eBay Shopping Secrets

Nicholas Tan asked:


Are you interested in using eBay to shop online? If you are, you are definitely not alone, as eBay is one of the most popular online marketplaces. As you likely already know, eBay is an online auction website; an online auction website that allows internet users to post items that they have in their possession, but not longer want or need, for sale. While this tends to give you a large number of products to choose from, it can make getting scammed on eBay relatively easy; however, there is a way that you cannot fall victim to some of the most common eBay scams. That way involves checking feedback.

If this is your first time using eBay, you may not necessarily know that buyers and sellers are able to leave each other feedback; in fact, they are encouraged to do so. Now, if another eBay buyer, just like you, were to have a positive experience, like they got their item in a timely matter and it was what they expected, they would be likely to leave a positive feedback. Positive feedbacks are marked with green circles with plus signs in them. On the other hand, if an eBay buyer has a negative experience, like they never received their item or it was in poor condition, a negative comment may be left. Negative comments are market by red circles with negative signs in them. In addition to positive or negative comments, eBay buyers are also able to leave neutral comments, which are commonly used when a problem arose, but the seller in question fixed it in a timely matter. Also, next to the positive, negative, or neutral markings, eBay buyers can also leave comments.

Although you might not necessarily think about it, the feedback that an eBay seller has can give you insight into the type of service that you may receive. As a way, this feedback serves as reputation for an eBay seller. When shopping at a traditional retail store, there is a good chance that you wouldn’t shop at a store that is known for selling poor quality products or a store that has poor customer service. The same thinking should be applied when using eBay. You don’t want to business with an eBay seller that has a number of poor feedback ratings, as it is a sign of what may come.

If you are interested in examining the feedback of an eBay seller, you can easily do so. When visiting an online auction listing page, say a listing for a new set of hair clippers, in the right hand corner there should be a “Meet the Seller,” section. That section has information on the seller’s eBay feedback, as well as a link that you can click to see each individual feedback rating. You are urged to click that link. When examining an eBay seller’s feedback, you need to remember that it is not uncommon for a seller to deal with disgruntled customers; customers that may leave negative feedback for no reason at all. That is why it is not uncommon to see a few negative feedback ratings; however, be on the lookout for any eBay seller who has an excessive number of them or a new eBay seller that has a large number of negative feedback ratings, as they are someone you should try and avoid.

In short, examining the feedback ratings or comments of an eBay seller will only take a few minutes of your time, but it may end up saving you a considerable amount of money. When shopping on eBay, it is advised that you use your best judgment. A number of negative feedback ratings may be a sure sign that an eBay seller may be out to scam you, in one way or another.

Nicholas Tan asked:


Are you looking to start buying on eBay? If you have never used eBay before, you may not necessarily know that it is relatively easy to fall victim to an eBay scam. While eBay is considered a safe place to shop online, there are a number of eBay scams that you should be on the lookout for. Knowing what these scams are, before you start shopping on eBay, will help to reduce or completely eliminate your chances of becoming a victim.

Before we start to examine some of the most common eBay scams that you should be on the lookout for, it is important to mention why those scams exist. eBay is considered an online market place or an online auction website. Just about anyone with an internet connection and an eBay account can start eBay sale auctions. This is what makes it possible for scammers to trap innocent shoppers like you. While eBay does work to combat these scams and eliminate the individuals behind them, there are some people who slip through the cracks. That is why you will always want to be on the lookout for eBay scams.

Speaking of common scams to be on the lookout for, one of the most common scams involves selling a product that the seller actually doesn’t have. This type of scam is sometimes difficult to spot, but there are signs that you should look for. When posting an eBay auction, an eBay seller should have pictures of the item or items that they are selling or at least accurate descriptions. With some items, such as books, CDs, or movies, eBay sellers are given the option of using a stock photo; one that is provided by eBay. All other items should have a genuine photo, taken by the seller. If not, you may want to refrain from making the purchase, as it may mean that the seller isn’t even in possession of the item or items that they are trying to sell you.

In addition to selling items that they don’t even have available, another common eBay scam involves lying about the items that they do have. For instance, there are some eBay sellers, although a small number of them, who claim that they have an item, like a car radio, which is in brand new condition, but it isn’t always. It is not uncommon for some eBay seller to outright lie or strength the truth a little bit. Unless you have a watchful eye, you may not find out until it is too late. That is why it is advised that you not only purchase items from eBay that are accompanied by pictures, but that you also examine those pictures. You will want to try and see if something really does look new or if it is in “like new,” condition.

