Jim Wilson's eBay Secrets : Part 1
Jim Wilson has been selling successfully on eBay since 1999 making a very nice secondary income, that fits in with his job as a Firefighter Paramedic.
And I was lucky enough to speak with Jim for almost two hours recently, picking his brains about every aspect of his eBay business ... and how anyone, even with little money or experience, can start profitting on eBay.
Hi Jim ... well firstly, could you tell me about your background please?
Sure, I am a firefighter paramedic, have been since 1982 and I am in what I like to call the twilight of my career looking at a potential retirement. I was looking at ways of making supplemental income and online seemed to be the way to go. And the easiest way to make money online seemed to be eBay.
Okay. So when did you start online?
I actually started marketing online in 1997. A friend of mine was already doing it, told me what he was doing and built a web site for me and unfortunately I did not know how to get traffic to the web site or anything really about marketing so that utterly and totally failed but it did lead me to the direction that I ended up with eBay. I actually started selling on eBay in mid-1999.
Okay. So two years later for you?
Yes. And because I'm still full time at the fire department I would imagine that if someone really devoted more time full time to an online effort it would be less time as far as learning but I worked full time so I couldn't devote as much time as I wanted to my online endeavor.
So it really started taking off in 1999?
I really got very lucky twice. In the first place I met a gentleman on eBay that took me under his wing and explained to me some of the basics as far as writing the ad and a little bit about finding some of the products.
He instructed me that I needed to find a niche that I was comfortable in, and that I felt comfortable selling. And that led me to software. And that was the first thing that I really focused on ... was selling software.
I was extremely fortunate shortly after I got started ... within one month of getting started on eBay I found a supplier that was selling software that he had no idea what it was worth. It was a title called the Neverhood and it was like a cult classic. It wasn't made any longer.
It was selling on eBay in droves for $70 - $80 per title and I got it for $6 per. I bought 200 of them and that really inspired me! I sold out in a couple of months.
What was the Neverhood exactly?
It was a game, by DreamWorks Interactive, and it became quite popular and unfortunately it wasn't made any longer and I assumed that it was a lot of college students, that seemed to be who I was selling the most to. Actually that really inspired me. And it became clear that there definitely is money to be made online. That was the one that really set it off.
Definitely a good return on investment there.
An incredible return on investment.
Just out of interest you say that it was a hot item and that you bought for $6 and were selling for about $70, how many bids would each one have?
It was incredible, I would start them out at 99c and often that's what I do with most of my ads as a matter of fact, that's a tip that I tell people that subscribe to Auction Hints start it low because once you get bids, bids get more attention. People always seem to want something that someone else has.
I've noticed that actually.
And I would end up with sometimes 30, 40, 50 bids, with people getting into bidding wars, and that really amazed me even though I had other titles that had less bids and cost less, people were still bidding on the more expensive copy of that exact same title.
I've noticed from my auctions that often there's very little activity until maybe the last two hours.
That's typical. Most of the time when they get to the going, going, gone ... people on eBay are looking for bargains. The main thing that they're looking for is something that they're going to save money on and they were going to buy it anyway, and so those last two hours are the key two hours.
But if you're selling something that people are looking for like in my case the Neverhood, it got bids almost immediately and continued to get bids throughout. I would run them for 7 or 10 days and they would get incredible bids.
And back then eBay allowed you to actually put a link on your ad on their site to your site so I actually built a site called TonsOfSoftware.com so I got a ton of hits on it and sold other software too.
So where were you getting your copies of Neverhood from, at such a bargain price?
I got it from a software company actually based out of Houston, Wholesale Software Incorporated. I found them completely, totally by accident.
They were selling on eBay, I was looking for a software title, I found that they were selling the one that I was looking for, one thing led to another and since I was also trying to sell software the next thing you know we started chatting and she said that she had found this guy locally that had some software that was hot on eBay and she was going to buy some and she suggested that I did.
And she bought 200 of them and I bought 200 of them and we were the only Neverhood suppliers probably worldwide. We held the market. I sold those things literally all over the world. I shipped them everywhere, you name it I shipped it there.
A great position to be in...
It was fun. My only regret is that there wasn't more than 200! Even to this day, if you check eBay the Neverhood still sells for $40 or $50. It's just an amazing software title. People are still collecting it.
So you mentioned that you start your auctions low and in that case you were starting it at 99 cents, was that with a reserve?
Actually no, because I knew it was going to get bids I felt very safe in running a no reserve auction.
There's two trains of thought where the reserve is concerned: You run a reserve auction ... there are those who may feel that there's no point in bidding because they probably won't meet your reserve and you might want too much for it. And that scares some bidders away.
However if you don't put a reserve on it and it's an expensive item such as real expensive golf clubs or jewelry or something like that then obviously you take a chance of losing quite a bit of money if it doesn't meet it's reserve.
