Last Minute eBay Holiday Sales Tips!

Last Minute eBay Holiday Sales Tips!

Now is the time to focus on last minute eBay Holiday sales!

Last Minute Holiday sales Tips For eBay Sellers!

Last Minute Holiday Sales To Do List For eBay Sellers!

I don’t know what the weather’s been like in your part of the country, but winter has definitely arrived in my hometown NYC, the Big Apple. That means two things! I better bundle up and Christmas is here very soon!  And you know what that means. It’s time to start checking items off your last minute eBay Holiday selling to-do list. I’m here to help!

The first to-do on your last-minute eBay Holiday list should be inventory.

Brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers are slashing prices to the bone this time of year. They are trying to get items sold before the end of Q4. Take advantage of last minute  Holiday sales events and stock up now on bargains to list in the new year.

Furthermore, don’t forget that Christmas sells year-round on eBay. This is the time to source products for your store’s Holidays categories! And when you’re scavenging through retail and online stores in search of holiday deals and steals, don’t overlook local drugstores and even dollar stores. You’ll be amazed at what you can find there. Remember eBay is home to an enormous diversity of goods from business & industrial to auto parts, electronics, games, toys, clothes, make up, luggage and more!

In addition, think wholesale sources for your eBay inventory.

Consider reputable wholesalers like BULQ. BULQ offers liquidation goods by the pallet or case. This is extremely advantageous for small sellers. A pallet may be too much for you to handle, especially in terms of storage space. For most sellers a case is very doable. BULQ ’s merchandise includes name brand overstocks and returns from some of the country’s major retailers, including Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. And it’s delivered right to your doorstep — convenient all year round, but a godsend when you’re snowed in!

BULQ reports that they anticipate excellent holiday-themed merchandise arriving daily starting towards the end of December through January.

New listings are posted every day at 11am, 2pm, and 5pm. So bookmark BULQ.com and check back often to catch the best bargains. If you see a lot you like on BULQ, you better purchase it quickly, as each lot is unique and can sell in a matter of minutes!

Now that you’ve taken care of your future inventory, let’s move on to your current inventory!

It’s time to discuss the sold items that I hope are flying off your shelves and out the door. How are your shipping supplies holding up? Even if you think you still have plenty, it’s time to reorder them now.  You want to be sure to have enough on hand for shipping all your last-minute sales! For free USPS supplies, go to https://store.usps.com/store/results/free-shipping-supplies/shipping-supplies/_/N-alnx4jZ7d0v8v

Better yet, order free co-branded eBay-USPS shipping supplies right from ebay.com.

To order go to http://uspssupplies.ebay.com/uspsweb/catalog

These include the popular Priority Mail Shoe Box as well as regular Priority and Priority Flat Rate boxes. Dress up your packed items and packages with eBay-branded tissue paper, stickers, and thank-you cards from eBay Shipping Supplies. (If you’re a store subscriber, be sure to use your quarterly coupon for these.) You’ll also find competitively priced polyvinyl and bubble-padded shipping envelopes there.

All good packaging for eBay Holiday sales isn’t complete without shipping labels!

And speaking of labels, do you have a backup system in place for purchasing and printing shipping labels in case eBay Labels goes kerflooey? Stamps.com has a full-featured free option especially for eBay sellers, so set up an account and have it ready, just in case. Use THIS link to set up a free account for eBay sellers with Stamps.com. You only pay for postage when you need it. There is no monthly maintenance fee.

Don’t Neglect Social Media!

With the frenzy of inventory shopping, and shipping sales, don’t forget to maintain posting schedule for your social media. You want the customer traffic social media brings you. Read eBay Holiday Sales Success 3 Ninja Tips for juicy tips for your eBay social media!

Now you’ve got your last-minute to-do list. Let’s make like Santa and check it twice:

1. Inventory
2. Shipping supplies
3. Plan B for purchasing and printing shipping labels

 

eBay Holiday Success Checklist!

Must Haves For eBay Holiday Last Minute Sales!

One more last-minute holiday reminder: be sure to take time to reflect on your many blessings and enjoy the Holiday season with family and friends. Ho, ho, ho!

eBay Holiday Sales Success 3 Ninja Tips!

eBay Holiday Sales Success 3 Ninja Tips!

Using these 3 eBay Holiday Sales Success Ninja tips, even with Black Friday coming soon, you’ll be ready to crush it!

Top 3 eBay Holiday Sales Tips!

eBay Holiday Sales Top 3 Ninja Tips!

