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eBay Challenge #1: Be the Customer First

 

Enjoying the newly revamped eMoms at Home so far? Getting fired up about eBay Selling for eParents? I am and I am thrilled to have you with me!

Come back next week for a fun giveaway to help jumpstart your eBay selling. If you haven’t already, be sure to please subscribe to the RSS feed of eBay Selling for eParents so that you are sure to never miss an opportunity to skyrocket your home business ventures.

In the meantime, a challenge:

In order to think like a customer, you need to be a customer first. Now is the time. If you aren’t already, end your hesitation and register on eBay to bid, buy, and sell. It’s not too soon to begin your holiday shopping, so this is the perfect opportunity to get a few purchases under your belt. Not only will it help you build your feedback rating (which is an essential for sellers), but you will have the opportunity to do a little seller research of your own.

Pay attention to the entire process. Make notes of the following:

  • What made you decide to bid on a particular listing? Was it the design, the price, the seller’s reputation?
  • What turned you off of bidding on other listings? Was their listing too cluttered? Photo blurry?
  • After you win, notice the seller’s communication skills. How did they make you feel? Did you feel they took a personal interest or did it seem like you were talking to a machine? Did you hear from them at all?
  • Take note of the packaging of your shipment when it arrives. Anything special about it, like a personal note or interesting wrapping? Did they throw in anything extra? Did they not bother to even include an invoice so you would know from which listing it was won? Did it seem like they just threw it in a box or was it shipped with care?
  • How well did the seller deliver on their promises?
  • At what point did the seller leave you feedback? Before or after you left feedback for them? Did the feedback appear personal or generic?
  • Would you buy from this seller again? Why or why not?

Finally, come back to eBay Selling for eParents and share your experience with us! We’d love to hear your juicy eBay details!

No better time than now– Register on eBay and take your first steps to becoming a PowerSeller… or just a really fabulous part-time “a little here, a little there” seller. I’m flexible. ;)



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Savvy eBay Sellers Think Like Customers First. Savvy?

 

Aaarrrr! Ahoy, ye mateys! This be yer eBay selling guide speaking and I’m ter share with ya how me became known as the “Bay Rum Runner.” Is it bounty ye be lookin’ for? Then read on… But ye be warned: Here there be monster profits to be made.

Savvy?

It begins with this: give and you shall receive. I admit, that doesn’t seem to fit the “eBay Pirate” theme, but that was the first step toward my becoming the “Bay Rum Runner” on eBay.

As I mentioned in Tell Me About Your Big eBay But…, the key to my growing eBay sales seemed to hinge upon my customer-based approach. I wanted my listings to be friendly, easy to navigate, and, most importantly, enjoyable. Bring back a little of the “world’s largest swap meet” kind of vibe, particularly the fun of feeling like you are haggling with some real characters, not just buying from some indifferent warehouse.

The first step toward my eventually taking on a new nickname was when I decided to focus on the bonus gifts a bit more. I wanted to alleviate some of the “Am I going to be ripped off here?” worries on behalf of my potential eBay customers, many of which were newcomers. The bonus gifts seemed to do that quite nicely.

As I was running low on my baby product travel sizes for bonuses, I hit a local clearance store for anything else that might be suitable. As the babies of the family were clearly going to be pampered already with the primary auction item, I chose to focus on pampering the parents a bit through the free gifts. I was thinking about my customers’ wants, needs, and desires. What would they consider a treat?

After ultimately purchasing several “sampler kits” from a well-known organic bath and body products company, with the goal in mind to break up the kits into individual samples to give away as the bonuses, a display of the same company’s men’s line of “Bay Rum” grooming products caught my eye on my way to the door.

This is where the”give and you shall receive”principle begins to come into play. Call it karma. Call it whatever you like… the gods of capitalism were about to show me my next big eBay sale.

Years of living on the Gulf Coast had made me fairly familiar with all products boasting the scent of “Bay Rum.” Blame it on Jimmy Buffet and our plethora of palm trees, sandy beaches, Hawaiian shirts, and every casino offering free drinks to guys who say to themselves, “It’s five o’clock somewhere” after their lunch at the buffet. I knew this line was popular. I made mental note of the prices of each of the key full size products and then a bee line for my home computer to do a little research.

