How to create auction listings and fill your E-bay store

Now for the meat and potatoes. Let's start filling your store!

This is where the action is; making your listings for your customer to see and making your items sell. We are going to learn the easiest and fastest way to make your auctions.

How to make auctions on E-bay

You can list your items on E-bay by using E-bay's standard listing form. The good news is that using it's free (other than E-bay's listing fees, of course). The problem is that it creates boring and generic ads. When you browse E-bay, it's quite obvious who does their listings this way. They do have some options however, that will allow you to make your auctions more attractive, but they do charge a fee for every listing.

Auction Tip: If you are going to be listing many items or plan on doing a lot of business, auction software is something you should be considering. There are a few great programs that will make your selling on E-bay life MUCH simpler. While they do charge a small fee, the pay-back and convenience is well worth the investment. We use a company called The Seller Sourcebook. They have hundreds of auction templates, about me pages, and host all of your pictures for you plus a lot more. The monthly price is very reasonable and we have had nothing but good service from them. You can find them here.

The following instructions will use the standard E-bay auction listing creator as the reference. This will vary a little with users of auction management software but the basics are the same.

Step-by-step creating auctions from Wholesale and Drop Ship sources

Pricing your items:
You need to realize that you will have end of auction fees (you can find these at E-bay), and you will also have PayPal fees (you can find these at PayPal). They are small but you need to take them into account. Add them to the price that you will be paying for the item that you will be selling and then add your "cut". Generally 10-20%. Look around E-bay, are there similar items? What are they selling for?

Because the items you are listing were "sold" to you by an Internet site, I will assume that there was a Title, Description, and a Picture in an ad for the item on the wholesale/dropshippers web site. We are going to use these things as our template, or in their entirety for the listing. Please note that this is optional, you may write your own title (which we suggest), description, and take your own pictures for items from wholesalers. You obviously need to use the pictures from the dropshippers sites because you will never have had the item in your possession.

• Click Here to open a new browser window that will take you to E-bay's listing page. It may ask for your log-in information first. The page header should look like this:

Sell Your Item: Choose a Selling Format

• We will start by filling our E-bay Store so choose "Sell in Store Inventory"
  
• Now, open up your product sources guide and navigate to the first item you will be listing for sale.
  
• The first step on listing your auction is to pick a category. Choose one that is appropriate to the item you are selling.

Auction Tip: Don't be afraid to try some alternate categories. Test the waters a little, sometimes the "appropriate" category gets cluttered with the same or similar items and by changing to a different category your sales can increase dramatically. Don't get carried away though. For example, don't list a bicycle in computer monitors. E-bay frowns on this.

• Now, we need to enter the title. You can copy and paste the title from the wholesalers ad or create your own.

Auction Tip: If you were a buyer, and you were searching for this particular item, what would you type into a search box? These are the words you want in your title so that people searching for it will find it. For Example: Levi/Levis 550 blue jeans/pants size 31/32 Your listing would show up in a search for "Levi jeans" as well as "Levis pants" etc. Also, when you have the room, use power words like: RARE, LIMITED EDITION, UNIQUE, ONE-OF-A-KIND, BEAUTIFUL, GREAT, UNBELIEVABLE, STUNNING, AWESOME, NEW We like to start or break up our title with ~ these ~ whenever we have extra room. For Example: RARE SPRINGSTEEN GUITAR-AWESOME! RARE SPRINGSTEEN GUITAR-AWESOME! RARE SPRINGSTEEN GUITAR-AWESOME! ~ RARE ~ Springsteen Guitar ~ AWESOME! RARE SPRINGSTEEN GUITAR-AWESOME! When your potential buyer is scrolling down a list of hundreds of items, anything that will set yours apart from the rest helps draw their eye to your ad. We suggest that you do not use all caps, they are much harder to read when you are skimming over something.

• Subtitles are a feature that basically allows you to get more information about your item on the main listings page. If you want to use them, use them as a short description or special things, like "30-day money back guarantee".
  
• If your category uses item specifics, you will be able to choose them with pull down menus right below the subtitle entry box. Only select categories use them.
  
• Now we will enter our description. Again, you can copy and paste the description from the wholesalers ad. This is the fastest way but you may want to ad to it, or alter it somehow to make it more exciting and unique. Just copy and paste it into the box and change it any way you would like.

Auction Tip: Use of HTML is allowed in the description so if you have knowledge of HTML, have fun! This is where auction management software really shines because it helps people with no knowledge of HTML to easily design beautiful ads.

The rest of the E-bay listing page will guide you through the process. Use the help topics on the right side if you don't understand a feature.

Move onto Step Six when you are ready to add your pictures.