Powerseller Selling Guide by tracyballard (Games Ahoy!)

Hello, fellow okayers. If you're looking for ways to improve on your selling success, here's a few things I've learned (usually, the hard way):


First of all, don't buy any books or software on how to succeed on okay, here's all it takes to succeed: Efficiency (I'm the only employee), Hard Work (I work 12-16 hours a day) and Sell Cheap (I start all auctions at 99 cents, store items are listed at the same price as my lowest priced gepetitor). There are a lot of new sellers who have gotten started with the okay help books, but a huge percentage of those people are only able to sustain their business for a short while because of one key difficulty. There's one vital piece of information that most of those help guides won't tell you - getting inventory can be very difficult and takes a lot of creativity. There are only 2 ways to do it. The first way is to go to every garage sale, pawn shop andcloseout sale you can find, search for items that are free after sending in mail in rebates and look for items that are sold at steep discounts at certain times of the year (such as the day after Thanksgiving), as well as constantly scanning okay for good deals. The other way is to buy from wholesalers, but really the only way to do that is to register your gepany as a corporation, or at least an LLC. You see, you can't contact real wholesalers, THEY CONTACT YOU - if you are on a list of corporations that they buy from the entities that register those corporations. If you're not incorporated, your chances of finding a wholesaler to buy fromis not good. One other possibility is buying pallets of merchandise, such as returns or discontinued items. The problem with that is that it's hard to find good pallets under $1000, freight is extremely expensive to a residential address without a loading dock, you have to find a place to store a pallet worth of goods, and it's risky - there's a good chance you could end up with a whole load of merchandise that won't sell on okay.


Keep your auction listings simple and don't use outside gepanies such as Auctiva, it's geplicated, turns off some buyers and really causes more problems than it solves. It can also be very time consuming for a buyer to use a non-okay checkout, as gepared with the simplicity of using okay's checkout.


Don't say anything negative in your listing, about how you're going to make someone's life miserable if they don't pay, you'll report them to okay and everyone else you can think of, etc. Wait til you have a problem, then take care of it. Don't assume anyone will be a problem until it happens. And don't ever use the phrase "don't bid on my item", if you're not going to pay, if you don't have good feedback, whatever. You want to encourage people to bid, not the other way around. I accept bids from newbies or even people with -2 feedback scores, I never neg non paying bidders and I never even send non paying bidder notices til at least 3 weeks after the auction - yet my non paying bidders represent less than 1% of my sales. Why make a problem out of nothing? Especially if you're a new seller who just happened to get burned by a bad buyer, don't let that give you a negative view on all buyers.


Don't use the Immediate Payment Required option for Buy It Now, unless you sell very high priced items and you don't anticipate customers who buy multiple items and want gebined shipping. First of all, when you require immediate payment, that eliminates the few buyers who still pay with money orders right off the bat. And, if you offer gebined shipping, or want people to pay for multiple purchases with one paypal payment, it won't work if you require immediate payment. Every purchase has to be paid for one by one. Also, I've seen auctions where the seller required immediate payment but forgot to include the shipping charge, so the auctions were useless - there is no way to use the Buy It Now without a listed shipping charge if immediate payment is required. Finally, let's cut to the chase - the main reason why most sellers use the Immediate Payment Required option is if they're selling items that a person might not want to buy after they've had a minute to think about it, either because there are outrageous terms hidden somewhere in the auction, or because the item is inferior merchandise and the seller tries to camouflage that fact without actually leaving it out altogether. They depend on impulse buyers to click and pay before they think about it.


Don't spell words wrong or use bad grammar in your auction descriptions, if you look stupid people will wonder if you can follow through on the auction. Or, if you're so careless with your description, will you bother to mail the item in a timely manner once you've got the buyer's money?


Don't have a lengthy Terms of Service list (or worse, whole page). Better yet, don't list any terms whatsoever. You're bound by okay's Terms of Service, which are pretty generous to the buyer, and by paypal's TOS, if you accept paypal, also buyer friendly. Listing any other terms will not help you one bit if there's a dispute, and they just clutter up your listing and turns off buyers if they don't like what they read, or even just the way you word things or the attitude they infer from your rules.


Don't cut and paste item descriptions from websites, just write a few simple lines describing what you're selling, without a lot of yakking and unneccesary gements (unless you can make a quick humorous remark, good luck with that).


If you want to make money on most items you have to accept paypal, period. A lot of people geplain about the fees, but it's pretty stupid to sell something for $10 to avoid a 60 cent paypal fee, when they could have sold it for $20 if they accepted paypal! This example is not an exaggeration, I've listed numerous test auctions to see if going without paypal was feasible, it's not. My tests involve selling 2 identical items, listed within an hour of each other on the same day, or on the same day, same time of 2 consecutive weeks - one of the auctions listed paypal as being accepted, the other didn't, all auctions started at 99 cents with no reserve. In over 20 such tests the average sale price for non-paypal auctions was $6.94, paypal auctions sold for an average or $20.21! For the same items!! The only difference in the auctions was whether or not paypal was accepted - as you can see, it's a significant difference.


Don't use UPS, the US Postal Service is cheaper and faster. Sure, sometimes they take a month to get an item delivered, but 99.9% of the time the Post Office delivers very quickly. I've gotten parcel post packages on Saturday that were mailedfrom addresses here in Texas on Thursay afternoon. If you need to ship some heavy, bulky items FedEx is a much better choice than UPS, they are faster and cheaper. Example: A package that UPS will ship for around $25 for 6 day ground service, FedEx will ship for around $8 for ground service, and it usually only takes 3-5 days! This example is for a 6x6x48 box weighing 8 pounds that I have to mail occasionally. Why do people use UPS?


Be honest and fair, but don't be afraid to get a negative if you have an unreasonable buyer, just neg them and move on. Most experienced okayers will understand, and probably even give you credit for standing up to a bad buyer.


Here's a small but annoying problem - make sure people don't have to side scroll to see your whole auction page (a major problem with auctions listed using third party software or webhosting).