Auction Autopilot Blog

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.

There are a number of free online auction fee calculators available, but many are out of date and don’t give you all the information you need.  One of the best ones available is the New Life Auctions free eBay and PayPal fee calculator.  The New Life Auctions tool will not only calculate your fees, but it will also show you how much profit you can expect to make on an item.  This handy fee calculator Includes the following features.

• Listing Format
• Auction Type
• Listing Upgrades
• eBay Picture Services
• PayPal
• Power Seller Discount

Michael Repzynski’s free eBay / PayPal Fee Calculator is another good tool.    It is a little faster than the New Life Auctions tool, but not quite as robust in its features.  However, it is still an excellent choice, if you are looking for something simple.

Doug Boudreau’s free eBay Fee Calculator is another good option.  There is also a free PayPal Fee Calculator you can use to calculate your PayPal fees.  When you check out Doug’s site, you will see that he also offers similar tools for Half.com and Amazon.com.

All of these tools have been updated to include eBay’s 2008 fee schedule.  No matter which tool you decide is best for your own needs, they can all help you get more control over your eBay and PayPal fees, ensuring you maximize your profitability.

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Today, I’m going to tell you about a strategy that can double or triple your eBay income.  This technique is so easy.  However,  very few eBay sellers use it, even though it takes so little  effort.  What is it?

Backend Sales!

Let me give you an example of something I did.  I  noticed there were several eBay sellers who were selling huge  lots of greeting cards.  In fact, when I first checked it out, there was a lot  of 1,000 cards available, with only two days left in the auction.  Guess what the high bid was?

$1.00!?

Can you believe it?  The final bid went a bit higher, but  not by much.  In the end, the bidder ended up with 1,000 greeting cards for less than a  penny a piece.

There are several eBay sellers that regularly sell lots of 25  greeting cards for $5.00 or more.  What kind of a profit could  you make if you bought 1,000 cards for $1.00 and then turned  around and sold them all for $5.00 per set of 25 cards?  $200.00,  which is a 20,000% return on your money!  Not bad.

By the way, there are deals like this all the time on eBay.  You  can find a lot of them by using a great power tool called  HammerTap.

But, this post is not about finding low priced items on eBay  and reselling them for a profit.  That will be the subject of a  future post.  So now, back to backend sales (no pun intended). 

These huge lots of greeting cards come up on eBay all the time.  So, I decided to use them as a backend sale item.  Here’s what I  did.

I bought a large lot of cards for about $0.02 a piece.  I then  made up an order form to sell the cards for $0.20 a piece (you can always raise the price later).  Each time I shipped something that I  sold on eBay, I simply included a sample card & envelope with an order form.

When my buyer (winning bidder) received their purchase, they were surprised and pleased to find that I had enclosed a free greeting card that they could use (nice little bonus).  And, they saw that they could order more high-quality greeting cards, for only $0.20 a piece, in lots of 25.  Since most greeting cards  retail for $2.00 to $3.00 each, that represented a savings of more than  90%.  That’s a pretty attractive offer.

The beauty of this strategy is that anyone who ever buys anything  from me can become a life-time customer.  They may buy greeting  cards from me for years.  My first “one-time” sale to them can turn into a lifetime income stream, as they reorder cards again and again.

You can do the exact same thing.  All you need to do is identify  a consumable item that people buy, use up and buy again.  Buy it on Ebay for pennies on the dollar, or through one of the great  wholesale sources I will tell you about in a future post.  Set  up an order form you can enclose with your Ebay sales.  And, sit  back and let the money roll in.  Very cool!

HammerTap can save you hours looking for consumable items you can resell as backend products.  Remember, it doesn’t have to be  greeting cards.  That is just an example of something I happened to notice.  You may find other great consumable products that are a better fit for the type of items you normally sell on eBay.  HammerTap can make it easy to find products that people will buy over and over again.

To summarize, backend sales is basically the process of selling  more merchandise to customers who recently bought something from you.  The best time to approach a potential customer is when they  are already happy with a recent purchase and they are in the ”buying mood.”

Remember, the ideal backend product should be consumable.  Once  you capture a new customer, you want to offer him something that he will need to reorder from you each time he uses up his supply.  This will create lifetime customers that can be the source of a never ending income stream for you.

HammerTap can be a tremendous help in finding the hottest high-profit consumable items to use as backend sales products.  Take HammerTap for a free 10 day “test drive” and find out what it can do for you.

