My Utile Center

Use eBay picture service or host your own photos?

If you use the eBay picture service, your first photo is free. But each additional picture will cost you $0.15 and the supersize picture will be another $0.75.

This can cut into your auction profits if you need, let’s say, 3 or 4 pictures showing different angles, and one supersize picture for the “WOW” effect!

So I found a way to have as many pictures I want in my listings without having to pay all these fees to eBay: I do my own image hosting!

They are a lot of image hosting services to choose from online. Some are free, and others charge a small monthly or yearly fee.

Currently I use Photobucket image hosting. They have a free starter package (which gives you 25 MB of disc space) or a premium package (unlimited disc space) to store your pictures. You can subscribe to the premium package for 3 months ($9.00) or one year ($25.00).

Now, how to load your pictures on your photo-hosting service?

First, you have to resize your images. One reason for resizing your photos is that Photobucket limits the size of the pictures you can load - 250 KB for the free package and 1 MB for the premium package.

The second reason is that you don’t want to slow down your eBay listings with huge images! Big pictures take forever to load, and potential customers will hit the back button instead of waiting.

So I recommend limiting each picture to a size of 500 pixels maximum. I use the free Irfanview image optimizer to resize my pictures.

Once your photos are resized, you can upload them to your image hosting service, which is very simple.

For Photobucket, you have to log in into your account. Once you are in, there is a white window on top of the page marked “picture”, with a “browse” button on the right. Click on “browse”, and a new “choose file” window will appear. That window shows the files in your computer. From that window, select the file containing the picture you want to upload to the Internet.

Once you have found the right picture, highlight it with your mouse and then in the “choose file window”, click the “open” button. The name and location of your picture will then appear on the Photobucket screen.

Now click the “submit” button, and voila! Your selected picture is on Photobucket. You can even load several pictures at the same time by using the “submit multiple pictures” feature.

All right, your picture is now on Photobucket. But how do you insert that picture in your eBay listing?

Once your image is hosted on Photobucket, you will have to copy the URL of that photo (which is directly under it) and paste it into your eBay listing. Use the following html code to display the picture correctly in your listing (don’t forget to inverse the quotation marks at the beginning and at the end of this code!); paste your Photobucket image URL where it says “the URL of your picture”:

>img src=”the URL of your picture”<

You can even add a border around your picture, by adding a border code to the above, making it:

>img src=”the URL of your picture” border=8<

By changing the number of your border, you can make it larger or thinner.

Another great advantage of choosing online image hosting is that the quality of your pictures in your auction listings will be much better than with eBay picture services!

So you can have as many auction pictures as you need, with higher image definition, for less money. You can’t beat that.

Good luck!

Author Sophie Van Tiggelen of Bagatelle Jewelry (http://www.bagatelle-jewelry.com) creates original handmade beaded jewelry in lampwork glass, freshwater pearls, Swarovski crystals, semi-precious gemstones and sterling silver. Sophie’s designs are natural, beautiful and sophisticated, and she specializes in turquoise, coral and chalcedony.

Get Native American Wholesaler at Salehoo wholesale directories and help your online and offline business. Over and over again you are going to see companies who do their best to make you think they are real wholesale drop shippers when they are NOT. Read on about Native American Wholesaler, Urban Clothing Wholesale Distributor and how Salehoo Wholesalers can help. What Do I Need To Do To Start My Own Online Mini-Mall? Many online courses will claim to have the answers you need. More on Native American Wholesaler and Urban Clothing Wholesale Distributor at Salehoo wholesalers. Also see Real Below Wholesale

Ease of use- We have all seen the banner advertisements, just click on them and they take you to the web site advertised. Email advertising is growing in popularity as well and includes a link to click on to take the user to the site after they read the text ad. There are some unique and catchy names of web sites that are easy to remember. Have a favorite web site or shopping site? Just bookmark it and add it to your collection of favorites! Read on about Native American Wholesaler and Urban Clothing Wholesale Distributor. So what can you as a small business do to start your own profitable store either online or offline? The answers are very simple. More on Native American Wholesaler and Urban Clothing Wholesale Distributor at our Wholesale Review website. Find out more about Native American Wholesaler and how Salehoo directory can help you start your own business from home. Native American Wholesaler, Even those that aren’t interested in buying the newest models will want to have the technology that everyone else has but offer it to their customers for a lower price.

