eBay is a huge worldwide marketplace. There are lots of buyers and also lots of sellers on the site. Whereas Craigslist is perfect for selling larger items to your local marketplace, eBay is better suited to selling items that are easier (and cheaper) to ship and perhaps of more value. Unlike Craigslist, it will cost you money to both list your product for sale and then when you sell you item there will be a final value fee. In addition, eBay really pushes their PayPal payment option which will also cost you a small percentage of the total take, but will allow a person buying your item to pay by credit card. You will have to complete a relatively simple registration for a user account for eBay and for PayPal.

I recommend setting up a separate email account for eBay. You can get a free email account through google, yahoo or msn. There are bad people that target eBay users with spam sending messages as if they have come from eBay – never click into these emails to access your account. Always go through www.ebay.com.

Now for selling items, first do some research, after you have signed up for an account on ebay you can actually do a search for the item you want to sell – see what the ads look like and research what people are asking for the items. You can also click the show completed sales box and that will give you a history of auctions that have closed for the item over the last 30 days.

Take a good digital picture of your item. (Keep the resolution relatively low though, so it is not a huge file size. 640×480 pixels is fine for ebay.) Also write a true and accurate description – note any flaws.

Research what it will cost you to ship your item. I am based in NY, so I always use the 90210 Beverly Hills,CA ship to calculation to give me an idea of what is the most it would cost to ship it to the other side of the country. Do not skip this step – shipping can be costly – you want to make sure you charge enough for this! eBay does allow you to select to calculate by location and this may be the best choice to use.

I like to employ a pricing strategy of “start low and let it go” coupled with making sure I have the shipping costs covered. So I will usually start my auctions at .99 (Remember we want to make some extra cash, but we do also want to get rid of our clutter so we can focus!)

When you list you auction it will close typically 7 days later at the same time. (You can run shorter or longer auctions but 7 days seems to work well for most items. It gives you enough time to have people who are looking for a particular item search and see your item for sale.) Some of the busiest times on eBay tend to be Sunday night and Monday night – between 8pm and 9pm Eastern time. Ending at a busy time can increase the number of bids your item gets in the last few minutes of the auction. Now don’t be concerned if you put your item up on a Sunday night and you have only one or two (or no bids) by midweek – my experience has been that you get the most bids in usually the last day and typically last hours or even minutes of the auction.

After your item has sold, always wait until you have received payment, in the case of e-checks – cleared payment, before you ship out your item.

Happy Selling