Take Your Half.Com Or Ebay Business to the Next Level. Tips You Can Use Now!

Learn how to eliminate crooked buyers, maximize positive feedback ratings, minimize product returns, and create happy customers who tell their friends and come back for more! Make more money, more efficiently, with less hassles on Half.com and Ebay.com!

Half.com VS Ebay.

If you already know how Ebay and Half.com works, feel free to skip down a section. Half.com is an Internet-based entity, similar to Ebay in a lot of ways, yet distinct in others. Like Ebay, an individual can sell new or used items for fun or profit, and purchase products at a significant discount. This is usually done through an online auction set-up, but a seller can also set-up a "Buy it Now" price where a buyer can pay a set price. Half.com is set up this way, to sell at a set cost. The ways Half.com are different, is the limited merchandise available to buy or sell, merchandise is set at a fixed price and not auction-able, shipping fees are set by Half.com, and the fees are substantially lower that Ebay.

As stated above, you can buy or sell; text, fiction, or nonfiction books; DVD or Blue Ray movies; compact disk (CD) music; Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation I, II, or III, Nintendo DS, et. el., video games. By the time this article is published, some categories may be eliminated or new ones added--such is the way of dealing with an Ebay business. You just have to learn to roll with the punches. The following strategies will work for virtually any product you want to market on Half.com or Ebay.com.

Tips And Strategies:

The PDA, How Did You Ever Get Along Without It.

A PDA can be an invaluable, asset in either an Ebay or Half.com business. Whether you buy your inventory at a thrift store, flea market or yard sale, you could use it to pull up the going-price in real-time and not have to guess an item's current worth before buying it. And you can write off the device on your taxes, because you will officially be running a small business. For books purchases, I like to search it's worth through the items ISBN number, located along with the published date on the title page. Occasionally you'll have to do a title search because, for whatever reason, it won't come up under the ISBN.

Imagine This...

It is feasible that you could find a great purchase, list it right there in the store, pay for it and sell it before you get home! Imagine doing that about 10 times a day! It could happen, if you price your merchandise right and don't get to greedy. A little greedy is OK, as long as it's a win-win for both you and the customer.

Express Yourself.

When listing an item on Half.com, or Ebay, make detailed notes in the comments section. If you have a teacher's edition book, let people know. Also list if it has an accompanying CD, the edition and date, and a detailed description of the books condition.

For books and other merchandise as well, notate if you're a quick shipper, if you ship with Delivery Confirmation for tracking, if you use quality packaging (IE book box), if you ship overseas etc. It's important to be a full service company-it keeps your customers happy and coming back for more, and they may even tell their friends about you.

Send The Crooks Packing.

When shipping the products that you sold through Half.com or Ebay.com, always ship with Delivery Confirmation, unless you're shipping with Insurance, Registered Mail, COD, or Certified Mail, as they will be tracked using that particular method anyway. Delivery Confirmation is a cheap and effective way to track your shipped items on the Internet at USPS.com. This is great for your customer to keep a bead on the expected package as to when it will show up. It is great for you because unethical individuals, I call them crooks, will often make a buy, receive the item and claim it never showed up. With Delivery Confirmation, you can track it yourself online and if they claim it got lost, the Postal Service will track it for you to verify their claim. Just include a line somewhere in you comments section of your listing, with something like, "I ship all products with Delivery Confirmation for online tracking." This will help keep most unscrupulous thugs away.

The Fine Art Of Keeping Good Customers.

Ebay and Half.com are both Feedback driven sites, meaning, the best sellers will have the most positive feedback and will get the greatest number of return customers and new customers alike. Nobody wants to deal with someone on a continual basis, who is going to be a hassle to work with, right? The best way to get positive Feedback, is to be a consistent man or woman-of-your-word. This means, mean what you say and say what you mean, remembering the golden rule, which is, treat people the way you want to be treated and you'll go along way in the online selling business.

Nothing Surer Than Death And Taxes.

Because you are operating a small business, you can write off your vehicle when traveling to pickup products, your computer when listing and handling sales, part of your household for a home office, a section of your garage for storage, etc. Consult your tax agent of research online at www.irs.com for more business write offs. Half.com makes tax season easy, by organizing all your sales for the year for you. Find this in My Account, under Selling, press the hyperlink Sales. Ebay also has a similar function.

Conclusion.

I hope that these strategies for successful business practices will help you to become a better Ebayer and/or Halfer. Cheers.