But in that case on a hot item like that I knew for a fact it was going to get bids and I felt quite comfortable, and actually my headline mentioned that it was no reserve. My headline was "Neverhood, brand new, factory sealed, 99 cents starting bid, no reserve". And that got tons of attention.
So you've developed software as your niche on eBay have you?
That was actually the original thing that I sold and unfortunately what happened was I sort of got bumped out of the market for lack of a better term.
eBay is constantly changing, when one thing becomes hot and everybody starts selling it, then those who have been in there long enough realize it's time to go ahead and find something else somebody is going to want.
There are those who set the market trend, and they make the money first and the other people sort of follow behind. And so actually I've sold several things on eBay. Software was just the first of many: jewelry, collectables, info-products, books, toys, electronics, just about everything.
One of the funnest things that I sold was laptops. I got 14 laptops free of charge, because this guy was throwing them out. I bought them home, they worked, he didn't know how to charge the batteries I guess, he didn't know they worked.
I put them on auction figuring that I'll be lucky to get $50 or $100 and every single one of those things sold for around $200 a piece. So in two weeks time I turned those around.
And that's the whole thing about eBay, it's actually fun, as well as profitable. I go out to garage sales and my wife and I actually look around for, you know the old saying "one man's junk is another man's treasure".
And we look to see if something looks old. That might sound silly but if it looks old it probably has some potential value. And then it's just a matter of negotiating. People sell things at garage sales for 50 cents. I turn around and sell it on eBay for $50. It's amazing.
So is that where you found the laptops?
The laptops were actually from a company that were going out of business locally, and he was throwing all kinds of stuff away and I went down there to help him clean out the office and there were those laptops in a box and I asked him "Where are these going?"
And he said "Those are going out to the dumpster".
"Do you mind if I take them?"
"No, not at all. Take them, they don't work".
He had no idea how to charge the batteries, it was amazing. They had all of the software and everything.
Were they decent specs as well?
They were old IBM 386 laptops. They sold like hotcakes -- I was very interested to find out why in the world people were buying old technology, this was around the time that 5, 6, 700 Mhz was state of the art and these things are 386's and I was asking people "What are you buying this for?" and most of them said they were going to use it for the calendar program that was built in and just for traveling. It was a nice cheap way of keeping track of their information. As long as the customer is satisfied. That's the number one thing.
I have noticed a lot of old computers still selling well on eBay, Pentium 166's -- you can run Word on it but it does crawl along, but I've noticed those auctions always getting bids.
What's amazing is some of the old stuff is collectable now. The older IBM's are actually considered collectables, you never know what's going to shoot up in value.
One of the things that I tell the people that ... as a matter of fact within the last week I had a gentleman that wrote me a heart felt letter how he got laid off and I've sent him several emails and I'm walking him through the steps of how to sell on eBay.
And one of the first things that I told him is "Things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them". Your ad is going to have to try to convince them that they want to pay that amount.
And online sales are very impersonal. You have to remove the mystery of who you are. That's why I have no problem giving my email address on my ad, I have no problem whatsoever if people want to contact me, and I'm very open and honest about the product. If they ask me a question about it I'm not going to mislead them and say it's better than it really is. Treat people with integrity.
Absolutely. Can I ask out of interest: what is your eBay ID?
Gnuday -- G ... N ... U ... D ... A ... Y
The same as your web site? Gnuday.com
That's right. The original was Gernsbid. My nickname as the fire department was Gern. And I started out with Gernsbid and then I was making an absolute incredible amount of money on golf products. For about 3 months there. And I changed my ID to GolfCFL.
I found a Golf supplier, I was able to get golf equipment at a fraction of what it would sell for and September 11th wiped that out. All of a sudden people were more interested in more important things than golf, and the golf market went from a club selling for $325 to selling for $175. My cost was $225 so that sort of wiped that out, so then I changed it to Gnuday.
I own that site and I said "that's a good name", so that's it. I think that I've got 300, something like that, probably 300 feedback ... only one was negative and that was a guy that got impatient about his golf clubs, and he came back, changed it, and said "Yeah, you did me right".
The golf clubs were late from the manufacturer and ultimately I ended up sending him some golf balls and all kinds of other stuff. And an apology. The thing that I've noticed, is that people simply want to know that you're still there, that you're communicating with them, and I have avoided negative feedback when quite honestly Louis I should have gotten it.
I had software in stock, sold more than I had in stock, promised someone I would send it, the supplier says "It's on the way", and it drags out ... as long as I kept emailing the person every single day "...I'm still working on it..." and I sent them another title in the mean time and told them "This is on me".
I avoided the negative feedbacks. Honestly, I don't think the feedback matters as much as people put weight on, and that's because of the fact that for so long there you could get fake feedback.
