When eBay items don't sell.

This is from the eBay hawk in me and is for all fellow eBay hawks out there, who operate big mental eBay businesses. Whenever we log on to eBay, we like to check for the items with the most bids, the members with the most feedback, the items they sell, how many items they manage to sell in a day, their listing style that generates so many sales etc. We just like to observe…. and plan.

Speaking of planning, have you ever planned a listing? No I don’t mean the prospective I’ve-got-to-list-this-CD-on-eBay-when-I-get-a-chance kind of planning. I mean you do some real work before listing that item on eBay. You took pictures of that CD from 15 different angles - left view, right view, top view, inside view, close-up view… etc, You “hovered” around eBay a week before to check out the best selling times for that CD, You looked at your competitors listings to note what people look for before they buy the CDs, You offered Paypal, You offered zero (or next to zero) postage, You mentioned that CD wasn’t coming from China so it would be with your customer the next day - even if you had to sit outside the post office with your Sidekick phone. And no one bought the CD.

You didn’t take no of an answer. You immediately relisted the CD. (Maybe the right person wasn’t there at the right time, surely they’ll see it now). After the end of the listing, no one still bought the CD.

I know the feeling. I had a similar experience, only that I relisted my item about 4 or 5 times before I realised that the person who I was trying to advertise my item to probably wasn’t seeing it. Why wouldn’t they see it? Afterall they are on eBay - The auction site with 100 million members. (And 25million auctions running). Maybe they were looking at something else. Since I was selling an accessory to a product, I figured out that they were probably looking at the product itself. Since this accessory wasn’t a very popular one, maybe I could capture a buyer attention while they were looking at the main product. How? List in 2 categories!

The idea being that (apart from listing in the parent category 5 times to no avail), people looking in the second category were either considering buying the product or had bought the product and were just checking to see if they could have gotten a better deal.

At my 6th attempt at listing, I ended up having 2 watchers (Something I couldn’t boast of before) and at the end of the listing, I had 4 bidders in total haggling for prices.

Morale of the story is, If it doesn’t work the first time, think about where your audience is. Are you reaching them? Look at your competitiors keywords and listings. Now, are you reaching them?

Teacher : Experience.

(Ladies and gentlemen, let’s call it a day)

All chorus : A day.