Selling on eBay

I am proud to announce my book entitled "Showroom Secrets - Making Money on eBay Motors without selling a thing"

The material is designed for people who know how to use eBay, but cannot afford to lay out hundreds or thousands of dollars for inventory to resell. After reading the book a person with solid eBay skills could approach vehicle dealerships in their area and begin a service business with no money upfront. Without the information in the book, there's a good chance of getting shot down right out of the gate.

Over the past several years I've traveled back and forth across the country teaching eBay University. In addition to eBay U, I was invited to teach eBay University for Motors beginning early in 2004. Part of the reason I was chosen was the fact that I managed the internet sales at a local Ford Lincoln Mercury dealership and taught for eBay. I personally sold over 100 cars on eBay Motors during that time.

Eventually I found a way to combine my knowledge of eBay Motors with nearly three years of experience within dealerships. As a result I began providing a service to assist many dealerships in my local area with their online sales efforts. During that time I personally listed several hundred cars on eBay Motors. This is a business opportunity for a person with a knowledge of how to sell on eBay, some drive, and good people skills. It's an opportunity that exists in nearly every community in which there is a car dealership.

Why haven't more people tried working with dealerships? Many have. But just because you know eBay doesn't mean you can list cars for a dealership.

• At what point do dealers feel inventory is getting "stale"? 30 days? 90 days?


• Where should a dealer set their Reserve price? Hint: Your research on eBay is useless here.


• Why is duration much more important with a vehicle listing?


• What should the dealer do if you have an auction running, and the vehicle sells on the lot?


• How do you charge for your services? Can you charge a percentage of the sale?


• Is it legal for you to answer emails or phone calls for your dealers?

Dealership Dynamics

As I taught eBay University, people would regularly approach me with the question, "How can I get in with dealers on eBay Motors?" They were interested in listing cars for dealers, but didn't know where to begin. Dealers are intimidating - in part, that's why eBay Motors exists - people want to avoid talking to car salesmen. In fact though, they are great people. But they do not like to deal with the internet.

Showroom Secrets contains many of the lessons I learned when working with auto dealers. Things such as:

• How to approach a dealer without looking like an idiot


• Convincing dealers to work with you


• Five mistakes dealers make on eBay - how you can help


• How to stay clear of the law (People who are selling cars as Trading Assistants, and taking a commission - are probably breaking the law)


• Educating the salespeople


• Getting paid

The information contained in this book cannot be found anywhere else - it's 100% original from my own experience. You can purchase and download it at www.ShowroomSecrets.com

What do you do if you have a package you'd like to send to someone, and that package was not purchased through eBay? What if you'd like to send out your Amazon orders, Media rate, but the USPS website doesn't offer Media rate?

Have no fear. PayPal has a link, which is not all that obvious, that lets you create one-off labels using service level you'd like.

You'll obviously need a PayPal account (with some money in it) to use this service. But it's a real time saver when you get to the Post Office and there's a line. Just plop your package on the desk and take off! Postage is all taken care of.

Here is the link: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now

This is an article about special ASCII characters using html that I posted on my blog last year. eBayers and many others have found it helpful and I hope you will too.

If you consider yourself pretty good with HTML, you probably know just enough to be dangerous. Most of us can change the size and color of text, create paragraphs, maybe even create a decent table, and get our self-hosted photos to show up on our eBay listings or websites. Have you ever run into a situation though, where the character you wanted to display is not on the keyboard? For example, if you're writing a recipe for your site how would you display the temperature? Like this: 350 degrees F ? or rather like this: 350° F ? Or if you'd like to add a trademark sign? A big floppy TM doesn't look nearly as cool as this ™ right?

Approximately 56% of eBay users are outside the United States. Many international buyers use characters in a little different way than we do here in the U.S. Getting the characters right for them shows attention to detail, and shows you'll go to a little extra work to make sure things are right. Take a little time here, and you may reap lots of benefits as a seller.

Want a code? Just ascii.

They're called ASCII Characters. That's an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "Asky" is not so much of a mouthful. There is a bunch of pages that give waaaayyy more information than you probably want on the topic. There are only a handful of these special characters you may want to use on eBay. I will try to give you the common codes instead of every imaginable character ever created. Then I'll show you how it should look in HTML. So here is first the description, then the character, then what you need to insert in your HTML to create it.