A lot of the people on eBay that have literally thousands in feedback, it's not hardbacked. When eBay started, you could get false feedbacks simply by, you could actually give yourself feedback. It was strange...
The guy who taught me -- his name is Leo Richardson, he's moved on now, his name on eBay was LCRR ... just an incredible mentor, he sold martial arts items and software, and Leo showed me how you could ... basically back when eBay first started and for about the first 6 months that I was on there, you could get feedback 50 or 100 at a time simply by sending other people feedback because feedback was not tied to an item number.
So if you gave Leo feedback, chances are they'll feel obligated to give you feedback, so you could just go through a whole list of eBay members and send them positive feedback saying what wonderful people they are and they would reciprocate.
I never did that. I promise I never did it, Leo said that he didn't either but I noticed that his feedback went from 800 to 1,100 in one day. So I don't know! Because back then, you could click on an eBay's member ID and actually send them an email directly. Whereas now it goes through eBay.
Unless of course you put your email address in your sales letter.
Exactly.
Actually I think that's a good idea because sometimes people don't actually want to bother clicking to ask a question ... and I think I remember this from your newsletter, rather than expecting people to click on "See All Auctions" actually adding "Click Here To See All My Other Auctions". Really spell it out. Because it's too easy to be lazy and not bother searching for a link.
It's too easy to be lazy and complacent. You also have to realize that the average knowledge level of the people that are on eBay, they're those who have 1, 2, 3, 400 ... 1, 2, 3, 4000 feedback, and there are those who are brand new.
Those who are brand new far out number those who aren't. You see the people who are brand new are probably also brand new to the internet, relatively speaking, so you have to write your ads around that idea, and you have to treat them like they are brand new, and sort of walk them through all the steps, make them feel comfortable bidding on your item.
Yes, I think it's too easy to take knowledge for granted. It's too easy to forget that you weren't actually born knowing how to use the internet...
It's easy sometimes to forget that people may not know what a URL is. So if you say "You can go to my URL to pay for your auction" they have no idea what you're talking about!
So you're far better off spelling it out in detail and that covers the whole gambit from the brand new person all the way up to the expert.
I have yet to have anyone say that I ended up making them feel like I had degraded them by sending them too much information. I send actually, my customers, and this is something very important that I would stress to anyone starting out in eBay, is I send out an email initially right after the auction closes thanking them for the bid and telling them that they're going to receive an automatic invoice from both Billpoint and PayPal, but in addition they can send me a check or a money order, I send them a second email once their payment has been received letting them know that it has been received and that their item is packaged and that it's on it's way, and then I send them a third email letting them know that I gave them positive feedback, thanking them for the manner in which they handled the transaction, and reminding them that I have other auctions and I would love to do business with them again.
It leads to positive feedback for me, and in addition to that it creates a comfort zone. They know that I'm a real person. I get literally hundreds of emails a week from people that read Auction Hints, people that are customers, that are telling me "you are actually making me feel a lot more comfortable about buying online". And that's kinda neat.
Something, related to what you said earlier... about you going to garage sales, I would say that now I've been online for a few years I've found my niche in sites I often visit, and it's very rare that I actually venture beyond it ... and occasionally when I search on key words, I find that there's a whole other world out there. I think it's the same with eBay ... they get millions upon millions of visitors every month, there's something for everyone there. But often you don't see it.
There definitely is. There is items on there which actually are astounding. There was a young man that was offering to sell his kidney. He actually had bids in to the seven figures, before eBay yanked the ad because it was illegal. There was a nuclear submarine on there. And it had six-figure bids. And eBay yanked it.
I mean, it's interesting if you go onto eBay if nothing else, just to do the searches and see what other people are actually trying to sell. It's actually amusing, and very educational.
And that is exactly what I do Louis, in order to follow the trends of what's selling, I find those people who have a lot of feedback and I go to their auctions. If they've got a lot of feedback, chances are they're selling a lot. Look at what they're selling. And then it's not hard to find their suppliers now that there's so many suppliers in the world.
I was going to ask you actually about something you said earlier -- how do you spot a trend, how do you see what's popular on eBay, because you say you try to get in early before it gets saturated, what do you look for?
That's an excellent question. The thing that I look for is hot items. An item becomes hot after 32 bids. If it gets 32 bids it's getting a lot of attention for some reason -- let's take a look and see what in the world it is.
Then actually something like a car, those things are hot items, become hot bids items all the time, but as it turns out informational CD's right now are extremely hot and it's obvious why because a lot of people in America are out of work now and are looking for ways of making money and one of the ways that they can do this is by buying CD's and information as far as teaching them how to make money online.
And they're selling like hotcakes. And that's one of the things that I've sold that's the item that I sold 78 of in one auction. An informational CD all about selling on eBay. I figured out that that was going to be a hot item simply because other people were already selling it and what I did was I took the idea and modified it and centered it on eBay.
