I have spent the past 8 months selling on ebay and have had both good and bad experiences. I have learned a lot about online sales and about people.
Most folks want to buy good stuff for cheap money. The better you present your product as a good deal, the more folks will be interested in purchasing your product and presentation counts for about 70% of sales. I spent a lot of time enhancing and ‘tweaking’ the digital photos I took of the items I had for sale. I learned very early on that the better my pictures and written descriptions were, the more sales I would make. Eye appeal online is much like ‘curb appeal’ in the real world.
Ebay! Wow! What a HUGE idea! And combined with PayPal services [owned by Ebay] they own the online auction market. It’s a win-win situation. The problem I have as a seller on ebay is the money amount I have to pay to Ebay to auction off my items. Although I made some excellent deals, a lot of my profit had to be paid to Ebay in the fees I incurred as a seller. This easily amounted to a few hundred bucks a month! And if Ebay is making an average of $100.00 per month per seller…the dollar amount is staggering! [I don't really know what the actual 'average' is]
During my time on Ebay I have seen scams, like the guy who claimed to have a vinyl record collection of over 3 million albums, made a deal AND got paid for a record collection that didn’t exist. And ‘miracle deals’, like the lady who wanted to sell a fistful of Pokemon cards her son stole while grocery shopping, to teach the boy a lesson, and walked away with a winning bid of OVER $5,000 bucks! How about the corn flake that looked like the profile of Jesus? Or the piece of toast with the silhouette of the Virgin Mary burned into it? I know! It really is ridiculous! BUT! IT WORKS!
Ebay has taken steps to protect both the buyer and the seller. And they keep pretty good tabs on everyone and everything. Once in a while a scam slips through and somebody gets away with what essentially amounts to stealing. I have heard that it can be tough to try to get money back via PayPal once it’s been paid out, although I have NEVER had a bad experience with PayPal [personally].
Sellers and buyers get feedback points from each successful transaction they make. [My number is 124.] I have seen sellers with numbers over 10,000! I imagine they’ve been with Ebay since the very early days. When leaving feedback you have the option to leave positive, neutral or negative feedback. The goal is to get as much positive feedback as you can, it is frowned upon to give OR recieve negative feedback and users are encouraged to exhaust all options BEFORE leaving negative feedback/comments as it can tarnish a person’s online reputation. You can avail yourself of an Ebay mediator to resolve disputes you may have with another user. And there are user-created forums to assist with all things Ebay. As well as extensive help files at your disposal.
The only REAL complaint I have about Ebay is the cost of their fees to users. It just costs TOO MUCH and it is very difficult to make any REAL money.