I recently ran across David White’s website eBay & Beyond, Basics to Business.  David has been selling on eBay for many years and has also taught at eBay University.  David provides insightful eBay advice via a weekly podcast, which you can download for free.  He interviews other eBay insiders, reviews helpful online auction tools and discusses a variety of topics important to anyone seeking to make a full time income on eBay.  Some of the most recent podcast episodes include:

eBay & Beyond Podcast (0)

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Check it out.  You may be able to pick up a few useful tips to help you make more money on eBay.

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.

This works great for a while. Selling unwanted items out of your garage, or bargains that you discover at yard sales is good practice and will help you learn the basics of the online auction business. However, you will never make any serious money by selling these types of “one off” items.

The key to making big money on eBay is to sell “cookie cutter” items that can be sold over and over again. Your goal should be to find products that will sell quickly and for a healthy profit. You also want to identify products that can be sold in quantity.

Once you discover the top selling items on eBay that attract bids like bears to honey, all you have to do is relist the items each time you sell one. I like to call these “cookie cutter” products. You only have to do the work of setting up the online auction once. After that, you just click one button to relist the item and keep selling it over and over again the same way. Walmart, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Macy’s and eBay Power Sellers all use this formula.

Consumable products can be the most lucrative moneymakers of all. After the first sale, the item will be used up and your customer will need to reorder. Over time, you can build a loyal customer base that will buy from you over and over, generating a lifetime income stream. My upcoming eBook will reveal a simple automated strategy to create a huge customer list that can make you mountains of money, as often as you want.

Finding top selling items on eBay is like going fishing. If you want to catch a boatload of fish, you first need to find out where the fish are lurking and what they are biting. If you fish in a lake with no fish, or if you use unappetizing bait, you’ll never catch any fish. The trick to catching as many fish as you want is to cast the right bait into a lake full of hungry fish.

By the same token, you will never figure out how to make money on eBay if you are trying to sell an item that is in low demand to a very small group of people. If you want to make a truckload of money on eBay, the trick is to identify a product that is in high demand and put it up for auction in the right category.

Trying to find the right product could take forever, if your method was to test several different products until you found the right one. Fortunately, there is a much easier and faster way.

The best way to figure out what sells on eBay is to use a powerful software program called HammerTap.

HammerTap makes doing product research a breeze. Without this incredible tool, it would take you hours, days, weeks and months testing different products before you would be able to figure out what’s hot and what’s not. Using HammerTap, you will be able to zero in on the hottest products in mere minutes. This mega-powerful automation tool takes all the guess work out of selecting the best products (high demand and large profit margin) to sell on eBay. Just think what an advantage you will have over the majority of eBay sellers who are “flying by the seat of their pants.”

Using HammerTap is a cinch. Just type a product name into the HammerTap search box, click the “go button,” and the program will “crawl” through eBay and return a list of all the auctions matching your search term. You can even specify whether you want HammerTap to search through current online auctions, or completed auctions.

As HammerTap sifts through the millions of listings on eBay to find the ones that fit your specifications, it will display all of the matching results in an easy to read spreadsheet format. At a glance, you will know the total sales, highest price, average selling price, average number of bids, most successful categories, most successful sellers and more. HammerTap will even allow you to sort this information pretty much any way you want.

HammerTap will show you everything you need to know to decide whether the product you are considering is a winner or a dud. Just think of the time you will save… and the money you will make by quickly discovering “where the gold is hidden.” No more wasting time with products that don’t get any bids and have low profit margins.

But, that’s not all. Once you find the top selling items on eBay, you may want to check out other products that are selling in the same category, to see what kind of competition you may encounter. No problem. HammerTap can do that too.

Here’s another great reason to use HammerTap. Let’s say you want to find the most successful sellers for your product, figure out what they are doing, and then copy their techniques. Of course you wouldn’t want to plagiarize their listings. However, you can certainly use the same techniques they are using to make money on eBay. With HammerTap, you can immediately tell which sellers know what they are doing and which sellers are floundering. All you have to do is do what the savvy sellers are doing. Why reinvent the wheel? Pretty simple, really.

Can you imagine the amount of time and money this tool will save you? If you are not using HammerTap, you are either wasting time searching for the “ultimate product,” or you are losing money by selling items that do not provide the highest return possible. Take HammerTap for a free 10 day “test drive” and find out what it can do for you today.