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How to: Make the most out eBay gallery

When paying for an additional feature, such as eBay gallery, it is best to get the most out of your investment. The extra fees associated with having a gallery image for each of your auctions really add up. You need to make those images work harder!

Here are 4 tips to get your auction titles clicked:

Drop the rectangle and use a square!

In order to get the largest gallery image available on eBay searches, you are going to have to crop your picture into a square. A square image will completely fill out the space that eBay provides (80 x 80 pixels), and it will look larger than most of the competition. Un-cropped images are typically 50×80 pixels.

Neon Border!

While using the photo editing software of your choice you should take one extra step to make your gallery image POP. Just insert a square border around your gallery image in a bright colour. Think Neon. This will draw even more attention to your auction.

Use a logo!

A great way to build your brand in your auction listing is to add a little logo in the corner, side, top, or bottom of your gallery image. If a logo is not your thing, try a word like “New” or “Sexy” in the image.

Mix it up!

You do not have to use the first picture you feature in your listing as a gallery image. You can crop the picture to highlight a specific aspect of your item. For more details read How To: Picking the Gallery Picture You Want.

Here is a great example taken from recent eBay listings where you can see how changing your eBay gallery picture can really make your title stand out:

Fine tuning your eBay gallery images will be a little more time consuming than what is likely your norm, but it will be worth it when you make more money than competitors selling the same items.

Editors note: In the UK gallery pictures are 64 x 64 pixels

Spring Fair - A sellers visit to source stock

The Spring Fair 2008 is billed as “where the world of retail loves to shop”. The feeling I got from some suppliers was that this is only the case, if you are not an online retailer and even more not if you sell on, dare we mention it? eBay! But I’ll discuss that later.

First of all the show is huge, I have to admit that this was our firtt foray into the world of trade fairs, so we have no previous experience to draw from, but it seemed vast to us. There were over 20 halls of exhibitors filled with categories such as Contemporary Gifts & Collections, Gifts, Fashion Accessories, Wellbeing, Festive & Floral, Volume Retail, International, Kitchen & Dining, Home Gifts & Interiors, Garden Living, Gallery (the list goes on).

The NEC itself is phenomenally well organised, parking was a cinch on both days, shuttle buses running regularly from the car parks to the halls to save the walk (we chose the exercise). Traffic in and out of the area was good too, apart from tonight (Tues) the M42 was slow because of the heavy rain (but thats an act of God right?) If you are considering attending a show at the NEC and are unsure about it’s accessibility I would whole heartedly recommend giving it a go, I’m sure you would find it a stress free visit.

When we arrived we were rather overawed by the sheer number of halls and the size of the show itself, so we spent most of the 1st day aimlessly wandering around doing a lot of “ooing”!

On our way back to the car at the end of the first day, we noticed a show guide for sale at £15, ouch! But as we felt we had barely scratched the surface in terms of potential stalls to see and found that it was difficult to orientate ourselves when in the halls, we decided that we would invest in a guide and use it that evening to plan our attack for the following day. We did this and found that the categorising of products and maps of each hall helped pinpoint people to see and the best route round the halls.

On the second day we had our list of exhibitors we wanted to see and locations for their stalls and found that this worked MUCH better and we were able to get round almost all on the stalls our list. As we are “newbies” we wanted to practice our approach to the exhibitors, as we were a little nervous about our credibility due to how long (or short as is the case) we had been trading and our status as ebay sellers. We did not plan to thrust ebay on them immediately and gauge the reaction to our being an “online retailer”, with multiple routes to market, which is actually true in a way, as we sell on ebay, amazon, play and are developing our own website.

With this in mind we chose the International Hall where this year there has been a large increase in the number of exhibitors from China. For some reason it was much easier approaching people whose first language was not English! I have to admit to using this hall as a bit of a warm up, but left feeling that had we been serious about buying some of the items on display, language would have been a huge hurdle as most of the exhibitors seemed to get by with a big grin and the thrusting of a brochure.

We moved into a hall called Volume Retail and this is where some of the more interesting discussions took place. Most of the exhibitors were polite asking for a card and promising contact within a week after the show etc, but a couple point blank refused to engage with us because we were “online retailers”.

