Mighty Bargain Hunter

Making money with an eBay Store, Part 6: Streamlining your listing process

February 13th, 2008 | by mbhunter |

(This post is part of a series on Making Money with an eBay Store. The Introduction and table of contents to the series is here.)

Part 5 of this series on making money with an eBay store gave some thoughts on setting up your store. Do you have a store? Or do you just have a lot of things to sell and want to get them up on eBay with a minimum of fuss?

A lot of the tricks that I’ll discuss work best if you have a lot of similar items, but you can make things easier on yourself by downloading and installing the free Turbo Lister 2. (This is for Windows only. Here are some choices for Mac.) Turbo Lister 2 is an application that lets you compose your auctions outside of eBay’s web interface, which by itself is a huge time-saver. It’s gotten pretty powerful, and I know that I haven’t exercised all that it can do.

After you’ve installed Turbo Lister 2, it’s pretty easy to get down to business on the listing process:

• Look at what you need to sell and group like items together. “Like items” means items that are likely to fall in the same eBay category. This will streamline getting images of the items and putting the listings together.
• Determine what eBay category best matches that group of items. If I can’t find the category easily, I cheat and do a search for the items I’m going to list. The current sellers will have found the right categories.
• Get images of all of these items. If they’re similar, there should be a way to take pictures of the items assembly-line style. Once you get the right lighting and aspect for one, just rinse and repeat. For magazines, books, or other similar thin objects, a scanner works very well. For some items like CDs or DVDs, pre-filled information may be available through Turbo Lister 2, so there may be no need to take pictures unless the item is special or in a condition that you want to point out for some reason so that you have accurate descriptions. If you have several items that are exactly the same, you may be able to get by with one picture unless they’re in different conditions.
• If you have a store, set up the store category for these items if you haven’t already. From My eBay, click on Manage My Store on the left sidebar. On that screen, under Store Design, click on Store Categories. Click the Add Category button on the right side of the screen, and add away.
• Fire up Turbo Lister 2 and select New -> Item from the main menu. Now you’ll do a listing for one of your items. Your new store categories should show up if you have a store. The Store Categories box is on the left side, just above the Pictures and Description section in the Edit Item screen. If not, then Canceling this screen and going to Tools -> Check for program updates should fetch the new categories. The parts that I fill in this first time around:
  • Title. Use up as many characters as you can with terms that people will be likely to search on. The default search mode for listings is title only, so getting the most important words in the title will help draw more hits on your listing.
  • Subtitle. I pass this one over, but you’re welcome to add one for a fee if you want.
  • Category. This is the eBay category for the item.
  • Item specifics. This area may or may not come up based on the eBay category. I fill these in as much as possible.
  • Store category. This is the category I just added for the items.
  • Description Builder. I put in text about the item and mention the condition. If it’s a magazine I try to highlight some of the key features of that issue. I also add that I will combine shipping. I choose a counter for the item. I add one picture of the item (more than one costs extra). You can crop your pictures right in Turbo Lister 2. And that’s about it! I haven’t added a slew of terms and conditions and things have worked out all right. I tend to think that a lot of rules scares off buyers.
  • Selling format and price information. I choose the format (Store Inventory, good until cancelled), set the starting price, and choose whether I want to accept offers from buyers or not.
  • Listing upgrades. I throw in the gallery picture for store inventory because it’s a penny a month. It will likely be free soon.
  • Shipping options. I select the shipping options I want to offer. I haven’t offered international shipping, but it doesn’t stop some people from asking, or even buying an item before asking. This has not been a problem but I suppose it could be if the country’s restrictions were such that I couldn’t deliver.
  • Sales tax. Please pay attention to this one. If you are authorized in your state to charge sales tax, click on the Shipping Options button, and then click on the Sales Tax tab. Enter the appropriate sales tax information (state, percentage, and whether to charge on shipping or not), and check the “Save for future listings” at the bottom. If you don’t do this last step, the tax information will apply only to this listing, and will not apply to others unless you go through this step each time. I found this out the hard way because someone in my state bought an item, and sales tax wasn’t applied. I had to eat it.
  • Payment Methods, Buyer Communication, and Instructions and Policies. Change as you like.
  • Finally, click Save.
• Now, here’s where the streamlining takes place. Click on the listing you just made, and type Ctrl-D, or select Edit -> Duplicate. Now you can create several separate listings with the information you just entered. Just repeat the steps in the previous item for each of your related items, except start by clicking on the duplicated listing rather than New -> Item. Most of the information will be filled in for you, and you only need to change what’s different, like the title, the item specifics, the picture, part of the description, and maybe the price or shipping options.
• Once all of your listings are done, do a quick sanity check and then highlight the listings and click the Add to Upload button right above the listings. Then click on the Waiting to Upload option on the left sidebar, and upload your items!

I’m pretty sure that there are even faster ways to do what I just did, but this way is straightforward and saves time without needing to go through a big learning curve. As I learn new Turbo Lister 2 tricks, I’ll share!

The time-consuming parts of selling on eBay aren’t the actual selling, but the preparation of the listings, answering customer questions, packing and shipping the items, and keeping records. Minimizing these time-consuming parts help to maximize the revenue per hour that you earn through selling on eBay. As you get used to the process, you’ll undoubtedly find your own streamlining processes that work best for your products. It’s to your advantage as a seller to seek out these time-saving tricks so that you can move the most product with your eBay Stores in your limited time.

Part 7 will be on streamlining your shipping process.

Questions tagged savings at Cash Commons:

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