The prospect of selling art on eBay can seem very daunting to a beginner: is it a good idea to set a Buy It Now price? What about a reserve? Is it better to open an eBay store and run long-term fixed-price auctions, or avoid the monthly shop fee in favour of individual listings? And what sells best–originals or prints? Griffins or fairies? Cute or creepy?
In order to answer these questions (and many others), I’ve compiled a little walk-through of the process, as I list one of my own prints for sale.
Choose a Selling Format
The first thing you’ll need to do is select a format (either auction or fixed price). Each has its advantages and disadvantages: with an auction, it’s possible for the bids to go quite high, if a lot of people are interested, and start bidding against one another. With a fixed price sale, there’s no need to wait for the end of the auction. Anyone who is interested can simply click a button and purchase your item instantly. The fixed-price format is great for items such as open-edition prints, which generally sell for low, predictable prices. The auction format works well for higher-priced items, such as original art and limited-edition prints, since it allows bidders to drive the price up, and also gives you options such as reserve prices (which I’ll discuss in more detail later.)
To start with, however, you’ll have to choose the auction format no matter what you’re selling: you must have a feedback score of 10 or higher to sell single items at a fixed price, and 30 or more if you want to sell multiple items.
You may also choose to open an eBay store from this screen. A store is a good idea if you are a high-volume seller, if you’re selling large quantities of similar items (open-edition prints spring to mind), or if you’d rather put up long-term listings that don’t have to be constantly relisted.
If you sell an assortment of items (both prints and originals, for instance, or both open- and limited-edition prints), you can choose different selling formats for different auctions, and take advantage of the benefits of each.
Category
The next thing you’ll need to do is select your category. In this case, I’ll be choosing Art > Prints > Contemporary > Open Edition Prints. You can select additional categories for increased fees, but I would not recommend this for lower-priced items. Remember, the more you spend on the listing, the lower your profit margin will be. While secondary categories help increase traffic to your auctions, it’s much more cost-effective to save money on the auction listing and advertise your eBay presence on your homepage, for example.
Item Description
On the next screen, you get to describe your item. This is the most important part of the process, because your description is how people find your auctions. And the most important part of the description is the title. The basic eBay search uses ONLY the title, not the more detailed description, so you need to pack in as many keywords relating to your item as possible.
I am listing a copy of my current bestselling print today:
This print sells particularly well not only because people like it, but also because it gets a lot of views based on the title and description. The actual title of the painting is “End of the World Sunset”, but that wouldn’t attract too many buyers. Bidders are interested in cute little furry things, not the apocalypse. So, much as I hate to describe my work in such saccharine terms, “End of the World Sunset” becomes “FAIRY TALE art print - cute cuddling rats”. (Note that my name doesn’t appear anywhere in the title–unless you are very, very famous, odds are there’ll be more people looking for, say, fairy tale art than for you in particular.) I’ve capitalized the words “FAIRY TALE” on purpose, to draw bidders’ eyes to my listing when they’re scrolling through their search results. It’s the budget alternative to getting a bold listing (which means that they display your auction title in boldface in the search results.)
