort of big change occurs, the boards are most likely going to quickly fill with discussion about it. On slow days, however, you may need to wade through endless personal messages and “chat” with no connection to eBay. Many of the people who post on these boards are long-time members with histories (as well as feuds) that can rival any soap opera. On a rare occasion, the personal postings can get rather nasty. Getting involved in personality clashes or verbal warfare gains nothing and wastes your valuable time.

One cardinal rule for eBay chat boards and message boards exists: no business. No advertising items for sale! Not now. Not ever. eBay bans any repeat offenders who break this rule from participating on these boards.

Remember that you’re visiting eBay and that you’re a member. It’s not Speakers’ Corner — that spot in a London park where protesters are free to stand on a soapbox and scream about the rats in government. If you feel the need to viciously complain about eBay, take it outside, as the bar bouncers say.

User-to-User Discussion Boards

eBay has some other boards that take a different tack on things. They’re
discussion
boards as opposed to
chat
boards, which basically means that the topics are deliberately open-ended — just as the topics of discussions in coffee houses tend to vary depending on who happens to be in them at any given time. Check out these areas and read ongoing discussions about eBay’s latest buzz. It’s a lot of fun and good reading. Post your opinions to the category that suits you. You can find tons of discussion boards on various topics relating to doing business on eBay, but my favorites are in the General Discussion area. Each discussion board carries as many topics as you can imagine. Here are few of my favorites:

The eBay Town Square
is a potpourri of various subjects and topics.

The Soapbox
is the place to voice your views and suggestions to help build a better eBay.

NightOwls Nest
is the fun locale for creatures of the night and their unique postings. (As I’m writing this, for example, there’s a thread with spirited advice to a community member who needs help with his “gassy” cat.)

eBay Live
is a big eBay user convention. Stop by this board to get a bird’s-eye view of the happenings from the previous year’s summit. You can also find out what’s in store for the upcoming soiree.

The Park
is an interesting place where community members join in for fun ideas and threads.

Other Chat Rooms (Message Boards)

About a dozen chat rooms at eBay specialize in everything from pure chat to charity work. The following sections describe a few of these boards.

Café society

The eBay Café (eBay’s first chat board from back when they were just selling Pez candy dispensers) and AOL Café message boards attract mostly regulars chatting about eBay gossip. Frequent postings include the sharing of personal milestones and whatever else is on people’s minds. You can also find useful information about eBay and warnings about potential scams here.

Holiday Chat Room

Although eBay suggests that this is the place to share your favorite holiday memories and thoughts, it’s really a friendly place where people meet and chat about home and family. Stop by for cybermilk and cookies next time you have a few minutes and want to visit with your fellow auction addicts.

Giving Works Board

eBay isn’t only about making money. On the Giving Works Board, it’s also about making a difference. Members in need post their stories and requests for assistance. Other members with items to donate post offers for everything from school supplies to clothing on this board.

If you feel like doing a good deed and conduct a member benefit auction, click the eBay Giving Works link on the Discussion Board page. For more on charity auctions see Chapter 18.

The eBay Friends from All Over discussion Board

People from all around the world enjoy eBay. If you’re considering buying or selling globally, visit the eBay Friends from All Over
Board. It’s a great place to post questions about shipping and payments for overseas transactions. Along with eBay chat, this board turns up discussions about current events and international politics.

Got a seller or bidder in Italy? Spain? France? Translate your English messages into the appropriate language through the following Web site:

www.google.com/translate

Category-Specific Chat Boards

Want to talk about Elvis, Louis XV, Sammy Sosa, or Howard the Duck? Currently over 20 category-specific chat boards enable you to tell eBay members what’s on your mind about merchandise and auctions. You reach these boards by clicking Community on the main navigation bar and then clicking Chat in the Connect area.

Of course, you can buy and sell without ever going on a chat board, but you can certainly learn a lot from one. Discussions mainly focus on merchandise and the nuts and bolts of transactions. Category-specific chat boards are great for posting questions on items that you don’t know much about.

On eBay, you get all kinds of responses from all kinds of people. Take a portion of the help you get with a grain of salt because some of the folks who help you may be buyers or competitors.

