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#1  25p saved on 100 eBay listings each week for 50 weeks per year because you incorporated a simple pricing technique into your listings.

#2  £10 extra profit on 1,000 listings per year because you remembered to incorporate another simple pricing technique into your listings.

#3  £5 loss on 1,000 listings per year because you failed to use another simple pricing technique in your listings.

Answers?

£1,250 gained.

£10,000 gained.

£5,000 lost.

Those examples show how comparatively small amounts of money can turn into big money won and lost on eBay purely because sometimes you do take your pricing policies seriously, and sometimes you don’t!

And there lies the main reasons many of us fail to reach our full income potential on eBay.  Sometimes it’s because we can’t wait to get our product listed and sold and money banked, and we don’t want to waste time on a useless task called ‘planning’!  Sometimes our earnings fall short because we ignore simple pricing strategies that can either save us hundreds of pounds each year, or possibly earn us a great deal more.

So how can we ensure we ALWAYS make money and never lose it on eBay?  For starters we could:

*  Know why asking one penny more for your product guarantees you lose money instead (#1).  Study eBay fees for various selling formats, and you’ll see that listing fees vary according to sellers’ starting prices.  What you may not realise is how asking just one penny more for your product might find you paying twice as much to list it.  That’s because, for example, if you start your auction at £14.99 you’ll pay 25 pence listing fee; starting at £15.00 will set you back 50 pence.  That means auctioning 100 items with starting price £14.99 will cost just £25.00, start at £15.00 and you’ll pay £50.  Check it out at: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/fees.html

*  Incorporate a safety system that guarantees you never sell at a loss.  If you must claw back a specific amount for your product, to break even or make a profit - little or large - these are the best ways to do it.

-  Use a higher starting price (#3) – but check out listing fees as mentioned earlier.  There’s no doubt that low starting prices can attract early bids and result in higher finishing prices than starting out with a price that makes you a profit.  But what’s the use of starting low so fifty people bid up to a fiver on something that cost you £100 and you hoped would sell for £5,000?  Far better to start your auction at a price that guarantees you make money, by starting your £100 product at £150, for example, to cover buying and listing costs and leave a little left over for you.  Maybe a lot left over!  The exception to avoiding low starting prices for expensive items is for goods always attracting plentiful bidders and famously high finishing prices.  A good example is Bonzo dog memorabilia, which I collect and which always fetches high prices and lots of eager bidders, so even if a listing starts at five pence most rare Bonzo items will still sell for double or triple figure sums. 

That suggests all you do to make this idea work is to research past sales of products similar to yours, check how often those items go unsold using low starting prices, then decide whether to ‘risk’ a low starting price or begin with your lowest acceptable selling price! 

-  Set a reserve on your listing (#2).  A reserve represents the minimum price you are prepared to accept for your product and if bidding fails to reach that price the item goes unsold.  Your reserve must be £50 or more and the amount will be unknown to bidders until your reserve is met.  You can use a low starting price as well as a reserve and still attract early bids because bidders do not know there is a reserve price until the first bid is placed.  Once that first bid is place eBay posts a message saying the reserve has or has not been met.  The fee for reserves of £50 to £4,999 pounds is 2 per cent of your reserve price (so £1 on a £50 reserve), for £5,000 or more you pay £100.  Lear more about reserve prices at: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/fees.html

*  Now let me reveal the three-step process that means you never lose money on eBay.  You do it by auctioning your product with your lowest acceptable starting price, while also setting a reserve of twice your lowest acceptable asking price.  Then you wait.  If the reserve is met, you win big time.  If the reserve isn’t met you list the item again, this time inviting Fixed Price bids (Buy It Now) starting twice your minimum acceptable price ….. but the clincher is …….  you also invite Best Offers ……. and that means anyone desperate to have your product will buy right away, even above market value, just to stop another person from having it.  If there is no eager buyer willing to pay over the odds, you wait for Best Offers to arrive, but you don’t accept any below ninety per cent of your Buy It Now price – not yet anyway!  As people place Best Offers, which you decline, their bid prices will show up in the history section of your listing where they can be seen by subsequent Best Offer bidders.  This means future bids will usually be higher than those you’ve already declined, which also means – eventually – someone will bid close enough to make a very nice profit for you!

So there you have it, easy-peasy ways to guarantee you always make money on eBay!