One who did not know that we sold on ebay confessed, “Some people are not online retailers, they just wanna sell the stuff on ebay and no one wants to see their stuff being sold on ebay!” I was actually quite stunned at this, as I was not talking to Gucci Homewares, but a company that made simple but funky picture frames and plaques with poems on, that retailed between £2.00 and £8.00!

The majority of the people we spoke to were ok with the idea of us being “online” but assumed we had a warehouse, which we did little to correct, as it was they, who had made the assumptions. I have to admit to still feeling a little deflated by the negative comments made by the couple of exhibitors who we wanted to get a relationship with and also could not help but question why they seemed to have their heads in the sand in terms of the potential for supplying internet only companies and the incredible growth of on line retail.

On the whole the experience was positive and we think we may get some “leads” to follow up.

The rise and fall of Auctioning4u

There is a lot of discussion of franchised versus company owned trading assistant models – I believe that discussion to be beside the point; the real question is if one can run a commercially viable trading assistant business (we know it works as a hobby from home).

Our Consumer Segment

The initial idea was to help consumers sell unwanted possessions on eBay. We started the business almost at the same time as Auctiondrop in America and Dropshop in Germany. We became a Trading Assistant business in April 2003 and soon opened our first shop in West London.

At the height of our consumer activity we had 13 locations; 11 in Greater London, one in Manchester and one in Brighton. Some of these were 3rd party locations in storage companies, some company owned stores and two were franchised.

We also had a fleet of four home collection vans. We exited the business in 2007, the shops in the summer and the vans around October. We sold the brand Auctioning4u at the end of the year to the operators of Serial Sellers who trade on a smaller scale from South London.

Main Issues

• Consumer Acceptance

  In our experience there are principally two groups of users: those who don’t want to pay for a service they could provide themselves (even if more often then not do not follow through) and those who value their own time and therefore have no problem paying for services. The latter group however is time poor and/or cannot be bothered to bring their unwanted possessions in.

  The only attractive consumer segments are those that undergo a life changing event such as a move, relocation, death in the family or children leaving the house. Most of these are hard to market to; we found only the relocation market to be attractive – the target market is affluent, time poor prior to the move and everything has to go before leaving the country.

• VeRO

  The current VeRO programme (eBay’s programme to allow brand owners to stop sales of counterfeits and trademark infringing items) makes it impossible to run a sizeable trading assistant business. The combination of the sheer size of the problem (more than 18,000 firms monitoring eBay for alleged infringements), the lack of any incentives of those firms to show restraint in their take-down actions and eBay’s three strikes out policy are lethal.

  eBay closed our main eBay shop four times over the years meaning almost unbearable pain and costs for a trading assistant. As an emergency measure we had to stop taking fashion items in the summer last year making the shops unviable. But even non-fashion items will become a problem over time.

  I believe that as a matter of policy auction sites such as eBay need to be put on the same footing as ISPs; i.e. brands should be allowed to serve take-down notices but sellers should equally be able to defend themselves by declaring the item to be genuine or not infringing a trademark. If the brand feels strong enough they then ought to take the seller to court but leave the auction site outside. With the current legal framework it is just a question of time until general auction sites will have to close due to legal risks (try selling a Tiffany product these days on eBay and you will understand what I refer to). Unless the VeRO issues are going away I do not think that it is possible to offer services to consumers on a commercial basis.

Our Charity Segment

With Blue Ocean Solutions we had a strong partner in the charity segment and at our peak served more than 200 charity shops. However, the value of donations was never sufficient and training the charities proved too difficult (our charity shops had an average of 18 employees, most with very little IT skills). The fact that being a trading assistant is labour intensive and charities principally do not pay for their labour did not help. We started to close our programme at the end of 2006 and I do not believe that a charity programme can work on commercial terms.