Another common eBay scam that you will want to look for involves those who want your personal information. This type of scam is implemented in two different ways. First, there are a small number of sellers who tell you that they need your credit card information, but they shouldn’t. Whether you pay by PayPal, personal check, or money order, you shouldn’t give out any personal information to any eBay sellers, even if you are buying an item from them. If you are not using PayPal, just send a check or money order to the address given to you, nothing else needs to be done.

The second eBay scam that involves trying to get your personal information is phishing. Phishing scams are increasing in popularity, making it easier to fall victim to one. With phishing scams, a scammer sends out an email that looks like it is from eBay. The email is often accompanied with a message stating that something is wrong with your account and that you need to click on the attached link, sign in and fix it. This is a scam. What they are trying to do is get your eBay account information. Once that has been done, they may have access to stored personal account numbers, as well as the ability to use your eBay account to make fraudulent purchases.

The above mentioned eBay scams are just a few of the most common ones that you may run across. Although there are those on eBay who are trying to scam or take advantage of you, the chances of falling victim to a scam on eBay are actually quite low, as long as you proceed with caution.

Simon Fusco asked:


Tips on Making Money on eBay, Not Losing It

Are you interested in becoming an eBay seller or are you a relatively new eBay seller?  If so, you may still be learning the ins and outs of eBay. Selling on eBay is a great way to make money on the side or even enough to support yourself, but you have to be successful at what you do.  Unfortunately, it can take time to fully learn the ins and outs of eBay, particularly how to become a profitable eBay seller, until now.  Below some helpful tips are outlined; tips that you won’t necessarily find explained on eBay.

eBay sellers are all required to pay fees to list their items for sale on eBay.  You are charged two separate fees, a listing fee or insertion fee and a final value fee.  For the final value fee, you are charged a percentage of the price that your item sold for.  The insertion fee or listing fee is figured out a little bit differently.  Instead of being charged a percentage, you are charged a set amount. For instance, at the current moment, it costs .20 to list an item up to .99 cents and .40 to list an item for sale between $1.00 and $9.99, and the fee scale continues up in a similar fashion.  Please remember that this is just a sample.  eBay regularly changes their fees; therefore, you are urged not to rely on the aforementioned fee samples.

Although eBay sellers must pay the eBay fees mentioned above, many do not take the time to thoroughly understand those fees.  You are advised against doing that, as it may end up costing you money.  For instance, many of the price ranges for eBay’s insertion fee scale ends at .99 cents.  For you, this is a great opportunity to save money, but you must know how to do so.  As stated above, if you list one of your items at $9.99, the sample insertion fee would be only .40 cents.  Did you know that if you listed your item for $10.00, your insertion fee could jump up to around .60 cents!  An extra .20 cents just for a penny is pretty expensive, especially if you list a number of eBay auctions that way.  Before listing items for sale on eBay again, examine eBay insertion fee sale and see how you can easily save money, sometimes by just shaving a few cents off your asking price.

It has often been said that to be a successful eBay seller, you need to have good product descriptions and clear digital pictures of the item or items that you are selling.  Of course, having a number of pictures in your eBay listings is a great way to increase your chances of making a sale, but it can be expensive doing so.  eBay allows sellers to post one picture for free.  Additional pictures can be purchased for a small fee, but that small fee can add up overtime.  For that reason, many eBay sellers limit the number of pictures they put in their auctions; however, you do not want to do this. Instead, you will want to examine photo sharing sites.  Photo sharing websites, like PhotoBucket are a nice, fee way to add more pictures to your eBay auctions.  Register with a photo sharing site, like PhotoBucket, follow the instructions and you should be saving money in no time at all.

The above mentioned ways are just a few of the many ways that you can save money on eBay, not lose it.  In all honesty, you should do a little bit of research first.  Using the internet is a great way to research selling on eBay, as many other eBay users will share their money making secrets with you, free of charge.

Sachin asked:


eBay has quite an intricate and long-winded dispute resolution procedure. Below you can see what’s involved and how long it takes.

As an example, let’s go through what you would do if you paid for an item but didn’t receive it from the seller.

Before you open a dispute: Give the seller a chance to send the item before you get ahead of yourself and open a dispute. If you’re concerned about how long the item is taking to arrive, the first thing you should do is send a polite email to the seller saying that you haven’t received it and asking whether they have posted it. You should also check your own email address in eBay’s options, to make sure that the seller can reply to you. As a last resort before opening a dispute, you should try to call the seller on the number eBay has for them. You might have to pay long-distance charges for the call, but that’s better than dragging the auction through mediation for months.