I've seen those too actually. A hot topic at the moment on the internet is selling ebooks with reprint rights and a lot of people do that on eBay, and as you said you're doing the same thing with CD's, and you're selling a CD like that on Gnuday.com...
That's the exact same CD...
The one you sell from Gnuday, and on eBay?
Yes. But actually I have 4 different CD's and the one that I'm actually marketing and really marketing heavily right now is the one that I developed that centers on eBay.
I noticed that. It has eBay software, eBay ebooks...
Exactly
Have you managed to fill all the CD?
Oh, it has over 650 MB of information on it. It has a tremendous amount of information. A lot of that info is what I would call fun information and wasted information as far as the person who is putting in the CD in order to start a business.
The ebooks that are on there, the information that I put on there personally as far as advertising and eBay tips ... it's a very, very good CD, it's very effective. It can end up taking someone from being a novice brand new to eBay and actually bringing them to a level where they know how to make money.
eBay affords everyone an equal opportunity to make money online whether you know how to get traffic to a web site or not. eBay already does that for you. All you have to do is write a good headline, write a good ad, and have a product with communality. A product that has mass appeal.
That's true actually. To sell on EBay, you hardly need any money at all.
Absolutely not. 30 cents ... that's dirt cheap and then a small portion of the sale, assuming that the item sells.
Anyone can get started with that.
Exactly.
As you've been doing this for a good few years now ... I'll ask you this: I would say that people tend to go through eBay by searching more, rather than trawling through categories. Would you agree?
Definitely. They go to eBay, and in most cases if they are the shopper as opposed to the seller they're going there looking for one specific thing.
When I was shopping for my Christmas presents I found myself exactly in that position. I was actually shopping on eBay for something for my wife and I specifically typed that search term in. And people that had used that term in their headline ended up getting hits and ultimately I did make a couple of purchases that way.
That's the thing. On the front page, the search only looks in headlines and I think if you go beyond that you can click on "Search Descriptions" as well. So your heading is very important. What would you recommend, for putting together the most effective heading, for choosing the best keywords in the heading?
In the first place, make certain that you don't use quotation marks or wasted space. You're only allowed so many spaces in the headline, and the quotation marks actually negate whatever term is inside of the quotation marks and a lot of people don't know that.
If you put something in quotation marks on eBay as far as the search engine is concerned it negates it. It no longer exists. So if you put in there "FREE" or whatever ... guess what? You've lost that particular search term.
I didn't know that.
Most people don't. Leo is the one that told me that little tidbit of information. The headline needs to have what I would call the words that catch attention: "bonus", "success", "free", which you've got to be careful about using that because eBay frowns on anything that's free, "controversial", that's one of the reasons that I sold those 78 is because I said that my CD is very controversial.
And people like that term I guess. Honestly I think they searched for "software" but when someone goes into eBay you have to put yourself into the mind of the potential buyer. They're coming in there and they're looking for software.
There could be 10,000 other people selling the exact same title that you're selling so the key is to try to get them to buy from you as opposed to those 9,999 others. The only way you can do that is by making your headline really stand out.
And don't be afraid of the competition. That's another thing that I tell people that I'm trying to assist, a lot of people shy away from the competition, they see somebody selling an item and they say "Shoot, I know where I can get that" or "I could make that" or "I could sell that " or "Oh, he already is so there's no point in me doing it" and that's simply not the case.
Because if they can sell it, you can sell it. Chances are you can sell it better. You take the idea ... they're setting the trend, you're just taking their good idea and making it better.
If you look right now, for that "Most controversial CD" on eBay, they're several of them now. And I was one of the first ones that did that. And people are copying the idea. Some of those people that are copying the idea, bought the CD from me! And I have no problem with that whatsoever because I'm going to move forward. They can continue selling that ... in the mean time I'm already developing another one.
Because of the sheer volume of people selling CD's which are very similar ... either selling them all separately, or with Dutch auctions, how do you compete against such quantity?
The guy who comes out new, is going to have a hard time competing against that quantity because they don't have the feedback and chances are they don't have the resources financially to have that kind of a mass quantity of stock.
So the thing to do is to try to set yourself up to build up to a level where you can compete. I'm up to that level now and I don't want to end up sounding like "Wow, boy" because that's certainly not the case because there's people out there that out-sell me every single day of the week.
But I'm up to the level now where I know that I can write a good ad, I know that my ads will sell and most importantly I know that once I sell something the people are satisfied and I make certain of it. 100%. I can't speak for the other people who are selling the same item.
Word of mouth Louis, it's amazing. I sold three today off of my web site that were sold specifically because of the fact that I sold to other people who were satisfied and told those 3 people about me. No advertising. No work on my part. Word of mouth. And they came to my site, they sent me an email ... they said "We've heard that this CD is wonderful, that you're a great salesperson" and I mean it's flattering.