Now,  it may feel as if you have all the time in the world to take care of eBay Holiday sales. Guess what, fellow seller? You don’t.  Right now, you want to grab all the sales you can. Also, get those sold items shipped. And you still want time for family, friends, and holiday festivities. Your top priority needs to be maximizing productivity for eBay Holiday sales success!

To save precious moments for savoring the joys of the season, you’ve got to make every minute count. Promoting your listings via social media will boost sales, but can you spare the time? Of course you can! In fact, you must. The trick is to budget that time, then use it wisely and well. Here’s how to make doing so as easy as 1, 2, 3.

First, pick a platform to attract eBay Holiday shoppers!

Social media offers many choices. There is Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. But very few solopreneurs have time to use them all, especially this time of year. Take a few minutes to check your various accounts: Which has the most followers? Which is garnering the most likes and comments? That should boil it down to one or at most two accounts.

If it’s two, then opt to concentrate on the one you most enjoy. Time is going to be in increasingly short supply due to eBay holiday orders. Additionally you’ll field questions from customers, etc., so you’ve got to focus. It will pay off! My YouTube Get Customers & Sales, No Matter What Is Going On With eBay explains this further.

Second: Decide how often you’ll post.

There are lots of recommended best practices for social media. However many such tips are designed for small businesses that have a social media team. You’re  likely to be your own social media manager (along with all the other business hats you wear), so be brutally honest: How much time each week can you realistically devote to social media? That means business-related posts and pinning, not catching up on what friends are doing, watching funny videos, or sharing the latest meme. Thirty minutes? An hour? Even if it’s only half an hour, that’s fine.

Just figure out whether you’re going to use that. Pick whatever works best for your schedule and lifestyle. It may be one choice one week and a different choice the next. As long as you put in your 30 minutes, exactly how you do it is up to you.

Third: OK, you’ve selected a single social media platform.

Let’s say  your top pick is Pinterest. You’ve allotted it half an hour per week. The next step is super important: Write that down. Set a phone reminder, put it on your electronic calendar, jot it in your daily planner or on your paper calendar, or any or all of the above. Just make sure you have it on record so you can cross it off your list as you get it done!

Next comes the hard part: actually doing it.

You’ve got two choices: post live in real time, or schedule your posts? Again, this is totally your call as well as a decision that may change from one week to the next. Remember how precious time is during the eBay Holiday sales season! Every minute counts.

Most sellers find that scheduling saves time by allowing them to create posts in batches.

Buffer and HootSuite offer free schedulers for Facebook and Twitter plus paid upgrades for Pinterest and Instagram. In addition, Facebook has a free scheduler for Business pages. You can also take advantage of Creator Studio for Facebook Pages and Instagram. It’s still in beta, so not all accounts have access to all features yet, but you should definitely check it out.

Enjoy my special social media freebie guide for you!

Use the ninja tips in the The Essential Social Media Cheat Sheet  to create social media posts that are irresistible to customers! Now you’re ready to utilize social media in a way that works best for you and your shoppers.

Essential Social Media Cheat Sheet for eBay Sellers!

eBay Holiday sales Success is here, with The Essential Social Media freebie tip sheet!

So, Holiday time eBay sellers:

1. Pick one social media platform on which to focus
2. Decide upon a weekly time allotment and how you’ll allocate that time
3. Choose between scheduling and posting live (switching back and forth as needed).

And finally enjoy my gift to you, The Essential Social Media Cheat Sheet.

Use The Essential Social Media Cheat Sheet and save time guessing what posts attract eager shoppers.

Good luck, and best wishes for a happy and profitable holiday season!

eBay Titles Matter More Than Ever!

eBay Titles Matter More Than Ever!

Great listings starts with great eBay titles.

eBay titles hold the secret to a great listing!

eBay titles hold the search juice you’re looking for!

Optimized eBay titles helps your listings be found in eBay and Google search results. Titles are key information for shoppers who increasingly buy on mobile. Furthermore, along with your hero image, or first  photo, the title is what’s going to catch buyers’ eyes. Your title can inspire shoppers to click on your listing.

Yet many sellers are not optimizing their eBay titles!

Small wonder, since eBay’s own Seller Center doesn’t even mention titles in its enumeration of listing best practices. And eBay’s Help page about optimizing listings for best match just says, “Write a clear and concise title with correct spelling and no more than 80 characters.” Correct spelling should go without saying. But while “clear and concise” may be concise, it’s not particularly clear!

So just what constitutes an effective title for your eBay listing?

