Bids/Offers

When you place a bid, eBay registers it in the Bids/Offers area, as shown in Figure 5-6, and displays a clickable link to the item.

When shopping, if you don’t check on your mobile device, make the bidding page a daily stop on eBay, so you can see the status of your bids:

• Bid amounts in green indicate that you’re the high bidder in the auction.
• Bid amounts in red indicate that your bid is losing. If you want to increase your bid, simply click the auction title to go to the auction.
• As auctions on which you’ve bid end, they are transferred to the Purchase History or the Didn’t Win section, depending (respectively) on your success or failure in the bidding process.

You can make notations on your bidding or item-watching. Just click the Add Note button which appears as you mouse over the item on your list and then add the information.

eBay Bucks

Loyalty programs keep you coming back for more, and eBay Bucks (shown in Figure 5-7) gives you rewards for the money you spend on eBay. Every calendar quarter, eBay totals up the amount you’ve spent on the site in qualifying categories and issues (currently) an eBay Bucks certificate worth one percent of your total. This certificate can be used toward the purchase of any item on the site for the following quarter after it’s issued.

Lists: Watch list

I’ll bet you’ve seen an item that made you think …

I don’t want to bid (or buy) this just now, but I’d like to buy it if it’s a bargain!

And you’ve probably seen the Add to watch list link on each listing page. Click it to add that item to your Watch list, which is available from your My eBay page.

Clicking the Watch list link from My eBay brings you to the Watch list (see Figure 5-8), one of the most powerful features of the My eBay Lists area. If you’re watching items, you’ll see a notation on the page, indicating how many auctions you’re currently watching. This page lists each watched item with a countdown (time left) timer, so you know exactly when the auction will close. When a listing on your watch list gets close to ending, you can swoop down and make the kill — if the price is right.

Here are two great ways to use the Watch list:

• As a buyer: Are you interested in an item? You can observe the bidding action — the number of bids and how fast the price is rising (or not) — without showing your hand to the competition.

  The watch-list function helps me keep my bargain-hunting quiet. Everybody knows when you’re bidding on an item; nobody knows when you’re watching the deals like a hawk. When you’re looking for bargains to buy and resell, you may not want to tip off the competition by letting them know you’re bidding.

• As a seller: Also a handy marketing tool, the Watch list allows you to store listings from competitive sellers. That way, you can monitor the status of items similar to ones you plan to sell later — and see whether the items are selling high or low, which helps you to decide whether it’s a good time to sell.

Saved Searches link

A tool that comes in handy for sellers as well as buyers is the Saved Searches area of My eBay where you can accumulate a bucket load of your favorite searches. When you want to see whether any of your searched-for items are available for sale, simply click the View Items link. If there are no items matching your search, you see the words Your search returned 0 items below the search words in the list.

Are you always looking for certain things on eBay? For example, maybe you plan to search frequently for a Callaway Seven Heaven Wood — whatever. Add it to your list of saved searches and you won’t have to type Callaway Seven Heaven Wood more than once. By organizing your saved searches, you can search for your favorite items with a click of your mouse on the title links.

You can view saved searches, change them, delete them, or indicate that you’d like to receive email notification when a new matching item is listed. To add an item search to the list, run a search from the search box on any eBay page and click the Save button with a star icon that appears next to your search text. The next time you reload your My eBay Saved Searches page, your new favorite search will be listed.

When you click the Save button, a window pops up, asking you to name the search and giving you the option to receive emails when new items match your search. Click the check box next to this option, and you won’t have to go to your Saved Searches area; you’ll be notified by email instead (refer to Figure 5-9). eBay sends its robot to check listings each night, so you’ll get a notification of new listings the next morning.

Be sure to use all the search tricks and shortcuts I show you in the table in Chapter 1 of this minibook. These are single-line searches that you normally would perform from the search boxes on the eBay pages.

Keeping track of favorite searches is a valuable tool when you’re looking for particular items to resell and want to find them at bargain prices. Also, when you have a unique collectible for sale, you can monitor the current selling prices.

Saved Sellers link

When you’ve been on eBay for awhile, you will find that certain sellers carry a specific type of merchandise that interests you. By saving their User IDs in the Saved Sellers area, you’ll be able to revisit their current items for sale without having to run a seller search. Remember that the purpose of the My eBay page is to have all your controls in one area.

From a seller’s point of view, Saved Sellers is where you can keep a list of people who sell items similar to what you sell. You can check up on them and see what they’re selling, when they’re selling it, and for how much. It’s a helpful timing tool that can prevent you from listing a similar item at the same time as their auctions.

Saved Sellers is handy also when your competition is selling an item that you plan to sell, but at a deeply discounted price. When that happens, don’t offer yours until they sell out of the item, at which time the price will most likely go back up — supply and demand, remember? I have a few quality wholesalers and liquidators under Saved Sellers, too, and search for lots that I can resell at a profit.