This is how you find new products to sell. You keep yourself open to opportunities. You never know when one will find you. You train yourself to move fast because you never know when that opportunity will pass right on by if you don’t move. You learn to make decisions and then act on them.

An hour later, I was back at the store and bought out their entire line of discontinued Bay Rum grooming products.

Now it was time for me to get them on eBay. More specifically, now it was time for me to sell them on eBay, despite some already established stiff competition selling the same line. Otherwise, I was going to have to learn to seriously love the smell of Bay Rum.

Oooh, what’s that tingle? Was that a twitch of panic? No, no, now is not the time to panic. Now is the time to breathe, be confident in my research, and launch. I’m an eBay Pirate, remember? Pirates don’t hesitate. They see what they want and they take it! Aaarrrr! Now walk the plank launch those auctions, Megan!

We’ll learn shortly the essentials to building your auctions, creating a checklist of the key ingredients for a successful listing. We’ll get to the point that you can knock out a new product launch, from discovery to research to launch, all within a handful of hours. If we weren’t parents managing the demands of kids and home simultaneously along with our eBay business, I’d say we could knock these new auction launches out even faster, but this isn’t called eSwingers at the Bachelor Pad now, is it?

One thing was clear, I had to figure out why a potential buyer would buy from my auction listings rather than one of the dozens of others. Some of the other sellers were starting their auctions at less than the price at which I bought my products. How on earth were they doing that and how was I going to compete?

Fortunately, this had also been the case with the baby bath products and I had managed to sell mine for more than my competitors in the end and in higher quantities. I achieved this through personality. I did it through professional polish, cobbled together through my hardly professional skills. I did it by thinking of my customers and what was going through their minds while they browsed the auction search results. I needed to set myself apart through personality once again.

I needed to begin branding myself. Creating an identity with which to relate.

The “Bay Rum Runner” was born.

I built auctions that complimented the theme of the product. I chose rich brown and red color schemes, outfitted with themes featuring palm trees hanging over ocean shores. I built punchy text, easy to take in by a scanning eye, and fleshed it out with clear, focused, close-up photos of my products that I took myself. I had snapped up every sample grooming kit from the same Bay Rum line and broke it down into individual samples to be given away as bonus gifts. Then I signed off each listing with the phrase, “Make me your Bay Rum Runner…”

I knew it had worked when the emails began coming in with the salutation, “Hey, Bay Rum Runner!”

My customers were identifying with me and they were having fun with it. And the sales flowed like, well, free rum at a buccaneer’s blowout. These were the sales that made me a PowerSeller. Although I no longer sell Bay Rum grooming products as my primary store line, I proudly don my “Rum Runner” hat when I do list a few.

Give and you shall receive. Yes, the bonus gifts cut into my profits, but in the end, I had higher numbers of sales and higher final bid prices because of those bonus gifts. I was selling more than the competition and my auctions were going for as much as 50-100% more for the exact same products listed by other sellers.

I thought like a customer, respecting their needs, as well as their choice to buy from me. Because they do have a choice. They deserve your respect. If you are sincere and thoughtful, they will trust you.

In order to think like a customer, you need to be a customer first. Have you bought on eBay before? Are you registered, yet? If not, the process of registering is incredibly simple. Then join my first eBay Challenge:  Be the Customer First and share your buying experiences with us.  Walk the plank, me mateys, I think you’ll find the waters are warm.

Ye be warned, though. You just might enjoy it. You might love it. Before you know it, you’ll not only begin contributing to your family’s finances more, but also begin contributing to the eBay community. Hopefully improving it along the way for everyone. Give and you shall receive.

Savvy?


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Tell Me About Your Big eBay But…

 

Let’s get it out of our systems now. Show me your but’s. ;)

I want to sell on eBay but:

  • …where the heck to you find enough to sell?
  • …how do I know I won’t get ripped off?
  • …I don’t know anything about computers.
  • …I don’t like dealing with people.
  • …what if I get negative feedback?
  • …it seems so complicated.
  • …where do I start?