Don’t be shy. As your second-grade teacher said, “No questions are dumb.” Most eBay members love to share their knowledge of items.

eBay Groups

If you’re the friendly type and would like an instant group of new friends, I suggest that you click the link in the Connect area to eBay Groups. Here you can find thousands of user groups, hosted on eBay but run by eBay community members. They may be groups consisting of people from the same geographic area, those with similar hobbies, or those interested in buying or selling in particular categories.

eBay Groups may be public groups (open to all) or private clubs with their own private boards. Only invited members of a private group can access a private board.

Joining a group is easy: Just click any of the links on the main Groups page and you’re presented with a dizzying array of groups to join. Your best bet though, is to participate in chats or discussions, and find other members that you’d like to join up with.

Blog It on eBay

A recent addition is eBay’s Blogs area. Here’s where any eBay member can start his or her own online posting page. You can share your opinions and ideas with the entire Internet universe, directly from eBay. I find reading other members’ blogs a fun pastime; plus you get to learn a little more about the faces behind the user IDs. Blogs do not replace the all-important About Me page, but a blog can be a fun pastime and fun for all your friends to read. Keep in mind, I said a pastime. If your plan is to learn to sell on eBay, study this book and lots of PowerSeller listings on the site. Go and list some test items rather than spending precious moments playing here. But if time is not of the essence, have fun.

Chapter 18

eBay’s Fun Features

In This Chapter

Buying for a good cause

Using eBay’s member specials

Buying souvenirs at The eBay Shop

Calling free with Skype

Getting a personal cyber-shopper

No one can say that eBay isn’t fun! The eBay staff is always trying to work with the community by filling needs and finding fun stuff to keep us happy. In this chapter, I show you how eBay members can get great inside deals from manufacturers, and I open the door of The eBay Shop, where you can get T-shirts and coffee cups with the official eBay logo on them. I also show you how you can help your favorite charity earn some well-deserved cash at eBay’s charity auctions.

Over and over, eBay members show what big hearts they have. Yes, you actually can pocket some nice-sized profits from selling on the eBay Web site, but (just as in real life) people usually take the time to give a little back for worthy causes. But because we’re talking about eBay, giving back means getting something fabulous in return.

Truly Righteous Stuff for Charity

Most of us have donated to charity in one form or another. But here on eBay, charities really rock. Do you need a
Jurassic Park
helmet signed by Steven Spielberg to round out your collection (and deflect the odd dino tooth)? Post a bid on one of the charity auctions. How about a signed original photograph of Jerry Seinfeld from
People
magazine? Yup, you can get that, too. All these and more have turned up in charity auctions. In short, having a big heart for charities has gotten a whole lot easier thanks to eBay.

eBay Giving Works

November 2003 was a lucky time for this country’s charities. That’s the month that eBay launched the eBay Giving Works Charity auction area. Smartly, the folks on eBay teamed up with one of the finest charity sites on the Internet, MissionFish. MissionFish, a service of the Points of Light Foundation, has been around since early 2000 and has enabled charities to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars by turning in-kind donations into cash. The eBay community has helped raise close to $200 million so far.

If you’re involved with a charity, you can register your charity to get on the list of beneficiaries. You can also run your own fundraising events on eBay! Just go to
www.ebaygivingworks.com
or click the Giving Works link on the left side of the eBay home page and you’ll arrive at the Giving Works hub (as in Figure 18-1).

The best part about this new system is that
you
can run an auction to benefit your favorite charity. eBay sellers can list items for sale and designate those items to benefit a charity from the MissionFish directory of thousands of charities. The seller can also specify what percentage (from as little as 10 up to 100 percent) of the auction proceeds go to the charity. At the end of the sale, MissionFish e-mails a tax receipt to the seller. You can browse to select the charity of your choice on the Giving Works page. When you list your item for sale, you can indicate on the Sell form’s Create Your Listing section which charity, and what percentage of the final sale price, you’d like to donate proceeds.

As you visit different areas of eBay, you can recognize the charity auctions by the small blue ribbon icon next to them in searches and the Category list.

