The New ebay: The Official Guide to Buying, Selling, Running a Profitable Business

Chapter 25

Listing your products and managing inventory

In part III we covered basic selling procedures, including listing your products for sale. As you will have noticed, this was a fairly manual process and not scalable for listing large volumes of product. Some of eBay’s larger sellers list thousands, even millions, of products on the sites, and there are ways to do this more efficiently than by entering every single product into the Sell your item form, as covered in part III. Let’s begin with the information you should include within your listing.

Create a professional listing

When you’re operating a professional eBay business, your product listings need to be the equivalent of a high-end retail catalogue. Polished, well-designed and comprehensive listings instil buyer confidence and help you secure initial, and repeat, sales. As well as completing every section of eBay’s selling form template (such as item specifics and returns), here are a few non-negotiable inclusions for serious business sellers.

Photography must be of the highest standard, with clean, crisp images and natural lighting, like something you would see in a retail catalogue. Upload large photos (a minimum of 1600 pixels per side) so buyers can enlarge them to see finer detail. Include multiple photos to show different angles, styles and close-up details (such as colour and material patterns).

Comprehensive product information, with every conceivable piece of information about the product, should ...