eBay Auc­tion Tip: A Case Study on How to Make Money on eBay

Apply These Copy­writ­ing Tac­tics to eBay Auc­tions Items to Make More Money

In this case study, you’ll learn how the revi­sion of one of our client’s auc­tion copy on eBay resulted in a 60% increase in the sale price of his auc­tion after just 30 mins of apply­ing proper copy­writ­ing prin­ci­ples to his listing. 

But that’s that the end of it — not only did the aver­age sale price go up (sig­ni­fy­ing that buy­ers per­ceived value of the prod­uct increased) but the TOTAL sales also went up. In this case by 21%.

                            Before: Aver­age Bid Price Of US$30–35

Notice in our auc­tion screen­shots below, What would nor­mally sell at an aver­age price of US$30–35, Sold for US$55 after our client imple­mented our tips on how to make more money on eBay auctions …

                            After:  Selling Price Increases to US$55

The Test Sub­ject - Video Gam­ing Mar­ket On eBAY

As both a seller and a buyer, Akshay Of Akshay’s Toy empo­rium, has been trad­ing on ebay for over six years now. His own busi­ness on ebay caters to the toy & collectible’s market .

Recently Akshay was offered a propo­si­tion. He was to list Gam­ing prod­ucts on eBay on behalf of a Gam­ing Store. The pro­posal allowed Akshay to receive 55% of the sell­ing price of each prod­uct, as long as he took the respon­si­b­lity to list the auc­tions, and han­dle all pre/post sale duties.

Upon hav­ing listed many auc­tions, Akshay soon noticed that the final clos­ing price on his auc­tions, were not even close to what he had planned on achiev­ing. So Akshay set about to rethink and reform a strat­egy for improv­ing his sales on eBay from what we thought him.

Some of the changes he made to his auc­tions include:

Tac­tic #1

Some of the most note­able changes made to the auc­tion, include high­light­ing the aspect of Free ship­ping, which was briefly touched upon in the first auction(before), how­ever note that in the sec­ond auction(after) — Free ship­ping was high­lighted in BIG/BOLD Font.

                             Before Free Ship­ping was Implemented

Also notice, that Akshay now had spec­i­fied the Lan­guage of the game (ie Eng­lish or Japan­ese). In copy­writ­ing, more infor­ma­tion = greater sales. Pre­vi­ously the Lan­guage of the game was not mentioned, this could have resulted in the mediocre sell­ing price of the first auc­tion.

                                     After Offer­ing Free Shipping

Tac­tic #2

Another major change came in the form of chang­ing the entire list­ing struc­ture itself from an online auc­tion to a fixed price list­ing.

          Using an Auc­tion For­mat          Using a Buy it Now Format

Why list an auc­tion at a fixed price? Simple. Time. Many peo­ple pre­fer not to wait until an auc­tion is over which could take days and not even guar­an­tee them a sure­fire win, hence they pre­fer to just use buy it now to pur­chase their prod­uct directly, just like they would do in a brick and mor­tar store.

Tac­tic #3

On the Mar­ket­ing side of things, One of the final major changes to the auc­tion came through the cre­ation of “Scarcity”, every per­son knows that if a prod­uct is Lim­ited chances are it will sell bet­ter.

             Before : The The­ory of Scarcity was not Implemented

Akshay, used this prin­ci­ple to his advan­tage. Since he only had lim­ited prod­ucts, he decided to dis­close this infor­ma­tion is his auc­tion, by adding the phrase “Grab it now while stocks last!!!!!!”. This term cre­ates a sense of urgency in the buyer, who feels com­pelled to buy the prod­uct as he/she may never see it again.

                        After: Using Scarcity to your advantage

Fur­ther­more, to ensure that his cus­tomers are fully roped in he added the term “Price has been reduced fur­ther in Con­junc­tion with our sale”, Think about it? If a prod­uct was lim­ited and dis­counted as well, it would attract more atten­tion and through that sales.

CONCLUSION

• Total Sales Up by 21%
• Aver­age Buy Price Up by 60%

We have taken the above case study as ref­er­ence, as it shows that the small­est changes can have a big impact –some­thing that we in Mind­Val­ley strongly believe in. As Price Pritch­ett said “Change always comes bear­ing gifts”, if we can learn to change the way we think and sell our prod­ucts (mar­ket our­selves), chances are great improve­ment lies ahead.

We hope you enjoyed this tip on how to make more money on eBay auc­tions

Some of the key learn­ings here:

1. The tini­est changes in copy (it took Akshay only 30 mins) can lead to huge boosts in sales.

2. Good copy­writ­ing prac­tices apply to ebay list­ings (and clas­si­fieds ads) as much as they do to direct mar­ket­ing and web­site copy.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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