Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

I attended an official eBay Univeristy’s “Advanced Selling For Serious Seller” course this past Saturday. Although the presenter was very good at telling real life eBay stories, I felt that majority of the stuff can be found on the web and other free sources. If you have already opened up a store or having been selling for a while, this course isn’t going to be advanced at all for you. So spend your 60 bucks elsewhere.

The only good thing about that course is the small booklet we received as part of the cource offering. Although they didn’t put a lot of juicy selling secrets in the booklet, it is a pretty comprehensive guide to teach you a structured way to sell, package, avoid negative feedbacks, dealing with unpaid buyers, etc…

A few tips I learned from the course that I didn’t know before:

1. Hot list. You can download ebay’s hottest sales each month via pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf
2. You can sell marked tome stones, but you can’t dig a stone out of a grave yard and sell it.
3. How to use second chance offer to the lower bidders since they are your potential serious buyers.
4. Combine shipping is the best discount/promotion you can give to the buyers if selling multiple items.
5. Some sellers actually put the following sentence in every listing :” Do not bid on my items unless you understand my strick policies.” Nothing turns away bidders faster than using phrases such as “Do not bid”
6. Don’t list the same item at the same time unless you expect to sell multiple at the sametime. Why competing with yourself?
7. Buy It Now is a good feature to have. It encourages buyers to bid. But use it only when you are absolutely sure about the price and add a couple of dollars to the usual price
8. Items with Reserve price tend to turn away buyers
9. Have a return policy and charge 15% or higher restocking fee.
10. You can sell Harrison Ford’s autograph, but you can’t sell his canceled check with his signature on it. You need Harrison’s permission to do that.