Let’s start with eBay’s stipulation of “no more than 80 characters.” To write an effective title, you should use as many of those characters as possible — at least 75, if not more. And those characters should comprise keywords: the words that buyers use when searching for your item.

Keywords are attributes that describe your item, such as brand, size, color, model, and, of course, “the noun”, meaning what the item is, such as a dress. They are terms that buyers will type into a search engine to help them find an item like yours. In other words, think like a buyer. What words would someone looking for your item, type into the search bar? Use THOSE words.

So it’s important to think like a buyer when composing titles for your listings.

Keyword order is important, too. In general, lead with the item’s brand name. But if there’s no brand name, lead with the keywords that most clearly and concisely tell buyers what the item is. For example, if you’re listing unbranded Thanksgiving place mats featuring a cornucopia design, don’t lead with the keyword “Placemats”. Instead you’d  want to lead with “Thanksgiving cornucopia”, then”Placemats”. Why do this? Because the attribute of most interest to a potential shopper is Thanksgiving or cornucopia, not placemat.

Similarly, if the item is a no- name brand, don’t lead with brand in the title.

Rather lead with what’s of interest. Is it a cell phone case or a dress? Or perhaps the pattern of polka dot or plaid is most appealing. Use eBay search. See what eBay suggests when you type in relevant keywords.

You can actually enlist the help of eBay’s search engine, to help you determine the most important keywords for your item and in what order you should put them. To find out how, check out my YouTube video “How to Write Great Titles for Your eBay Listings Quickly” . This tip will save you time. Let eBay search tell you exactly how buyers search for your item!

Here are some additional tips for optimizing the titles of your listings.

Titles are not sentences; think “Keyword Keyword Keyword”  Never waste valuable characters on words such as “L@@k” or “Wow” or “Beautiful”, because nobody searches for those. Using terms like these are “old school eBay” used in years past. They are not effective now.

Don’t include excessive punctuation such as exclamation points, quotation marks, commas, etc.  It’s not needed and wastes valuable characters. Also avoid special characters, such as stars, hearts, or emojis.  Style your title in conventional title case, capitalizing the first letter of each keyword. Avoid UPPER CASE TITLES and rAnDom UpPeR aNd LoWeR CaSe TitLeS as they are hard to read! Remember most of your shoppers are on mobile. Again, think like a buyer.

If you’ve got listings that have been up for awhile with no sales, try tweaking their titles using the tips in this post and in my YouTube video. HERE is some additional information to move your listings ahead in eBay search results.

Titles aren’t rocket science.

But they can mean the difference between an item that sells and one that doesn’t. Because so many shoppers are on mobile know that your pictures and your titles are what shoppers see first.  Done right, they land you in front on more shoppers and the RIGHT shoppers. Titles are THAT important.

Attention to titles pays off in better eBay and Google search ranking. And that means more sales!

 

Do you think like an eBay buyer?

When creating your title, it pays to think like your potential eBay buyer!

eBay Top Rated Seller Program Is Even Better!

eBay Top Rated Seller Program Is Even Better!

It’s always been good to be a Top Rated Seller on eBay.

You want to be an eBay Top Rated Seller!

But since new Seller Protections for a Top Rated Seller (eTRS) went into effect on October 1 , 2019 , it’s better than ever. So if you’re not already a Top Rated Seller , now it’s time to step up your game. You don’t even need a store to qualify!

Why should you strive to become Top Rated Seller?

Consider the benefits:

  1. Newly enhanced Seller Protections (more about those in a moment)
  2. A boost in search results
  3. Increased credibility with buyers
  4. $30 quarterly credit for Promoted Listings
  5. Eligibility for meeting Top Rated Plus standards, thereby getting the Top Rated Plus seal on your listing(s) along with a 10% discount on your selling fees

With all those goodies to be garnered, why wouldn’t you want to be a Top Rated Seller?

And with a bit of effort —plus perhaps some tweaks to your business practices — you can and will be!

To further whet your appetite for eTRS, let’s take a quick look at the new protections enjoyed by US-based Top Rated Sellers as of October 1st, 2019.

They can be broken down into two categories:

  1. Protection from abusive buyers
  2. Protection against events beyond your control

Whichever it is, eBay will automatically remove any negative and neutral feedback, defects, and/or open cases in service metrics. The new protections were first announced at eBay Open 2019.

eBay Open 2019 announced a multitude of updates for sellers!

To qualify for these newly enhanced protections, you must be a Top Rated Seller.