To add a seller to your Saved Sellers list, just go to one of their items for sale. If you are actively searching items, and find a seller with goods you like, just click the Save this Seller link in the Seller Information box on the item page.

Purchase History link

Clicking the Purchase History link in the My eBay navigation area displays all the items you’ve won as far back as the last 60 days, as shown in Figure 5-10.

The Purchase History page is the go-to place to check on any items that you’re waiting to receive. It’s also a convenient way to keep track of your expenditures, especially if you are buying for resale.

Helpful features on the Purchase History vary whether the item has been delivered or is still in transit.

• Drop-down menu: Click the More Actions drop-down menu to the far right of any item you’ve purchased, and you’ll be able to perform actions related to your transaction. Here are some important ones:
  • Contact Seller: This link sends you to the seller’s smart answers page. If you don’t see the answer to your question, you can send a message to the seller through eBay messaging.
  • I didn’t receive it: If the item is hasn’t arrived by the estimated delivery date, click here to make an inquiry.
  • Return This Item: If the seller has a return policy, you can use this link to initiate a return and resulting refund.
  • Sell This Item: If you purchased the item to resell, or just figured out you really don’t want it, click here and you go to a Sell an Item page.

Clicking on the View order details link takes you to a page where you can check the status of your item. It includes

• Listing title: A link to the listing. I always use this when an item arrives so I can be sure that the item I received is exactly as advertised.
• Item sale date and price paid: Helps you remember when you purchased the item.
• Leave Feedback. Here’s where you can leave the all-important feedback for the seller.
• Estimated delivery date: Based on the seller’s mode of transit, eBay estimates how long the item should take to get to your door. If it hasn’t arrived within a day or so (barring snowstorms and natural disasters), it doesn’t hurt to contact the seller to check on the shipping status.
• Show shipping details: When the seller has shipped, you can click this link to see the progress (or delivery confirmation) of your item, as I did in Figure 5-11.

Personal Information link

Click the Personal Information link to get to the Personal Information page, which holds all the links to your personal information on eBay. This is where you can change your email address, User ID (without losing your feedback), password, and credit card information — and also edit or create your About Me page. You can also change or access any registration or credit card information that you have on file at eBay. There’s even a link you can use to change your home address on record.

Keeping all your contact information up to date on eBay is important. If the eBay folks should ever find that any of the contact information is wrong, they may suspend your membership.

Another link, Communication Preferences, takes you to where you can specify how you want to receive information from eBay and handle your member-to-member communications.

By using the eBay mobile app, you can get instantaneous notifications on your smartphone. My personal favorite is the cash register sound I hear when someone pays for one of my items on PayPal.

Site Preferences link

A handy feature of the Site Preferences area is the opportunity to customize the settings you see here by clicking the Show link and then the Edit link for that preference. For example, under General Preferences, you can save extra clicks by changing preferences to keep yourself “Signed in on this computer.”

You may as well click through every option every once in a while. That way, you’ll be sure you have things set up just the way you want them for conducting business on eBay.

Seller Dashboard

Customer service is what it’s all about when you’re building and maintaining a business on eBay, so this space should be a regular stop for you. It’ll keep you apprised of how you’re doing with your customer service. Your average DSR (Detailed Seller Ratings) will appear in a box at the top of the page.

Each title on this page links to deeper information on your personal seller performance. There’s a lot of revealing data here, so be sure to click these links regularly to see where you can improve your customer relations (and status with eBay).

If you’re a Top Rated Seller, the Seller Dashboard is a very important place — because this is where you can keep track of your Final Value fee discount (which is based on your ratings). Click the arrows to expand the information and then click links to generate reports on how your feedback has fared.

Feedback link

In Book 1, I talk all about the importance of feedback to the eBay community. In the Feedback area of the Account page, you can keep track of all your feedback duties. Feedback is a most important function of your eBay transactions; don’t forget to leave some for your trading partners!

When you click the Feedback link, you can see your listings from the last 30 days. You see a star to the far right of a transaction if you’ve left feedback. (The star will be grayed out if you haven’t.) If your trading partner has left feedback for you, you see a sign in a comment-cloud icon — a plus sign means positive feedback and a minus sign means negative.

At the very bottom of the page, eBay shows you recent feedback that has been left for you. But it’s much easier to click the feedback number next to your User ID to see your most recent feedback.

There’s also a link on the top that takes you to the Feedback Forum, where you can perform many feedback-related functions, including these crucial two:

• Reply and Follow Up: Responding to feedback left for you is especially important, especially if the feedback is less than stellar. Every story has two sides. Make sure yours is prompt and professional.
• Request Feedback Revision: If you’ve solved a problem and turned an unhappy customer into a happy one, you can request that the person re-examine the feedback left earlier.

Should you want to check feedback for a specific eBay member, there’s a Find a Member search box where you can type in his or her User ID and go to the Find a Member page.

Subscriptions link

Click the Subscriptions link, and you’ll be able to see just which additional selling tools you’re paying for. From here, you can upgrade, downgrade, or unsubscribe.