Get: Native American Wholesaler at Salehoo wholesale directories, and get a head start in your own startup business. The only way to thrive in your startup business is to get quality products cheaply, and from 100%, weekly verified wholesale suppliers from all over the world.
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If you currently run an Ebay Business or you are considering running an EBay business the ability to earn the most out of each auction is key. A little extra profit on Each Auction could make a huge difference in your bottom line at the end of the year.

If you are shipping a physical product and most people do then you probably have a shipping and handling charge. Let’s take a closer look at this charge. The Shipping part of this charge is your actual cost to ship the product to the Buyer. The Handling part is your Labor cost’s to ship the item.

The Shipping cost consists of the actual cost that the shipping company charges you to ship the item. The Shipping cost would also include the cost of any packing materials you use.(Boxes,Tape,Pop Corn etc). Shipping costs may also include insurance. Don’t forget to use a shipping option where you get a delivery confirmation. You always want proof your buyer received the item.

The Handling costs are the labor it costs you to ship the item. Your time is worth something isn’t it. Depending on the expected price of the item and actual shipping costs you could add a handling fee of $1 - $5 or more to the actual shipping costs. That Handling charge is money in your pocket and it is money you earned for your labor. If you run 10 Auctions a week and your average handling charge is $3 that is an Extra $30 a Week or $120 a month. What could you do with an Extra $120 a Month…

About The Author:
Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 When he Built an Organization of over 100,000 Members

Drop Shipping Your Way to Wealth Over 90,000 Items You can Sell on EBay Today
http://ewguru.com/ebay-dropship

Getting Started With Ebay Resource Guide
http://ewguru.com/ebay-start

Weekly Tips and Tricks Newsletter
http://ewguru.com/etips

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler the Coolest Guy in the Universe

If you are a registered user on eBay you can watch up to 100 items and if you are a guest you can watch 10 items. If you are a guest on My eBay other users on the same computer system may view and delete your watched items.

For watching an item click on the link ‘watch this item’ at the top right of an item page. Click the link ‘My eBay’ available at the top of most pages to view the watch list. If you are a guest, you can have the watch list only on the computer from which you added the items. For bidding an item from your watch list click on the link ‘bid now’. You may even delete an item in your watch list by selecting the checkbox next to the item and click the ‘delete’ button.

You can get email reminders a few hours before the items come to your watch list end if you sign up to receive the same. For this you should have at least one watched item. For the sign up, go to ‘My eBay’ for guests page, click the link ‘Sign up for Watched Item emails’. Type your email id in the box and click on ‘continue’ button. After this eBay will send you an email to confirm your address. Once you fill up the instructions in this email to confirm, you will start receiving email reminders for the items in your watch list. For each new watched item in the list you need to re-confirm your email id to receive reminder for this new item. You have to be a registered member if you would want eBay to remember your email id for reminders.

Donny Lowy runs http://www.closeoutexplosion.com an online wholesale and closeout business that supplies eBay sellers, retailers, and flea market vendors.

He also manages http://www.wholesalecloseoutforum.com an online wholesale and closeout forum.

Donny can be reached at 718-389-5502.

QUESTION: I have lots of books I haven’t been able to sell on Amazon or eBay. How many months do you let books sit on the shelves before you begin lowering prices?

ANSWER: I used to have very limited storage space, especially when I started selling books online. Back then I lived in a small apartment and had to rent storage lockers to hold my books. So after my first 18 months of selling used books I had about 10,000 unique books and was paying more than $1,000 a month in storage fees. I was making plenty of cash to cover the rental fees, but didn’t want to commit to more storage bills. So I decided to delete all my listings for books where the price on Amazon Marketplace was under $4. Getting rid of those books was a pretty big hassle, so I’ve been more careful in selecting low-priced books since then.

