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Posts Tagged ‘savings’

  1. Multiple Variation Listings Are Pretty Sweet

    September 13, 2011 by Webster

    The next time you’re selling a bunch of the same item…but there might be a small difference between each of them…try out Multiple Variation listings.

    I recently used this when selling a number of identical shirts at different sizes (the obvious example), and it was super easy.

    The plus side? You only get charged one listing fee from eBay. So if you have 10 blue shirts in 10 different sizes, you’ll only pay 50 cents for that single listing instead of $5.00 for all of them. You can also charge different prices for each item (say if one is more rare/popular/whatever than the others) and use unique pictures (if necessary).

    The down side? If someone searches specifically for a dress shirt and uses “15-33” in their search phrase, your listing might not show up. I wouldn’t worry too much about this, though. My guess is that a lot of people do a generic search for what they want and then drill down the specifics anyway (via the left-side navigation).

    Now, when I first tried to do this, I couldn’t find this option at all. It’s not really hidden, but it may not show up as a blatant listing option when you’re filling out the item description. It turned out to be right below the first box at the top, below the Categories box. If it’s set to hidden (which mine was by default), you simple click the “Add or remove options” link in the box and change the radio button to “Show the create variations option when listing”.

    When you click the button to Create Variations, it will take you to a new page. From here it’s very straight forward how you can create the listing. Select the different options that make each item different (shirt size and sleeve length, for example). Add all of your variations, and then continue to the details part (which will be shared features, such as brand and color). If your item is New With Tags, you can even add the SKU number, which will help you populate the variations as well.

    You’ll then be re-directed back to the normal listing description where you can continue to fill out shipping details, return options, handling time, etc. Then continue…continue…and boom you’re done. X number of items available for sale at one listing price.

    Now when bidders/buyers go to your listing to see what you have, they’ll be presented with a nice drop-down box to pick their size (or whatever other option variations you created).

    Then they’ll be like “ooh you fancy, huh!” and beg for another reason to put money in your PayPal account.

    Category Listings | Tags: ,, | No Comments

  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).

    Category Listings | Tags: ,,, | No Comments