Unofficial
Guide
®
the
to
Making Money on
eBay
®
Lynn Dralle
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Copyright © 2006 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans-
mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record-
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and trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
and/or its affiliates. eBay is a registered trademark of eBay, Inc. All other trademarks
are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc. is not associated
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The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to
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pose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The

Acknowledgements
T
hank you to my rebel housewife buddy Sherri Caldwell
(www.rebelhousewife.com) for introducing me to her
agent, Marilyn Allen. My thanks go to Marilyn for giving
me the opportunity to write this book.
It was great working with all the folks at Wiley. They are very
professional and a pleasure to write a book with. My thanks
go to Pam Mourouzis the acquisitions editor and to Suzanne
Snyder the project editor. You are both awesome! I also want to
thank Susan Thornberg for her excellent job of tech editing.
Tere Stouffer did a great job of editing and rearranging text.
I am so grateful for my family and circle of friends who all
rallied to make this book happen. I want to thank my dad and
stepmom, Wayne and Sue Dralle, who took my kids for most of
the summer in Washington so that I could write. Also, a big
thank you goes to my mom, Schaara Chase, for always being
happy to help (or fly to Mexico) at the drop of a hat. I am also
indebted to my sister, Kristin Dralle, for spending two months in
120 degree weather taking care of my kids so that I could finish
this book! I also want to acknowledge my brother, Lee Dralle,
who always does a fantastic job on graphics and photography.
I want to thank my two children for being so wonderful and
putting up with a mommy who always has a book to finish. Their
independence, sense of humor and intelligence continues to
amaze and inspire me. I want to thank my friend Melanie Souve
for her positive support and cheerful phone calls. I am indebted
to Peter Gineris for helping me to see the big picture and for
always encouraging me. I am grateful for Maureen Arcand, who
is such a great assistant and friend, and who makes my job easy!

Supplementing your store front 45
Turning into a full-time seller 48
Just the facts 49
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CONTENTS
3 Determining What to Sell 51
Cars and eBay Motors 52
Consumer electronics 56
Computers and networking 61
Clothing, shoes, and accessories 63
Books, movies, and music 67
Home and garden 71
Collectibles (and antiques) 76
Sports 80
Toys and hobbies 83
Jewelry and watches 87
Just the facts 90
4 Acquiring Your Merchandise 91
Your house 91
Buying items to sell on eBay 96
Selling homemade goods 111
Selling for others 112
Just the facts 113
II How to Get Started Selling
on eBay 115
5 First Steps to Building a Business 117
Thinking about your
business goals 117
Writing a business plan 120

9 Preparing Your Items for Sale 187
Establish a routine 187
Cleaning 189
Writing up the details 191
Just the facts 202
10 Photographing Your Item 203
Setting up your photo
studio or area 203
Quality and features 206
Photography tricks 208
Saving your photos to your hard drive 210
Editing 211
Picture Manager 215
Just the facts 216
11 Doing Your Research 217
Identify your item 217
Pay an expert to identify your item 228
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CONTENTS
Researching the competition 231
Just the facts 234
12 Listing Your Item 235
Making eBay a daily routine 235
Starting a new listing 236
Categorizing your item 237
Writing a good title for your listing 243
Using item specifics to search 247
Writing a good description 248
Just the facts 252

Leaving feedback 307
Just the facts 309
16 Troubleshooting 311
Your customer doesn’t pay 311
Your customer is unhappy with
the purchase 314
Your shipment never arrives 315
Your shipment arrives damaged 316
You ship the wrong item 317
Your customer leaves you
negative feedback 318
Just the facts 319
17 What to Do if Your Item
Doesn’t Sell 321
Relisting items at auction 322
Opening an eBay store 325
Donating to charity, selling on
consignment, or holding a garage sale 333
Just the facts 334
V The Future of Your Business
and eBay 335
18 The Future of Your Business
on eBay 337
Making (and keeping) loyal customers 337
Driving traffic to your eBay auctions 338
Marketing your eBay store 342
Just the facts 348
19 The Future of eBay and
Online Auctions 349
Looking at eBay’s predictions 349