Creative charity auctions

New charities are popping up all the time on eBay. To see the auctions that are running, go to the Charity page by starting on eBay’s home page and clicking the Giving Works (Charity) link on the left side of the screen. Here are some of the more creative charity auctions that have been held on eBay:

The highest grossing charity auction occurred in 2008. In an annual eBay fundraising auction run by Kompolt & Company, billionaire Warren Buffet donated a private lunch to benefit the Glide Foundation in New York. The 2008 auction grossed $2,110,100.

Oprah Winfrey has jumped onto eBay with a bang! To fund her charity, the Angel Network, Oprah auctioned two chairs from her set. These were not just any chairs. Aside from being luxurious leather chairs designed by Ralph Lauren, they housed the behinds of famous names such as John F. Kennedy, Jr., Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, and Michael Jordan, to name just a few. The 7-day auction netted the charity an amazing $64,100.

To celebrate Chivas Regal’s 200th year, the company chose eBay for CHIVAS 200, the largest online charity auction in the world. From September 6 to October 31, 2001, the Chivas folks auctioned more than 200 of the world’s most-wanted items and experiences — such as an opportunity to become a Russian space station astronaut — all for the benefit of charity partners around the world.

When I appeared on
The View
with Barbara Walters and Star Jones, all four stars of the show autographed a coffee cup that we auctioned off on eBay to benefit UNICEF. We raised over $1,000 on a single coffee cup! Now that a couple of the hosts have moved on, I wonder what that little cup’s worth.

If you go to the About Me page (by clicking the link from the listing page) of any of the charities on the Charity Fundraising page, you can find out exactly where the money that eBay users bid goes.

And Now for Our Feature Presentation

As an eBay member, you’re entitled to some features offered on the Web site. The perks aren’t quite as high-end as you may receive with, say, a country club membership, but hey, your nonexistent membership dues are a lot less! With about 203 million confirmed registered users, eBay can get outside companies and manufacturers to listen to what it has to say. You know the old saying about power in numbers? On eBay, you find “savings in numbers” on items or services that you can buy outside the Web site, as explained in this section.

Member specials

As eBay gains popularity, more and more outside companies are offering special deals exclusively for members. These deals aren’t auctions but are conventional “pay the price and get the item or services” transactions.

To find the member specials, go to the very bottom of eBay’s home page and look for the business logos or link boxes at the bottom of the page. eBay also has a page with most of the Power Trading features (special deals) at
pages.ebay.com/services/buyandsell/member-specials.html
.

The special deals change all the time, but here’s a small sampling of perks available to you as a member:

eBay gift certificates:
Wow! It doesn’t get much better than this. Now I never have to drag myself all over town looking for a gift. You can purchase these certificates in any amount from $5.00 to $200.00. You can print the certificate and give it with a gift (I think my book,
Santa Shops on eBay,
would make an excellent companion for an eBay gift certificate), or you can have it e-mailed to the recipient. You can also find information at the secure site
https://certificates.ebay.com/
.

PayPal:
Online payments integrated directly into your eBay auctions.

Authentication services:
Get a special discount (usually 10 percent) if you authenticate coins through Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) or trading cards through Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA). See Chapter 16 for tips on authenticating your items.

As time passes, you can see additional benefits and programs that eBay creates for the community. The folks at eBay are aggressively searching out new and helpful affiliations to help you take care of your auction business. But don’t leave the task of maintaining your listings entirely to eBay — take it upon yourself to find new ways to make your listings easier to manage.

A successful seller takes advantage of every program and service he or she can. The less time you spend tied to your computer, the more time you have to plan new auctions and find new items to sell. Investigate these programs and try them out for yourself.

Who’s minding The eBay Shop?

eBay’s minding The eBay Shop, of course (and freshening up its window-dressing from time to time). If you can’t find the perfect item for your favorite eBay member with more than 89 million listings (or so) worldwide running at any given time, go browse around eBay’s General Store, The eBay Shop. You don’t find any auctions here — just eBay logo items, such as shirts, bags, coffee mugs, and even eBay pick-up sticks!