I feel your but’s, I really do. giggle giggle Okay, seriously, I hear this stuff all the time. The easiest way to get started seems to be to tell you how I got started. You will quickly see how simple it was. An accident, really. Let’s say, serendipity.

When I became pregnant with my second child, Goose (a web moniker), we were quite short of money in our house. In fact, we were quite short on house, as we had just lost everything we owned in Hurricane Katrina. Down to a bare slab of concrete. Ouch. Needless to say, Goose was a bit of a Hurricane Baby Surprise, catching us with our financial pants down.Despite our financial pressures, I was still determined to remain a stay-at-home mom, so I was open to finding ways to make money from home. How I came upon eBay selling was nothing more than a fluke.

Having not a stitch left from all of our carefully preserved hand-me-downs from my firstborn (Pants, another moniker), I had to start from scratch again for the new baby. While stocking up on new baby supplies, I found that my favorite baby wash and lotion had been discontinued. Fretful Baby BathI was clinging to all things nostalgic at the time, so combined with raging pregnancy hormones, this was equal to sheer devastation. No baby-smelling baby wash? Whatever will I do? And let me tell you, I was serious.

As a veteran eBay buyer for years, I knew there would be some of the coveted baby products there, so I eagerly logged on, only to be disappointed at the incredibly high bids at which they were going. Paying $12 for an 8 ounce bottle of baby wash was not in my budget, thank you. I felt like I was being looted by the eBay pirates.

So I hit the discount stores. The salvage stores. Anywhere that might be clearing out the baby product stock. I didn’t have to search long before I found it. For $2 a bottle. Hot dog! Jackpot! In more ways than one, in fact.

After stocking up a ridiculous amount of product for myself, it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from becoming an eBay pirate myself. After all, where were these other sellers getting this stuff? Why couldn’t I give selling baby products on eBay a go? Especially at a profit of close to $10 per bottle. So I bought approximately two dozen bottles in a variety of the discontinued line’s products, an investment of less than $50, and hit eBay to do some research about how to be a seller.

Everything you need to know about selling on eBay is right on their site. I could probably end my blog right there. However, if you are reading this, you are probably looking for more than just how-to information. On we press…

In less than a day, I taught myself how to sell on eBay, using nothing more than their online tools. It was incredibly simple. I looked at the auctions that were selling for the highest price (I’ll teach you later how to do this by searching “Completed Auctions,” one of the absolute keys to launching successful auctions), made notes about what I liked and didn’t like about my soon-to-be competitors, broke out the digital camera, and got rolling.

Oh, and one more thing, I made sure I stood out by throwing in a free bonus gift with every winning bid and I advertised this in the listing. At one of the stores I had visited, I bought a bunch of travel sizes of the same products, knowing they would make perfect bonus gifts. Having received such surprise extras from sellers before, I knew it was the extra touch I needed to stand out from the pack.

Within 24 hours I had my first sale. I had created a mix of two types of listings:

  1. Auction-style listings with a Buy It Now option
  2. Buy It Now listings with the option to buy at whatever quantity the customer preferred, ranging from 1 product to 12 products

It quickly became clear that I had hit the right note somewhere, as the sales never stopped. In fact, buyers were paying more for my auctions than they were for identical listings. As the demand grew, I raised my prices, but it didn’t deter my buyers. Was it my bonuses? Was it my design? My photos? My descriptions? I mean, there are only so many ways you can pitch a bottle of baby lotion, people.

Later, I would more closely analyze what was attracting buyers to me, which I will be sharing with you over the coming posts. In short, it wasn’t so much a formula for selling, but a customer-satisfaction-based approach. I wanted my buyers to be happy. I wanted them to enjoy buying on eBay. And my buyers wanted to give me their money.

Baby Feet TowelBut the supply of discontinued products eventually, well, discontinues. I had to find something else to sell. I was hooked. But where to go now? I certainly didn’t have any old cookie jars or Matchbox cars to sell, unless anyone wanted to lend me some scuba diving gear and was willing to buy severely waterlogged vintage books with pages nibbled by creatures from the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, I was a month in and there was no turning back. I had tasted the satisfaction of being both a stay-at-home parent and a contributor to our family finances, all thanks to baby wash. I. was. hooked.

Are you, yet?