And I was lucky enough to speak with Jim for almost two hours recently, picking his brains about every aspect of his eBay business ... and how anyone, even with little money or experience, can start profitting on eBay.
Hi Jim ... well firstly, could you tell me about your background please?
Sure, I am a firefighter paramedic, have been since 1982 and I am in what I like to call the twilight of my career looking at a potential retirement. I was looking at ways of making supplemental income and online seemed to be the way to go. And the easiest way to make money online seemed to be eBay.
Okay. So when did you start online?
I actually started marketing online in 1997. A friend of mine was already doing it, told me what he was doing and built a web site for me and unfortunately I did not know how to get traffic to the web site or anything really about marketing so that utterly and totally failed but it did lead me to the direction that I ended up with eBay. I actually started selling on eBay in mid-1999.
Okay. So two years later for you?
Yes. And because I'm still full time at the fire department I would imagine that if someone really devoted more time full time to an online effort it would be less time as far as learning but I worked full time so I couldn't devote as much time as I wanted to my online endeavor.
So it really started taking off in 1999?
I really got very lucky twice. In the first place I met a gentleman on eBay that took me under his wing and explained to me some of the basics as far as writing the ad and a little bit about finding some of the products.
He instructed me that I needed to find a niche that I was comfortable in, and that I felt comfortable selling. And that led me to software. And that was the first thing that I really focused on ... was selling software.
I was extremely fortunate shortly after I got started ... within one month of getting started on eBay I found a supplier that was selling software that he had no idea what it was worth. It was a title called the Neverhood and it was like a cult classic. It wasn't made any longer.
It was selling on eBay in droves for $70 - $80 per title and I got it for $6 per. I bought 200 of them and that really inspired me! I sold out in a couple of months.
What was the Neverhood exactly?
It was a game, by DreamWorks Interactive, and it became quite popular and unfortunately it wasn't made any longer and I assumed that it was a lot of college students, that seemed to be who I was selling the most to. Actually that really inspired me. And it became clear that there definitely is money to be made online. That was the one that really set it off.
Definitely a good return on investment there.
An incredible return on investment.
Just out of interest you say that it was a hot item and that you bought for $6 and were selling for about $70, how many bids would each one have?
It was incredible, I would start them out at 99c and often that's what I do with most of my ads as a matter of fact, that's a tip that I tell people that subscribe to Auction Hints start it low because once you get bids, bids get more attention. People always seem to want something that someone else has.
I've noticed that actually.
And I would end up with sometimes 30, 40, 50 bids, with people getting into bidding wars, and that really amazed me even though I had other titles that had less bids and cost less, people were still bidding on the more expensive copy of that exact same title.
I've noticed from my auctions that often there's very little activity until maybe the last two hours.
That's typical. Most of the time when they get to the going, going, gone ... people on eBay are looking for bargains. The main thing that they're looking for is something that they're going to save money on and they were going to buy it anyway, and so those last two hours are the key two hours.
But if you're selling something that people are looking for like in my case the Neverhood, it got bids almost immediately and continued to get bids throughout. I would run them for 7 or 10 days and they would get incredible bids.
And back then eBay allowed you to actually put a link on your ad on their site to your site so I actually built a site called TonsOfSoftware.com so I got a ton of hits on it and sold other software too.
So where were you getting your copies of Neverhood from, at such a bargain price?
I got it from a software company actually based out of Houston, Wholesale Software Incorporated. I found them completely, totally by accident.
They were selling on eBay, I was looking for a software title, I found that they were selling the one that I was looking for, one thing led to another and since I was also trying to sell software the next thing you know we started chatting and she said that she had found this guy locally that had some software that was hot on eBay and she was going to buy some and she suggested that I did.
And she bought 200 of them and I bought 200 of them and we were the only Neverhood suppliers probably worldwide. We held the market. I sold those things literally all over the world. I shipped them everywhere, you name it I shipped it there.
A great position to be in...
It was fun. My only regret is that there wasn't more than 200! Even to this day, if you check eBay the Neverhood still sells for $40 or $50. It's just an amazing software title. People are still collecting it.
So you mentioned that you start your auctions low and in that case you were starting it at 99 cents, was that with a reserve?
Actually no, because I knew it was going to get bids I felt very safe in running a no reserve auction.
There's two trains of thought where the reserve is concerned: You run a reserve auction ... there are those who may feel that there's no point in bidding because they probably won't meet your reserve and you might want too much for it. And that scares some bidders away.
However if you don't put a reserve on it and it's an expensive item such as real expensive golf clubs or jewelry or something like that then obviously you take a chance of losing quite a bit of money if it doesn't meet it's reserve.