Business Segment

Started in 2005 this segment soon became the most important part of the business. This month alone we sold more than £500,000 of eBay GMV. That being said we believe that the VeRO problems also impact this business. We have had significant problems selling fashion items or other luxury products for a number of our clients including department stores and jewellery companies (we even tried to sell a product for one brand owner only to be stopped by one of the same brand owner’s employee through the VeRO programme) and were so worried that we sold off all non consumer electronic and IT clients to XS Items, a competitor in late 2007. Another problem is the fact that eBay is only a partial solution for companies’ problem stock (returns and overstock); most of the times clients will have stock that either has no market on eBay or cannot be sold due to its low value.

The high number of Non Paying Bidders also added to our problems rising to 15% in the last few months (eBay sellers should be able to insist on immediate payment, which would be no different to any other ecommerce site).

This segment made profits for the company; particularly once we had specialised (in consumer electronics and other IT equipment through our brand Clocktronix and in vintage and collectible toys through our brand The Toy Auctioneer).

Closing

In the end our overhead costs put in place when we had wanted to built a national network, in particular our 45,000 sq.ft. processing centres and marketing costs to build the Auctioning4u brand and the relative low margins on the business segment made new investments into the company an unappealing choice and leave the board no other choice than to close.

eBay accounts made simple with Tradebox

Like many established eBay sellers, we are always looking for ways to streamline our processes and maximise profit. Whether this is sourcing our products from suppliers who can give us the greatest discounts or finding the most economical method of shipping, the need to maintain competitive pricing drives us to trim excess everywhere we can. Every aspect of our operation was placed under this ‘profitability’ microscope, including time costs. The most significant time cost was accounting for our sales, which had started to become a barrier to growth. Like many SMEs we used Sage Line 50, which gave us an impressive control over our stock and financials but required quite a bit of data input.

The discovery of Tradebox Finance Manager for eBay removed this issue, literally overnight. Tradebox links directly with our eBay account and automatically compiles our sales data in Sage saving us about 2 days administration every week. Tradebox creates all customer and invoice records in Sage, depletes our stock for each product we sell, downloads all our eBay and PayPal fees, automatically calculates the VAT liability and provides us with separate analysis on our eBay sales.

Because of the automation and time savings, Tradebox has allowed us to really enhance the power of Sage Line 50 which has now become central to our sales operation. We now synchronise Tradebox with eBay twice a day; once in the morning and once in the afternoon. All new sales which are downloaded are allocated for dispatch, a delivery note and invoice printed and the product shipped to the buyer. At the same time our stock is depleted, allowing providing us advanced warning of when to re-order from our suppliers. Using Tradebox and Sage also allows us to automatically categorise our sales to separate categories within our accounts, as well as providing us with a raft of analysis which examines and compares monthly sales income, monthly unit sales, individual product performance, analysis of income against fees, a breakdown of fees etc. We have used Tradebox for nearly 2 years now and it has had a significant impact on our eBay sales operation. The support is excellent and new features, which are intelligently thought out to enrich the solution, are routinely released.

“I have to question their timing”

Julianne Moleski runs Toy Town Express eBay Shop and website, as well as having a B&M toy shop in South Shields. Today she gives us her thoughts on eBay’s recent changes to fees in the Toys category.

When last week Ebay held a ‘backstage party’ it was mentioned that the fees for Toys categories would be changed. As an old dog it’s hard to adjust your business plans to change but also exciting. Especially when the word reduce is mentioned.

It has been a long hard summer in the toy category, to the point on occasions fees outweighed the profit. A lot of the long standing toy businesses operate where you tread through 9 months of the year and make your profit in just three months. eBay is an ideal platform for part time sellers who can just sell for those three months. Some of us are in it all year. The satisfaction you get from that is you do have return customers who do buy all year long, or have a birthday in say March to buy from, they can come back to you. Good Old Toy Town Express will have it in stock, and be open!

When the fee structure was announced this week, my stomach dropped as I read the FVFs’ increase.

The initial shock comes from the dates that are announced. Even before doing number crunching in your mind it goes “if I sell such and such, great I save 10p on the listing fee, but in those months I know it will sell so it’s actually going to cost me more.”

After a few (ok a lot) of deep breaths and quite a long conversation with my eBay account manager, I started looking at my figures and working it out.

As with all things, some it will work in favour of and some it won’t. What will make the difference is whether this is just until the New Year, or whether it will become a permanent change.

