How To eBay

We now have some very important tips for eBay sellers.

How to write a good title

Customers find your listing based on keywords in your title, so it is really important that all of your keywords are working for you. How do you know which of your keywords are generating hits? Sign up for a 30-day trial of

They will record the searches made by visitors to your listings. After a few days, look at your highlights page to see which keywords are generating the most hits. This is a gold mine of information. Replace the poor performers with different keywords. Hint: a lot of ebayers use generic terms in their search.

What to do with a cute slogan or important item-specific information that is not generating hits? Consider spending 50 cents on a subtitle.

Whenever you sell an item, look at its details page to find the high bidder's search terms. If keywords that generate visits are like gold, then keywords that generate sales are like diamonds. You will find that some generic keywords generate a large number of visits and a large number of sales, while some specific keywords generate a moderate number of visits but still generate a relatively large number of sales. You'll want both of those kinds of keywords in your titles.

Protect yourself against cashier's check fraud

The problem of forged cashier's checks is growing. Online auction sellers are especially vulnerable. Here's advice from the American Banker's Association.

Steps you can take to avoid being scammed by buyers

Ship to the U.S.A., Canada, and Great Britain only, and check the box that says that you will not accept bids from buyers registered in countries that you do not ship to.
Get a paypal premium or merchant account -- in addition to your paypal personal account.
When you list an item, check the box that says you require immediate payment for buy-it-nows. Do not accept any form of payment except paypal.
Set the preferences on your paypal premium/merchant account to require a confirmed address and payment in U.S. dollars.
When you receive a payment, read the email careful to make sure you are eligible for seller protection.
Get a FedEx account, and ship by FedEx Ground using your own account number only. (If you use the buyer's account number you are responsible when they don't pay their bill. Scammers also love overnight delivery.) Insure for $500 or more to get free signature confirmation.

Useful ebay tools

How to Respond to a VeRO Notice

Don't panic. Read Tabberone's Twelve Commandments before doing anything. For more background, you can read some of her war stories. If the VeRO member doesn't justify its actions, you may need to file a counternotice with ebay. For your convenience, we have also converted the counternotice to Microsoft^TM Word format.

Re-listing an item

If you list an item on ebay and it doesn't sell, ebay encourages you to relist the item and advertises that it will refund your insertion fee if the item sells the second time. There are some important caveats to be aware of:

In order to be eligible for the insertion fee credit, you must relist using the "relist this item" link (or equivalent) on your completed listing.
Only the insertion fee for the second listing is refunded, nothing else. As of this writing (Jan 8, 2005) eBay does not refund any of the following:
- reserve fee for the first listing
- buy-it-now fee
- fees for listing upgrades, such as
  - subtitle
  - gallery
  - bold
  - highlighted
  - featured

Dutch and fixed-price multiple-item auctions are not eligible for the insertion fee credit.