INTRODUCTION
I've been a seller on eBay for only 2 years and have been through the relative thick and thin of being a seller. My account has been hacked by an American, had many people trying to scam me, non paying bidders and credit card fraud. However I still have 100% positive feedback and am selling better than ever. I had to learn through my personal experience, so the object of this guide is to pass on my experience to you in the form of five main selling tactics I use.

TACTIC 1: LISTING AT THE RIGHT TIME
It is always a good idea to time when your listing ends at a time when there are most likely to be bidders sat at their computers. This means not having your listing ending at 4am in the morning when everyone’s asleep or 5pm when everyone’s stuck in rush hour traffic. I personally like to time my listings to end late evening, say between 7pm and 9pm just after tea time. Of course if you’re selling internationally this only applies to your home country, but it still makes a difference.

The day the listing ends can also be crucial, say, end it on a Saturday night when everyone’s out on the town would probably see poor turnover, however end it on a Sunday evening when everyone’s most likely at home and you’re golden. Oh yeah & don’t end anything on Christmas/New Years morning for heaven's sake!

TACTIC 2: LISTING IN MASS NUMBERS ALL AT ONCE
If like me you sell many of the same type of item listed in the same category, then I will let you into a helpful tactic which benefits attention to your items. Instead of listing them bit by bit, use eBay’s TURBO LISTER tool to list them all at once in one go. This way, when it comes to searching items in that category in the eBay search, it is likely that your items will fill one or more pages continuously of the search results. This is handy as the buyer comes along and sees nothing but your items as every one else’s items have been pushed aside either way. Genius! The other advantage of this of course is every buyer who finds one item their looking for will potentially find all your items, and the chances they’ll buy something else is greatly increased.

There are 3 downsides I can think of when engaging this tactic and having millions of items ending at the same time. 1) It may cause lag on your eBay account and Paypal, 2) it will fill your inbox up to the brim with confusing information about listings ending everywhere, and 3) put a strain on any buyers trying to buy more than one of your item if they are in a last-minute bidding war.

TACTIC 3: SENSIBLE STARTING BIDS
Now you would think that low starting bids would attract buyers, full stop. Well, you are absolutely right. However it depends on what type of item you are trying to sell. If like me you sell old unpopular dance records, it turns out that only one or two people are looking for a particular record and would spend anything between £0-£6 on it (unless it was rare). Many times I have listed records at 99p and that’s all they have gone for as only individual people are after them. So I would normally list them at industry release price of £4.99 and people are still willing to pay for them. However if you’re selling items that are popular such as a popular DVD or something worth hundreds of pounds, a low starting bid can attract early attention and watchers. Therefore by the time the listing ends the chances are you will have more people fighting over it.

TACTIC 4: EYE-CATCHING YET EASY TO FOLLOW LISTING DESIGN
I have seen some terrible listings in my time on eBay and here’s what to think about when constructing your listing design:
1) Avoid over-the-top huge text all the way through the listing – really hard to follow. If you want to be eye-catching and bold then use big text on titles and important info only, and don’t underline everything! It’s not nice on the eyes.
2) Try and keep the colour of the text flowing – i.e. red for titles and black for normal text. Try and avoid making every single paragraph a different colour. Make words you want to stand out a non-standard colour of the parent design layout.
3) Clearly state things such as the condition of the item, payment, postage and guarantee plans you offer for that item. It covers your back when the buyer claims they weren’t given the right information.
4) Use pictures wherever you can, in the gallery and on the listing design itself if you can afford the listing fees. The first bite is always with the eye and buyers love their eye-candy and feel more secure when they can see what they’re buying. I know I do.

TACTIC 5: MAXIMUM SECURITY
It is a good idea to secure your reputation and money to avoid scammers and hackers and time wasters giving you grief, because they ARE out there – I have been a victim of a few in my time! Change your password for eBay about 3 or 4 times a year (say once for each quarter), and make it a good long one with lots of numbers. There are always scammers and hackers out there trying to get hold of your password. My password was guessed once after they followed a link to my personal website and found the answer to my secret question! WATCH OUT FOR THE TRAIL BACK TO THE SECRET QUESTION! I had to replace my credit card and fill forms out to claim back £700 worth of fraud as a result of that so don’t make my mistake, especially if you don’t have credit card insurance!

Also do not trust any e-mails that appear in your inbox disguised as eBay official letters asking you to re-enter your information to update your account! That’s how hackers get hold of your details! Just ignore them and forward a copy onto eBay for reference. Details on how to do this are in the eBay help section at http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/confidence/isgw-account-theft-spoof.html

TACTIC 6: SUSTAINING YOUR REPUTATION
Buyers like to see a seller with a clean positive feedback score. To ensure this you need to keep the buyer happy (obviously!). Ways I make sure my buyers are happy are as follows:
1) Build a “ME” page they can turn to for contact and further information
2) Links to further information or your personal website helps so that they know they are dealing with a real person and not a company of robots.
3) Creating my own invoices with contact info so when the buyer receives the item they know what they’ve paid for and who from etc.
4) Post items out as quickly as possible and avoid over-charging on the postage
5) Support e-mails to keep the buyers informed what’s going on.

One of my main practices to ensure I receive good feedback is to leave feedback once the buyer has left it for you. This encourages the notion in the buyer that whatever tone of feedback they leave for you will be returned to them. People always say to me why not leave the buyer feedback as soon as they’ve paid? They’ve done their bit yes, but if you leave them feedback you have just shot the only bullet you have to defend yourself, and the power will be in the buyers hands and out of the sellers. Once they get the item, if the buyer feels devious enough they can say anything they want to try and scam their money back – its broken, hasn’t turned up, not happy with it, or fancy leaving you a negative for the hell of it! Sounds harsh but believe me it happens! It’s a good self-security measure to protect your reputation and to ensure it’s a clean one.

One last hint now. To help you keep on top of items and ensure you send things to the right people, the “My eBay” console is very good and has been vastly improved this year. However before they had the updated version I liked to go one step further. I log every single purchase / sale in an excel file with addresses and contact e-mails for future reference. This has helped me when dealing with buyers from months & months ago or those whose accounts suddenly disappear off the face of eBay.

CONCLUSION
There are plenty of other selling techniques but I will be writing forever if I didn’t stop, I shall leave it to someone who has even more experience than I do. So to all you sellers out there I hope this proves to be a healthy insight to boost your selling performance. I am honoured to pass down the knowledge! Happy selling!