When was the last time you looked at your eBay auction listings through the eyes of a prospective buyer?

We all have a common goal with every auction listing we write - To attract the largest number of serious potential buyers and to elicit the highest possible selling price. Unfortunately, in attempting to do that, we are often accomplishing just the opposite - We are turning serious potential buyers away. And, not just from this auction, but from our future auctions also.

If we want to write auction listings that consistently attract serious potential buyers, result in the highest possible selling price, and build a following or repeat buyers, we need to forget everything the so-called experts tell us about writing ads and ask ourselves three simple questions.

1. How will a serious potential buyer search for this item?
2. What do serious potential buyers need to know about this item to elicit bids from them?
3. What can I do to make it as easy as possible for serious potential buyers to buy this item?

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I’ve been using MarketWorks as a listing/auction management service for a lot of years without any problems. Then, within a nine month period, they inadvertently deleted all my images from their database. The second time it happened I began looking at other services that provided the features I needed.

Over the last few months I’ve registered with several management services for their free trails. I never got to the point of actually listing an auction with any of them because once I got into the actual day-to-day workings of each, none of them offered all the features I viewed as ‘must-haves’.

Then two weeks ago I decided to take a look at InkFrog. After poking around it’s insides for a week I didn’t find any of the drawbacks that all the others had, so I decided to take them for a test drive.

I used InkFrog for the twenty-six items that are currently live on eBay and for twenty-one more that will go live later today. I won’t get a ‘real time’ look at how InkFrog handles after-auction duties until later tonight, but if no problems pop up tonight, I will definitely be using InkFrog on a full-time basis.

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The local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is having their annual book sale this Friday and Saturday.

The sale is always located in the middle of the main corridor of one of our local shopping malls. Because of the large number of books to be put out each year, the ladies from the AAUW always start setting up for the sale Thursday morning and enforce a strict policy of “no sales” until the sale begins at 10:00 Friday Morning.

I have a friend named John, a retired school teacher, who has been selling books on Amazon for the last few years as a way to supplement his retirement income. John’s wife sent him to the mall shortly after it opened Thursday morning to pick up something for her. On his way out of the mall, hoping to scope-out the location of a few good books, he asked one of the two women there if he could “just look” at what they had out.

Her response was, “Go right ahead. If you find any you are interested in, buy them. We’re here to sell them.”

“I can buy them now?”, he responded.

“Buy all you want”, she replied.

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RSS Feeds

If you subscribe to The Auction Rebel RSS Feed you may have already noticed the change made to the RSS Feed. It is now a full feed rather than a partial feed. This means that you will now be able to read each post, in it’s entirety, right in your RSS reader rather than having to click through to the blog to read the entire post.

Email Notifications

The old option to receive an email notification whenever new material is added to the blog is no longer available to new subscribers.

In it’s place, readers will now be able to have each new post delivered, it it’s entirety, directly to their email in-box. Similar to RSS subscribers, this means you can read each new post right in your email without having to come to The Auction Rebel to read it.

These emails will actually be a daily digest of any new content on The Auction Rebel. By using the digest format I can refrain from cluttering up your email box on days there might be two or more new posts. The digest will be sent each day between 3:00 and 5:00 pm. On days when there is no new content added there will be no digest sent out.

This change has been made because, with the garage sale and auction sale season coming to a close here, I’m going to be spending a lot more time on the road in search of new inventory. When at home, I’ll be pre-writing several new posts and scheduling them to be posted on the days that I’m gone. The old email notifications were sent out manually and this may not always be possible when I’m traveling. With the new system, the digests are sent automatically each day there is new content.

For those who are already receiving email notifications of new content, you will continue to them. However, I encourage you to subscribe to the full feed (you can use the subscription box at the top of the right-hand menu bar). Once you have done so, and verified you are receiving them, you can unsubscribe from the old notification system simply by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of any old email notification you get.

If you have a question about the new full-feed emails, you can use either the comment section of this post or just send me an email.

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Within the last one or two months, I’ve started receiving emails from several readers asking about a book I wrote some time ago about selling books on Half.com and what my thoughts are regarding selling books on Half.com vs Amazon.

Since one, or both, questions are being asked with increasing frequency, I thought it would be worthwhile talking about both here.

Selling Used Books Online - How To Sell Common Everyday Books On Half.Com Like Crazy!

WOW! Until people began asking about it one or two months ago, I hadn’t thought about this book in years. If memory serves me correctly, I wrote this in either 1999 or the very first part of 2000 (this was some time ago, and I’m writing this from memory, so this and subsequent dates may be off by a year or so).

At the time Half.com hadn’t yet been acquired by eBay and there were frequent questions about how to get started selling on Half.com on several book and eBay related forums and news groups. I’d been selling used books on Half.com for some time, and the book was written as a beginner’s guide to getting started on Half.com.

Somewhere around the middle of 2000 eBay purchased Half.com. A year or two later, there were rumblings coming out of eBay that they intended to shut down Half.com as a stand-alone site and incorporate it into eBay. In essence, this would have meant that individuals selling books on Half.com would have two options - either change to the regular eBay auction format or move their book business to one of the other book-selling sites such as Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.

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The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge is over and it fell nearly $2000 short of my announced goal for the project. Ultimately, whether it was a success or a failure is something that each reader will have to decide for themselves.

Personally, I view it as a resounding success because I had several other, unannounced, goals set for The Challenge as well. I believe it either reached, or went beyond, each of those unannounced goals. Here is what those goals were.

1. Show That It’s Entirely Possible For Anyone To Bootstrap An eBay Business Using Garage Sales As An Inventory Source

If you go back and look at the first week of The Challenge, you will see that I spent $61.15 for an initial inventory of twenty-seven items. Fifteen of those twenty-seven items sold the first week for a net profit of $255.70. Twenty-two weeks later, I had turned that $61.15 into a net profit of $8143.39.

