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Why Aren’t My eBay Items Selling?

Today’s question comes from someone from the Wholesale Help member’s club in a private message. I won’t quote the whole thing, but I’ll give you the gist: “I researched my niche, I found an item, I bought the item, I had some good sales, and now the sales have slackened off. Why are my items not selling?”

There are a few things to cover with this. I’ve narrowed it down to three core selling elements, and it all ties together with a fourth. The three keys are: demand, profit margin, and competition. Your profit margin and lack of competition don’t matter if there is no demand. Your lack of competition and demand are pointless if there’s no profit margin for you to make money off your sales. Your demand and profit margin mean nothing is the competition is too high, because you’ll never be seen among the crowd. These are all good things to research before you by a large number of an item. Of course, if you find yourself having issues with these things, it’s best to lower your price until you sell out of the item, make your money back that you spent on getting said item in the first place, and try again with something new.

Of course, there can be variations to these rules. For example, it’s okay if you have a good profit margin and low competition but the demand is a little lower. When buyers do look for the item, low competition drives them to you and the high profit margin puts money in your pocket. If profit margin is the weak element, but you’re still selling a large number of the product, you can make that work. If you sell fifty items at a £1 profit, you’re still going to make £50. I don’t like to do it that way, but it could work out. Competition is hard when it comes to variations, though. If there’s a high demand, you may still make some money, and it may be worth it if the profit margin is astronomical, but several dozen other people have that same idea.

The final thing that ties all of this together is scale. It would behoove you to stock your eBay store well with complementary items, because some items sell quickly, some don’t, and some fluctuate between highs and lows in regards to demand. Having more items stabilizes your business. If you have one item that you sell five times per month, you’re still doing okay. But, imagine if you had twenty items, all of which sell five times per month. Instead of making five sales per month, you’d be making a hundred. If your profit margin were at, say, £20/item, you’d be making £2000/month. In terms of sales, that’s not bad at all.

While that’s the general overview of the question itself, I’d like to take a moment to thank you guys. By my donating 20% of all the profit from the sale of my eBay tutorial DVD course (which is still available for sale!), we’ve managed to raise over £300 for cancer research, which comes out to over $500 USD. If you haven’t already gotten the DVD, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. The DVD will help you and your business, and your purchase will help fund cancer research.

Check out the video below for a more detailed description of the above!

Filed Under: eBay, eBay Sellers Tips & Tricks, General, Readers Questions

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The Worst Mistakes to Make on eBay

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!

Filed Under: Wholesale Articles

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Get Stunning Photos for Your Listings with Remove the Background

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.

Filed Under: Wholesale Articles

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How to Ship Multiple eBay Items

Glen over on the YouTube channel had a great question for me about shipping multiple items.

“I am new to EBay and plan to sell items slow to begin with, but obviously I want to speed it up. How do I handle shipping multiple items a day? I’m not too worried about the time aspect – more the cost. Are there any tips that you have for saving time or money? Do you always use the Postal Service or sometimes FedEx? Do you have your own label printer and scale?”

There’s no specific answer to this as such, because there are many different ways to post. Some of them will be country-specific and the cost will vary. You as a seller have to determine whether time-efficiency or cost-efficiency is more important. Once you get past a certain level of selling, you might be able to earn some discounts on shipping rates from your local post office, so keep an eye out for that possibility.

Personally, for the most part, I use the integrated postal application right on eBay. If you’ve got heavier items, you’d be better off to go with a courier, but for smaller things, the application on eBay is convenient.

You tell it what kind of parcel you’re sending, and the options and pricing will vary by country. After that, it gives you a whole host of different shipping options. On thing to note is the option for the recipient to sign for their package upon delivery, because it deters those people who like to pretend they never got their item so they can ask for their money back. I’d suggest you use this option on anything over £5 in value, lest you lose out on that sale.

When I use this feature, I purchase what are called two up labels, which means that you can print two labels per sheet. They cost only pennies, and they allow you to use the eBay integrated postal application right from your home. You print the label, slap it on your packaged item, and you’re all set.

Check out the video below for a more detailed explanation of all of the logistics of this process!

Filed Under: eBay, Readers Questions

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Step-by-Step Instructional DVD Available Now!

As you guys well know by now, through this channel, I’ve been able to help tons of people set themselves and their businesses up for success through my experience in several different online marketing platforms. You know by now that I’m passionate about helping others to achieve success online because of how liberating it is. Earning a living by selling online cuts you away from the mundane parts of work – the daily commute, the office politics, and so on and so forth. Working for someone else pays you for your time, because you have to be there, but online business is much different. There’s no correlation between how much you work and how much money you make. With your business always working for you, there’s no ceiling to where you can go with an online marketing job. By freeing yourself from your job, you’re free to be the person you want.

I’ve been helping people make money online for several years, but some people are struggling to put all the pieces together. I asked you here at Wholesale Help if it’d help if I created a step-by-step instructional DVD to put all the pieces together for your chronologically through to a fully functional, refined online business, and I received a resounding, “Yes”.

I want to put everyone in the same boat, so I didn’t use an established eBay account to make this DVD. I started with a fresh eBay account, and filmed the steps that I took, the steps anybody can take. By using the right tools in the right way, you can build the same success for yourself that I built in the DVD. Using these tips and tricks helps you to build your business based on fact instead of guesswork, providing you with a more stable foundation as you build ever upward.

No matter how much money you want to make with your online business, my eBay tutorial series can help you achieve it. It’s a compilation of twenty-two videos, totaling over three hours worth of training that I’ve made into a physical DVD for use on anything with a DVD drive.

I called this DVD Instant Profit Auctions simply because my items were selling almost immediately as I was working through setting up this account. I took an empty account and built it into a top-rated seller account in my fastest time ever, and on this DVD, you’ll get to come along through each step of the process so you can see what I did, and then apply it to your own business.

I’ve always been passionate about helping others, so I’ve made the decision to donate 20% of the profits from the sales of Instant Profit Auctions to Cancer Research UK, because I’d like to try to help out with something that devastates so many people every year. I want to help as many people as possible, so by changing your life through your business with the help of this DVD, we’ll both be helping to change someone else’s life as well.

A lot of people have spoken to about the value of this DVD, regarding how much you’ll learn and how much you’ll earn, the price should be in the hundreds. However, I really do want to help as many people as I can, so I’ve priced it low enough that everybody could afford it. The price of this DVD is just £27.95, plus £1.99 for shipping. It’s about $48 in USD, and I’ll ship it to your door. In the UK, that’s the cost of going to the movies for the night with your special someone. Besides, if you follow the steps and advice on this DVD, you’ll make that back in your first few sales.

Check out the introductory video below. In the comments box, I’ve listed the site featuring the official advertising video for the DVD, and I’ll also paste it in here below the YouTube video, so be sure to check it out for all the details about this can’t-miss DVD.

 

The introductory video:

 

The link to the promotional sales video:

https://wholesale-help.com/instantprofitauctions/

Filed Under: eBay, eBay Sellers Tips & Tricks, General

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