If you’re selling business equipment and have mostly business customers, you should really aim to have your auctions finishing between 9am and 5pm on weekdays. It is worth, however, trying to avoid mornings and avoiding the ‘lead-in’ and ‘lead-out’ that takes place on Monday and Friday themselves.

If most of your sales are to private customers having it shipped to their own home, then you want your auctions to finish when these kind of customers will be around. Unfortunately, these times are the opposite of what they are for the business customers. The ideal time to catch a home customer is on a Sunday evening.

In order to get your listings to end on a particular day, you can simply change the duration of your auctions depending on what day it is. For example, if you mostly sell to home customers and the day today is Thursday, then your auction needs to run for either 3 or 10 days to hit a Sunday. If you sell more to business and the day today is Friday, then:

a 1 day auction would be bad (finishing on Saturday),

3 days would be alright (Monday),

5 days would be good (Wednesday),

7 days would be good (another Friday),

and 10 days would be alright (Monday again).

You could draw up a little timetable of when you should and shouldn’t be listing depending on the days of the week - make it red, amber and green, traffic light style, and stick it on your wall.

Of course, if that all sounds like too much trouble then there is an easier - if more expensive - way of doing things. Simply use any of the many tools that let you schedule listings (almost all listing programs and sites do) - you can set the start date for any day and time you feel like.

Be aware that you might have to pay a few cents per listing for this if you do it through eBay. With some software, you may also need to leave your computer on all the time, so the software can start the auctions when it’s supposed to. The advantage of this method, however, is that there will be no per-listing fee, since the auctions were scheduled through your computer and not through eBay.

If it’s the home market you’re after, then you might not have realised what one of the most powerful things to sell on eBay is. I’ll give you a clue: it’s not consumer electronics, or media products. It’s what eBay is famous for.

Yes, collectibles! Collectibles are where eBay started, and they’re still one of its biggest areas - however much they might want you to believe they’re not. eBay's most hardcore and long-time users are almost all collectors of something or other - it is quite common to post what you think is a mundane item, only to have collectors suddenly go to war over it because it is somehow linked to something they collect.

Collectors are the people on eBay who really do pay top-dollar for things that seem like junk to you and I - not to mention to the people you’ll be getting your stock from! That’s why you can make so much profit on collectibles. Here are a few tips.

Go to people’s homes. People’s homes are full of things that someone out there collects - they are the best and cheapest source of collectibles out there. Sure, you might find something if you hang around at enough garage sales, but you’d have competition. Getting invited to people’s homes to look around should be a dream for you, and one you’re doing your best to make a reality.

Buy on other auction sites. You’ll be surprised how much money you can make if you buy the collectibles that people sell on smaller auction sites like Yahoo Auctions, and then list it on eBay. These sellers will often be perfectly knowledgeable about their item, but simply getting a lower price because they serve a smaller marketplace. Sometimes you can almost double your money.

List in non-collectible categories. If your collectible doesn’t have a category of its own under ‘collectibles’, you might prefer to list it in a category that has something to do with the item but nothing to do with collecting. What you will often find is that people browsing a category for their favourite thing will pay more for your collectible than actual collectors would.

Do lots of research. Never list something you think might be valuable without searching and searching to dig up every piece of information you can on it. Everything you find out is likely to be useful when you come to list it.

List every tiny, tiny detail. Remember that collectors really care about the most seemingly insignificant things. An item from one year can be worth thousands while the one from the year before is near-worthless, or an item that is one shade of a colour can be worth far more than one of a subtly different shade. It’s not worth puzzling over and it’s not worth trying to pass your items off as something they’re not - just make sure you put absolutely everything you know in the description.

When you are listing items that require close research and description down to the tiniest detail, however, don’t be tempted to steal someone else’s work! Whatever you do, don’t take another seller’s description and try to pass it off as your own, as this could have all sorts of consequences for you.

Understanding eBay’s "Description Theft" Policy.

When a seller writes an original description of an item or takes an original picture, they own the copyright on their work. This happens without any requirement for them to register or even to want the copyright - that’s just the way copyright works. What that means is that it’s actually illegal to copy another sellers description or pictures.

eBay refer to the practice of copying another seller’s listing and using it in your own auction as ‘description theft’. It is against their listing policies, and ignorance of the rules is no defence.

If your ‘theft’ is discovered, then your listing will be ended and all bids will be cancelled. Do it more than once and your account could get suspended, and you’re subject to the usual eBay punishments: you could lose PowerSeller privileges, or your auctions could be ended, leaving you with a stack of eBay fees.

It’s only likely that eBay will investigate description theft and go after you if the seller whose description you took actually takes the time to report you. When you’re competing with that seller directly, though, don’t be surprised if they do turn you in - after all, you’re their competitor!

Think of how you’d feel if someone was re-using a description that you took the time to research and fine-tune for the most sales - and not only that, but they were using it against you, to list competing items. That’s why other sellers don’t want their descriptions taken.

