As some of you may be aware, I am just a private geek who buys and sells handsets with my own money, and just for fun. Over the years I have managed to almost always get back most of my money, and in a few rare cases, even turn a tiny profit, although these days if you take eBay and Paypal fees into account, this is rare. A little warning here, so of these tips might not be 100% within the spirit of the rules, although I have personally not had anything worse than the odd pulled auction, please be careful.
In my last 60 days view, I have sold a Nokia 5800, and N900, plus a Nexus One and a Nokia E72, and the total of these is just over £1300.
Of course, I do tend to buy and sell the very latest handsets while they are still hot, so I do very well. I think one of the most important things is your feedback, not just a very high number, but how you got the feedback. Mine is currently 100%, and with 164 feedbacks mostly for high value items, I can exploit that. If you are just starting out on eBay, you may not be able to get away with some of the tricks and tips here, but in time you can.
OK, so eBay is an Auction site right? Well, of course, but would it surprise you that I have never sold a single item via auction? Its true, all my items are sold via BIN (buy it now) fixed price listings.
In addition to this, every listing I do is set for immediate pay via PayPal what this means is simply that a buyer can not actually end your sale without completing the PayPal checkout screen, and I find that this stops idiots and children hitting BIN with no intention of every buying, thus ending your sale. Given that I find that you get very little interest in the first few days, (I use 7 day listings), this is very annoying, and before I started using Immediate Payment, it used to happen often. So, the first thing I do is search eBay for the phone I am selling and then filter by Completed Items. It is not enough to just look down and choose to sell at the highest price, first of all take a really good look at the Completed Listing, and see if it it what I call a real sale. A real sale I hear you cry, surely all completed listings with a green value are completed sales? Absolutely not.
Lets say I am selling the Nokia 5800, I will search for 5800, select UK only, and then select Completed. I also put an amount in the first price box, say £45, whatever figure you want, all it does is filters out the silly cases and 99p accessories that have 5800 in them! You don't have to put a value in the second price box BTW, just leave it blank.
I then end up with a list of 5800's that have in theory just sold in the UK, above £45 in date order, with the most recent first. I then look closely at some of those, and rule out any that I consider to be bogus. They are rather easy to spot, you will get some that are silly high priced, and when you look at them, you see something like "this user is no longer registered on eBay" meaning someone has done a spoiler, which is when an idiots bids way over value to wreck a sale, and eBay has banned them.
I often also rule out a "sale" where the seller is under 30 days on eBaywith a 0 or low feedback score.
Have a look at THIS listing for an obvious spoiler, in fact on this one it looks like the seller and bidders are all jokers, just a waste of time all round. HERE is another one, here the buyer is probably genuine, but the bidders (just click on the Bids just above the Winning Bid Price).
Of course if you use BIN and Immediate PayPal, you avoid all this silliness. For balance, HERE is what I consider a proper sale, this is my sale, and you can see both my feedback and the buyers feedback suggest this is a real completed sale.
Once I have found a few sales that look genuine, I will probably put mine a little bit higher as my 100% feedback for high value items should get me a better price.
Lets take a more detailed look at my listing now, (HERE) and this will give you a good idea of how I work.
Quite often you will hear people give the advice that you really must have lots of photos of the actual item, well lit, perfectly exposed, and lots of them. Well, I am sure that can not hurt, but in the main, I use one, often poor photo, and lots of explainations, and in the case of the 5800 I used just a stock photo nicked from the Nokia website. But look at the description, I want to make it clear to people that they can trust me, so on all my listings you will always find some version of the following
"I am a 100% positive feedback private individual, not looking to make huge profits, and I have my great feedback based on selling expensive phones and other gear, not some 99p items to boost my rating. You can buy from me with total safety and confidence, is that worth a few quid more?"
Then I go on to explain that my phone is unlocked, but help the buyers here, tell them that a lot of other 5800's on the site will be locked, and not to listen to the sellers saying these are easy to unlock for a few quid. After all, if it were that easy, why don't they unlock it?
I also mention the "no stuck or dead pixel" issue in most phone listings, it is a HUGE issue for me, one dead or stuck pixel and the phone is unusable for me, so maybe the prospective buyer feels the same, this is an active reason why they might decide to pay me close to retail, as they are worried about getting a faulty one.
The other thing I did on this listing was to make a big deal out of the Free Nokia Maps for life. OK, you and I know that is standard now, but its possible that not everyone does, and it is a strong selling point.
The other thing I often do is list something and then decide I don't want to sell it, and what I do then is simply revise the auction to a different item, amazingly there is nothing stopping you replacing an item totally. Watch out for how many watchers you have at that point though, too many and you might confuse someone, but its not really an issue.
I don't really care much about the tips on time of start and end, as for BIN that is pretty much irrelevant. I do also quite often put in some text to suggest I would prefer (or insist) upon a local collection for cash, and in these cases people email me to ask if I will post, and often I choose to do so. If you do meet up with someone to exchange, be very careful, and try to have someone with you, or you might find that you lose your cash and or worse! There are lots of stories about this, and some dodgy people out there, but like anything, a bit of common sense works wonders. This sort of works for me as I work in a car dealership, and thus most people choose to pick up from there, during the day, and that is very safe for both parties. Of course if you can get a cash collector to come to your house (or work is better if possible for you) you can just end the sale and you don't have pay ebay and paypal fees, and can offer discount for that if you wish.
I often start a listing a couple of days earlier than I want to sell, as you get very little action in the first few days normally, but with BIN you always run the risk of someone hitting BIN without contacting you, which is an issue if you do not then wish to sell.
Another little trick I use, is that I put an item up, and then have second thoughts about selling it. Rather than delete the listing, what I then do is put a large font message on the listing, saying the item is on hold, raise the price to a silly level say double retail, and tell people you have the item on hold for a work friend for a few hours, and explain the price is silly high to make sure nobody buys it while on hold, but if they want it at the real price, which you should put in the bold large font, they should contact you and you will make a quick decision, this way you don't lose your listing fee, and more importantly any watchers you have. If you then decide you do want to sell it after all (maybe its just me!) you can simply revise again, and delete the note.While it might sound like I spend huge amounts of time and effort on eBay, I really don't, most of these things take a few mins at most, and witness these two listings for the N900 which went for £399, or this one for the £459 Nexus One
Well, I think thats it for now, feel free to comment either here, or on the PSC Facebook page and I will answer as soon as possible.
Kev
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 10:32PM 
