Deals and Pitfalls on EBay

Finding deals is important to online success. We all fill out a budget and work to stretch every penny to get the most value. Often overlooked in this quest for a deal is online auctions.

Squeezing a deal out of EBay auctions is an art. Buying from auctions can be a costly proposition or a very economical option depending on your tactics. Buy wisely by learning from my (sometimes costly) experiences.

1. Is the Seller Honest?
Both EBay and Yahoo auctions have seller ratings. Read these and their associated reviews. If the seller has a good rating from buying and a bad rating from selling, you probably don't want to buy from them. Look at both praises and complaints to see if they apply to what you are bidding on.

2. Read the Description Throughly
It is very simple to read what you want to see in an Ebay auction rather than what is actually written there. Read both what is in the Ebay description and what is NOT in the description. Often your mind will want to fill in details with your dream interpretation. You need to re-read the description until you find out whether what you are searching for and what the seller is selling match.

* Links
If you are buying a link, first find out the PR value of the page you will be on. Then, find out how many other links are on the page, where it will be on the page, what text you are allowed, and if it is a direct link or a redirected link. Though it is NOT recommended to buy all your links, buying a few can help you get indexed faster and get you a bit of extra publicity. Of course, make sure you are paying fair value -- compare to Yahoo, looksmart, and such.

* Pageviews
When buying pageviews, make sure they are from real users not a program. If it is a program that has people visit your page for 15-20 seconds without user intervention do NOT expect people to buy from your site. People will start up the program and leave the computer. It may help your page rank, but it is useless.

* Hits
These are even more useless than pageviews as this is done by a computer program. Avoid these.

* Classified Ads
If there isn't a direct link to your site from the classified ad, avoid it. Again, verify PR rank and see if it is well visited.

* Pay-Per-Click
Relatively new Pay-per-Click engines usually don't have enough popularity to be worth your while. You can win big if the site truly has good amounts of visitors but needs advertisers. Things to look for are: are people being paid to go to your site and does the advertised site seem to be attracting people that are likely to purchase from your site.

* Site Promotion
Generally avoid these. Site promotion works best by hand. Usually these are huge submits that will get you on every mailing list possible. If they mention FFAs or thousands of directories run.

3. Is it a Deal For You?
Many times an EBay auction will say that the items are "worth $XXX". In many cases, that price is inflated. Often you can find similar items much cheaper than "$XXX" at normal stores. (However, the auction price may still be cheaper than you can by elsewhere - it really helps to know how much you usually pay for items!) If you are only interested in some of the items in an auction, adjust your bid to reflect how much you are willing to pay for just those items unless you plan to sell the rest as that is how much you would pay for it elsewhere.

4. Auction Excitement
When in a bidding war, it is easy to get caught up in the possibility of getting a deal. Compare prices on the net to avoid overpaying. Know that usually you can get the item later elsewhere. Wise buyers know to walk away when the price is higher than the item is worth to them.

About The Author:

Lorraine Venner offers reciprocal links for jewelry related sites. Get free website promotion at: http://www.jewelrymall.com/freeresources.html