If you’ve just sold them a brand new item, ask your buyer if they have an old one that they might like to trade in. They will often be delighted to take you up on your offer, since they were wondering how they were going to get rid of their old one anyway. Give them a fair price for it and offer to pay their postage and you won’t believe how happy they’ll be - and the chances are you can make a good profit on what they send you.

When everything is going to plan with your buyers, it’s nice to be able to spend a while every week leaving them all big chunks of positive feedback. But how do you make this feedback the best it can be? We’ll take a look at the dos and don’ts of leaving feedback for buyers in the next email.

So your buyer has paid on time, you’ve shipped them the item, and they’ve left you positive feedback. Everything is going great! You know that leaving your buyer some nice feedback will finish everything off, and make them glad they chose to buy from you.

When you see that little feedback box, though, you might find that you have no idea what to write to make your buyer happiest. Well, here’s a guide.

Don’t write "A++++++++". Once upon a time, leaving grades on eBay buyers actually meant something. Now, though, writing an ‘A’ and filling the rest of the space with pluses seems to have become a common way of saying ‘good’. The meaning of the grades is gone entirely - no one ever leaves a B-, after all - so it’s a pretty useless thing to write. Try something more descriptive.

‘Prompt/fast/instant payment’. Did the buyer get on PayPal within hours or even minutes of winning the auction and pay you as quickly as they could? If they did, then your comment should include the words ‘prompt payment’. This is a big thing for buyers, as other sellers will really prefer to deal with someone they know will pay on time.

‘Great communication’. If you found the buyer was very responsive to all your emails, then point this out. It’s especially worth putting this if there was a problem that you had to overcome, and the buyer was co-operative and easy to work with.

‘A pleasure to deal with’. If this was one of those very easy transactions where nothing went wrong, then you should put that the buyer was a pleasure to deal with, or ‘the way ebay should be’, or just a ‘great ebayer’.

‘Great as always’. When it’s the second or third time that the buyer has bought from you, make sure to point it out. The fact that they go back to the same seller more than once and build up a relationship is a good thing for them to have on their record.

Think of anything good you have to say and try to fit as much of it as you can in that limited space. Don’t worry too much about punctuation. Here’s a good example comment: "Instant payment, great communication - excellent buyer!".

As a side effect, this then gives you the power to leave slightly negative feedback for some buyers without actually having to make it negative, like this: "Paid quite quickly, communication fine". Making very short, to-the-point comments also reflects badly on the buyer: if you just write "OK", it means "I really wanted to leave a neutral or a negative". Don’t do this if that’s not the meaning you intend.

Don’t spend too much time agonising over what to write in your feedback comments, though - the chances are you’ll be leaving hundreds every week. You might find it worthwhile to come up with a few standard ones for different situations, and use eBay’s Selling Manager to leave feedback in bulk.

Of course, before you can leave your buyer any feedback, you need to make sure they’ve paid you. Luckily getting your buyer to pay is easy, as eBay handle most of it for you. In the next email, we’ll take a tour of eBay’s checkout.

Back in the ‘old days’ of eBay, getting payment for the item was entirely left up to sellers: you had to choose your payment service, sign up for it and then send links to your buyers. Now, though, eBay handle most of the complexities of payment for you with their checkout.

The checkout will be offered to your buyers automatically. When they win an item, eBay send them an email with a ‘Pay Now’ button that takes them to the checkout, and they can also access it through their My eBay page.

It is in step 4 of the ‘Sell Your Item’ process, the payment and shipping step, that you can choose which kinds of payment you want to accept through the checkout and which you don’t.

PayPal: You should be accepting PayPal. You might want to click ‘Edit Preferences’, however, to either select or de-select the ‘tell buyers I prefer PayPal payments’ box - you don’t want to tell people you love PayPal when you only tolerate it. If you’re selling Buy it Now items, you can also tick the box to require immediate PayPal payment for them.

Money orders and cheques: tick these boxes if you want to accept the more ‘traditional’ payment methods. Your address will be revealed to your buyers so that they can post the payment to you - you should make sure eBay have the correct address.

You may also tick credit cards to accept, which you should do if you have your own merchant account or an account at somewhere like NoChex that you’d like to use.

It’s also worth writing any instructions that might be needed in the box on this page, such as who to make cheques out to or a warning that international non-PayPal payments might take a long time.

Once you’ve set the checkout up on your items, buyers will be able to choose which way they would like to pay you out of the options available, and eBay’s checkout will take them through the process step-by-step. This will save you the trouble of having to explain things.

When the buyer pays or agrees how to pay, eBay will send you an item letting you know what happened. If might tell you that the money is now in your PayPal account and you should send the item, or it might say that they’ve put a cheque in the post. Remember to wait for payments to clear before you send anything.

That’s it - the role of the checkout is over. You just configure the checkout; it’s the buyer who deals with it the most. You might have noticed, though, that you can configure the checkout differently for different items. This is sometimes worth doing if you some of the items you sell are worth more than others, and you’d prefer not to accept PayPal for the highly-valued ones, for example.

By now, you might be a little sick of going through the ‘Sell Your Item’ screens each time you want to list something. The next email will show you how to use eBay’s automated listing tools.

