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eBay Hacks

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

eCommerce tips and tricks for auction success

eBay is one of the big eCommerce success stories – a giant marketplace where over 20 million goods of all description are being bought and sold at the astonishing rate of $680 every second of the day. You can buy and sell almost anything. Some people buy what others throw out at knock-down prices, then re-sell the same stuff at a profit – and actually make a living doing so. David Karp’s book is not just a user’s manual – though it does show you how to use the system. And the hack in his title refers to making the best of its features to improve your trading. He explains how to use and improve search terms to find what you’re looking for.

He also includes Perl scripts for those enthusiasts who want to take their buying and selling strategies to a more serious level. There’s an amazing amount of detail on how to operate the bidding system, including tips on what’s called ‘sniping’ – making a killer bid just before an auction closes. All this is advice based on first-hand experience. He’s a seasoned buyer and seller, and he even reveals some of the mistakes he has made.

There is a dizzying array of checks and balances to promote fairness and minimise cheating on eBay. The auction process works through interlocking systems of trust, public feedback, posted reputations, and third-party arbitration for any disputes.

He deals with an amazing range of skills: page design, eCommerce payments and banking, digital photography, scripting (if you want to maximise control) public relations (dealing with buyers or sellers) and mail order techniques for shipping items you sell.

Finally, for those who want to open a serious business, he explains the steps for running a full time store on eBay. You can also join their affiliate program and ‘make money whilst you are asleep’.

You might want to start with just a little part-time hobby, or you could become a serious eCommerce day-trader. Either way, everything you need to know about taking part in the world’s biggest auction is covered here.

The latest edition has been completely revised and updated to make use of an array of new tools and features, as well as to reflect the changes in the eBay API, eBay’s policies, and the general practices of its increasingly sophisticated users.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

David A. Karp, eBay Hacks: 100 Industrial-strength tips and tools, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2nd edn, 2005, pp.447, ISBN: 059610068X

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eBay the smart way

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

selling, buying, and profiting on the Web’s #1 auction site

The Internet has thrown up lots of new possibilities for commerce, and one which has exploded in the last eighteen months is online auctions. This is the car boot sale principle writ large. People are making a living – if not fortunes – buying cheap and selling as dear as the market will stand. Vendors describe their goods on an auction house website, and buyers register their bids. At its best, everybody wins. Sellers get more profit than they would in the bricks-and-mortar second-hand market, and the buyer gets a cheaper price. The person who makes most of course is the auction house, because it gets a cut of the transaction.

There are lots of auction houses, but Joseph Sinclair’s guide concentrates on eBay because it is the biggest and most successful. In July 1999 eBay had over two million items for sale in over 1,600 categories, and it was receiving over 50 million hits per day on its site. That’s an awful lot of traffic, and it’s quite obvious from his account that if you want to win in buying or selling, you need to know how it all works. There are four types of auction, and they can last for three, five, or seven days, usually producing a flurry of bidding towards the last few hours.

The system is obviously wide open to abuse and fraud, all of which Joseph Sinclair confronts quite frankly. Some people send duff goods, others fail to pay for them. Many, many pages are devoted to the problems, and by midway through the book auctions seemed to me like a legal minefield. But eBay has built into its interface a complex system of public feedback, checks, complaints, and an ‘About Me’ system in which commercial reputations can be built up via honest transactions – or lost via sloppiness or corruption. He also claims that online criminals are more easily caught than offline, because they are easier to trace.

It’s interesting that the online auction system brings all the previously ‘hidden’ disputes over problematic transactions out into the open. They certainly do go on in daily terrestrial commerce, but others don’t normally see them or even hear about them However, he includes advice on withdrawing an item from auction, withdrawing a bid, or disagreeing over a transaction. It’s quite obvious that he knows the system very well, and anyone feeling inclined to snap up bargains would do well to follow his advice.

As you can probably imagine, this new form of trading has throw up its own weird jargon – including terms such as ‘feedback solicitation’, ‘bid shielding’, ‘bid siphoning’, and ‘shill feedback’. He explains most of the terms, but I think a glossary would have been useful.

The book is quite an interesting market product in its own right. Huge margins, wide line-spacing, only 200 words per page, a sub-heading for almost every paragraph, and page layout kept brutally simple. Perhaps this is a sign of book production which has been influenced by the design of web sites? Oh, and it’s also quite cheap.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph T. Sinclair, eBay the smart way: selling, buying, and profiting on the Web’s #1 auction site, New York: Amacom, 1999, pp.418, ISBN: 0814470645

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the eBay survival guide

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to make money on eBay – and avoid losing your shirt

I rarely talk about computers when socialising – otherwise you easily get branded an IT bore. But I was at a dinner party recently with neighbours where it suddenly turned out that half the table were trading on eBay! There are amazing bargains to be had. It turned out that we were eating off antique plates the hostess had bagged to match up with family heirlooms. But for tender mortals like you and me, there needs to be some hand-holding through the jungle of bids, deadlines, and prospective bidding. That’s where guidance manuals such as eBay the smart way, eBay Hacks and the eBay survival guide come in.

Michael Banks is an experienced trader with twenty years of eCommerce experience, and he talks you through the basics in a friendly and encouraging manner. First he gives a clear account of the huge variety of services, downloads, and support materials at the eBay site, then explains how the auctions (and the sales) actually work . There are lots of different ways of trading, and he covers them all.

Then he shows you how to find things using eBay’s powerful search engine. This includes neat tricks such as including plurals and deliberate mis-spellings in your search terms.

He deals with the central issue of ‘How much is it worth?’ – which is a much easier question to ask than to answer. His advice is that you need to cross-check with other auctions of the same object; look into price guides; and track what other people are searching for and buying.

Selling items is a more complex business than buying – not because of eBay, but because more of your own time is tied up in handling and posting stock to customers. There are also lots of different ways to set a selling price: you can have a minimum, a reserve, and a buy-it-now price.

He shows you how to describe, display, and illustrate the goods you want to sell. This might sound fairly simple – but you’ve got to remember that you need to stand out from thousands of other sellers, and you’ve got to be completely accurate, otherwise you might get negative feedback.

eBay has a fairly detailed system of resolving complaints and offering protection for both buyers and sellers. If you’re worried about getting into difficulties, he explains quite clearly how to solve problems.

As a buyer, if you really have your heart set on securing a bargain, you might need to get into the skills of bidding at the last possible minute – or ‘sniping’ as it is known in the trade. Once again, he shows you how to do it, and even how to outwit other people who may be doing the same thing.

He finishes by showing you how to recognise scams and misleading descriptions of products for sale. Thanks to eBay’s gigantic database of information on its buyers, sellers, and the history of all their transactions, it’s possible to locate all the information you need to protect yourself.

It’s quite true that some people make a full time living just buying and selling on eBay. If you fancy putting your toes into the waters of eCommerce, this would be an excellent place to start.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Michael Banks, the eBay survival guide, San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2005. ISBN: 1593270631

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eCommerce tips and tricks for auction success

selling, buying, and profiting on the Web’s #1 auction site

how to make money on eBay – and avoid losing your shirt

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