If this was announced in June, I would have likely said eBay, you are wonderful! Announce it in October and I wasn’t best pleased. Spread this over a year and yes, it will be a benefit to me.

So, although I resist initial changes especially when this time of year comes around, I can see the logic behind it, but I really do have to question their timing and wording…. “Selling fees are now more closely based on your selling success in the Photography and Toys & Games categories.” From my workings, the more success the more you pay BUT under the current climate if a lot of us could be more successful we would be willing to pay that bit more.

Another question that has to be raised is, it will encourage a lot more inexperienced sellers on eBay, whilst at the same time, Amazon have implemented stringent criteria for sellers on their site over the Christmas months. I have to be honest, what Amazon did not only make me feel a little bit special but it gave me something to strive for. It has also reassured me that at my busiest and hair-ripping-out time, they are looking out for my customers.

I think the clinch will be to see whether the dates for these fee changes are extended or not.

Insight on ChannelAdvisor Insite

Bev and Andy Toogood are successful eBay PowerSellers trading as Little Sunflowers as well as running their own website and a retail outlet in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. Yesterday Andy took time out to attend the ChannelAdvisor Insite conference in London and today shared his take on the day with TameBay.

ChannelAdvisor Insite has the stated aim of ‘providing you with the information you need to build the most successful online business and encourage exponential growth’. Whilst I wouldn’t say I came away feeling as though that was achieved in 8 hours yesterday it was a fantastic day with good insight into current trends and the opportunity to network with other sellers sharing experiences and finding solutions to problems with people who have been there before.

My own driver for attending was about trying to keep up-to-date with information in an ever changing e-commerce landscape and with some hope to pick up a few pieces of information that would improve our own offering. Things change so quickly that it’s hard to keep up, even from week to week, and this event certainly provided lots and lots of very good information on what’s going on where with tidbits of information thrown in on how to improve your own online presence.

What impressed me most and has done so in the past with ChannelAdvisor events is that whilst the organization clearly offers solutions for just about everything that is ecommerce they always steer well clear of promoting or even entering into discussion on what they offer as solutions during any of the sessions. This makes the events a pleasure to attend because rather than feeling as though you’re in the middle of a sales pitch it is pure information provision and advisors are always eager to offer advice and assistance whether you are a ChannelAdvisor client or not.

Would I recommend attending? Yes, I would. For £49 it’s very good value for money and you definitely won’t regret it.

There are four more opportunities to attend ChannelAdvisor Insite this year in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and Dublin.

eBay University update!

eBay University and the timetable in particular has always been and will always be an iterative process, based on the feedback we get both on and after the day.

There was a big change in how the event was run in 2006 and now in 2007 – namely that last year those that came to University had a choice of just three classes, which ran all day. The challenge with this is that not all of the content will be relevant to all of the people all of the time – maybe a panacea to try to aim for this, but we wanted to. This led to the decision in 2007 to offer a variety of ‘select yourself a class’ where an attendee can choose which session to attend, and although indicating at the time of booking, they are free to change their mind, even during the class!

Coventry was the first ‘run out’ of the new format and from this we learned a great deal. Primarily that most people want to attend the ‘Power Hour’ at the end of the day, so it doesn’t make sense to run other sessions at the same time – and aside from that it’s a great way to end the day. We also found that running the same class twice resulted in a much lower turnout the second time round – and when you have lots of content to try and cram into one day, for London we decided this no longer made sense. We also dropped the Selling Manager Pro session, as this was covered elsewhere on the day – but not to such depth – although as University is an iterative process it may well return.

The one challenge that will always remain is that someone cannot go to all of the classes in one day and this is why all of the content (and more) is on the disc that you get when you attend the event. Of course, it’s not quite the same as having a presenter walk you through it but it is better than missing out on it all together.

I am sure that the timetable will be tweaked for both the Glasgow and Manchester events in the second half of the year – both to meet the demands of those that attend and as we bring out further products and information that we think our community may want to hear about. We will always notify those who have already booked and the information will be on www.eBay.co.uk/university, and we shall let Tamebay know, of course!