But in that case on a hot item like that I knew for a fact it was going to get bids and I felt quite comfortable, and actually my headline mentioned that it was no reserve. My headline was "Neverhood, brand new, factory sealed, 99 cents starting bid, no reserve". And that got tons of attention.
So you've developed software as your niche on eBay have you?
That was actually the original thing that I sold and unfortunately what happened was I sort of got bumped out of the market for lack of a better term.
eBay is constantly changing, when one thing becomes hot and everybody starts selling it, then those who have been in there long enough realize it's time to go ahead and find something else somebody is going to want.
There are those who set the market trend, and they make the money first and the other people sort of follow behind. And so actually I've sold several things on eBay. Software was just the first of many: jewelry, collectables, info-products, books, toys, electronics, just about everything.
One of the funnest things that I sold was laptops. I got 14 laptops free of charge, because this guy was throwing them out. I bought them home, they worked, he didn't know how to charge the batteries I guess, he didn't know they worked.
I put them on auction figuring that I'll be lucky to get $50 or $100 and every single one of those things sold for around $200 a piece. So in two weeks time I turned those around.
And that's the whole thing about eBay, it's actually fun, as well as profitable. I go out to garage sales and my wife and I actually look around for, you know the old saying "one man's junk is another man's treasure".
And we look to see if something looks old. That might sound silly but if it looks old it probably has some potential value. And then it's just a matter of negotiating. People sell things at garage sales for 50 cents. I turn around and sell it on eBay for $50. It's amazing.
So is that where you found the laptops?
The laptops were actually from a company that were going out of business locally, and he was throwing all kinds of stuff away and I went down there to help him clean out the office and there were those laptops in a box and I asked him "Where are these going?"
And he said "Those are going out to the dumpster".
"Do you mind if I take them?"
"No, not at all. Take them, they don't work".
He had no idea how to charge the batteries, it was amazing. They had all of the software and everything.
Were they decent specs as well?
They were old IBM 386 laptops. They sold like hotcakes -- I was very interested to find out why in the world people were buying old technology, this was around the time that 5, 6, 700 Mhz was state of the art and these things are 386's and I was asking people "What are you buying this for?" and most of them said they were going to use it for the calendar program that was built in and just for traveling. It was a nice cheap way of keeping track of their information. As long as the customer is satisfied. That's the number one thing.
I have noticed a lot of old computers still selling well on eBay, Pentium 166's -- you can run Word on it but it does crawl along, but I've noticed those auctions always getting bids.
What's amazing is some of the old stuff is collectable now. The older IBM's are actually considered collectables, you never know what's going to shoot up in value.
One of the things that I tell the people that ... as a matter of fact within the last week I had a gentleman that wrote me a heart felt letter how he got laid off and I've sent him several emails and I'm walking him through the steps of how to sell on eBay.
And one of the first things that I told him is "Things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them". Your ad is going to have to try to convince them that they want to pay that amount.
And online sales are very impersonal. You have to remove the mystery of who you are. That's why I have no problem giving my email address on my ad, I have no problem whatsoever if people want to contact me, and I'm very open and honest about the product. If they ask me a question about it I'm not going to mislead them and say it's better than it really is. Treat people with integrity.
Absolutely. Can I ask out of interest: what is your eBay ID?
Gnuday -- G ... N ... U ... D ... A ... Y
The same as your web site? Gnuday.com
That's right. The original was Gernsbid. My nickname as the fire department was Gern. And I started out with Gernsbid and then I was making an absolute incredible amount of money on golf products. For about 3 months there. And I changed my ID to GolfCFL.
I found a Golf supplier, I was able to get golf equipment at a fraction of what it would sell for and September 11th wiped that out. All of a sudden people were more interested in more important things than golf, and the golf market went from a club selling for $325 to selling for $175. My cost was $225 so that sort of wiped that out, so then I changed it to Gnuday.
I own that site and I said "that's a good name", so that's it. I think that I've got 300, something like that, probably 300 feedback ... only one was negative and that was a guy that got impatient about his golf clubs, and he came back, changed it, and said "Yeah, you did me right".
The golf clubs were late from the manufacturer and ultimately I ended up sending him some golf balls and all kinds of other stuff. And an apology. The thing that I've noticed, is that people simply want to know that you're still there, that you're communicating with them, and I have avoided negative feedback when quite honestly Louis I should have gotten it.
I had software in stock, sold more than I had in stock, promised someone I would send it, the supplier says "It's on the way", and it drags out ... as long as I kept emailing the person every single day "...I'm still working on it..." and I sent them another title in the mean time and told them "This is on me".
I avoided the negative feedbacks. Honestly, I don't think the feedback matters as much as people put weight on, and that's because of the fact that for so long there you could get fake feedback.
A lot of the people on eBay that have literally thousands in feedback, it's not hardbacked. When eBay started, you could get false feedbacks simply by, you could actually give yourself feedback. It was strange...
