PayPal has scheduled maintenance for a 2-hour period from midnight April 19 to 2:00 am on April 20, and its site will be inaccessible for around an hour. This is to allow for a scheduled maintenance and upgrade. In the UK the shutdown will occur between 5 am an 7 am on Friday morning.

Please note that some data may differ between this email and the seller dashboard, due to timing differences between the email and updates to your Seller Dashboard. “

Another blow for auction sellers is the news that with effect from 30^th April the Royal Mail is raising its prices by up to a staggering 33%. First class stamps will go fro 46p up to 60p and the price of a second class stamp for a standard letter will rise from 36p to 50p. The cost of a Large Letter stamp up to 100 grams will rise from 75p to 90p for First Class and from 58p to 69p for Second Class.

Royal Mail say that the rises are essential if it is to return to  a stable financial position. I wonder when so many customers are turning to emails and text instead of letters if this rise will not prove to be counter productive.

Whats in a name?

You would think that if you had an eBay user name for 14 years and had over 11,000 positive feedbacks it would be safe. But not so, As eBayer  Marlene discovered when eBay offered her username “animal” to a company called Animal as an inducement to open an eBay store. Animal  have a chain of 4 bricks and mortar shops selling surfing equipment.

In fairness to Animal they did not know anything about this and when they discovered that the id name had been taken from Marlene they asked eBay to reverse the decision. It would appear that it was only the intervention of Ina Steiner of EcommerceBytes newsletter that lead to eBay.co.ukretuning the user id to Marlene. Animal have now taken the user id “animalshop”. We wish them both good trading.

Easy Auction Tracker accounting software could be the easy was to keep you out of trouble with HM Revenue and Customs. In recent years R & C have taken an increasing interest in eBay sellers and the amount of money they earn. On several occasions they have claimed that they have set up specific teams to look at eBay sellers and as a result some have faced hefty tax bills.

Do not let you reBay accounts become a headache

Given the fact that once again the R & C are believed to be showing an interest and eBay is duty bound to pass on any details they request now would be a good time to get your accounts in order. Keeping accounts and records can be both boring and time consuming but fortunately there is now a very good software program on th market that will do the job for you.

Easy Auctions Tracker was especially created for eBay users and there are versions for eBay US, eBay Canada, eBay UK and eBay Australia. It is a spreadsheet that uses Microsoft Excel 2002 XP or higher. The spreadsheet connects directly with your eBay account and automatically pulls off all the information it needs.  The main part of the spread sheet is the Selling Tab which retrieves all the information on items that you have sold. The Easy Auctions Tracker also has monthly and annual Profit & Loss features which make end of the year accounting simple.

Information used by Easy Auctions Tracker

The software pulls the following information from your eBay account:

Details of the Item .eBay Item Number,  Listing Title, Selling Price, Sales Tax and  Charity Donation Listings

eBay Fees. Insertion Fees ,Final Value Fee,Store Referral Credits, Paypal Fee and Payment Method.

Shipping information. Shipping and Handling Charged ,Paypal Shipping Information,Shipping Method Used and Tracking Information*

The Easy Auctions Tracker is the brainchild of husband and wife team Josh and Jen Sinsel who originally created the spreadsheet for their own use. Since its launch customer comments have been very favourable about Easy Auctions Tracker particularly the fact that all the information is kept in one place and the ease of use. The spread sheet can be customised for individual customers and the cost for this is dependant upon how much extra work is required

Currently there is a free months trial version of the software available after which there is an annual charge of $49.99 (£32.50) which could be a small price to pay to keep the R&C off your back.

Best UK Auction Site is not an easy question to answer. First of all you have to define exactly what you mean by UK Auction Site. In the top 3 there is really only one true British site and that is CQout. Both eBay and eBid are basically off shoots of American web sites. Although it can be argued that both have bases in the UK and offer a service targeted at the UK. Therefore we will consider them for the title of best UK online auction sites.

Over the last 10 years in the UK eBay has managed to see off nearly all of the threats to its online auction monopoly. Companies such as QXL have disappeared and even giants such as AOL and Yahoo threw in the towel in the face of eBay. However, one UK based company has not only survived but has prospered and has now expanded into the USA. That company is CQout pronounced “seek you out.”

CQout has grown mainly by word of mouth after being launched in 1999, the same year eBay came to the UK, by 3 London Business School graduates. The number of members has swelled in recent years with many dissatisfied eBay users swelling the ranks and reached the magic million items for sale figure in March of last year.

A unique feature of this online auction site is that it actually charges a token amount as a registration fee. The company explains that the £2 fee actually covers the costs of validating user details and this helps to create a secure environment for trading.