Instead of taking another seller’s descriptions, you can use the stock descriptions that eBay have on file for many items, especially things like CDs, DVDs and books. Simply enter the item’s unique ID number (an ISBN for a book, for example), and the listing will be created for you. If you can’t find any unique ID, then you can also search by name to find a matching item.

Once you’ve found your item, you’ll get a listing with all the technical details on the item, and often a stock picture, too. This is called ‘pre-filled item information’, and eBay licence it from big databases on your behalf.

It really is worth taking the time to write your own descriptions, though, as many people will be listing items using the pre-filled information. Remember that if you sell the same things often then you can re-use your own descriptions as many times as you want. You can keep your own database, re-using the ones that get high prices and re-writing the ones that don’t. Writing descriptions is the biggest way that you have control over your auctions.

It’s easy to keep discovering new things about eBay, isn’t it? So many of the rules and functions are completely hidden away that sometimes it feels like unravelling one big mystery - and, for me at least, that’s a big part of the fun.

How to Make More Money with eBay’s Affiliate Program.

If you’ve been on the web for a while, the chances are that at some time or other you will have taken part in an affiliate program. They generally work by giving you a URL to send people to their site that contains your affiliate number, and then giving you a small amount for each person who comes in using your link and signs up or buys something.

eBay's affiliate program follows this basic formula, but with a few twists.

It pays a lot. Each user who follows your link to eBay, signs up and then bids on anything within 30 days will earn you $20. Most affiliate programs will only give you something like 10% of the user’s first purchase. What’s more, for each existing eBay user who clicks through from your site and then places a bid or buys something, you’ll get 10c.

You can be your own affiliate. If you just link to your own auctions with your affiliate link number from your own website, then you’re getting money without sending buyers to anyone except yourself. There aren’t many affiliate programs that can say that.

You can visit eBay’s affiliate program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/. Once you’re there, just click ‘Join the Program’. You will then be required to sign up for Commission Junction, which is free.

eBay suggest a number of ‘business models’ for their affiliates. Before people can click your affiliate links, they need to be at your website. There are two ways to get them there using a search engine, which eBay refer to as ‘natural’ and ‘paid’ search.

Natural search: This is when someone finds your website in a search engine’s normal results, either because something you wrote is relevant to them or you used SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. Be careful not to use any dodgy methods to get a high search engine ranking, though, or eBay might come after you and keep your affiliate money.

Paid search: This strategy involves paying for traffic to your website or directly to eBay, by buying ads on search engines. If you go for this option, it’s actually worth placing ads on the less popular search engines instead of the big ones: they’ll have similar click-through rates as a percentage, but the cost typically won’t be anywhere near as high.

Content: What you can do is just have a normal website, with articles on a variety of subjects and perhaps a community forum. Run the website for pleasure, but place the occasional eBay affiliate link there.

Newsletters: Don’t ignore the potential of putting your affiliate ID in each time you send out a newsletter. You can get 10c for every bid it generates with no extra work, which could be enough for the email to pay for itself, whether it leads to any sales or not.

Sadly, our time together is nearly at an end, but there is one thing that I have left to show you. It’s called the featured gallery, and it could help your sales.

The ‘featured gallery’ is a little-known and little-used eBay feature, but that’s part of its power: it is far more used by buyers than it is by sellers, which means you can pick up some new buyers by advertising there.

Basically, the featured gallery works a lot like ‘Featured Plus’ for normal listings, which shows your item before all the other results. Buying a ‘Featured Gallery’ listing shows your listing at the top when someone chooses to use the picture gallery instead of the list view.

Exactly - you’ve probably got no idea what I’m talking about, since it’s such a little-used and well-hidden feature. Try doing a search for an item. Do you see just above the results, where you can choose between ‘List View’ and ‘Picture Gallery’ (it’s next to the options for sorting the results)? Click ‘Picture Gallery’. A whole new world opens up before your eyes!

This feature is there for buyers who prefer to work visually instead of by title - and there are a surprising number of them, especially if your items are being sold for their visual appeal.

Becoming featured in the gallery means that your item will be displayed above the other items in the picture gallery when any search there includes your item in the results. You might think this useless, considering how few people ever look at the picture gallery - but for the people who do look, you’ll be right up there. You’ll stand out even more, in fact, since so few sellers buy the featured gallery listings.

Not only that, but your picture will appear almost twice the size of the normal gallery listings below it. Your picture will be taking up a big part of the users’ screen as soon as they get their results, and they can’t avoid seeing it! For users with smaller screens, your picture could take up as much as a third of their display area.

Consider it targeted advertising towards buyers who prefer to work visually - if you want to attract that kind of buyer, you’ll do well from the featured gallery. If you sell art then this will be absolutely ideal for you, especially for large, striking pieces. There are independent artists out there who’ve gone from no sales to bidding wars just by getting featured in the gallery.

Just tick the option when you’re going through the Sell Your Item process. It costs $19.95 per item, so it’s only really worth using on auctions where you think you’ll make more than that back in the extra bids.

By now, I hope your business is well and truly off the ground, and expanding every month - if you’re putting in the time, working hard and working smart, then it should be getting there.