But to get back to your question, deciding when to cut the price to remain competitive depends totally on the book, and how high the average price is online. For low-priced books that I want to sell as quickly as possible, I’ll cut the price every week or so, just to try to get rid of the book before the price falls too far. But for higher-priced books — say over $40 — I am much more reluctant to cut the price. Maybe I’ll cut it a penny or two if it will make the listing more visible. But if I think the other prices are abnormally low, I’ll let the book sit there for six months or a year without even considering lowering the price.

I base this on two observations:

– Buyers of low-priced books don’t consider feedback much in their buying decision. So even though you might strive to have high feedback to be competitive against other sellers, buyers of low-priced books either aren’t informed enough to consider a seller’s feedback or just don’t want to take the time to consider any factors other than price. So to sell a low-priced book you have to compete on price, just because most of the buyers for these items aren’t going to scroll through to compare listings for feedback, condition, etc.

– Over the long term, prices of low-priced books tend to fall, and those of high-priced books hold steady or go up. That’s because low-priced books tend to become more available over time (more used copies appear for sale online and price-cutting ensues), but higher-priced books tend to be more scarce and as used copies are purchased, price tends to go up as they become more scarce. This is why out-of-print books are such a hugely profitable area for used booksellers. Also, the buyers of these books usually pay a lot more attention to the book description and seller feedback, so you don’t have to compete just on price.

One more interesting observation I’ve seen in the past year: Last summer I moved to a house where I could store all my books in the basement instead of paying for off-site storage. I had to hire movers, everything got disorganized, and most of my books I had to delete until I could locate them again and organize them on shelves in my basement. I’m still re-listing them, and I’ve been surprised to find that many of my relatively low-priced books — say those that were going for $5 or $10 on Marketplace last summer — have doubled in value during those six months. Some of them, may a quarter of them, had become essentially worthless, worth less than a dollar or two, and I’ve been getting rid of them. But in most cases, whereas six months ago I’d have been beating my brains out to sell them at the lowest possible price — now I’m selling them faster at double the price.

See a real-time list of the most highly sought after used and collectible books.

Read more free articles on selling used books profitably online: http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/selling.htm

Steve Weber is author of “The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site” (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com

One of the most frequently asked questions on the Net is: “What should I sell online?”

Many people know what products they want to sell. However, they don’t know how to do this. Should they physically stock the products themselves or promote other companies through affiliate programs?

Drop shipping may be the answer for some website owners who want to become stockless retailers, whereby they keep no stock themselves. Instead they promote products on their website and get a drop shipping company to despatch these products for them.

Here are the steps involved in drop shipping:

1) You open an Internet Store with a shopping cart and accept credit cards on your site. You can also sell on Internet Auction sites.

2) You find a distributor who will “drop ship” the products you want to sell.

3) You open an account with the “drop ship” distributor(s) you choose.

4) You receive descriptions and images of the products you wish to sell from the distributor and put them on your Internet Store or Auction.

5) When a customer buys from your Store or Auction, they pay with their credit card. Your Store or Auction charges their credit card plus shipping.

6) You email the order to the drop ship distributor with the customer’s name and address.

7) Then the drop shipper despatches the product to your customer from the warehouse with YOUR business name on the package.

The drop shipper charges you the wholesale price plus shipping. Remember you have already passed the shipping charge on to your customer, so the shipping costs you nothing.

So that’s how drop shipping works. You don’t have to buy products in bulk and store them, hoping to sell. You don’t have to pay to have it shipped to you, and then pay again to ship it to your customer. All you had to do was send an email to your drop shipper.

(C) John Lynch

For details of drop shipping companies for your website or ebay business: http://www.merchant-account-service.com/drop_shipping.html

Good communication is the key to encouraging your auction
buyers to leave you positive feedback. Such communication
also helps avoid most negative feedback on eBay.