Are Auctiva spamming your customers?

Steve Seddon sells audio books from his eBay shop, Okantfoss Audios, and uses Auctiva to showcase his entire range on individual listings. But they’ve been causing him problems…

Many sellers use Auctiva’s services, whether for picture hosting, scheduling, templates or just - as I do - the free scrolling gallery. Recently Auctiva launched a new service: after a sale, they email the winning bidder to confirm the sale and request payment.

Most professional sellers will already be using either eBay’s order confirmation & request for payment emails or their own system, particularly if the only service they use is the scrolling gallery. Another email from a company the buyer doesn’t recognise (maybe we’re getting to the point here) can only be overkill.

Auctiva have by default opted every user “in” to this new service, even if they only ever use the scrolling gallery. They have not publicised the launch to their users, or told users that they need to go into their Auctiva account and disable the setting if they don’t want these emails to be sent to their buyers.

If Auctiva sending spam payment request emails without your permission to your customers isn’t bad enough, these emails are going out weeks after the sale was concluded. Understandably, buyers receiving reminders about orders they’ve paid, received and almost forgotten about, are not happy. Even after opting out, (remember these emails are going out weeks late) the emails keep going right up until the date you switched them off. So, in my case, that’s two more weeks of time wasted answering worried buyers’ emails.

There’s little that can be done now except to switch the emails off and keep reassuring the buyers. But I’ll think twice before allowing a third party free access to my buyers again.

Vero to zero in one eBay step

Nici Smith has been trading on eBay for more than three years, running a successful shop selling gifts, gadgets and novelty items. Then, overnight, everything she had worked so hard to build was taken away from her - by an eBay program supposed to fight fraud and fakes.

On December 13th 2006 my eBay business gadgets-and-gifts-uk was shut down overnight by the VeRO department at eBay for a trademark infringement. The company who had challenged my business was based in America, and the infringement? Well, that would be an alleged breech of copyright over a light shaped like a part-melted ice cube.

After shaking, crying, ranting and raving, I eventually calmed down and took matters in hand. Thankfully I am a member of the Federation of Small Businesses so I was able to use their free legal advice line to assist.

The rights owner was, in all fairness, very helpful; he was horrified that his VeRO infringement notices had closed my business during the busiest trading week of the year . He had only wanted the offending listings to be removed. So he employed his UK lawyer to contact VeRO to try and sort the situation out. The lawyer wrote urgent e-mails to VeRO to no avail, and could not believe that a department of this nature had no publicly available contact numbers at all.

I was informed later that allegedly the rights owner had just lost an EU court battle to stop my supplier from selling the product I had bought. The UK patent office said that it would be impossible to claim a UK patent for a light up ice cube and virtually impossible to claim UK copyright for a partially melted ice cube as the design is too generic. This VeRO was nothing to do with trademark infringement; it was all about market share.

To cut a very long story short, the business sat out its suspension, and re-opened a week later. When my eBay account was reinstated, everything had gone. All my listings had simply vanished, my shop had been closed and everything had to be redone from scratch. A few days before Christmas, I wanted to be packing my last couple of parcels and putting my feet up, not trying to rescue my income from Hurricane VeRO.

This wasn’t my first run in with VeRO. I have had a few over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, the first you hear about the possibility that you are infringing a trademark, for an item you’ve bought from a UK supplier in good faith, is when it is removed from eBay. By this time, the black mark has already gone against your ID. I have never wilfully infringed any trademark, patent or copyright and have always complied and removed offending items. Not one VeRO has been for counterfeit or fake goods which is what the program was intended for. All have been for market manipulation. VeRO don’t get involved in the decision as to whether your item infringes a trademark; they simply remove the listing on the instruction of the person claiming to be the rights owner. And unfortunately I don’t have the finances to challenge eBay legally.

Read more

Going solo

Andrea has been an eBayer for over three years and recently took the step from part time eBay seller with full time employment to full time eBayer. Today she shares her story of how redundancy spurred her on to success. Andrea is a full time business-registered PowerSeller with over 11,000 feedback from over 8,000 seperate buyers.

