In the last issue, I went over the process of listing your fantasy art for auction on eBay. That’s not the end of the story, though!
Monitoring your Listings
While your auctions are running, you can check on their status by going to the “My eBay” section and clicking on the “Selling” tab. On the Selling page, you can see lists of all the items you’re currently selling, and all your sold and unsold items for the last 1-30 days (you can specify how many days’ worth you’d like to see.) You can get the basic details on how your auctions are faring on the Selling page: the title, the starting, current, and reserve prices, the quantity available and number of bids, and the time remaining. Once the auction has ended, you can also send invoices and payment reminders to your buyers through the Selling page–links will appear in the “Items I’ve Sold” section to allow you to use these features.
Invoices are very convenient–you can enter any shipping instructions you want, and the shipping charges (if known). You can also enter a message to the buyer. If you don’t know how much shipping is going to be, you should contact the buyer by e-mail before sending an invoice, to make things simpler when the buyer goes to pay. The invoices allow the buyer to pay the amount quoted quickly and easily via PayPal, and if the shipping is incorrect, it can confuse less savvy buyers.
If you have sent out an invoice and not received payment within three days, you can send a second payment reminder, which is a nice, diplomatic little note from eBay, congratulating the buyer on their purchase and reminding them that their bid is a binding contract.
For more detailed information on any specific auction, you can click on its title to go to the auction page.
There are several things you can do on the auction page, and I’ll go through the ones you’re most likely to need.
1) Revise your item: If you made any mistakes while listing your auction, or if you just want to go in and add more features, you can revise your listing. As long as you’ve got no bids and at least 12 hours remaining on the auction, you can change anything you like, including the prices. If you’ve already received any bids, however, or if your auction is within 12 hours of closing, you may only add extra promotional features or change the description. Once your auction has at least one bid AND is in its final 12 hours, you can no longer edit the description at all.
2) Promote your item: This is much like revising your item–select this if all you want to do is add extra visibility features, such as subtitles, second categories, or bold listings.
3) Sell a similar item: This will take you to an auction listing page where all the information for the auction you’re looking at is already entered. This is useful if you want to sell several identical or very similar items in separate auctions.
4) Bidding information: The starting bid, remaining time, and bid history can be seen on the left-hand side of the header (the area above where the listing you made begins). The most useful function on this side of the header is the bid history link. Not only can you click this to see everyone who’s made a bid, but you can use it to view bid retractions, cancel unwanted bids, show bidders’ e-mail addresses, and even send a second-chance offer to an underbidder if the high bidder fails to pay, or if you have several identical items.
Why would you want to cancel someone’s bid? Well, eBay doesn’t remove problem bidders until they have at least 3 non-paying bidder warnings AND final-value fee credits. What this means, in layman’s terms, is that a deadbeat bidder has to fail to pay AND be formally reported three times before their account is suspended. A lot of sellers don’t realize they can file for a final value fee credit (that is, get their listing price and eBay’s cut of the final sale back) if they are stiffed. Others are afraid to file reports, especially on low-priced auctions, because they feel the risk of retaliatory negative feedback is not worth it. So there are a lot of buyers out there with a lot of complaints in their feedback records, and who can still bid on your auction. You can check a buyer’s feedback profile by clicking the number to the right of their name. More on that later, when I discuss eBay’s feedback system.
5) Seller information: On the right-hand side of the header, you can see a box containing information on you. Your feedback score, the length of time you’ve been a member, and a link by which buyers can send you questions are all located in the seller information box.
