Decide How You Want to Be Paid
Watching bids come in on your item, exchanging chatty messages with other sellers in the eBay Café or the other eBay message boards, and researching your sales items can be so much fun that you forget about the real purpose of why you're starting an eBay business. Why, you're in this to make money, of course. Remember? The simplest and most effective way to accept payments from your customers is through credit cards. Your high bidder or buyer (for a Buy It Now item) submits a credit card number, either to you or to a payment service, the funds are transferred in a matter of minutes, and you can ship the item out immediately. When it comes to accepting credit cards, you have two general options.
Most eBay sellers sign up for an account with eBay's own payment service, PayPal. PayPal streamlines the process of accepting credit card payments: Buyers tell PayPal to debit their credit card accounts, and PayPal receives the payments, subtracts its transaction fees, and forwards the money on to you. If you accept PayPal transactions, you get to add a standard logo to your auction listings, like the one shown in the following image.
On the other hand, some sellers don't like PayPal because of the fees that it charges. They limit their payment options to accepting checks or money orders from their customers. This process takes longer because you depend on the mail to get you the money. If a personal check is involved, you're safest if you delay shipping until the check actually clears the bank. Otherwise, if you're planning to be in business for the long haul, you can establish a credit card merchant account, either with your own bank or with a company that specializes in providing such accounts.
Get the Hardware and Software You Need
Before you can step up to the auction block, you need to connect to the Internet, and in order to do that, you need some basic computer hardware and software. Buying and selling through auctions, like other types of electronic commerce, don't require a super-fast connection to the Internet. Nor do you have to spend thousands for a computer with the latest multimedia bells and whistles.
Buy the Right Computer and Monitor
The good news is that buying and selling on eBay don't require much computing overhead. In other words, if you can get on the Internet and surf Web sites, and if you have enough memory to run an image editing program as well, you should be able to sell successfully on eBay. However, the speed and quality of your computer, monitor, and other hardware can affect your auction experience. Hard disk storage space isn't an issue for most new computers, which come with hard disk drives that store one or more gigabytes (GB) of data. (A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes (MB). ) Any hard disk capable of storing a gigabyte or more should be fine for your needs.
(Many new computers come with hard disks of 10, 20, or more gigabytes these days. ) If you're buying a used computer, beware: Don't come home with less than a gigabyte of storage space, or you'll run out of room before you know it. Going online, using a Web browser, and shopping for auction treasures doesn't require huge amounts of memory, but if you plan to put up goodies for sale, you need some additional software, and each program requires RAM. For example, you may want to do one of the following (all of which require RAM):
- Create a Web page A Web page or Web site can help advertise you oryour business, if you have one.
- Capture digital images You're likely to get more bids if you provide aclear computerized image of your items by scanning them or using a digitalcamera. Saving the images on your hard disk can quicklyconsume storage space unless you delete the image files as soon as the saleends. Running a good image editing program like Adobe Photoshop orPhotoshop Elements does require a lot of RAM, however. The cost of RAM keeps going down, so you should load your computer with asmuch as you can in order to streamline the process of creating auction listings, notto mention listening to Internet radio, downloading video clips, and the many othermultimedia events that increasingly popular parts of the online user experience.
Pick a Scanner or Digital Camera
Hardware requirements for auction sellers are a bit more extensive than those forbuyers. You need a way to take images of the merchandise you want to sell andcapture those images as digitized computer files. Including a clear, sharp imageon your Web site greatly increases your chances of selling your product or service. You have several choices for digitizing:
- Taking photos with a digital camera and saving the image files on yourcomputer.
- Taking photos with a conventional camera and then scanning them intoyour computer.
- Taking conventional prints or slides and having a photo lab send them backto you on CD-ROM or posting them online so you can copy or reuse them. After you have an image in the form of a computer document, you can transferit to a Web site to let potential buyers take a look.
Install Web Page and Auction Software
For the most part, the software you use to conduct transactions on eBay is the sameas the software you use to view sales, bid on items, surf Web sites, and exchangee-mail with others. You don't need special software to get your sales online, toformat auction listings or Web pages that describe you or your business, or editphotos
- but they can help, especially when your sales activity increases. In addition, software that enables you to keep track of your financial activity soyou can prepare your taxes more efficiently, apply for loans or merchant accounts,or perform other tasks can make your business life much easier as well.
Become a Power E-Mail User
Aside from theWeb browser that you use to create auction listings, e-mail is probablythe single most important tool you have as a seller. E-mail is what you use to answerquestions, notify bidders that they have won, tell bidders that their item has shipped,and remind buyers when they are slow to follow through on their commitments. When you sell at auction, it's important to use all aspects of e-mail fully. Theseinclude:
- Signature files A signature file is a bit of text that you can appendautomatically to each of your outgoing e-mails. Such a file tells othersyour User ID, the name of your Web site if you have one, and any othercontact information you want to provide.
It's a great way to get free marketing for your auction business.
- Attachments Sometimes prospective bidders who are particularly interested in an item will ask you for more information and possibly more detailed photos. Although you should post such additional images on the auction listing itself, you might also want to attach them to e-mails you send to interested buyers.
- Checking your e-mail Get an e-mail account that you can access from the Web; also consider getting a wireless device that you can use to check your e-mail, such as a Web-enabled cell phone or a handheld device, soyou can get those messages as soon as they arrive.
- Vacation notices If you're going to be out of town, make sure your sales don't end while you are gone. If you are going to be away, be sure to put a vacation notice on each of your auction listings that tells bidders when you'll be back.
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