Chapter 3: Listing Items for Sale

In This Chapter

  • Organizing your sales
  • Prepping for the listing
  • Setting up a solid description
  • Making changes after the sale is posted

Are you ready to make some money? Yes? (Call it an inspired guess.) Are you on the threshold of adding your items to the hundreds of thousands that go up for auction (or fixed-price sale) on eBay every day? Some items are so hot that the sellers quadruple their investments. Other items, unfortunately, are so stone-cold that they may not even register a single bid.

In this chapter, I explain all the facets of the Sell an Item page — the page you fill out to get your merchandise up for sale. You get some advice that can increase your odds of making money, and you find out the best way to position your item so buyers can see it, bid on it, or buy it outright. I also show you how to modify, relist, and end your listing.

Getting Ready to List Your Item

After you decide what you want to sell, find out as much as you can about it and conduct a little market research. Then you should have a good idea of the item's popularity and value.

Before you list, make sure that you have the following bases covered:

  • The specific category under which you want the item listed: Ask your friends or family where they'd look for such an item — and remember the categories that were most successful when you conducted your market research with the eBay search function. Using a product UPC (or ISBN) number when you search may also give you ...

Get eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.