August 2, 2000, and I miss her every day. We shut the
store on August 2, 2002, two years to the day after she
died.
How I got started on eBay
eBay played a huge part in the story of my grand-
mother and her shop. In 1998, we found that we
needed to raise a lot of money quickly for her nurs-
ing-home care. Friends had been telling me about
eBay for a few years, but I was hesitant to try it until
my grandmother got sick.
The set-up to get me selling on eBay took almost a
month. During this time, I realized that I needed a
way to keep track of my eBay purchases and my eBay
sales, so I created two tracking systems, I Buy on eBay
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
and I Sell on eBay. These recordkeeping notebooks were and are
a lifesaver, and eBay liked them so much that they carried them
for three years in their online store from 1999 to 2002 and they
are now for sale in the eBay online shop again! I include blank
copies of both tracking sheets in the Appendix for you to use.
The notebooks that are sold in the eBay store come with a three
ring binder, tab dividers, instructions and 200 double sided track-
ing sheets.
From 1998 until 2000, my family and I used eBay to pay for
my grandmother’s nursing care. I was selling $20,000 during the
best months. Things that had sat in the store for years gathering
dust were now bringing in 10 to 100 times what they were
priced. It was incredible!

430,000 people just like me who are making their
full-time living selling on eBay. I want to teach you
how to become one of them.
On any given day, more than 29 million items are
for sale on eBay, and eBay says that in 2005 they sold
90,000 items a day. eBay has changed the way the
world does business and the company is such a force
that USA Today does an article every January 1 enti-
tled “The Year According to eBay.” eBay is a huge
gold mine of opportunity for any person who wants
to be his or her own boss or even for any person who
just wants to sell a few items for fun and profit!
The only thing constant about eBay is change.
eBay is one smart company, and it knows how to stay
one step ahead of the competition at all times. For
this reason, eBay is always making tiny changes. A
tweak with the way a page looks here and the way a
page looks there.
If you go to a page and the button that I’ve
described happens to be in a little different position,
don’t worry. If you ever get stuck, click on the “Live
help” link next to the yellow question mark icon that
is on every single one of eBay’s sell pages and an oper-
ator will be there by e-mail to help you within minutes.
Also, if there have been any major changes to
eBay, you can check my Web site at www.thequeenof
auctions.com/guidechanges.html, and I will post
anything that you must know about. My goal is for
you to be as successful on eBay as I am and to do this,
I want to keep you updated and motivated.

PART I
Laying the Foundation
for Selling on eBay
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Chapter 1
3
GET THE SCOOP ON
Looking at an overview of eBay
■
Understanding
basic auctions and terminology
■
Selling on eBay
versus using an auction drop
eBay Basics
I
n this chapter, you can get a feel for eBay’s hum-
ble beginnings and see what happened along
the way to make it such a market leader. You
will also learn some basic auction terminology (for
instance, what a regular auction is as opposed to a
reserve price auction) that will make reading this
book and going on eBay much easier to understand.
Finally, you’ll read about the new phenomenon that
is sweeping the on-line auction world, the eBay drop-
off stores, which are in no way affiliated with eBay.
These stores take in your items, much like a con-
signment store would, and then sell them on eBay. I
examine the pros and cons of these chains and

