Guide on How to Sell Successfully on eBay

Selling on eBay is a great way to make money as it connects millions of buyers and sellers around the world. In this article, you will learn five tips on how to sell successfully on eBay and stand out from hundreds and thousands of your competitors.  

Use good quality images.

Your product photo is the first thing a customer checks when buying items online. The customers first want to see the products they plan to buy since they can’t see those personally. High-quality and original photos are crucial to include in each of your product listings and that’s why it’s important to know how to take great pictures for eBay.

People are naturally drawn into aesthetically pleasing images on everything from Instagram to Facebook, so you might as well incorporate that to the photos in your listings.  

Although a good quality DSLR camera is the perfect choice to use for you to get crisp-looking images for your listings, there are smartphones with built-in cameras that can take decent to high-quality photos.

EBay has image guidelines or requirements that apply to all product images. The requirements are as follow:

• Image dimension: 500×500 pixels and 9000×9000 pixels (height and width).
• Image file size: not more than 12MB.
• Should be evenly lighted to show many details.
• Number of images per product: 12 for non-motors products; 24 for motors products.
• Image formats: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and GIF.
• Image background should be one solid color: can be between white to light grey, and with no border.
• Must not include text, symbols, or logo that is not part of the product. 
• Should not contain copyright marks, watermarks, reflections, or hot spots.

Optimize your item descriptions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial in building your business, and you can take advantage of this in your eBay listing. Optimizing your item description on eBay is one of the most effective and popularly used strategies to get your product listing on top of eBay’s search result. 

There are a total of 1.5 billion listings on eBay in the second quarter of 2020 that are eyeing 182 million buyers. Therefore, if you want your product to stand out and appear first on the search result, then you must optimize your listings to draw more traffic to your eBay store. 

This approach can boost your sales as your product appears first when a customer searches for it. 

To start, think of the keywords or phrases your customer would type in the search tab of eBay when reaching for a product. For example, if you are selling homemade organic body scrubs, your keyword list may look like this: body scrubs, organic scrubs, scrubs, bath, body, skincare. You should also front-load your item description with the most important keywords. To learn about optimizing in detail go through our SEO courses.

When you write your item description, you must write accurate information that would also answer any questions that they may ask, such as product condition, price, shipping, and return policy.

Price your items competitively.

Your product price must be reasonable and competitive so that your potential customers are willing to pay for it and consider your product for purchasing when they first see it. Remember that you are also competing with other stores that have similar products as you have.

A tip that you can use is to check similar products on eBay that have recently been sold. Analyze the successful sales to guide you with your pricing.

You can use eBay’s pricing recommendations tool as a starting point. eBay usually shows price recommendations through price range when you enter a new listing. This will help you decide your final price for your products. You can also check the price of similar products sold on eBay to help you determine what price you will use. 

The tips that I have mentioned can help you with your pricing, but you must also keep the following in mind to ensure that your strategy is effective:

• Don’t lower your pricing to undercut your competition. Your product may look unappealing or may appear low in value.
• Include other expenses in your pricing, such as the cost of your packaging and even the time you spent on your product.
• Accept negotiated prices, especially when you are new to selling on eBay. This can also help you determine what price your potential customers are willing to pay.