For me, taking the next step to being a full time eBayer was simply that. Taking that step. Working two full-time jobs, i.e. as an eBayer and as a market research exec was taking its toll on me. 9 to 5 in the office with a three hour round commuting trip five days a week and then working evenings, weekends and lunch hours eBaying was slowly but surely draining me. I got up at 6.30am and went to bed at 1am with a lie in on Sunday (midnight to 7am). The worst of it was that I NEVER had time for the children. As a single parent, that was the criminal aspect of how I was leading my life! Something had to give eventually.

I was a bit of a coward, I ‘downsized’ my off-line job and became a Regional Manager for the same company – looking after interviewers and mystery shoppers in the field, which meant I could work from home. All this meant was that I managed to cut out the three hour daily commute. It brought its own problems though. Working from home in my off-line job meant dealing with interviewer problems etc in the evenings and the weekends as well as during the day. I was also earning less than half of my previous wage. Which was good in a way, because it showed me that my eBaying was actually able to sustain me. My off-line job wage now reverted to becoming my pin money. However, I STILL wasn’t spending time with my children. Not properly, anyway. I was at home – but at my computer the whole time.

Finally, October 2006, my company closed its field department and now outsource that aspect to another company. So I was made redundant. Best thing that could have happened really. I now work from home, eBaying full time, but now with the added ability of being able to schedule eBay and my personal life to really suit me. I can now work harder on it, I can list more because I am now able to cope with more sales, I can spend time on proper customer service, my mistakes are almost non-existant (I was forever sending out the wrong thing to the wrong person, or sending out only one when two were ordered etc). I am able to concentrate on getting a real off-eBay website set up and can now factor in some other retail projects for 2007 properly, i.e. book myself onto a whole lot of Festivals.

All in all I am very VERY glad to have been made redundant. I don’t think I would have had the nerve to do it without that shove – I used my off-line job as a crutch for way too long. I wish had been brave so I could have done it all earlier…and by myself.

The best of it all, of course, is that I now have time for the children. We have a LOT of things planned for 2007 for us as a family and I CAN’T WAIT! They are the reason I worked myself into the ground in the first place and they are the reason I realised that my life had to radically change to fit them into it.

If you are working two jobs and are on the verge of going solo, I would say go for it IF it means you can make MORE of your e-tail business if you do. It might be an idea to downsize first, i.e. take on a part-time job or find a job that you can do from home first. Do your accounts properly, so that you know exactly what you need to do to go solo. You need to be sure that the time you give up being employed will make a real difference to you as a full time e-tailer. You need to be sure that you can live off your earnings as well as keep investing back into the business. You need to also love being on your own, eBaying is a fairly anti-social business – no colleagues to throw paper-clips or to roll your eyes at when the boss is having a go! Finally, your foundations for being able to do so must be your reasons for doing so – they must far outweigh any reasons for not doing so.

“Safeguarding Members IDs is not a licence to shill”

Sean_Coolness has been an eBay member since 2001, and describes himself as “addicted”. Specialising in motorcycles, he feels strongly that eBay should do everything they can to protect his customers from the fake ’second chance offers’ which have left too many people with no goods and no money. Here are his thoughts.

Let me first say that I totally agree with eBay’s new Safeguarding Members’ IDs policy, because it stops fake second chance offers dead!

Sellers of high value items, like myself, suffer greatly from scammers sending out fake second chance offers to underbidders. The scammers had the underbidders’ IDs from the items bid history, and could see just how much that person had bid. So it was pretty easy for them to send out a fake email which looked identical to eBay’s own. Too many people have fallen foul of this, and enough of them, sellers and bidders alike, have complained about it that eBay have finally taken action.

This is a controversial decision which many think gives the seller greater scope for shill bidding. This simply isn’t true.

In the new style bid history, there is a link to each bidders’ bid history, showing their activity not just with the current seller, but with any seller. So if a seller is using a second account to push up the price, which is what shill bidding is all about, it will show. You can see how many times the bidder has bid on this seller’s items, how many other sellers’ items they have bid on, and other such information which was previously hard work to compile from the various searches available in advanced search.