Step 1 - You open an Item Not Received dispute: You can do this here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?InrCreateDispute.

All you need to do is enter the item number and say that you did not receive the item.

Step 2 - eBay contacts the seller: eBay sends the seller an email that tells them that you’ve said you didn’t receive the item. Then can then choose to tell you one of three things: that your payment hasn’t cleared yet, that the item is in the post, or that they’ll give you your money back. The seller can also tell eBay that they would like to send you a message.

Step 3 - You talk to the seller: You try to work out what’s happened directly with the seller, sending messages back and forward. Hopefully they’ll agree to give you a refund for the sake of their feedback, or your item will turn up in the post during this time.

Step 4 - Closing the dispute: After 30 days (or 10 days if the seller didn’t respond), you have two options to close the dispute: either you were satisfied or you weren’t. If you weren’t satisfied, then you can claim under eBay’s purchase protection program for up to $200.

Independent Dispute Mediation.

If you don’t want to go through eBay’s own process, and especially if the auction was for a high-value item, then you can use a third-party mediator. eBay recommend SquareTrade, at www.squaretrade.com, who provide mediation to many websites where there are buyers and sellers. They will contact the seller on your behalf and then mediate as you negotiate what to do from there.

Sellers who are committed to going through SquareTrade’s mediation for any disputes can sign up to display the ‘SquareTrade seal’ on their auctions. This gives their buyers $250 fraud protection, and shows that their identity has been independently verified so they are who they say they are.

When your sellers aren’t in such good standing, though, you need to be careful to avoid being a victim of fraud. There are a few scams that you especially need to look out for.

Read More articles on Authority Guide

Boris Tomson asked:


How to Make Money on eBay

How Do You Launch A Successful eBay Business-

There are more people selling on eBay today than ever before, and the number just keeps growing and growing. How do all these sellers know what to sell on eBay? That is a question many would-be eBay sellers would like to know. Many sellers find it hard to decide what to sell on the site. Knowing what items to sell and what items to stay away from is an important part of a successful eBay seller’s repertoire. It’s true that you can sell virtually anything on eBay, but there are products that are highly profitable and other products that must practically be given away in order to sell.

Let’s face a simple fact: to make money on eBay or in any other online business you’ll need to pay almost as much effort as to arrange an “offline” business. So, there is no sense in rushing forward straight away. Your keys, like in any other business, will be patience and research.

Some Facts about eBay business You Should Know-

The first thing associated with eBay is its huge popularity in online. The website has more than 100 million members, and this is a definite advantage for everyone who is going to offer their products on eBay. Just think how large your customer base can be! Even though the scope of eBay is really enormous, you’ll need to put in a certain amount of effort in order to smell business success.

A Few Tips For an eBay selling-

1.Always keep in mind that online business, including an opportunity to make money on eBay, has a lot of similarities with any other business. This means that you’ll need to find out what categories of products are in demand, and which those that are especially profitable. This can be determined with the help of eBay itself - the website provides excellent helpful tools to their newbies.

2.The most proficient eBay dealers begin as customers. That is because as a customer you’ll get a fair idea of the entire process, and determine the things that you like or dislike as a buyer. In other words, you’ll be able to understand the process from a buyer’s point of view. You should pay attention to the dos and don’ts of eBay sellers.

3.A great help for an eBay beginner should be classes at eBay University webpages. Combining your experience as an eBay customer and knowledge of being an eBay seller should be one of the keys to success.http://Selling-stuff-on-ebay-for-profit.blogspot.com

So, be sure to browse eBay website for more helpful tips and basic information on running business with them. The best way to decide what to sell on eBay is to do research and find out what the buyers are looking for: what are they searching to buy? There are several ways for sellers to do buyer research. EBay Pulse is a good tool to use and find out the keywords with the most number of searches by buyers. Go to eBay Pulse at onlinesfortune.com to see the top ten most popular searches. The most popular searches are also given for each category.But how can you be sure you’re getting the best price? Try our tips and tricks for eBay searching, Download the ebay free kit guide in the next Visit to : http://Selling-stuff-on-ebay-for-profit.blogspot.com

Gary Ruplinger asked:


The Fast Way To Become A Trusted eBay Seller

If you’re just starting out selling on eBay, you may find it tough to sell your products are decent prices, especially if you’re selling high priced items like electronics.

The problem is that when you’re a new seller is that you lack feedback, and a low or nonexistent feedback score is a red flag to any buyer that you might be a crook trying to scam them.

To make the problem even worse, there are some features that you can’t use on eBay until you get enough feedback.

