A Day of Selling on eBay

by admin on July 30th, 2009

eBay Shipment - Licensed via Creative Commons - http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyonflickr/2968841480/ As implied in my post two days ago, I spent all of yesterday listing stuff on eBay. I now have thirty-two auctions running! Luckily, my schedule is flexible enough to allow me to push everything aside temporarily to take advantage of opportunities like eBay’s occasional fee sales. Unfortunately, that also means that I now have twice as much work to do today.

Anyway, I figure I’ll go over my strategy for the day, as putting together thirty-two auctions from scratch over the course of twelve hours isn’t exactly a cinch. Here are five tips on how to make listing on eBay quick and easy:

1. Use third-party software to create your listings.

It’s really, really time-consuming to use eBay’s web interface. It’s better than it used to be, but it still wastes a lot of time and makes me want to strangle eBay’s executive board even more.

But yesterday, I used iSale for the first time, which I got as part of the MacHeist bundle, and holy crap is it awesome! The software has a few deficiencies, but for creating listings, it’s extremely quick and easy to use. All you do is select a template, enter a description, drag and drop photos, and set up the details of the auction. Much of this can be done automatically, such as setting up shipping preferences for every auction, which saves a lot of time. I used to be able to do a little over one auction per hour. Yesterday, I was able to do three.

You don’t have to use iSale, but do yourself a favor and find a better solution than eBay’s web interface. Before iSale, I used a small script I slapped together to create an auction template and automatically upload photos to my own server (to save money on eBay image hosting costs, of course!).

2. Buy a good electronic scale.

This is one of the best investments I’ve made. It’s paid for itself many times over. Owning your own scale saves you a trip to the post office, UPS, or FedEx. Plus, online postage generally offers a discount. The post office, for example, provides free or discounted delivery confirmation online depending on the service. For UPS, I use my UPS account number, which gets a bulk shipping discount via eBay. I’ve discovered that UPS stores generally can’t (and won’t) link a UPS account for anything slower than 2-day air. Plus, they offer retail rates, which appear to be higher than the online rates.

The scale I have is the Salter Brecknell 325, which weighs to the nearest tenth of an ounce up to 25 lbs. There are cheaper offerings out there, but I find that a generous 25 lb weight limit suits my purposes better. It also works much better than any mechanical scale out there. I’ve tried numerous scales, and mechanical scales tend to be much less accurate. Plus, they’re usually heavy monstrosities. Just get an electronic scale.

When listing an auction, I pack, weigh, and measure the item so I can offer an accurate shipping estimate. Plus, the items stack more easily in boxes, and shipping is a breeze a week later.

3. Save all the boxes and packing materials you get.

People who see my office area are inevitably horrified by the gigantic stack of cardboard boxes (more than forty after packing thirty-two auctions!) and large garbage bags full of bubble wrap (five full bags now), but the thing is these materials are expensive and largely reusable. Boxes can generally survive several trips, and bubble wrap lasts until it pops. Rather than throwing it all in the garbage, hold onto it for future use! Not only do you help the environment, but you also save money. I only discard these items if they arrive in bad shape.

4. Get free shipping materials from your carrier.

If you don’t have a bunch of packing materials lying around, then get them for free! USPS, UPS, and FedEx all offer free shipping materials. There are some restrictions on how they’re used, but you’ll often want to bump people up to those services anyway. For example, boxes from USPS are only free for Priority and Express Mail, but unless you want your items to languish in Parcel Post, then you’ll likely want to ship via Priority anyway!

The only caveat is to do this several weeks in advance of when you’ll need them. Getting these materials to you is extremely low priority for them. If you only need one or two, though, you may be able to just stop by the nearest office for some freebies.

5. Line up your stuff, and take good pictures before listing.

The biggest time-waster is switching from task to task. If you do all like tasks at the same time, then you’ll easily cut out the fat. The biggest one here are the item photos. Taking a photo, transferring it to your computer, incorporating it into your auction, and uploading it is very time-consuming. Instead, take a bunch of photos of all the items first. Then, transfer them to your computer all at the same time. For the last two steps, I just used iSale, which made the process simple.