Business symbols:

Copyright sign © = ©
Registered sign ® = ®
Trademark sign ™ = & #8482;

Currency Symbols and Fractions

Cent sign ¢ = ¢
Euro sign € = € or & #8364;
Yen sign ¥ = ¥
Pound sign £ = £
Dollar sign $ = $

One half ½ = ½
One quarter ½ = ¼
Three quarters ¾ = ¾

International Alpha Characters

Inverted exclamation ¡ = ¡ This is used before an exclamation in Spanish.
Inverted question mark ¿ = ¿ Used before a question in Spanish.
Any letter with a tilde ñ = ñ Just change the letter in the code from n to a or A or whatever you need and the formula stays the same.

Using Special Characters in Your HTML

Now that you know what code creates the characters, how will it look in your html itself? It's easy. If I was writing a recipe, a portion of it may look like this in your browser:
Preheat oven to 350° F
Add 2½ Tablespoons oil
Your actual HTML to make it look like that is:
Preheat oven to 350° F
Add 2½ Tablespoons oil
That's it. Just type the code for the special character right where you want it to appear. These characters are not tags that need to be opened and closed with < and >. Just make sure you use the colon at the end of the code or it won't appear correctly.

It does matter.

Using the proper characters makes a difference in the way people perceive you as a seller. On eBay, lots of sellers throw things together and they lose credibility when they look sloppy. If you take just a little time to learn to make your listing stand out as different, it may be just the thing that swings the buyer toward your listing when all other things are equal.

Great Resources for ASCII HTML Codes

http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm In English and Spanish
Wikipedia has a ton of information on this subject here.

In nearly every eBay class I teach, I get the same question. "Can I bid on my own auction?"

The quick answer is yes. Using a different account or getting a friend to do it you can bid on your own auctions. The longer answer is that it's illegal, against eBay policies, and at worst could land you in jail and suspended from selling on eBay.

Shill bidding is by definition: "Bidding on an item without the intention of buying it." Usually this involves bidding to either raise the price artificially, or protect the seller from selling an item at too low a price. Shill bidding in eBay's eyes though also includes having a relative bid on your items. If a relative wants what you have to sell, walk across the street and sell it to them. Don't use eBay.

eBay has some very sophisticated programs to discover shill bidders. An easy way is to look at your IP Address. They can see if a person logs out, and then logs back in under a different ID on the same computer and places a bid. While there are exceptions, this is a pretty clear red flag that shill bidding is occurring.

A "shill ring" is another thing eBay watches for. When a group of users agree to place bids on each other's auctions to raise the final selling price. The members of a shill ring may be scattered around the country or even around the world, but what they are doing is illegal. It becomes obvious that shilling is taking place when buyers win several auctions from the same seller and never leave feedback, or they frequently wind up as the second highest bidder on a particular seller's auctions - never winning.

Some high profile shill bidders have gone to jail. Shill bidding is a federal offense in the United States and can result in fines, and imprisonment. Auto dealers and art sellers have been in the news for shilling their auctions.

If you get caught by eBay for shill bidding, you will likely have all of your listings (auctions and eBay Store listings) ended immediately. You will then have to take an online tutorial before you can list anything again. Once you've completed the tutorial, which covers the subject of shill bidding and eBay's policies, you may only be able to list fixed-price items for 14 days or so. It's kind of a probation. If you are a repeat offender, the punishment may be much more severe, such as permanent suspension.

The best policy is to create high-quality listings, price your item in your comfort zone, and keep your nose clean on eBay.

Look familiar? You've seen them. Sellers who just cannot think of anything interesting to say about their item. So they try to grab your attention with useless words and lots of exclamation points.

Most buyers on eBay search for items using keywords. These searchers type exactly what they want to find. Not vague terms that mean nothing. Make sure your title is "keyword rich" using very specific, solid keywords that buyers will use. Avoid words like:

• L@@K!!
• Antique
• Best
• Rare
• Wow!!

You get the idea.

Rather than waste any of the valuable 55 characters you're given, do some research on eBay for the item you're going to list and see which keywords show up in their titles. If searchers cannot find your item because they don't type "L@@K!!" in the search box, they won't see your wonderful photos, read your wonderful description, or buy your item.