Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.
There are many people who do not like the idea that their item might sell for a much lower price than they intend. Equally, there are people who have hundreds of the same item and do not want to sell them individually. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and how to spot them.
Normal Auctions.
These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows. You bid, others outbid you, you outbid them, and the winner gets the item. Quite simple.
Reserve Auctions.
Reserve auctions are for sellers who do not want their items to sell for less than a certain price, a concept you will know about if you are familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that you will be told if your bid has not met the reserve price set by the seller. If no one is willing to meet this price, then the auction is cancelled, and the seller keeps the item.
You can spot these auctions by looking out for ‘Reserve not met’ or ‘Reserve met’ written next to the current bid on an item’s description page.
Fixed Price (’Buy it Now’) Auctions.
‘Buy it Now’ auctions can work in one of two ways. A seller might add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that you can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions. They introduced the ‘best offer’. This implies that you can negotiate a price to someone who offers their items using ‘Buy it Now’, which could be a great way to get a bargain on things that don’t seem to be selling.
Fixed price auctions are easy to spot, as they have a little ‘Buy it Now’ logo either next to or instead of the current number of bids on the search listings page.
Multiple Item (’Dutch’) Auctions.
These are auctions where a seller is selling more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that then do not worry, everyone else is having the same problem! These auctions are very rare.
What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types. A multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that they say how many they have, and offer them at a fixed price. You can enter how many you want and then just click ‘Buy it Now’ to get them.
After all this, you might find yourself facing a dilemma. When you have the option, should you bid, or should you just use ‘Buy it Now’ and save yourself the hassle?
This is what the next posting will be about.
* * * * *
If you seriously thinking of earning, not losing BIG money on eBay, I definitely recommend a very successful product how to market eBay(R) auctions
eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches -
as a successful eBay Seller, you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
* * * * *
Another viable and most recommendable option, when starting up an eBay business, is to make use of the drop shipping concept, which you can read about in the post – eBay and Drop shipping – What Is It All About?
Click here to find out more about drop shipping.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
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eBay Lesson – How to Check an eBay Seller’s Reputation and Why You Should Do It
When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return.
However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain. If you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you will not get all of that money back.
That is the reason why you should always check the seller’s reputation, or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.
How to Check Feedback Ratings.
On each item’s description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title ‘Seller information’. This contains the seller’s name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they have earned.
Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a ’shooting’ star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.
If you click on the seller’s name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation – their ‘member profile’ page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.
What to Look For.
You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn’t always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.
Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others’ experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.
Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you do not accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad.
The next posting will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.
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Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
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Your reputation as a buyer (or ‘feedback rating’) is the most important thing people see when they deal with you on eBay.
It is on the basis of this little number that they will decide whether they can trust you or not.
Each time you buy or sell something on eBay, people can leave feedback for you, and you can leave feedback for them. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral, along with a comment. Your feedback rating, then, is worked out using a very simple summary: the numbers of positive feedback comments people have left for you, minus the number of negative ones. This means that someone with a feedback rating of 28, for example, might have 30 positive ratings and 2 negative ones.
If you are a considerate buyer, then you should find that positive feedback will just appear next to your username, without you needing to do anything. If you want to help it along, though, there are a few things you can do.
Always leave feedback for others: People will feel an obligation to leave feedback for you if you leave it for them (eBay will send you an email after each transaction to offer you the opportunity). Take the time to write a positive comment about sellers who do what they should and the chances are they will do the same for you.
Pay promptly
Sellers love nothing more than to be paid promptly – paying as soon as the auction ends saves the seller all sorts of worry, especially if you pay by credit card or another electronic method. You will often find that your positive feedback appears within a few minutes of you paying if you pay as soon as the auction ends.
Don’t be a difficult customer
Understand that your seller might take a day or so to respond to you, and perhaps a few days to send your item – harassing them is nasty and unnecessary, and won’t get you good feedback.
Build relationships
If a seller sells a lot of a certain kind of thing you like, buy from them a few more times. They will be very happy to find a regular customer, and will go out of their way to leave positive feedback like ‘a joy to deal with as ever’. Also, they might offer you a few special deals!
Sellers will not generally be reluctant to sell to buyers without much of a reputation, simply because it is the buyer who takes most of the risk in a transaction. It is worth remembering, however, that transactions where you are the seller and where you are the buyer are counted towards the same feedback total – so if you ever want to start selling, being a good buyer is especially worthwhile.
On eBay, people pay far more attention to sellers’ ratings than they do to buyers’ – most sellers cannot be bothered to check their buyers’ feedback, while bad feedback on a seller can (and should) be a dealbreaker. When you are buying, then you need to worry more about the seller’s reputation than you do about your own, and that is why the next email will be all about sellers’ feedback ratings.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke
When you buy things on eBay, you pay the seller before they send you anything. This means that you, as a buyer, are vulnerable to all sorts of problems. You might not get the items you have paid for, or they might be damaged or faulty.