Also you need to reside in the USA and offer 30-day or longer returns. Easy-peasy! And they apply whether you ship the item to a domestic buyer or internationally, with or without the Global Shipping Program (GSP). Get the details here.

So just what does it take to become Top Rated?

You don’t need an eBay store; all you have to do is to consistently deliver outstanding customer service and a great buying experience. That’s your goal in any case, right?

However, eBay has very specific criteria for “outstanding customer service” and “a great buying experience”. First, your eBay account must have been active for at least 90 days. You’ve also got to have racked up a minimum of 100 transactions and $1,000 in sales with US buyers during the past 12 months.

Once you’ve qualified in those two respects, there are more detailed requirements to be met. You can find them by going to ebay.com/TopRated.

There’s only one thing as important for your business as achieving Top Rated Seller status, and that’s maintaining Top Rated Seller status. You especially don’t want to lose it right now, going into Q4! So keep a sharp eye on your Seller Dashboard (linked from Seller Hub or your Feedback Profile page). Monitor it on at least a weekly basis, and nip any negative trends in the bud ASAP.

By the same token, if you haven’t yet earned eTRS, take a close look at your business practices as reflected in your Seller Dashboard metrics.

Figure out what’s holding you back. Are you chronically late shipping? Perhaps you should adjust your handling time. Do your buyers frequently open INAD cases? Maybe you need to improve your photos and/or descriptions.

Once you’re Top Rated, consider qualifying some or all of your listings for the Top Rated Plus seal by offering same- or one-day handling plus 30-day or longer free returns.

The extra effort needed to up-level your customer service will be amply repaid by a 10% discount on your final value fees and the extra traffic that the TR+ seal will drive to your listings.

Don’t be intimidated by eTRS. Achieving and maintaining Top Rated Seller status is imminently doable. You’ve got this — now go get it!

It's easier than you think to be a top rated seller on eBay!

Are you missing out by NOT being Top Rated on eBay?!

 

eBay Sellers Christmas Holiday Sales Alert!

eBay Sellers Christmas Holiday Sales Alert!

eBay sellers Christmas is less than 90 days away. That is less than 12 weeks. That may seem like a long time to you. It is not.  So, eBay sellers that means it’s time to start preparing for a profitable Q4 right now.

Not sure exactly where to begin for a successful eBay sellers Christmas selling season?

Relax, because I’m here to help you have your best Holiday selling season ever! The first thing to remember is that there’s really no wrong way to tackle Q4, as long as you tackle it. It’s your business; you get to be in charge of how you run it.

So don’t waste time and energy comparing yourself to others.

What works best for another eBay seller may not work for you — and vice-versa. Make the best decisions for your business and your life. It’s your eBay business.

If you’re like most eBay sellers, there are probably 3 things on your eBay sellers Christmas Q4 wish list:

  1. More sales than last year
  2. Get more done in less time
  3. Enjoy the holidays with family and friends

My proven Q4 success strategies can help you achieve all 3 of those goals to have a great eBay sellers Christmas!.

Go to your Active Listings page in Seller Hub, and click on Current Price to sort items by what’s most expensive. Which of your items are new with tags?

You may think an item is not a gift. Remember not everyone has your lifestyle. Your family may not gift power tools, but for someone else, it’s the perfect Chrostmas gift. Think outside the box when it comes to what you think is just right for a gift. Many, many items are giftable! Christmas present are not just dolls, teddy bears and video games!

eBay seller s Christmas is more than teddy bears!

The perfect Christmas gift is more than toys!

Don’t forget that used items also sell as gifts, especially if they’re vintage and/or collectible.

Next, check your unlisted inventory, and get gift-worthy items listed ASAP.

Make a list or spreadsheet, so you can easily keep track of your Holiday listings. Then cast a critical eye at your active listings. Do any of them need their photos redone? Or maybe put into a different order? Make sure your listings are still optimized for search, too, as item specifics may have changed. This recent video Lost In eBay Search shows you how invaluable correct item specifics are.

By now you should be pretty well organized. Check your holiday inventory at the beginning or end of each week, whichever works best for you:

  • What’s selling or sold?
  • Do you need to run a sale?
  • What needs tweaking?

Create promotional campaigns, and make a note of what works — then do more of it!

Finally, to have the ultimate eBay sellers Christmas, plan to enjoy yourself

In between all of the above tasks, take time to bask in the company of family and friends and participate in holiday events.

Build that time and those events into your Holiday plan. You’ll be making memories while your business is making money!

Break out the wassail, and let’s share a toast: Here’s to your best eBay Christmas Holiday selling season ever!

 

 

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