When most eBay sellers are seeking new products to promote, I find myself looking for ways to increase the value of goods I’m already selling on eBay, but only where whatever new techniques I adopt are easy to implement, cost little or nothing, and guarantee to at least double or preferably triple my typical weekly eBay earnings.   do it like this:

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Offer a valuable free gift to people who buy products I am selling which are very similar to goods other sellers also have listed on eBay.  All I do here is locate a small gift, but a valuable free gift, preferably a unique offering, which I mention in the sub-title for my listing.  The sub-title has the additional benefit of adding depth to the size of my eBay listing and making it stand out from the rest.  Now let’s say I and four other sellers have a ‘Class A Widget’ for sale and those other sellers use a variation on this basic title:

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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Now let us assume four other people are selling the same Widget which means their listings will look like this on a typical eBay search engine return:

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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Now assume I want to make my listing stand out from among those four regular listings, and let’s say I have a free report, on CD, about making money with my Widget.  Can you see how I might use my free report to make my listing stand out from among just four rival offerings?

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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       **  FREE Guide to Making Money With Your Widget  **

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CLASS A WIDGET.  With Carry Bag and Three Spare Batteries.

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As you see from that example my sub-title not only makes my listing stand out purely because of size, but it also offers a free guide that gives my product higher perceived value than its fellows and makes mine almost certainly the one most people will buy.

So the free report or other bonus gift serves two obvious purposes of making a listing more prominent and its product more desirable, as long as these essential features are in place:

-  The bonus gift must be valuable in its own right and something your target audience desires and would buy independently if the item was actually available to buy separately.  That means, unless there’s good reason to do so, it makes sense to reserve your bonus for high profit products with serious rivalry on eBay.

-  The bonus gift should be unique to your business with no similar or close alternatives available from anyone else.  Additionally there should be no chance of the item being copycatted by your competitors and little chance of a different bonus item having higher perceived value. 

Ideas

-  Research past sales from eBayers offering similar products with and without bonus gifts.  Research across a range of products, not just listings for items similar to those you are selling.  So if you sell toys, for instance, and you’re looking for a suitable bonus gift for the sub-title for all your toy listings, then check completed sales by eBayers promoting not just toys, but also books for parents, party accessories, children’s clothing, and so on.   This is because the same bonus item might suit various product types within an overall eBay category, so if you restrict your search to traders in similar goods you may miss more profitable ideas elsewhere.    

Past auctions let you see how many similar items are sold by rivals within a particular time scale and how many transactions result from specific bonus offers.  So if one eBayer sells 100 more of a specific item each month with a bonus than another promoting the same product from the same number of listings but with no bonus incentive, then the gift probably accounts for those extra sales. 

-  You should change your bonus gift every few weeks and additionally offer a choice of free incentives, especially on repeat buy items and others that need constant replenishment.  This is to prevent regular buyers becoming bored with your free gift and taking their business elsewhere.

-  Keep on checking bonus items from rival sellers, especially when your sales nosedive, and be quick to copycat new and more profitable bonus ideas currently growing profits for rival sellers.

-  Look for freebies offered on foreign eBay sites which are not available domestically and which you may be able to buy from your overseas rivals without restricting their profits.  As before, do a completed sales check to see which freebies attract most orders, then import similar items to your eBay country site.

Idea #2

You can offer your product in batches of two or three, or more units, and charge less than the cumulative price for those items sold individually.  So say, for example, a Widget sells for £10, meaning ten Widgets bought separately cost £100.  However, ten Widgets in your bundle cost just £80, and offer good savings on items most people buy individually at regular intervals.  To make this work the saving has to be sufficient to make people want to stockpile or they might go elsewhere to buy individually. 

Profits per bundle must be sufficient to cover not just the cost of buying your product but also of storing larger product quantities and transporting them to your place of business. 

If you have to employ staff to sort or bundle products, or you need a larger vehicle to take bigger bundles to the post office, those costs must also be taken into account.  Most important of all, bundled products must generate more money overall than you’d make from selling your goods individually.

There are two possible cost savings on bundling products this way which make additional profits for you, being:

-  Buying in bulk typically means paying less and enjoying higher profit margins pre unit of product.

-  Fewer transactions are likely for multi-product sales than for similar items purchased individually.  Which also means fewer eBay listings and potentially lower eBay fees also, as well as lowered cost of employing helpers, fewer journeys so lower cost of transporting goods from source to base and ultimately to the post office.

Idea #3

Make something look more attractive, worth more than it really is, but be sure your idea appeals to potential buyers. You might, for example, clean your product or have it restored, or have two items made into one as did a dealer on a recent television who turned two armchairs into one sofa.  The armchairs cost £40 (about $60) each, the conversion cost £200 (about $300), plus auction premium and transportation costs.  His sofa did not sell even at less than the price he paid for the original item.

So spend time researching similar items that have already sold on eBay before spending time creating an item you like, which you think is valuable, which you might personally bid for, but which nobody else wants to own.

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