Next up is the “turn.” I move from fluke to calculated success and I plan to bring you with me.

eBay Selling for eParents next post: How I became known as “The Bay Rum Runner.” Yep, I was about to become a real eBay pirate. But Ye be warned: Here be monster profits to be made. Arrr!!!

In the meantime, think about your big ole eBay “but…” Tell me about it. We can discuss it over some rum and gold doubloons.

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The Trust is Free. The Cookie Jar starts at $14.99.

 

My one year old son just ate a piece of pink chalk while I was launching an eBay auction. My three year old son came in and told me about it. Chances are, had the older brother not informed me of the younger brother’s sneaky “snacking,” I wouldn’t have known about it until the next diaper change, at which point I would have been thoroughly puzzled.

My name is Megan. I am a stay-at-home mom running an eBay store. Welcome to my world, where the colors of the eBay logo are frequently found to make surprise appearances in the diapers around here.

The words “non-toxic” are my friends. Without them, how else would I get that vintage apron listed?

As you may have gathered at this point, my eBay Selling for eParents blog won’t be quite like the other home-based business blogs you will find here at eMoms at Home. Rather than saddle you with more how-to information than you could possibly digest, we’re going to share stories and hopefully begin a solid discussion of what it takes to begin and maintain a successful home-based eBay business while simultaneously juggling a real life. You know those pesky things that involve dishes and laundry, kids and spouses, bills and sleep deprivation? And, yes, I’ll probably mention diapers more than just today. In my world, eBay and diapers go hand in hand.

Are you smiling, yet? Are your shoulders relaxing just a wee bit as you realize that I am not some fancy pants eBay guru that is going to try to sell you some wacky selling system while flashing all of my bling in your awe-struck faces as I expound on the riches to be made in the eBay universe?

When it comes to eBay, I am a bit of an eBay customer guru, though. I fully believe it was my understanding of my buyers that made me a PowerSeller right out of the gate. An eBay PowerSeller is a seller that has maintained an average sales total of $1,000 over three consecutive months, having met certain additional requirements we can get into later. I reached PowerSeller status my fourth month as a seller.

How did I do this? I was a buyer first and I paid attention to what I liked in sellers. I also paid attention to what I didn’t like. The seller that shipped my vintage tablecloth the day after I paid? Awesome. The seller that took two weeks to answer my emails? Stinky. The seller that threw in an extra bonus gift because I took the time to send them an email telling them how excited I was to find a checkbook to match my husband’s planner? Rocked my socks. The seller that wrapped my fragile vintage chalkware statue in old newspaper and toilet paper? Not so much.

Granny Cookie JarThe details of how to become a solid eBay seller can be overwhelming. There are so many books, websites, and courses (both live and on video/DVD/online) already out there that it is difficult to know where to start. Most people give up after the first couple of pages of information. I mean, how difficult is it supposed to be to sell my grandmother’s cookie jar, anyway?

I’m here to help you discover that you can so do this. I know you are hesitant. I know you have questions. I know you aren’t sure where to start. I know you don’t know who to trust. I know you don’t want to get ripped off. Seriously, I feel you. I was you. I still am you. I just decided to go ahead and do it and now I’m a millionaire thousandaire.

We’ll get into all of the details of how to get started and explore some of the options available for sellers soon enough. I will absolutely give you suggestions of good books to read and courses to avoid. I’ll walk you through the key elements to be sure to include in your listings. We’ll do all of… snore… snort… zzzz… huh?! Whoa, I think I fell asleep there for a second.

How-to stuff can be boring. It’s everywhere. It’s flashy and obnoxious and confusing. It’s intimidating. Particularly when you still haven’t found the time to take a shower today.

As I told Wendy Piersall, Ms. eMoms at Home master of all things home based business, this week and these first posts will be less about building our millions and more about building relationships.

In my opinion, eBay is all about trust.

I’m going to help you believe that you can trust yourself to be a successful eBay seller, learn to trust me, and begin conveying through your auctions that your customers can trust you, as well. You can so do this. You can even do it in your pajamas, having not yet had your shower today. You can do it with kids hanging off of you and toddlers eating pieces of chalk. Yes, even then. Are you ready?

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