Top Tips to Improve your eBay Experience

Danel is a 15 year old who is an avid eBay’er. He has already made quite a lot of money as a Seller. Here are his top seven tips for getting the most out of eBay.

• When buying an item, do not place a bid for an item several days before the auction is over. This will just cause the bid to increase. I suggest placing a bid in the last few seconds. Have 2 windows open, one will be the bid you are willing to place for the item. And the other is another bid you are ready to place for the item. But, the second screen will be a higher amount. How high? Your choice. You see, other people also place their own bids in the last few seconds, and if someone places a bid higher then your first… there’s no chance of you going back and placing another bid. Thats why it is a good idea to keep another screen open with a higher bid price.
• Ifyou find the item you would like to bid on that still has time left, it might not be a good idea to put it on your watch list. See, if the seller of the item sees that there is no bid on his item and 20 people are watching it, he probably will not drop the price. What you should do, is save the item number and view the item like that. If there are no bids on it, and no one is watching it, there is a large possibility that the seller of the item will lower the price.
• Just because you find an item you would like to buy and are ready to place a bid on it, you might want to look at one thing… the user who is selling it. If a brand new user with zero feedback is selling a $20,000 car, it might not be a good idea to bid. If a user has 5 feedbacks and 3 of them are negative, once again… might not be a good person to buy from. If there is someone with 10,000 feedbacks and only 200 negative feedbacks, they are most likely a good person to buy from.
• For some items, there is the “Buy it Now” option. Instead of waiting for the auction to be over, you could just click that button and simply buy it now for the price shown. But keep this in mind… if the buy it now price is $300 and the current bid is $50 with only a few hours remaining, it may be a good idea to wait. But, this is one of the things people just can’t predict. There is no strategy for this. Someone sees something they like, they know the price will rise, they buy it, with still plenty of time remaining.
• The ‘reserve’ option is very popular. Some sellers may be worried that their item will not sell for the amount of money they want it to, so they put a reserve amount in place. This is a hidden price that only the seller will know. There will be text below the bid price that will say ‘Reserve met’ or ‘Reserve not met’. No matter how much you bid, if the price does not exceed the reserve price then you will not win the auction. Once the hidden cost of the reserve is met, whoever bids does have a chance of winning the auction. Some sellers use a strategy of telling people what the reserve price is, but most people do not. I suggest not to.
• Some auctions you might see might get you ’surprised’. For instance, you may see a pair of shoes for $10,000. This will most likely be a ‘best offer’ type of auction. This is where the person that sends in the best offer will get the item.
• When selling several of the same items, it would be easier to sell them one by one in the same auction. If you are selling pencils, you will place a “buy it now” price, and tell how many of the item you will sell. People could then buy X amount of that item for the certain price you placed.

Have you ever heard of Traffic Blazer? Submit your business info to more than 200 search engines and directories and position your Web site for top rankings with Google and other leading search engines - it's available through GoDaddy. Plus, as a listener of The Chris Pirillo Show, enter code CHRIS2 when you check out, and save an additional $5 off any order of $30 or more. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy!