While I’ve been silent a lot lately, I haven’t been idle. My most recent project has been helping a former client sell some equipment on eBay. Yes, eBay - I haven’t used them in a few years, but their audience *is* massive, and he wants to clean out his storage unit, so I agreed to help.
It’s still somewhat of a hassle to list on eBay, but it’s gotten easier from the last time I did battle with it back in 04. I was able to list 5 pieces of equipment in 3 hours and sold 1 the first day. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to experience an internal phishing attack. Luckily, I switched to Firefox and avoided it. More eBay thoughts after the jump, along with screen shots.
Here is the warning I received:
If I wasn’t so aware of security issues, I might have missed this and assumed it was a real question. I couldn’t resist trying it anyway just to see what would happen:
Score: Phisher 0, Firefox 1
Back to eBay. I stopped using eBay back in 2002 because most of the inventory I had wasn’t moving well at auction. When I went to list this equipment, I paid careful attention to pricing - most eBay users are searching for bargains, after all, so pricing the initial auctions was going to be key to how they perform. There wasn’t much at eBay, but thanks to some other equipment dealers, I was able to set fair market values and calculate where to begin the auctions.
So far, so good - as I said above, I’ve sold one piece outright - it was picked up today. The next auction closes on Saturday and the bids are still a little low, but there are a lot of people watching it, so hopefully it will pick up.
After the auctions are complete, I’ll talk more about the keyword research I did to help spur bids.