Luckily, you have two very important rights when you buy on eBay.
The Right to Receive Your Item.
Maybe the seller never sent the item, or maybe it got lost in the post. Whatever happened, you paid for the item. If it does not arrive in the post as described, you have the right to a replacement or a refund, whether it is the seller’s fault or not.
The fact that you bought something on eBay does not mean that you do not have the exact same rights that you would have if you bought it in a shop (these rights are pretty much the same all over the world). Plus, under eBay’s rules, the seller is not allowed to change their mind about selling you the item: once the auction ends, it becomes a contract – you must buy and they must sell, or face eBay’s penalties.
The Right for Your Item to Be as Described in the Auction.
Sometimes sellers do not wrap items properly, and so they get broken. Occasionally they write descriptions that are misleading or just plain wrong to begin with, leaving out vital details that would have caused you to change your mind about buying. If this happens to you, you again have the right to a replacement or a refund.
So How Do I Use My Rights?
First, you should take it up with the seller as most will be responsive, and do not want to have their reputation damaged when an upset buyer leaves negative feedback for all their future buyers to see. If that does not work, report them to eBay.
While eBay does not have many people handling complaints, they do have a relatively effective set of automatic process to handle common problems buyers and sellers have with one another.
Finally, if that does not work, then you should seek advice from consumer groups in your country, and as a last resort from the police. However, you should never have to get this far. Problems on eBay that cannot be resolved easily are extremely rare.
Don’t Be Too Quick To Complain.
Remember not to get too annoyed and be unfair to the seller. Nice sellers have agreed to give me refunds for undelivered items, only for me to find out a few weeks later that they were being held for me at the post office! Always try your best to communicate and think of everything that might have gone wrong. eBay works best when buyers and sellers sort out their problems together, instead of reporting each other to the authorities straight away.
More often that not receiving what they paid for, buyers have an altogether different problem. T hey knew what they were paying for, but did not realise that what they were paying for was overpriced, low quality or a scam.
The next posting will give you a list of tips on how to avoid being ripped off on eBay.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke
Have you noticed that whenever you open a newspaper, watch the TV or have a conversation, people seem to be talking about eBay?
If you never have used it and you have no idea what it is all about, then the chances are that you’re starting to feel a little left out. But don’t worry! This email contains everything you need to know about the basics of bidding and buying on eBay.
So What is eBay?
eBay is an online auction website – and not just any auction site, but the biggest one in the world. If you know how an auction works, then you already know how roughly eBay works. Someone adds something they want to sell to the site, and then buyers come along and place bids on it. The highest bid wins the item! It is that simple.
eBay being an online auction makes a big difference, though. Buying and selling are not reserved for any elite. eBay accept almost any item, no matter how small, and will then advertise it on their sites all over the world. It is a powerful combination of an auction and a slightly chaotic marketplace.
What is Bidding?
Bidding is when you say how much you will pay for an item in an auction. Bidding on eBay, however, does not work in exactly the same way as a normal auction, at least in theory. On eBay, you tell the site what the maximum you are willing to pay for each item is, and then eBay places the bids on your behalf. That means you could say you were willing to pay up to $100 for something and only have to pay $50, if that was the highest maximum bid anyone else placed.
It is not as complicated as it sounds – the best way to get used to it is to give it a try. First, the best thing to do is to go to the eBay website designed for your country. If you don’t know the address for it, just go to www.ebay.com and it will tell you there. Now, on the front page you should see a big box marked ’search’: just type in anything that you’d like to buy there.
Wasn’t that easy? Now you should have a list of items for sale in front of you, along with how much people are currently bidding for them and the time when bidding ends for each item. If you click one of these, you can read the description, and then – if you are happy with the item and happy to pay more than the current highest bidder is – you can bid!
How Do I Bid?
Go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of an item’s description page, and type the maximum you are willing to pay (your maximum bid) into the box. Then simply press the ‘place bid’ button – you will need to sign in once you press the button, or go through a quick registration process if you don’t have an eBay username).
If someone else’s maximum bid on that item is higher than yours, then eBay will tell you and give you the opportunity to bid again. Otherwise, you are now the new highest bidder! All you need to do now is wait until the end of the auction – if someone else outbids you, then eBay will email you and you can bid again.
All sounds great, doesn’t it? But by now you might be wondering whether a site as chaotic as eBay can really be all that safe to buy from.
That is why the next postingl in this series will be about your rights when you buy from eBay.
* * * * *
If you seriously thinking of earning, not losing BIG money on eBay, I definitely recommend a very successful product how to market eBay(R) auctions
eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches -
as a successful eBay Seller, you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
* * * * *
Another viable and most recommendable option, when starting up an eBay business, is to make use of the drop shipping concept, which you can read about in the post – eBay and Drop shipping – What Is It All About?
Click here to find out more about drop shipping.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke