It's important to be selling continuously on eBay, literally day by day, giving you constant stock turnover and regular daily profits. You do it by getting potential buyers to focus on your products over rival listings but you have very limited time to achieve your objective. Most importantly, your products must appear on the first few pages of eBay's search listings whenever someone keys in words to describe items such as you are selling. But there is a big problem here.
The problem results from eBay's listings appearing in reverse order, from those closest to ending, through to items only recently listed. Items listed on the first pages of any popular category will be those ending in the next few minutes or hours, and few people will search beyond the current day's listings, especially for relatively commonplace items available from numerous sellers.
To illustrate, imagine I want to buy some CDs, featuring Roy Orbison, for example, and Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, John Denver, and others. If I go online right now and key those names into eBay's search engine, I'll almost certainly have dozens of pages of suitable product listings to search through.
Given I definitely don't want to spend hours looking for CDs with so many similar items listed, I'll probably order something from the earliest pages and ignore the rest.
Now imagine you are selling those CDs, but you only list on Sundays, and today is Wednesday. Your listings have four more days to go before they'll appear on eBay's earliest search return listings so I almost certainly won't buy from you today.
By listing all your items the same day, they'll all be selling the same day, so you'll only reach eBay's first and second page listings for an insignificant part of the week ahead. You are reaching just a tiny part of your target audience.
You circumvent the problem by listing all your products daily, which by implication means all your product offers also end daily, and consequently everything you sell also features daily in the first few pages returned by eBay when someone searches for items such as you are selling.
TIPS
* Obviously this system works best for products with unrestricted demand and supply, such as CDs, health and beauty products, toys, lingerie, computer parts, and other mass market goods. It doesn't, obviously, work with rare or unique items such as antiques and collectibles.
* Multiple product listings are a good idea, allowing several sales from each individual listing. But unless stock is unlimited you'd probably sell more by listing single items daily or in small batches where you'll gain longer exposure on eBay's early listing pages.
* For selling Buy It Now or Best Offer, extend your listings over 10 days, not 7, so your offers will be available much longer at usually no extra cost.
* If you can't afford or don't want to list all your items daily, then at least have a few listings ending each day (hourly if you can) using sub-titles to attract visitors to other goods available inside your eBay shop. Offer a discount to get people to buy inside your shop and leave your outside listings to run their course.
Avril Harper is an eBay PowerSeller and author of MAKE MONEY TEARING UP OLD BOOKS AND MAGAZINES AND SELLING THEM ON EBAY which you can read about at: http://www.magstoriches.com - She has produced a free guide - 103 POWERSELLER TIPS - which you can download with other freely distributable reports and eBooks a http://www.avrilharper.com