The guy who taught me -- his name is Leo Richardson, he's moved on now, his name on eBay was LCRR ... just an incredible mentor, he sold martial arts items and software, and Leo showed me how you could ... basically back when eBay first started and for about the first 6 months that I was on there, you could get feedback 50 or 100 at a time simply by sending other people feedback because feedback was not tied to an item number.
So if you gave Leo feedback, chances are they'll feel obligated to give you feedback, so you could just go through a whole list of eBay members and send them positive feedback saying what wonderful people they are and they would reciprocate.
I never did that. I promise I never did it, Leo said that he didn't either but I noticed that his feedback went from 800 to 1,100 in one day. So I don't know! Because back then, you could click on an eBay's member ID and actually send them an email directly. Whereas now it goes through eBay.
Unless of course you put your email address in your sales letter.
Exactly.
Actually I think that's a good idea because sometimes people don't actually want to bother clicking to ask a question ... and I think I remember this from your newsletter, rather than expecting people to click on "See All Auctions" actually adding "Click Here To See All My Other Auctions". Really spell it out. Because it's too easy to be lazy and not bother searching for a link.
It's too easy to be lazy and complacent. You also have to realize that the average knowledge level of the people that are on eBay, they're those who have 1, 2, 3, 400 ... 1, 2, 3, 4000 feedback, and there are those who are brand new.
Those who are brand new far out number those who aren't. You see the people who are brand new are probably also brand new to the internet, relatively speaking, so you have to write your ads around that idea, and you have to treat them like they are brand new, and sort of walk them through all the steps, make them feel comfortable bidding on your item.
Yes, I think it's too easy to take knowledge for granted. It's too easy to forget that you weren't actually born knowing how to use the internet...
It's easy sometimes to forget that people may not know what a URL is. So if you say "You can go to my URL to pay for your auction" they have no idea what you're talking about!
So you're far better off spelling it out in detail and that covers the whole gambit from the brand new person all the way up to the expert.
I have yet to have anyone say that I ended up making them feel like I had degraded them by sending them too much information. I send actually, my customers, and this is something very important that I would stress to anyone starting out in eBay, is I send out an email initially right after the auction closes thanking them for the bid and telling them that they're going to receive an automatic invoice from both Billpoint and PayPal, but in addition they can send me a check or a money order, I send them a second email once their payment has been received letting them know that it has been received and that their item is packaged and that it's on it's way, and then I send them a third email letting them know that I gave them positive feedback, thanking them for the manner in which they handled the transaction, and reminding them that I have other auctions and I would love to do business with them again.
It leads to positive feedback for me, and in addition to that it creates a comfort zone. They know that I'm a real person. I get literally hundreds of emails a week from people that read Auction Hints, people that are customers, that are telling me "you are actually making me feel a lot more comfortable about buying online". And that's kinda neat.
Something, related to what you said earlier... about you going to garage sales, I would say that now I've been online for a few years I've found my niche in sites I often visit, and it's very rare that I actually venture beyond it ... and occasionally when I search on key words, I find that there's a whole other world out there. I think it's the same with eBay ... they get millions upon millions of visitors every month, there's something for everyone there. But often you don't see it.
There definitely is. There is items on there which actually are astounding. There was a young man that was offering to sell his kidney. He actually had bids in to the seven figures, before eBay yanked the ad because it was illegal. There was a nuclear submarine on there. And it had six-figure bids. And eBay yanked it.
I mean, it's interesting if you go onto eBay if nothing else, just to do the searches and see what other people are actually trying to sell. It's actually amusing, and very educational.
And that is exactly what I do Louis, in order to follow the trends of what's selling, I find those people who have a lot of feedback and I go to their auctions. If they've got a lot of feedback, chances are they're selling a lot. Look at what they're selling. And then it's not hard to find their suppliers now that there's so many suppliers in the world.
I was going to ask you actually about something you said earlier -- how do you spot a trend, how do you see what's popular on eBay, because you say you try to get in early before it gets saturated, what do you look for?
That's an excellent question. The thing that I look for is hot items. An item becomes hot after 32 bids. If it gets 32 bids it's getting a lot of attention for some reason -- let's take a look and see what in the world it is.
Then actually something like a car, those things are hot items, become hot bids items all the time, but as it turns out informational CD's right now are extremely hot and it's obvious why because a lot of people in America are out of work now and are looking for ways of making money and one of the ways that they can do this is by buying CD's and information as far as teaching them how to make money online.
And they're selling like hotcakes. And that's one of the things that I've sold that's the item that I sold 78 of in one auction. An informational CD all about selling on eBay. I figured out that that was going to be a hot item simply because other people were already selling it and what I did was I took the idea and modified it and centered it on eBay.