Listing tools automate the process of adding listings to eBay, to stop you having to go through the ‘Sell Your Item’ process every time. There is a surprising amount of choice out there when it comes to eBay listing tools, to the point where you might not know what to choose. Here’s an overview of what’s useful and what’s not.

Turbo Lister is a free download from eBay, and allows you to sell on eBay without ever having to actually visit the site. You can write descriptions, save them and list them over and over again - if you want to, you can even do most of your eBay work offline, and just go online for a few seconds to upload it.

You can list in bulk and schedule your listings to start any time. Since this is eBay’s officially supported program, you’re guaranteed that upgrades to eBay’s site will never break it and leave you out in the cold. Personally, though, I find the design quite bad - it’s not really that much easier than just going through eBay directly.

Also from eBay, this is what used to be called the ‘Seller’s Assistant’. It’s a downloadable program, but it’s more powerful than Turbo Lister is. It lets you do everything in bulk: listing, re-listing, and even feedback. You can export your sales data to an accounting program, and track your auctions while they’re still going on. You only have to enter things like payment choices and shipping details once, and they’re saved forever.

So where’s the disadvantage? It costs $9.99 per month, or $24.99 for the pro version, which also lets you print shipping labels in bulk and manage an inventory.

If you want to try something that’s not been made by eBay, Andale’s lister is still web-based, but aims to streamline the process.

You can create ‘profiles’ with different selections for your auctions. For example, you could create a ‘Normal’ profile that doesn’t include any of the listing upgrades, a ‘Promote’ profile that includes Bold and Highlight, and a ‘Super Promote’ profile that buys Bold, Highlight and Featured Plus. This makes it easier to choose the set of options you want for each item.

It’s all about saving things you’ve done. Each time you upload a picture, it gets added to a ‘Picture Library’ for you to use again, and you can store an inventory and choose from it to create a listing. You also get nicer-looking templates than eBay provide.

Of course, if eBay had their act together then this is what their own process would be like - but they’re happy for third-parties to make money doing the work instead of upgrading their own site. Andale Lister can cost anywhere between 20c and 4c per listing, as you get discounts for volume.

Now that you’re listing in bulk, you can spend more time trying to attract people to come and bid on your auctions. But how should you be doing your marketing? In the next email, we’ll go through some of the options available to you.

How to Market Your eBay Business.

So you want to market your eBay business? Well, you probably won’t have too much luck with traditional marketing methods - they’re just not targeted enough. The best way to do things is to pay for targeted advertising, which comes up when people search for keywords you specify: they’re looking for exactly what you’re selling, and so many of them will click on your ad.

You might not have noticed that eBay offer this kind of advertising, but they do. You can pay them for a small ad that will appear above the search results (next to the banner ad) for any keywords you want. Buyers will then be able to click through and get to your eBay store - and you only pay for clicks, not for views. You can also set a budget for how much you want to spend, and your ads will simply stop if they go over-budget.

If you do this, it is best to create very targeted ads for specific products. Buy a specific model of something as your keyword, and write how much you sell it for in the ad - this will be more effective than just advertising across the name of a whole category.

There are some products that this approach simply doesn’t work for, though, and you might be better off spending your money on a more visible Featured Plus listing for your item, especially if you’re trying to advertise on valuable keywords.

If you want to market your business more widely, then you can try to bring in business from outside eBay. The best way to do this is by buying keyword-targeted ads on search engines. With Google AdWords, for example, your ad will appear in their ‘Sponsored Links’ section when someone searches for your keywords. Again, you set a maximum budget and only pay for clicks.

This can be very effective, as you’ve just taken your products to the world outside eBay - imagine someone going to a search engine, typing in what they’re looking for and seeing your store right there! What’s more, if you target this approach to specific models of a product it can be very cheap. Most advertisers try to get as much traffic as they can instead of targeting their ads as specifically as you will be, meaning there won’t be much competition for the keywords.

eBay benefit from this as well as you, since it drives new buyers to eBay as a whole, not just to your site. They actively encourage sellers to go and advertise on search engines by offering you 75% of your final value fee back for each item that someone finds and buys this way. On expensive items, that’s probably enough to pay for the advertising to begin with!

If you’d really like to try a little marketing in the real world, though, you might want to make some flyers. Did you know that eBay can do this for you automatically? The next email will tell you how.

How to Use eBay’s "Promotional Flyer" Tool.

If you have an eBay store, then you can print off promotional flyers for it for free.

You might have seen ones that other sellers have sent you - they’re basically lists of items available in their eBay stores, usually bearing this default message: "Thank you for your purchase! Please visit my eBay Store for more great items and friendly, reliable customer service." If you know what you’re doing, though, you can really make your flyer stand out from the crowd.

Go to ‘My eBay’, then ‘Manage Your Store’. Now click ‘Promotions’, and you’ll see the ‘Store Promotional Flyer’ option there for you to use. A flyer will be automatically created using the settings and items from your eBay store, and you can customise it however you want. Be sure to add a border, to make your flyer more attractive visually.

Once you’ve created a flyer, you can print it as many times as you need to - it will be updated each time you print it to show your latest items, so you should only print what you need that day.

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