So what’s a person to do? Well, if you’re serious about selling on eBay, then you’ll embark on what I like to call a Fast Feedback Campaign.

You’re going to want to budget about $50-$100 to start buying small items, like $.99 reports, CDs, or other low priced items. Try to buy at least 20 different items, and try to find items that you can either resell (even if you lose money on it - that’s okay), or buy cheap reports that teach you how to make more money on eBay.

Make sure that you pay promptly for everything. Within just a few days, you’ll have built your feedback score up from nearly nothing to just a small but less suspicious looking number.

However, you’re still not out of the woods yet. After all, some savvy buyers will notice that all your feedback is from buying items, not selling, so they might still be suspicious of you and will be reluctant to trust you. Your next step is to start selling items, but don’t start out with high priced items. If you can get your hands on cheap items that you can sell on eBay (try to at least break even, but a small loss is okay - this is still feedback building), such as CDs or books, do it and start selling cheap items on eBay. Sell these items as quickly as possible so that you can get your feedback built up. Once you have your feedback score up above fifty (you’ll need to sell more than fifty items to get to this number as not all buyers leave feedback), and when people look at your feedback, they see that you already have satisfied customers, they won’t be reluctant to purchase from you anymore.

If you’ve done a really good job of pleasing your customers, you may make it more likely that your customers will purchase from you than someone who has a higher feedback score but also has some negative remarks in their score.

Remember that good feedback becomes especially important the higher the cost of your items. People are far more likely to take a chance buying a DVD for $10 from a low feedback seller than they are to buy a $1300 video camera.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have not trouble building up trust with your potential customers right from the start.

Eric Scott asked:


As an eBay seller you can build your seller site around the items you are selling faster and with greater success by using the eBay tools and resources available to you. They can be found on eBay and other auction themed websites.

Using these eBay tools and resources can lead to more eBay sales and greater success as an eBay seller.

eBay Seller Listings

After you have found a product that you want to sell on your eBay auction site search the eBay seller item listings and locate the same and similar items.

Keep track of the items prices on the seller sites that are listed.

Take note on when the auctions began and when they will be ending.

Go back to them many times and check out which of the sites are getting the most sales of the item you also want to sell.

eBay Seller Sites

Take note on the auction sites that get more sales than the others, how they are set up, designed, and their overall look.

You can also compare these seller sites to the other auctions that didn’t do as well as they did.

When you start setting up and designing your own eBay seller site you’ll have alot of other auctions to compare to that have already run or are up and running.

This part of your plan will save you a lot of time and you’ll also get better results.

Compare Prices

Add up the price that you could sell the item for at a profit after paying

your best priced and reliable supplier.

Compare your price to the prices of the other eBay seller sites that had a good amount of sales.

If you can make a profit by coming close to, matching, or beating these prices you have found a good product to sell on your eBay seller site.

eBay Tools

You can find a lot of articles, eBooks, eBay tools, and resources that will show you how to set up an eBay seller site that looks like it was designed by an experienced eBay store owner.

This will increase your eBay sales and success as an eBay seller.

eBay Sales

Start off with a small to medium inventory. After your auction begins you can lower the price just enough as needed to get more sales or raise the price just enough as needed to cover your costs and profits.

There will be more new visitors and customers going to your eBay seller site or eBay store and any improvements you add to the setup and design will increase your eBay sales in your current and future auctions.

After a while if the item sells well, then you can buy more from your supplier than you did on the first order.

Buyer Discounts

You can offer your customers a discount when they buy more than one item from your eBay auction site or sites that are listed in your eBay store.

Your customers will appreciate any discounts that you offer to them. They will feel that they got a good deal from an eBay seller on something that they needed and/or wanted.

eBay Shipping

If two or more items are ordered from your auction site that can be shipped to the customer together in the same box or as part of the same eBay shipping order you can offer a discount on the s/h cost.

Your customers will appreciate it if you use a shipping calculator in your auctions because they will be getting an accurate s/h cost based on their location.

This eBay tool is offered for use in all eBay seller auctions and can be found on the eBay business shipping page.

Auction Details

Put all of the buyer discount, shipping, and other important details in your auction where your customers and visitors can easily find them.

If you have an eBay store with other related auction items you can mention that and you can list some of them with their description and picture towards the bottom of your auction listing.

eBay Seller Plan

A good eBay seller plan will help you find the right products to sell in your eBay auctions.

It will also help you set up and design an effective eBay seller site that will increase your eBay sales.

Follow your eBay seller plan and you will be a successful eBay seller !