I've seen those too actually. A hot topic at the moment on the internet is selling ebooks with reprint rights and a lot of people do that on eBay, and as you said you're doing the same thing with CD's, and you're selling a CD like that on Gnuday.com...
That's the exact same CD...
The one you sell from Gnuday, and on eBay?
Yes. But actually I have 4 different CD's and the one that I'm actually marketing and really marketing heavily right now is the one that I developed that centers on eBay.
I noticed that. It has eBay software, eBay ebooks...
Exactly
Have you managed to fill all the CD?
Oh, it has over 650 MB of information on it. It has a tremendous amount of information. A lot of that info is what I would call fun information and wasted information as far as the person who is putting in the CD in order to start a business.
The ebooks that are on there, the information that I put on there personally as far as advertising and eBay tips ... it's a very, very good CD, it's very effective. It can end up taking someone from being a novice brand new to eBay and actually bringing them to a level where they know how to make money.
eBay affords everyone an equal opportunity to make money online whether you know how to get traffic to a web site or not. eBay already does that for you. All you have to do is write a good headline, write a good ad, and have a product with communality. A product that has mass appeal.
That's true actually. To sell on EBay, you hardly need any money at all.
Absolutely not. 30 cents ... that's dirt cheap and then a small portion of the sale, assuming that the item sells.
Anyone can get started with that.
Exactly.
As you've been doing this for a good few years now ... I'll ask you this: I would say that people tend to go through eBay by searching more, rather than trawling through categories. Would you agree?
Definitely. They go to eBay, and in most cases if they are the shopper as opposed to the seller they're going there looking for one specific thing.
When I was shopping for my Christmas presents I found myself exactly in that position. I was actually shopping on eBay for something for my wife and I specifically typed that search term in. And people that had used that term in their headline ended up getting hits and ultimately I did make a couple of purchases that way.
That's the thing. On the front page, the search only looks in headlines and I think if you go beyond that you can click on "Search Descriptions" as well. So your heading is very important. What would you recommend, for putting together the most effective heading, for choosing the best keywords in the heading?
In the first place, make certain that you don't use quotation marks or wasted space. You're only allowed so many spaces in the headline, and the quotation marks actually negate whatever term is inside of the quotation marks and a lot of people don't know that.
If you put something in quotation marks on eBay as far as the search engine is concerned it negates it. It no longer exists. So if you put in there "FREE" or whatever ... guess what? You've lost that particular search term.
I didn't know that.
Most people don't. Leo is the one that told me that little tidbit of information. The headline needs to have what I would call the words that catch attention: "bonus", "success", "free", which you've got to be careful about using that because eBay frowns on anything that's free, "controversial", that's one of the reasons that I sold those 78 is because I said that my CD is very controversial.
And people like that term I guess. Honestly I think they searched for "software" but when someone goes into eBay you have to put yourself into the mind of the potential buyer. They're coming in there and they're looking for software.
There could be 10,000 other people selling the exact same title that you're selling so the key is to try to get them to buy from you as opposed to those 9,999 others. The only way you can do that is by making your headline really stand out.
And don't be afraid of the competition. That's another thing that I tell people that I'm trying to assist, a lot of people shy away from the competition, they see somebody selling an item and they say "Shoot, I know where I can get that" or "I could make that" or "I could sell that " or "Oh, he already is so there's no point in me doing it" and that's simply not the case.
Because if they can sell it, you can sell it. Chances are you can sell it better. You take the idea ... they're setting the trend, you're just taking their good idea and making it better.
If you look right now, for that "Most controversial CD" on eBay, they're several of them now. And I was one of the first ones that did that. And people are copying the idea. Some of those people that are copying the idea, bought the CD from me! And I have no problem with that whatsoever because I'm going to move forward. They can continue selling that ... in the mean time I'm already developing another one.
Because of the sheer volume of people selling CD's which are very similar ... either selling them all separately, or with Dutch auctions, how do you compete against such quantity?
The guy who comes out new, is going to have a hard time competing against that quantity because they don't have the feedback and chances are they don't have the resources financially to have that kind of a mass quantity of stock.
So the thing to do is to try to set yourself up to build up to a level where you can compete. I'm up to that level now and I don't want to end up sounding like "Wow, boy" because that's certainly not the case because there's people out there that out-sell me every single day of the week.
But I'm up to the level now where I know that I can write a good ad, I know that my ads will sell and most importantly I know that once I sell something the people are satisfied and I make certain of it. 100%. I can't speak for the other people who are selling the same item.
Word of mouth Louis, it's amazing. I sold three today off of my web site that were sold specifically because of the fact that I sold to other people who were satisfied and told those 3 people about me. No advertising. No work on my part. Word of mouth. And they came to my site, they sent me an email ... they said "We've heard that this CD is wonderful, that you're a great salesperson" and I mean it's flattering.
