Having upgraded my iPhone from the 3G to the iPhone 4, I decided I’d try to recoup some of my cash by selling the 3G on ebay.
I know a lot of the old tricks and techniques for getting good responses to my auctions like posting a ton of pictures (using my own site to host them for free) and giving a thorough and descriptive summary so that people will feel comfortable that they are getting exactly what I’ve described.
Feeling sure I’d make a descent amount of money, I went ahead and posted my item. One thing that eBay does to try to make things easier for you is they automatically generate an Auction title for you based on keywords you enter for the auction.
In my case, they generated “iPhone 3G 8GB Black ATT”. Sounded pretty accurate for me so I just added “No Reserve” to the end and posted it for a 7 day auction.
I was watching the auction go and noticed that I wasn’t getting very many views or bids. After five days I only had 35 page views and one bid. I decided this was too low and started doing some research on how much similar phones were selling for at auction close and how many bids they were getting.
Ultimately I discovered that only people searching for “iphone 3gb 8gb” would find my auction in their search results. If they had put a space between 3 G or 8 GB, eBay would not show my auction because it didn’t have those exact key words in the title including the spaces. How stupid!!
Realizing I was setting myself up for doom as no one was finding my auction to bid on my item, I immediately cancelled the auction and relisted it with the new title “iPhone 3G (3 G) 8GB (8 GB) Black ATT”.
Within the first 24 hours, I had already racked up over 50 page views and 4 bids. Mind you the ONLY thing that I had changed was adding three space G and 8 space GB to the existing title. It made THAT much of a difference.
Now I’m usually smarter about these things but in this case I was lazy and decided to go the easy – research free way out of letting eBay decide what my auction title should be.
In summary, make sure your eBay auctions have exactly the words you’d expect people to search on in the title, forget about putting “no reserve” or “free shipping” in the title as no one will search for “iphone free shipping”. Get it? Good!
Have any good eBay tips? Let me know by leaving a comment below and I’ll ad them to the post!