5 Mistakes You Want to Avoid Making on EBay

After hearing so many success stories about people selling items on Ebay, I decided to see what all of the rave was about. I enthusiastically signed up for an EBay account and listed 6 items for sale with the intention of selling at least 3 of the 6 items. At the end of the listing I felt disheartened and bitter. My EBay endeavor did not go as intended. I made many mistakes along the way but I learned from them all. I have decided to share my mistakes with the public so that anyone new to Ebay will not make the same mistakes that I made.

1. If you decide to include free shipping on your listing make sure that your profits exceed any shipping cost. For example, I sold a shirt on EBay for $5.00 but I included free shipping. The shirt ended up costing $4.90 to ship which means I made a meager ten cents out of the deal!

2. Set a Reserve Price on every auction listing. When you list an item on Ebay you have the choice of setting a reserve price. A reserve price is the lowest price that you are willing to sell your item for. Say you list a shirt at $5.00 but when the auction ends the shirt sells at $2.32, the price that you sold your shirt for does not meet your reserve price of $5.00 which means that you do not have to sell the shirt. If you do not set a reserve price (in the auction bidding format) you will have to take whatever the highest bidder bids for the item.

3. Use the Shipping Calculator. EBay allows users to use a shipping calculator. The shipping calculator helps users determine the shipping cost for their items. It allows users to determine the costs for shipping different sizes of items ranging from one pound up to ten pounds. If you use the shipping calculator you never have to worry about under pricing the shipping costs for your items.

4. Avoid packing your items in oversized packages. For example, I placed a children's sized dress into a medium sized box and had to pay near $7 to ship the dress which sold for just $5. The post office offers free flat rate boxes of varying sizes. You can stuff as much as you can into these boxes for one flat rate. These boxes will save you a great deal of money.

5. Avoid selling similar items without testing the water. Maybe you have a dozen pair of jeans that you want to sell. You should not list every single pair of jeans that you have at first, instead list one pair of jeans and see how well those jeans sell. If the jeans sell well then list two more pairs and if those sell well list more and so on. It costs money to list items on eBay so you want to make sure that your item will sell well before listing it.