Make Your Net Auction Sell!
by Sydney Johnston
SiteSell.com, Inc., 2001
E-book in PDF format, 520 pages plus indexes
ISBN 0-9684292-5-4

It's amazing how much hype you have to step over when you're looking for introductory books on eBay auctions, . You are offered marketing secrets, riches, how to make a fortune -- you name it. Then I discovered Make Your Net Auction Sell! published by Ken Evoy's SiteSell. It's a brand I've grown to trust, so I bought Sydney Johnston's e-book for about US $20, and was very glad I did.

Johnston offers an extensive treatment of both buying and selling. First, she introduces the online auction concept clearly and explains the differences between Dutch auctions and reserve auctions, and other important terms. Then she discusses various kinds of buying strategies.

My chief interest, however, is selling in auctions. Johnston approaches the subject from the standpoint of someone who has never sold anything on the Internet before, and may not even know what to sell. Topics include insertion and final value fees, how to estimate the probable sales price of an item you are auctioning, and how to select a category. Then she discusses the pros and cons of various types of payment you might want to accept: checks, money orders, certified checks, cashier's checks, cash, credit cards, COD (don't), escrow companies, PayPal, and other proprietary auction site payment systems.

She explains the advantages and potential problems with selling internationally and how to detect fraud. She details how you can determine which sellers on eBay are successful and which are not, so that you can learn from the winners rather than the losers. She describes how to best market products on eBay, using effective photographs, headlines, and copy. She also explains how to structure shipping policies and even recommends sources of shipping boxes.

After covering the basics of buying and selling, Johnston offers a number of tips for those seeking to develop an auction-based business: keep your spending low, reduce risk, refrain from buying large amounts of merchandise until you know what you are doing, and do not allow your lack of knowledge to be an excuse for taking no action at all. She offers a long section on what not to sell, mentioning applicable laws and potential shipping prohibitions.

Next, she outlines the two basic selling strategies for eBay-only sellers: (1) specialize in smaller profit items and sell a lot of them, or (2) sell a few large items with higher profit per item. What follows is a long and suggestive list of places to obtain bargain merchandise that can be sold on eBay -- at garage sales, pawn brokers, government bargains, etc. She mentions how to drop ship new items from distributors without having to obtain the inventory yourself.

Now, Johnston turns to selling unique items -- items you make or purchase and re-label. She goes into selling for someone else, such as finding buyers for an expensive car owned by a motivated seller. She also explores selling industrial equipment, medical equipment, and excess inventory.

She explains the basics of creating your own auction site (something I don't recommend for most merchants) and lists various auction management software programs. She reminds sellers to offer incredible value and not forget backend sales -- that is, selling additional products to existing customers. The book concludes with a discussion of different auction sites and how to evaluate them.

I found this e-book easy to read, chock full of carefully presented, accurate information, generously sprinkled with pregnant ideas that set my mind working on how I could leverage the auction marketplace to sell online. If you're trying to get a quick, thorough education about selling and buying in online auctions, I strongly recommend you start with Make Your Net Auction Sell! (http://sales.sitesell.com/mynas).

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