Auction Autopilot Blog

When you first began your eBay business, I’m guessing you used the basic eBay listing form to sell your first item.   However, if you are like me, as sales increased, you soon found that you needed a more powerful auction management system.  At that point, you probably subscribed to Turbo Lister, which is fine if you are only handling small volumes of merchandise.   However, if your business grows to the point that you are shipping several items a day from sales made on multiple websites, you need to consider a full featured auction management system.

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Whether you are an eBay newbie or a seasoned Power Seller, these two simple tips can keep you ahead of 90% of your online auction competition.  If you aren’t doing these two things, you can bet you aren’t making the kind money on eBay that you can.

Use Your Keywords in Your Auction Titles

This may seem obvious, but I am amazed when I see people who don’t do it.  More than 70% of eBay buyers use the eBay search feature to find the items they are looking for.  The basic search feature on eBay’s home page or listing page searchese all the auction titles for the keywords you enter.  If you haven’t used keywords that would normally be used by a buyer in your title, you could miss more than 70% of the potential buyers who are looking for your product.

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Here is a cool little tool that can help you pick up some great deals on eBay, by finding auctions with virtually no competition.  It is called Typo Buddy.

Typo Buddy is a search tool that allows you to find misspelled listings on both eBay and Craigslist.  Auctions with misspelled words often get few, if any, bids.  With little or no competition from other bidders, you can easily to snag some incredible deals and pay only a fraction of the usual cost.

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Skip McGrath made a post on his blog recently, recommending a couple of free eBay and PayPal fee calculators.  I thought I would pass them along to you and make one more recommendation.

Sometimes figuring out how much your eBay and PayPal auction fees will cost can be a little confusing.  Knowing the fees in advance is important, since it can help you decide the best (i.e. most profitable) price and format to list an item on eBay.

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eBay Desktop is a free software application from eBay that you can install on your own computer. It allows you to do virtually everything you can do on the eBay website and a lot more. eBay Desktop is a great alternative to the eBay website. The application uses Adobe AIR, so it will run on both Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac OS X.

Some of the best features of this snazzy desktop application include, title and description search, browsing, watching and bidding. The software even includes search feeds, item reminders and persistent filters. It automatically syncs with the eBay website in real time, so there is no need to refresh to get updated information. Your recent item cache (listings) and outbid alerts, along with other critical data, are all updated automatically.

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Deciding what to sell on eBay is one of the most important decisions you will make. With more than 20,000 categories and sub-categories, your choices are virtually limitless.

Most eBay sellers caught “the eBay bug” the same way. First, they began selling a few things around the house to generate some extra income. Then, when they found out how easy it was to convert “dust collectors” into cash (in only a few days), they started selling everything that wasn’t nailed down.

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