sellers could use to communicate with one another and estab-
lish their reputations. These simple message boards grew into
an elaborate way for collectors to connect, and they also estab-
lished trust. Omidyar took this concept and turned it into the
current feedback system that self-regulates how business is done
on eBay (see “Feedback” later in this chapter).
eBay grew so quickly that Omidyar and his business partner,
Jeff Skoll felt that it was spinning out of control. So, in 1997,
they lured Meg Whitman away from her position at Hasbro’s
Preschool Division, where she was general manager. Whitman
was the perfect choice to be this growing company’s CEO and,
in fact, much of eBay’s success has been attributed to her.
Also in 1997, eBay finally got the venture capital it had been
looking for, and officially changed its name from AuctionWeb
to eBay and considered an IPO (Initial Public Offering). By
1998 eBay had gone public, which made Omidyar a billionaire.
Omidyar and his wife Pam are now well-known philanthropists.
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CHAPTER 1
■
EBAY BASICS
eBay has experienced growing pains, most notably during
the summer of 1999 when the eBay site crashed for 22 hours.
I remember when this happened—it was something that
affected many buyers and sellers. eBay took the event as a wake-
up call and the technical aspect of the site was overhauled and
beefed up.
eBay has done a great job since 1999 in keeping the Disneys
and Sun Microsystems of the world selling on the site, while still

LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR SELLING ON EBAY
Of the registered users, more than 60 million are active. An
active user is someone who has bid, bought, or listed an item on
eBay within the previous 12 months. That is a lot of people
using this site!
eBay estimates that gross merchandise volume (GMV), or
the total value of all successfully closed listings on eBay, will
be $40 billion in 2005, and that 12 categories will deliver over
$1 billion in sales for 2005. Take note of these categories,
because there is a huge dollar volume potential in selling these
items.
■
eBay Motors at $12.9 billion (this is the world’s largest car
dealership)
■
Consumer electronics at $3.4 billion
■
Computers and networking at $3.2 billion
■
Clothing, shoes, and accessories at $3.1 billion
■
Books, movies, and music combined at $2.7 billion
■
Home and garden at $2.2 billion
■
Collectibles at $2.2 billion
■
Sports at $1.9 billion
■
Toys and hobbies at $1.7 billion

cent of all transactions on eBay. eBay works hard to keep the
small sellers happy.
Understanding auction terms
Before I talk about how an auction works, I need to define
some of the more common terms. Knowing the meanings of
these words will make it much easier for you to understand the
concepts throughout the book.
Bid increment
Bid increment is the amount by which a bid must be increased
in order for it to be accepted. For example, if the bidding for
an item is currently at $10 and the next bid must be at least
$10.50, the bid increment is 50¢. Bid increments are set by eBay.
Table 1.1 lists the current bid increments.
Bright Idea
For an in-depth eBay glossary, visit pages.ebay.com/help/newtoebay/glossary.
html.
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PART I
■
LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR SELLING ON EBAY
Table 1.1. Bid Increments
Current Price Bid Increment
$0.01–$0.99 $0.05
$1.00–$4.99 $0.25
$5.00–$24.99 $0.50
$25.00–$99.99 $1.00
$100.00–$249.99 $2.50
$250.00–$499.99 $5.00
$500.00–$999.99 $10.00

There are quite a few levels to the categories, and some get
quite specific. The category numbers serve as quick shortcuts
when you’re listing your item. Instead of having to search by the
different top categories and follow numerous threads, you can
just type in the number. As an example, I list a lot of items in
category #25:
Pottery & Glass→Pottery & China→China,
Dinnerware→Other
You see, I would have had to go through four steps to get to this
category the traditional way.
Dutch auction
Also known as a multiple item auction, a Dutch auction involves
a seller offering multiple identical items. Dutch auctions can
have many winners. A bid is placed when the bidder decides
how many of the items he wants and at what price. The winning
bids are determined by the total overall value (items × price).
As an example, I could put up 10 glass prisms at 99¢ each. If
someone comes in and bids $1.10 each for all 10 of them, and
no one else bids, this bidder would get 10 prisms for 99¢ each,
or a total of $9.90. If, however, someone else comes in and bids
for 8 of them at $1.50 each, who do you think will win? It’ll be
the person who bid for 8 at $1.50 each, because that total is
Bright Idea
If you find that you use the same categories over and over again, make
yourself a little cheat sheet with those numbers. If you keep it handy by your
computer, you’ll save a lot of time. Some of my favorites are 453 Majolica,
25 Dinnerware-Other, and 38242 Stainless Flatware.
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PART I

Rating
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