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How to Use eBay to Teach Entrepreneurship to Children: Listing Items


The next step in teaching entrepreneurship to children is listing the items they have purchased. This is a very important part of the process, the deal maker or breaker. Thankfully, eBay makes it very easy to list items. Below we will go through the basic steps of listing an item so you can help you child walk through the listing process.


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eBay Category Selection

Many buyers will look for items based on a preset category provided by eBay on their home page. You will want to make sure that you select the best category for the item you are listing. It your item is in the wrong category, it is very possible that your target customers will not see it.

What if my item could fit in more than one category? When we have this problem, we type our item into the search bar and look at all the sold items. Then, just start clicking on each item and see what category sold items were listed in. This will be a good gadge to find out what category buyers are looking in.

Listing Title

Your listing title is like a mini description. It’s important to use as many keywords to describe your item in the title as possible. keep in mind the words that a buyer might type into the search bar to find your item. Important things to include in the title are:

  1. brand

  2. color

  3. model

  4. size

  5. pattern or materials

See our article, SEO for eBay: Item Listing Titles, for more advice on how to optimize titles for eBay search.

Pictures

eBay gives us 12 free pictures for each listing. Use as many of them as possible and show everything, including the blemishes. Many times, it’s your pictures that will make the sale. With increasing mobile buyers on the eBay app, pictures are even. Ore important. We have heard stories about buyers using mobile that never look at the description. They purchase solely on what they see in the pictures.

Item Specifics

Each eBay category has its own item specifics, but it is extremely important to fill out as many specifics as possible. When a buyer is searching for items on eBay, they will often use the selections on the left side of the screen to narrow down the results to find what they want. Those selections are the item specifics that you use to describe your item. Try to use as many of them as possible to have your item included in those specifics.

Description

For those buyers who do make their way down to the description, you will want to describe your item as detailed yet simple as possible. We highly recommend using bullet points to list as many descriptive aspects of your item as possible. We do not recommend using a sentence and paragraph style of writing. People want short and sweet, but we also want to make sure to describe as much as possible, including all defects.

For more information about listing descriptions see our article, SEO for eBay: Listing Descriptions.

Pricing

You should have a pretty good idea what you want to sell your item for based on the research you did when pickin’ your item. (See our article on Going Pickin’ for more details) When we’re pricing, our rule of thumb is to get at least 5x our cost (especially if we’re offering free shipping).

Shipping

You should have a good idea what your packaging is going to be for shipping. It can be really frustrating if you have to rush around to figure out what your going to ship your item in when it sells. If you are using free shipping supplies from USPS, it might be a good idea to use a sticky note or masking tape to write down the type of box you want to use and then stick it one the item.

Also, in order to qualify for Top Rated Seller, you need to have same-day or 1-day handling time on your items.

Return Policy

Lastly, make sure that you have set up your return policy. In order to qualify for Top Rated Seller Plus you need to have a minimum 14-day return policy. We choose to offer a 30-day return policy to add the extra sense of confidence to buyers that they can return for any reason if they do not like or want the item.

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