The Finney School of Real Life

While some companies have online auction sites, the individual seller conducts most online auctions. Auction sites such as eBay require sellers to register, and to pay a fee each time they auction an item. Sellers usually list a reserve price, or minimum bid they are willing to consider, and also set a time limit for bids. Better sellers provide a full description of the item being auctioned, and a photograph, and are willing to respond to any questions about the item. At the end of the bidding period, the person with the highest bid wins the auction. At this point, the seller establishes contact to discuss payment options, shipping, refunds and follow-up service, if any is available.

Auctions work best when both the buyer and the seller fully understand and comply with the rules of the auction site. Doing so helps either party notice if something doesn’t seem quite right. Experienced sellers learn to identify and screen out bogus bids.

Once a buyer places a winning bid, the seller usually specifies payment terms via a third-party payment agency. For items of substantial value, an escrow service may be used, which holds the buyer’s money until the buyer receives the item and is satisfied with it. Some auction sites provide payment and escrow services.

Unfortunately, online auctions don’t necessarily proceed in a smooth manner or to the satisfaction of the seller and the bidder. The Federal Trade Commission ranks fraud related to online auctions as one of the leading causes of complaints. Fraud may be committed by either the seller or the buyer, and usually involves payment or receipt of items. Online auction fraud should be promptly reported, with as much documentation as possible, to the Better Business Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, local consumer protection agencies and your state attorney general’s office.

It seems as if everyone is talking about online auctions. And why not. There are thousands of online auctions on the internet with more popping up everyday. People love them because they can usually find great bargains. Businesses are now also seeing the benefits of online auctions. Below are five ways your business can benefit from online auctions.

1. Get Rid Of Excess Inventory

You could sell your excess or discontinued products at an online auction. Your unsold inventory is doing you no good sitting around, collecting dust. It’s an effective way to make extra income and it won’t be a total loss for your business. You could even get lucky and make a profit depending on how much people will bid for your excess inventory.

2. Test Pricing For New Products

An easy way to test new product prices is to see what people will bid for them at an online auction. First, sell your product at three different online auctions. Next, calculate the average selling bid from all three auctions and that will be your selling price for your new product.

3. Sell Your Products

You can get your product in front of a large audience by selling it at an online auction. Some of the bigger auction sites draw over millions of hits a year. The key to being successful is to sell your product at multiple online auctions at the same time. Let’s say you sold one product a day from just one auction site. If you sell your product at one hundred online auction sites that would be one hundred sales a day!

4. Start Your Own Online Auction

Drive traffic to your web site by starting your own online auction. People will visit your web site to find bargains and to sell their own products. You will get plenty of repeat visitors from people rebidding on products and adding new products to sell. You could also charge other businesses to advertise on your web site.

5. Lower Your Business Costs

You can find lower prices on business supplies and equipment at online auctions. I’m not saying all the time, but before you go pay retail for a new printer try bidding on one first. A company may be selling them at a lower price at an online auction because they have excess inventory.

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Julia Tang publishes “Smart Online Business Tips”, a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
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The short answer is; anything you can get for less than its actual worth.

One way of finding cheap goods to resell is by finding misspelt items listed by other eBayers. Suggesting this tends to get you shot down in flames by non-believers - but it does work.

For example:

Consider one of the most popular video games of the last couple of years - Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

If, in the middle of 2005, you could’ve bought this game for £10, do you think you could’ve made money? Of course you could, people were more than willing to pay £20 or so on eBay for this game.

Figuring out that many people would spell a word like Andreas wrong, I did a little experiment.

Using an eBay arbitrage tool, such as the one found at http://www.BenCatt.com/arbitrage.php I simply entered “san andreas” into the box and clicked Generate.

I was then given a clickable link which immediately searched all of eBay for misspellings of “San Andreas”.

Typically, each time I did this I would get around 20-30 results.

Next, I simply noted down the worst spelt examples and their eBay item numbers.

The most I was willing to pay for a PS2 version of the game was £11.50 in total i.e. the winning price plus the postage and packing.

So, I saved this search in the “My eBay” section of this site and every couple of days would note down new additions.

After finding the item numbers I then went to http://www.auctionsniper.com and set up automatic bidding on each item in the last 6 seconds for my maximum price.

If the postage for a PS2 version of the game was £2, my maximum bid price was set at £9.50.

The net result was that I was bidding on any misspelt San Andreas game automatically whether I was at my PC at the time or not.

Out of 45 attempts, I won 7 of the games - the cheapest at £8.50, the most expensive at £11.50.

Once I had the games “in hand”, I simply listed them on eBay for a Buy It Now price of between £16.50 to £18.00 with £2 postage charge. Each game was sold within the 10 day listing time for a healthy profit.

Examples of titles of the auctions I bid on were as follows:

Grand theft auto - San Andres

PS2 GAME GTA SANANDREAS

GRAND THEFT AUTO - SAN ADREAS

PS2 Grand Theft Auto San Anderas

My own listing title was optimised to ensure I captured as many potential buyers as possible through the search facility:

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Playstation 2 Game PS2 GTA

No keyword spamming, no ridiculous “L@@K” or “W@W”, just relevant words which an interested buyer would be searching for.

Total profit from the 7 listings after all fees and costs: £29.74 (+ 7 positive feedback points)

As you may or may not know, San Andreas is now available online for £14.99 or less, brand new and so it is not a viable profitmaker anymore. The game went platinum after Christmas and so halved in price.

However, there are plenty of other games which have slightly “complicated” spelling - the titles of which many people will make mistakes in spelling.

Look at the Amazon top 25 every couple of days and note down the titles of the items at the top of the chart. You can do this with any particular niche, just browse to the sections where your interest lies and you will see the “Amazon Hot 25″ list.

For example - the Hot 25 PS2 Games (with spelling mistakes found on eBay in brackets):

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (TimeSlitters, timespitters,
Timsplitters, timespliters)

Shadow of the Colossus (COLOSSU)

The Chronicles of Narnia (Cronicles)

Star Wars Battlefront II (BATTELFRONT, BATTLEFORNT)

Gran Turismo 4 (Tursimo, TRISMO)

Others:

King Kong (King King, Kingkong)

Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories (LIBERY, LIBERT, LIBETY)

Perfect Dark Zero (prefect)

If you simply find the misspelt items, decide a maximum bid, set up your auction sniper and leave it to run, you will make money.

Of course, video games are just a simple example - your niche may be even more profitable!

Ben Catt is an active eBay buyer and seller and runs an eBay Tips and Tricks website found at http://www.BenCatt.com.
He also runs a business opportunity information site - http://www.BizOppsUK.com