In fact, a glance you can see the whole bidding activity of the bidder, and in far more detail than previously readily available. Coupled with eBay stopping private feedback, this actually reduces the scope for dodgy sellers to push prices up by shill bidding.

It has also been said by others that shill bidding is a “lesser” crime than fake second chance offers, as people who enter their maximum bid, and stick to it, can’t be pushed higher by shill bidding. Where as with fake second chance offers, people have been ripped off for hundreds and even thousand of pounds. I’m not so sure I agree with this, but I do understand the sentiments.

So, with the bidder’s identity hidden from general view, is it still possible to see if a seller is shill bidding, or getting a mate to regularly bid up their auctions? The answer is basically yes:

1) Using the link provided by eBay you can see how many different items and the number of sellers the bidder has bid on. If the bidder has only ever bid on one seller’s auctions, but has bid on many different items, you can draw your own conclusion.

2) If a high value item is re-listed a good number of times, I would suspect the dodgy seller has “won” their own item in their efforts to push the price higher than genuine bidders are willing to pay. Remember there are a number of legitimate reasons why a seller has to re-list an item once or twice, so this isn’t a hard and fast rule.

3) Common sense. Never underestimate your gut feeling.

Finally, not all sellers of 99p no reserve auctions are dodgy sellers; some of us use it as a sales pitch to generate more interest in our items
Sean_Coolness

In the beginning, there was Graham…

Back in 1996, gf-attic registered on eBay, one of the earliest people in the UK to do so. He soon became the UK’s first powerseller, and he still trades on the site today. eBay celebrated his achievement with a birthday cake. Here he reflects on his ten years’ trading.

Things were pretty tough in the UK antique trade a decade ago. The mainstay of most British dealers, the foreign trade, had stopped coming and it was clear that the nostalgia boom of the 1980s was well and truly over.

I’d already lived on fat for a couple of years and it was almost in desperation that I signed up for eBay’s new fangled auction-on-line service.

Ten years later I’m still there.

And it’s been an easy ride with my customers.

I reasoned early on that asking a buyer to send money to a foreign country to someone they didn’t know for something they hadn’t seen wasn’t going to work without building some trust. I started taking part in collector groups, especially for sewing related subjects and soon started dedicated forums where I could field questions about sewing machines.

It’s worked. In those 10 years I’ve not had a single negative feedback and, more importantly not a single non-paying buyer. Got my first neutral last week just in time for my 10th anniversary.

This isn’t all due to my business practices – a lot is a result of my customers being in that middle age to senior comfort range that insurance companies love so much. But this does mean that are not always too savvy in the ways of e-commerce and a lot of hand holding is required.

Most customers are American and so I list on the US site and in US dollars and am happy to take personal checks. The prospect of paying for international shipping is solved by simply not charging for it. OK, FREE shipping isn’t really free, it’s built into the reserve/starting price but it’s a real attraction to Mr and Mrs Middle America.

And there’s nothing ambiguous about my terms and conditions. There can’t be — I haven’t got any. They pay, I send. It’s as simple at that.

Graham Forsdyke aka gf-attic

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  • northumbrian: I am buggered if I know where you all find the time from I am lucky to squeeze in the 10 o clock news...
  • DBL: Typical, I’m back at the same hotel I was at for SB2.0 next Sat/Sun always the same, a week too late I...
  • ebuyerfb: If I had to speculate eBay made the initial policy for the reasons they’ve stated. Now that it seems...
  • Sue Bailey: Steve, I don’t know - I can only go by the announcement eBay make (and give em a few days to...
  • John Pemberton: #17 Hi Nick - please see my comment made( #11). 99% of our shipping is via Interlink Express. I use...
  • Steve: Sue, you mention “ten listings per seller per search results page.” results pages of what size? my...
  • John Pemberton: sounds logical to me!
  • Sue Bailey: Chris, is two months’ notice enough? The next one’s 15th Jan - see you there.
  • chris o'D: Can we have some more notice next time - sounds interesting Chris
  • Chris Dawson: #17 All the details are at http://www.meetup.co m/ebayuk/ Well volunteered to take minutes and report...

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