gabby

The first six to twelve months of your eBay career are absolutely crucial to your success in selling on the website. I see a few mistakes made quite often, so today, I’ll be telling you about the three worst mistakes you could make as a beginner eBay seller. I do this because eBay has, in the past few years, become quite strict about their performance standards. You have to be on top of your game, or you don’t get to play the game at all. They will shut down your account if you’re not on your best behavior, and although there’s an appeals process, I’ve never, in all my time on eBay, heard of someone getting their account back.

The site works in percentages based on your buyer feedback, so you’ll want to keep that as high as possible. In the first few months, when you don’t have many sales under your belt, a few negative buyer reviews can tank your business. Of course, you’ll see the top-dog sellers who sell hundreds or even thousands of items a day who will receive negative feedback, but it won’t impact them. It all comes down to how much history you have on the site. Getting two negative ratings out of ten sales will leave you at 80% buyer satisfaction, whereas those same two negative reviews coming out of 100 sales will hurt a lot less, leaving you at 98% buyer satisfaction. Although it’s in your best interest to keep these practices, the first few sales and months of your career on eBay are the most crucial. Do them right.

The first tip to keeping your rating up is, don’t argue with people. Although the problem with the sale might not always be your fault, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is if you get snippy with your customer and get your account shut down. People on this site can be absolute morons, but you’ve got to keep your cool. These people, no matter how ignorant you might think them to be (and sometimes, they are indeed quite ignorant), have the power over your feedback. Treat them well.

Secondly, always accept returns and give refunds. Most people just want their money back without making a fuss about it, and will be happy once they’ve got it. They blame every reason under the sun why they’re not happy with their purchase, but their reasoning doesn’t matter. Have them send the item back to you and offer them a 100% refund. You might be down a few dollars in postage, but it just comes out of your profits for the month. If you make, say, $500 in profit for the month and you have to lose out on $10 for shipping an item that gets returned, you’re still $490 richer than you were at the start of that month. In the grand scheme, it’s but a drop in the pail of your earnings, and so it’s not worth making a fuss over.

Finally, always be polite. Now, this is a general rule for life, but it plays strongly on eBay. The moral victory isn’t worth not having an account on eBay. These people will undoubtedly test your patience, but you’ve got to bite your tongue. For example, I sold a pair of pants of a man who also happens to sell designer clothing on eBay. He bid me down on a seller’s best offer listing, and after he received the pants, he asked for a partial refund because “they were short in the legs, but his mother could cut them into shorts for him”. I have little doubt that he just wanted more of his money back so he could pay the lowest price possible and sell the same jeans in his store for a considerable profit, but I decided not to call him out on it. I simply told him I don’t offer partial refunds, but would be happy to take the pants back and give him a full refund.” He never wrote back and he never left feedback, so in the end, I still made some money and didn’t get into trouble because I kept my cool.

Check out the video below for more elaborate examples of the tips I’ve listed above!

With eBay tightening up on their image guidelines to make the site look a bit more uniform and organized, a lot of people are left scrambling to figure out just how they’re going to clean up the pictures they used for their store and auction listings. But, fear not, because in today’s post, I’m going to tell you all about the tool that will make that job exponentially easier for you – Remove the Background.

Removethebackground.com is a wonderful site that exists to help you clean up all the clutter and mishaps in your listing photos and makes them shine. Businesses like Eco use this site for their images – if that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is. The truth of the matter is, when it comes to buying online, people have no choice but to judge a book by its cover. They can’t hold the item in their hands until they purchase and receive it, so they rely on good quality photos of the items to help them make their decision. Needless to say (although I’ve said it time and time again), good pictures are your key to making money by selling online.

The site offers a free trial so that those who are curious can test out the amazing features. In your trial, you get three free samples of what the site can do (after that, it’s a measly $1.45 [85p] per picture, which you’ll make back several times over in sales), and you’ll get to see how easy to use the features are.

One cool thing about this site is that it lets you set a format for your photos, and it will continue to save photos for your according to those specifications. You can change the alignment, background, layout, dimensions, and file type. It’s beneficial to customize it if you’re runnin your own eCommerce site, but Remove the Background also offers preset options for those of us selling on eBay and/or Amazon. By selecting that option, the site automatically produces a clean photo in the exact size and file type that eBay and Amazon want on their listings. Another plus is that you can connect your eBay account to the site, and it will go through your listings and tell you which photos need to be fixed, which is really handy if you don’t have time to figure that out.

To test out the site for the purpose of the video (which I’ll post below), I used two sample photos. My first one, a Burberry Macintosh, was a mess. The sunlight was spotty, I got the doorframe in the shot, my mannequin didn’t look the best, and I even managed to cut off the bottom of the jacket. In my second one, a Lyel and Scott polo shirt, I got the dado rail in my dining room in the shot, the light was strange again, and I also cut off part of this article of clothing, too.

Without fail, Remove the Background was able to clean up my images and make them eBay-ready. In the first one, it removed the sunspots on the jacket, hid the doorframe, edited out my mannequin, and even filled in the bottom of the jacket. In the second one, it put my polo shirt on a clean background, and, again, filled in the part of the shirt that I didn’t get in the photo. Really, it’s incredible. You can test it out for yourself and see the true capabilities of this site, because it’s astounding how helpful this can be.

For a more detailed explanation of the site, eBay’s change in its photo policy, and visual examples of the change in photos, check out the video below! Be aware that YouTube may have garbled the quality of the photos a bit, but I promise, they look breathtaking when you do them yourself.