1. Good Communication Prevents Misunderstandings

Good communication helps to avoid misunderstandings.
For example, if surface shipping takes six to eight weeks
but the customer doesn’t know this, he may expect almost
immediate delivery. When such quick delivery doesn’t
materialize, he may feel that he has been cheated or that
your service is slow and poor.

Thus, try to spell out delivery time frames and other
details as much as possible. Is your refund policy clear?
Is your product clearly and accurately described in your
auction ad? Does your product’s quality meet or exceed the
expectations created by your auction ad?

2. Prompt E-mail Response

If, for whatever reason, your e-mail response is slow, the
customer may assume that you aren’t delivering on your
promises. Prompt e-mail communication can help reassure
the customer and gives evidence of good customer service.

3. Encourage Queries

Basically, state in your auctions: “If you have any
questions about this auction, please e-mail me.” If a
person is expecting instant delivery of an e-book but
instead you send him the information via the postal
service, he might be disappointed. Nip all such problems
in the bud by encouraging your prospective buyers to ask
questions.

4. Ask for Positive Feedback

How can you encourage buyers to leave positive feedback
for you? Simply state that you’ll leave positive feedback
for them after you’ve received theirs.

Since they are leaving the feedback first, they will
hesitate to leave you negative feedback, knowing that you
may respond in kind. If you leave positive feedback for
the buyer first, they may never return the favour.

5. Reversing Negative Feedback

With good communication, you can often avoid receiving
negative feedback. Try to do everything that is reasonable
to make your customer happy.

However, what if you do receive negative feedback on one
of your auctions? What can you do about it?

Under certain, very limited circumstances (such as
an extortion attempt), eBay might reverse negative
feedback unjustly given to you. In most cases, however,
eBay will not reverse negative feedback.

You can use eBay’s “Mutual Feedback Withdrawal”
procedure. This is where both the buyer and seller
agree to withdraw negative feedback from each other.
Thus, the negative feedback will be removed from both of
your total scores (thus improving both feedback ratings).

The negative comments themselves won’t be removed by eBay.
However, your comments left in response to a negative
feedback will also stay to tell your side of the story.

Yes, good communication can lead to more positive feedback
from your auctions. Such communication can also help you
to avoid and even reverse negative feedback. So, by all
means, promote positive feedback on eBay through good
communication.

RESOURCE BOX:

J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc.,
has been helping clients to earn maximum business
profits for over twenty-five years.

To learn more about Internet auctions, visit
http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/auctions.html

For more profitable Work at Home Small Business Ideas,
visit: http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/

If you look around a little on the web, you’ll no doubt come across people trying to sell you ebooks about eBay’s ’secrets’ for as much as $20. Here’s a sample:

“Along with 400,000 other excited eBay fanatics I now make a living using the Internet and eBay. I can go days without ever speaking to a single customer, but I have a world wide customer base. My online business runs like a well oiled machine with a part-time effort!”

You too can get such valuable tips as:

“All you need to do is write a list of questions other people would pay to get the answers to, give that list to a friend, have the friend call you on the phone and ask you those questions, record the call, have the recording transcribed, and edit the transcription! Presto - you’ve just created a ‘meaty’ ebook fast!”

So What Do These Books Contain?

Don’t be deceived by the slick sales copy and promises of ‘automatic sales machines’ and unique sales strategies. Most of these ‘winning money-making strategies’ boil down to the same thing. Follow their advice, and you’ll be writing long, old-fashioned sales copy in an effort to sell shoddily-written downloadable ebooks to gullible souls, either directly through eBay or by trying to redirect people through your About Me page to your website.

The theory is that the rubbish ebooks will sell themselves, and you won’t have to do a thing.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: if these ’secrets’ work so well, then why aren’t the ebooks authors spending every hour they have putting them into practice, instead of trying to sell you ebooks? If these secrets were so valuable, then why would they give them away for that price, or any price? Out of charity? Yeah, right.

