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Posts Tagged ‘pictures’

  1. High-Quality Photos Make a HUGE Difference

    November 2, 2011 by Webster

    It’s no secret that great photos will significantly increase your chances of a successful eBay sale…but sometimes I’m just left in complete and utter shock at the way people handle it.

    CLEARLY the pictures of the item are one of–if not THE–most important resources for a buyer. No matter how great of an item you are selling, your pictures will make an impact on the buyer’s purchasing decision and/or the bidding amount. So obviously…make them great.

    Here’s an example of a listing decision that left me completely speechless. This guy/group was selling a NEW (with tags) Bow Tie–certainly a classy item catering to a particular type of individual. Here is the picture he/they decided to use:

    how not to advertise a tie for sale

    This probably isn’t the most desirable image when you want a buyer to make a quick and easy purchasing decision. Probably better to aim for a response like “Nice!” or “That looks perfect!”

    This guy looks like he’s pretty upset with life, and he certainly doesn’t care what you think about the tie. The decision to use this picture is a direct reflection on the attitude and mindset of the seller. Why include this guy? Why not just take a close-up picture of the tie so people can see the detail?

    When I first started selling items in high quantities on eBay, I thought I was taking great photos. I used an iPhone 4 (which takes pretty solid photos) , incorporated an appropriate back-drop for each item, and made sure there was plenty of natural light. This turned out to work out really well.

    However, recently I noticed that some of my items (that I thought were awesome) weren’t selling. So I’d mark down the price…still no sales. I was dumbfounded. Then I decided to take new pictures with a high quality digital SLR camera. I have to admit, the item went from looking good/acceptable to looking amazing. With a higher level of detail and clarity in the pictures, some of those un-sellable items quickly sold for their original price. And all of the items with “new and improved” photos are gaining more traffic, more watchers, and more sales.

    Using this new camera turned out to be quite a bit more work than before, but I’ll never go back to the phone [2014 update…as you’re well aware, mobile phones have come a long way and will totally get the job done at this point].

    I realize that not all sellers are going to have access to a high-end camera for their eBay pics–all I’m saying is that it clearly makes a difference, and you should do whatever you can to take pictures that will WOW your potential customers.

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  2. I Just Saved 15% On My Car Insurance

    September 12, 2011 by Webster

    Not really.

    But I did save 15 cents on every listing I put up yesterday, which multiplied by 100 or so comes out to about $15 in my pocket. That may not seem like a huge accomplishment, but it IS equivalent to roughly two Chipotle burritos. And multiplied by 52 weeks a year that’s a savings of nearly $800 annually.

    Here’s how I did it.

    *I must preface this with a slight warning. My method for accomplishing this is a bit technically advanced, but I will also recommend methods that are simple and user-friendly as well.

    Some items let you add as many pictures as you want to the listings, depending on the category. In this instance I was listing clothing items & accessories, for which eBay charges an additional 15 cents per picture (the first is free).

    To avoid paying the additional 15 cents per image, just put one up the normal old-fashioned way (with the eBay image uploader). Then you need to host the other image files somewhere else and place the appropriate HTML code for those files into the listing.

    *Hosting means you have a dedicated place to put your files so they can be shared or viewed on the internet. Everything you see on the internet can be nailed down to specific files (images, html, etc), all of which are hosted on some server. Certain people/companies choose to buy their own servers for this (or they have so many viewers that they have to — i.e. Facebook), but a lot of people just pay a small fee per month and get shared space on a server at a large hosting company.

    In my circumstance, I just hosted them on the same server this site uses. If you’re familiar with the term FTP, this is pretty much the exact same thing. I placed them in a specific folder on the server (so they can be viewed in a web browser from anywhere), and then placed the HTML code pointing to those pictures in my eBay listing.

    This is what that the HTML code looks like:

    <img src="/EXAMPLE_FOLDER/EXAMPLE_PICTURE.jpg">

    Works like a charm. And you can add as many as you want.

    One caveat is that these pictures don’t appear at the top of the listing heading (where the main pictures normally appear). They will only show in the actual body of the listing details itself. Your main image will (the one you uploaded the old-fashioned way), but the rest won’t.

    If you don’t have access to an FTP account to host the files yourself, you can just as easily upload them to a photo sharing service like Flickr. You’ll just need to find the URL (same as you’d type into the address bar at the top of your browser) that points specifically to that image file (it will end in a “.jpg”, or whatever image type you used).

    I also notice some people use dedicated services like Auctiva, but I have no personal experience with it, and I’m pretty sure you pay a monthly fee to use it.

    The pictures I put in also went up at a much larger size than the regular ebay hosted files do (ebay resizes them for disk-space reasons), so they ended up looking much better and more detailed. I’ve already noticed these are getting way more traction than some of my previous listings because of that.

    I’m sure there are many, many variations of how to accomplish this “free extra pictures” method, but this worked great for me and I’ll be using it until I come across something better/faster(stronger).

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