Listing on eBay in Ten Easy Steps

There are many ways to list items on eBay. For that matter, many cities of a good size (like Dallas) have eBay stores, where someone else will clean up your used item, take photos and present it in a listing on their store for a commission. Unfortunately that commission is usually 50% of the money received after the eBay fee of 10%.

I prefer to list items via desktop (or iOS) applications like GarageSale and iSale as they have cool templates and let you use your own FTP server to store photos indefinitely. These applications have many bells and whistles you might find unnecessary and can be complex to use for a first-timer, so in this blog post, I’ll cover how you list a simple item using the eBay web interface.

Prep work: make sure you have at least a couple of good photos of your item. In this example, we’re going to look at a T-Shirt with print on the front side only, so I’ve taken a picture of the front on a mannequin and the inside collar tag. For most clothing I like to take 3 to 6 photos, with closeups of the collar, buttons, sleeves, the front and the back plus the tags inside the item.

STEP ONE - LOG INTO eBAY

Using your username and password, visit eBay and select the Sign In option by your name.

STEP TWO - CLICK SELL

As indicated in the picture above, the Sell button is in-between Daily Deals and Customer Support on most eBay accounts in the USA.

STEP THREE - TYPE THE NAME/DESCRIPTION OF THE ITEM, CLICK SEARCH

In this example, we’re listing a New Orleans Saints T-Shirt.

STEP FOUR - CHOOSE A CATEGORY

In some cases you will be prompted with different requests for information because of the item you entered in the search box. Products that are likely to have UPC codes and that exist in the eBay database will request confirmation of the product so that eBay can integrate this data with your listing.

For this item, we’ll select Men’s Clothing > T-Shirts then click Continue.

If the system asked you about listing variations, say no for now and move on.

STEP FIVE - ENTER PRODUCT DETAILS

In many cases you have to enter the content -- especially in the Brand and Material fields.

STEP SIX - ADD PHOTOS

Scroll down below the Country of Manufacture and you’ll see this section:

Click Add photos and the following dialog opens up:

You use the Browse button to find your photos. Hint: having the images resized before uploading will save time. eBay reduces size anyway, so full size iPhone photos are a waste. I use the Camera+ app and set it to smaller photo (1200x1200) size output by default.

Click Upload

STEP SEVEN - ADD DESCRIPTION

You’ll see your item title up top, under the “Describe Your Item” heading. Be sure to select pre-owned for used items.

Just below this section you will find an area to enter a detailed description. Use my basic description as a guideline or search for previously sold listings of similar items so you can use the best details possible to sell your item.

 

STEP EIGHT - CHOOSE LISTING TYPE: AUCTION/FIXED PRICE

Auctions can be up to 10 days while fixed price listings can be 30 days. Fixed price listings cost less to list, but for most items the final value fee payed to eBay is the same (10% for clothing, for example).

You can also choose to give donations to a charity as a portion of your selling price. It’s important to know that the minimum donation is $1. I once had a 99 cent auction item end up giving $1 to charity.

The next section requires entry of your PayPal information so we’ll skip that for now and go to shipping details.

STEP NINE - ADD SHIPPING DETAILS

I recommend you start out with light items that weigh less than 13 ounces (so they qualify for first class postage) OR items small enough to comfortably (and safely) fit into a flat rate Priority Mail envelope. In these cases you can charge a flat rate to your customer. Most T-Shirts are going to be under 13 ounces, but the more they weigh and the further they go in the mail, the more you pay for first class mail. This is under $4 even without negotiated rates, but you should expect to make 50 cents to $1 on your shipping and packing minimum, especially if you are doing auctions.

Make sure to uncheck International Shipping and create an exclusion list to exclude all international locations.

We’ll come back to how to revise items on a later blog post. For now, click continue at the bottom of the page.

Note: eBay will do a basic scan of your content to see if there are any issues with it. In this case, I’ve selected both “pre-owned” and used the word “New” in the title:

STEP TEN - CONFIRM AND LIST YOUR ITEM

Review the information presented and click List your item!

You are done! Congratulations!