Think about that. In essence, I started out with $60 in my pocket, and twenty-two weeks later, without investing another cent, I had a little more than $8000 in that very same pocket.

Anyone can do this! I don’t care who they are, or where they live. If they can drive a car, have Internet access, are willing to do a little research, and then get out of the house a few hours a week, they can do it. They may only have $20 to invest the first week. They may have $200. They may only make $4000 the first twenty-two weeks. They may make $12,000 the first twenty-two weeks.

There are very few opportunities today that allow someone to make a small one-time cash investment and turn that investment into a several thousand dollars in less than six months. With eBay and garage sales someone can do that.

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With the close of last Sunday’s auctions The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge is officially over.

During the last week of The Challenge, there were nineteen garage sale items listed on eBay. Of these, only nine sold for a rather disappointing sell through rate of 47%. These nine items sold for $213.01.

As I stated in The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge - Updated a few days ago, there are still a few garage sale items sitting around that will be listed over the next few weeks. Also, many of the items that didn’t sell have been moved to my eBay store. Some of these items will eventually sell but it will take some time and the additional revenue will not significantly affect the overall results of the Challenge.

Here’s how things look after the final week.

In the end, I fell about $2000 short of the goal of $10,000 that I’d set for myself in the five months between May and September. Was The Challenge a success? Not if you look at it from the standpoint of did I, or did I not, reach the goal I’d set. But, there are some lessons that can be taken from this five-month long process and tomorrow we will look at some of them.

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Over the last couple months, most mentions of Amazon here elicit two or three emails from readers asking what kind of books sell well on there.

I’m certainly a long ways from being an expert on that subject but, over time, I’ve been able to develop an ‘eye’ in some genres of what has a fair chance of doing well on Amazon. However. whenever I try to answer those questions, once I get beyond ‘non-fiction’, I have a hard time generalizing what kind of books I look for. After I hit the ’send email’ button I’m always left with the feeling that I haven’t really been a whole lot of help.

Yesterday evening was the cut-off time for my last two weeks of Amazon sales. I thought I’d list the titles of what I sold on Amazon during the previous two week period in the hope that seeing some actual titles would help interested readers get a better idea of what, for me, generally does well. I’m just cutting and pasting these out of my Amazon stats page, so in some cases, if the book has a long title, the last word or two may be cut off.

So, here goes.

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Once again, here is your chance to brag a little and share with other readers some of the items you sold on eBay last week. By contributing you will also be helping others broaden the scope of what they can be looking for when they are out on the hunt.

Remember, you don’[t have to have three or four-figure, mega-buck, items to participate. Did you sell something for $20 or $30 that you paid one or two dollars for? These are the week-to-week, bread and butter items, everyone needs. You are encouraged to share with other readers. By doing so you help everyone to learn.

Guidelines are the same as they were previously.

• Use the comment section of each week’s Weekly Winners post to tell everyone about your winners.
• Please limit yourself to four items a week.
• I encourage you to include a link to the completed auction (if you don’t know how to do this, see below).
• Share some information about the item with everyone - what it is, where you got it, what you paid for it, what it sold for, etc. Remember, links to closed auctions disappear after a few months, so the more you share regarding price, condition, item description, etc., the more useful your information will be to others once eBay deletes the item from their database.

To insert a hyperlink to your eBay auction simply insert the following code (with your auction URL and item name) where ever you want it in the comment box.

<a href=”CUT AND PASTE THE URL TO YOUR AUCTION HERE”>INSERT DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ITEM HERE (i.e. 53 Dr. Suess Books)</a>

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Over the last few weeks my weekly updates to The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge have been missing from the blog. Earlier today I updated everything and here is how The Challenge looks as it nears it’s end.

The items that were purchased at garage sales during the last week of September are currently listed on eBay and will be ending later this evening. Some of these that don’t sell may be re-listed and I still have one or two dozen garages sale items that didn’t get listed sitting in the office that will eventually be listed. However, there is not anything in the pile that would significantly affect the results of the Challenge.

As you can see from the updated information below, I’m going to fall quite a bit short of my goal of $10,000 in net profit for the summer. I’[ll end up with a little more than $8,000 in profits once tonight’s auctions end and all associated fees have been paid.

Here is how things look with one week of auctions still to end.

Here are the current garage sale items along with what I paid for them. Only some of the items currently on eBay came from garage sales. I went to Antiques Spectacular in St. Paul on dealer’s set up day, Friday the 28th, so some of what is on eBay right now was purchased there.

• 1916 Emanuel Swedish Lutheran Church Cookbook - $1.00
• 1926 M.E. Church Directory and Cookbook - $1.00
• 2 Martial Arts Instruction DVDs - $2.00
• 2 Whataburger Coffee Cups - $.10
• 7 Rothmans Football Yearbooks - $1.75
• A 100 Year Look At Grafton, North Dakota - $2.00
• Anchor Hocking Sandwich Pattern Scalloped Bowl - $.25
• Anchor Hocking Sandwich Pattern Oval Bowl - $.25
• Anchor Hocking Sandwich Pattern Cream & Sugar - $.50
• Building A Good Marriage audio book - $1.00
• Grand Forks County Heritage Book - $5.00
• Hamm’s Beer Ashtray - $.05
• Jadite Refrigerator Dish - $1.00
• Large Classroom Our Picture Book - $3.00
• Light His Fire/Light Her Fire audio books - $2.00
• Prayer & Fasting audio book - $1.00
• Rosemeade cream & sugar - $.50
• The Evangelist Lutheran Church History In America - $.25
• Vintage Pheasant Cocktail Shaker - $1.00

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