How To Realistically Price An Item And Make The Sale.
If you want to sell an item on eBay and you want to sell it quick, the best thing you can do is sell the item at a reasonable price. Many people get greedy and price an item too high. Believe me, if you have too high a price on an item it can literally sit on eBay for several years before it sells, if it sells at all.
Before you put an item on eBay, take a few minutes and do a little research on pricing, there’s a lot of competition, and if your price is too high the item will never sell, conversely, if the item is priced too low it’s money out of your pocket, and nobody wants to lose money. It’s best to come up with a reasonable price for a quick sale.
Most people research the normal Ebay listings for the category of the item they want to sell and choose a price amongst those similar items. Many of those items will be over-priced, and that’s not what eBay buyers are looking for, they want some kind of deal. After all, that’s what buying online is all about, saving money. So don’t go full retail.
A good general rule is: If the item is rare, price it a little higher, if the item is common, price it on the low-end for a quick sale. If the item is new, price it a little below retail. If the item is used price it 20 to 25% of the original retail price. But even this is kind of a guessing game. For accurate pricing, it’s best if you do a little research.
The best way to price an item on eBay for a quick sale is to charge a little less than previous sold prices for the same item. Most people aren’t aware that there is an easy way to look up the price an item has sold for on eBay. In fact, you can look up the price for every similar item that has sold in the past 30 days.
You can do so by following the instructions below. Here’s what you want to do.
How To Price Your Item
STEP 1: Locate the search box at the top of any of any page in your eBay account and type in a basic semi-detailed description of the item you want to sell. You want to give a few details so that your description is accurate without giving too many details, thus limiting results.
In my example, we are going to use the popular book ‘To kill a Mockingbird’. We’ll add a little detail by stating its a 1st edition copy of the book. Remember, don’t add too many details because your limited search results will not give you enough information to make a reasonable decision.
STEP 2: Click on the search button.
Next, you’ll pull up the current Ebay listings for that item.
STEP 3: Click on the advanced link in the upper right-hand corner.
Next, you’ll see the ‘Advanced Search’ page which shows the item search description you entered along with the Advanced Search options available to you. At this point we are only interested in three of these options.
Step 4: Check those three boxes as shown below and click the search button above those checked boxes.
Now you’ve arrived at the ‘advanced search’ page results displaying all of the items similar to your original search that have sold in the previous 30 days. As you can see, sold items have green prices indicating the actual price the item sold for, not just the asking price as displayed in the general search box results. Now you know exactly what eBay buyers are willing to pay for an item like yours.
Scroll through the list and you’ll get a general idea of where you should price your item. In addition, in the upper left section of the search page eBay will tell you how many of those items sold in the previous 30 days. If the number is too low, say 30 or 40 items you know the item you want to sell usually sells about once per day.
If you have a high number like the one shown on this page 184, you’ll know that eBay sells about six of these items per day. Personally I’d rather not bother with an item that sells less than one per day because that could take quite a while to sell. On the other hand, if the item sells six times per day you have a reasonable chance of selling it quickly.
If the item sells thousands of times every month you may have to ‘give-it-away’ to make the sale and it most likely won’t be worth your time and effort to sell it. Too little sales is not good and too many sales is equally as bad. I’ve had the best luck selling items that sell somewhere between 3 and 10 times a day.
That’s it, now you have a good idea of how often the item you want to sell actually sells on eBay, and what would be a reasonable asking price for the item you wish to sell.
Good luck!
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask me, I’d be more than willing to give you a helping hand.
On Reflection:
As you can see, it’s not very difficult to do a little research in order to come up with a reasonable price for the item you want to sell on Ebay. You can learn everything you need to know about pricing an item on Ebay itself. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a price you know Ebay buyers are willing to pay.
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Thanks for reading my article.
Info Sources: My personal experience as an Ebay seller for over 20 years.
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