Here’s the reality: trying to sell ebooks on eBay or anywhere else is very likely to get you nowhere, and fast. The bottom fell out of the ebook market a long time ago - in fact, it’s doubtful whether it ever had a bottom to begin with. The ebooks are an effort to get to you sign up for all sorts of services, making money for the ebooks’ writers each time. In short, the only way to profit from ’secrets of eBay’ ebooks is to be selling them, not buying them - and do you really want to become a con artist?

If you’d like to take a look at one of these ebooks, try searching for the name and picking through results. The chances are you’ll find an excerpt or review - and if it’s not by someone trying to sell you the ebook then it won’t be a favourable view. The fact that most ebooks you buy for $20 come with unlimited resale rights should tip you off if nothing else does.

It’s All Out There for Free.

You can almost any information that someone might be trying to sell you in an ebook for free using a search engine, if you take the time. Ebooks aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on.

If you’d like a real way to make more money, look out for our next email: we’ll show you how and when to use eBay’s powerful ‘Second Chance Offer’ feature.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.

If you’re goal is to steal a bargain, you need to check out www.propertyroom.com.

This online auction site might just be the most unusual of its kind on the Internet site because it consists of items from police property rooms.

You’ve probably seen police auctions advertised in your local paper, This site takes the concept to the max with items from more than 550 police departments across the country. The auctions are run much like eBay. There’s an opening page with featured items called Hot Pursuit Specials, and a list of categories of items such as Automotive, Cell Phone, Clothing & Accessories, Jewelry, Watches, Computing, Bicycles, Electronics, Photography and so on.

You must register to bid. The sign-up process is,similar to eBay’s. The way auctions work is also almost identical to that of eBay. When you click on an item to bid, you see the current bid, bid increment, bid history and time left. There is also a complete description of the item, its shipping cost and sales tax (if applicable). If the item is not new, there is also a rating of its condition - excellent, good, etc. — and a description of any imperfections.

What kind of deals can you expect?

Naturally, the items up for bid change almost daily as do the amounts bid. However, here were some of the deals as of this writing.

Item - Current Bid - Time remaining

Mustek 8.0 megapixel camera
6 in 1 digital camera - $70.00 - 1 hr. 57 min.

This site will be growing even larger in the future, as its owners are negotiating with 3,000 more police departments to handle their property sales. It also seems likely that the prices items sell for will increase as more and more people discover the site.

So, if you’d like to steal a bargain, there’s no site like www.propertyroom.com and no time like the present

Here’s something that’s also a bargain. It’s a new technology called HD Radio that enables AM and FM radio stations to broadcast their programs digitally. These digital broadcasts provide listeners with radically improved audio quality, more radio channels through multicasting, and new data services — and it’s all free! To learn more about this new technology, just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com, to get all the buzz.

Douglas Hanna is a retired marketing executive and the author of numerous articles on HD radio, the Internet and family finances.

Posted in Clearance Sales, Auctions | Comments Off

eBay sellers are engaged in a constant search for the hottest selling items.

Online auctioneers have now more auction sites at their disposal than ever before.

Sites such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo all offer selling opportunities for online entrepreneurs.

But having a place to sell your merchandise is only part of the battle.

The next step is knowing how to sell your merchandise.

Gone are the days when someone could simply place an item up for auction and expect to receive bids.

Now the same seller must be educated in terms of online selling to experience a decent level of success.

Sites such as ebaybusinessbook.com offer the type of information that an eBay seller can use to build their online auction business.

But the question that still begs to be asked is, “What should I sell?”

This is where both eBay and Amazon come to the rescue.

Both of these online giants share information on their sales with the general public.

Their purpose in sharing this information is to help sellers grow their business so that they can conduct more auctions and sales on their sites.

While it might be a self serving action, it can definitely benefit eBay and Amazon sellers.

For instance, Amazon and eBay announced that during Thanksgiving of 2005 their top sellers where electronics products.

As a seller you can use this information to gear up your electronic sales.

You can use wholesale search engines such as www.wholesalequest.com to find wholesale electronic sources.

Remember that staying on top of sales trends is the third and most important ingredient in your online auction business.

Donny Lowy runs a wholesale business geared towards eBay sellers at:
http://www.closeoutexplosion.com