One of their policies is that if you get 3 negative feedbacks then you are banned from the site for life. This fact alone must discourage many unscrupulous sellers and I am told it is almost impossible to rejoin the site using different details.

At the moment CQout does not get anywhere near the traffic that eBay does but this should not deter potential users of the site because it does have one big advantage. There are no listing fees and they operate a no sale no fee policy. It also offers a service similar to eBay’s Buy it Now which it calls Instant Buy.

The company has members in over 80 countries although they are predominantly based in the UK there is a growing membership from the USA, Ireland and the rest of Europe.

There is a lot to like about the CQout online auction site and the service it offers.. The customer support is better than many similar sites and the listing process is simple and easy.

It is doubtful whether CQout will ever reach the size or global proportions of eBay. However, with eBay seemingly intent on moving away from online auctions and into straight retail sales CQout is ideally set to benefit in the UK. So in answer to the question can CQout offer a viable alternative to eBay I think that the answer is yes it can.
eBid currently has around 4 million items listed on it very easy to navigate auction site. It is free to list an item but you do pay 3% of the sale price of sold items as commission. I get the impression that eBid may be easier to deal with than eBay has proved in the past and still seem to support the small sellers. However, I still suspect they do not get the same number of visitors to their site as eBay.

I have no hesitation in naming the 3 Best online auction sites as

eBay

CQout

eBid

If you are new to online auctions I would recommend that you try all 3 to see which works best for you and gives you the best results.

If you are going to set up as a seller on sites such as eBay it is important to remember the following:

1. It is their ball and they make the rules. You break their rules and they can take the ball away and you will have no business. It is well worth reading their rules before you start.

2. Knowledge can lead to success. There are plenty of web sites (such as this one) books and ebooks that offer advice on how to list items and generally run an online auction business. Read some of this before you start to avoid making what could be expensive mistakes.

3. Using eBay or any of the other auction sites should be a starting point for your Internet marketing business not a destination. You can gain a great deal of experience and knowledge selling through auctions. Equally so you can use it to build up a list of customers interested in the type of items that you offer. Your eventual aim should be to have your own web sites selling directly to those and other customers. That way whatever happens to online auctions in the future you will still have a business.

The first question to ask before you start selling on eBay is what am I going to sell? Ideally you should select an area that you have some interest in. A good starting point is to browse through the eBay categories and sub categories as this should give you some ideas. Once you have decided the product range you want to concentrate upon then go and look to see what other sellers are offering. We go into more detail on how to evaluate a market in an article below which you should read.

Once you have found your market you need to select a suitable product or products that you can offer at a competitive price. In this section of our web site we are going to take you step by step through the process either showing you what to do or pointing you to where you can get the information to succeed in selling on eBay.

We now saves buyers eBay requests for hard to find items and allows you to respond to these requests with eBay ads, vendors. There are several positions of thousands of hungry buyers every day for things that really want to buy!

Simply collect data now wishes on the eBay site you want and then find jobs as frequently produce certain combinations of words. In addition, the total number of responses for combinations of words.

More importantly, the number of repetitions and the number of responses are used to determine that the combination of the terms “Yen” revealed a product idea or niche as possible. “the Yen is a quality factor that varies from 0 to 10, where 0 is no good and 10 is the best. This factor essentially points to you if the combination of the word is good or not so good from a marketing perspective.

To say that there are 26000 jobs in a sell me article. You could imagine that some words appear more than once in 26000 jobs! The idea is to know that these words!

From a marketing point of view, several times a certain combination of words produced the increased demand. Minus the number of responses to a combination of Word less competition.

Therefore, the best combinations of Word are those who have high demand and low competition … that shows exactly what the yen factor. Look at the following table: when I wrote this website, in the section “Collection” sell me on eBay.com were 17,300 post buyers hungry for things to buy.

AuctionYen automatically downloads the 17,300 posts and then determines the Yen factor for all combinations of words up to 5 words. In this example, I have about 8 minutes to download and process the data.

In addition, the total number of Word combinations in each grid of data that have a “factor of Yen” greater than 0 are summarized in the section “quick stats”.

In this example, the third entry in the grid of 1 word was “Yearbook”. It took place on 69 occasions in the section “Collection” and only 2 eBay sellers responded resulting in a high factor of “Yen”.

Also, if you click on the link “Directory” in the column of words, will be directed to sell me that the word “Directory” search results.

In this example, when you click on the link “Directory”, total 684 entries exist for all sections to sell to me.

There are thousands of sell to me every day! This means that you can find current product or niche of the hottest ideas before they hit the market!

See the screenshots below to get an idea of how you can easily find niche product ideas to sell online …

Universal grid. This file …read more

“How embarrassing discovery simple easily lets you go on eBay.read more