Simplx Blog

Designing your own website can be daunting. What font should you use? What colors would look best? How can your font and color choices attract customers—and get them to stay? With a push in the right direction, everyone can put together a website that´s both eye-catching and effective. Below are some tips to help you get started on font and color selection.

Keep It Simple
When choosing a font for your body text, remember that readability is key. For web content, a sans serif font (a font without serifs or embellishments) is easiest to read. Because font selection varies depending on your computer, choose a well-used, widely-available font like Verdana for your body text.

Make sure to monitor the amount of text on your website. Use shorter line lengths and keep your text crisp and concise. Shorter sentences and smaller paragraphs will be easier on your customers´ eyes, and will keep them from feeling bogged down in text.

Flaunt That Font
Your font can help to pull customers into your site—or push them away. Here are a few tips to help you select effective, eye-catching fonts:

• Body Text: as mentioned above, sans serif fonts are the easiest to read. Choose a sans serif font with clean lines and an easy-to-read layout. Use only one sans serif font in your body text to preserve continuity. (Note: Bolded sans serif fonts also work nicely as headers—as long as they´re the same font as your body.)

• Headers: Serif fonts (fonts with decorative finishes) are best used in headers or as added emphasis. Feel free to use a more creative font—but use it sparingly. Also, keep in mind that more obscure fonts may not show up properly on all computers. If you use a serif, be sure it compliments your sans serif body text.

• All Caps: Avoid using all caps to emphasize text. First, capitalized words are more difficult to read (our eyes are trained to recognize the shape of a words as well as its spelling). Second, capitalized words tend to appear overstressed (readers will feel they´re being shouted at). Instead, apply emphasis by using color, bold, or italics.

Size Matters
After you´ve chosen your body text and header fonts, take a look at their relative sizes. Make sure your body text is readable without appearing too small or too large. When pairing a heading with body text, make sure the heading is large enough to stand out from the body. Try increasing its size, bolding it, or selecting a more distinct (yet readable) font. Headings should attract attention and compel the customer to read further.

Pack A Colorful Punch
Color can add flair and personality to your website—but if used incorrectly, it can actually repel customers. Here are a few tips to help you color your site successfully:

• When choosing a font color, be sure to select one that is easy to read and that contrasts well with your background color. While the easiest color combination is black text on a white background, you can experiment with color to create a visual appeal.

• Don´t use more than two font colors on your site. Occasionally three work, but it´s safer to just use two—one for the main body and another to draw attention.

• When choosing a background color, make sure your body text does not fade into the background. Choose contrasting colors as well as contrasting tones—one must be light and one must be dark.

• Studies show that light text on a dark background doesn´t read as easily as dark text on a light background.

• Avoid fluorescent text and background color—it´s difficult to read.

• Keep in mind that people with color blindness may have difficulty viewing a red/green color combination.

Browse the internet for websites that appeal to you. What do you like about them? What fonts do they use? How do they employ color? Keep track of the elements you like. Likewise, look for websites you find unappealing. What do you dislike about them? In what ways are they visually unappealing? Once you know what works and what doesn´t, apply the same concepts to your own website and watch your profits soar!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Your website´s title and description are the most important factors when preparing your site for search engine registration. Not including a title for your web page is similar to publishing a newspaper without a headline. The title not only displays at the top of the browser window, but also appears when potential customers perform a search in a search engine and review the results. The description is equally important, as its purpose is to entice customers to click once the title has their attention.

In this discussion, please understand that we are referring to your web page title and description, not your company or position title/description. We are referring to the actual title and description of your web page, as defined by the title and meta name HTML tags.

Where are the Title & Description?
These tags are in the HTML code in the <HEAD> tag near the top of the document. They look like this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Your Page´s Title Here</TITLE>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Your Site´s Description Here”>
</HEAD>

Important Note: Some search engines do not use the description tag. Instead, they index the first 30-40 words of your site or the text around the keyword phrase being searched and use that as your description. For this reason, you should plan a well-rounded strategy for achieving high search engine rankings. This series is designed to help you create this type of strategy.

Tips for Writing Titles and Descriptions
Think of your title and description as an advertising campaign and spend as much time writing an effective title and description as you would writing an important ad.

Include Your Researched Keywords: To have a realistic chance of being listed on search results for certain keywords, make sure those keywords are used in your titles and descriptions. This is because when a search is requested through a search engine, the search engine gives highest priority to the words within the title tag. Since each page of your website can have its own unique title, it is vital for you to customize each page with its own keyword-rich title, focusing on just one keyword phrase per page. Tip: Do not use keywords multiple times in the same title or description tag.

Evoke Emotion: Don´t make the mistake of using just your company name for the title or stuffing keywords in the title with no other emotional pull. Your web page´s title MUST grab attention, create curiosity, and evoke emotion. Pay close attention to TV and radio news programs and how they use short “hooks” to keep viewers and listeners through a commercial break. The same “hooks” can be used for your title and description.

Use Compelling Words: What words are compelling? We have compiled a short list of compelling words to choose from: bold, breakthrough, magical, revealing, accomplish, favorite, security, save, stunning, personal, outrageous, you, announcing, warning, secrets, enormous, love, best, earn, more, wealth, protect, dazzling, exciting, incredible, free, fear, imagine, succeed, gain, money, sale, stunning, how-to, proud, health, prosper, future, easy, extreme, and fate.

Make Titles Short: Shorter titles are more effective than longer ones because web surfers scan the words on a search result page—they don´t read them.

Avoid Search Engine “Tricks”: There are many “tricks” out there to allow you to have more than one title tag, a title longer than the maximum 78 characters, and multiple descriptions. We advise against these methods because search engine criteria and algorithms change frequently. Unless you are keeping up-to-date on the latest changes, what may be legal today could draw a penalty tomorrow.

Make Sure You Can Support Your Claims: Make sure you can back up any claims you make in your title and description. If you can´t, you may be sued. Recently a large online site was sued for stating they were “The World´s Largest Bookstore.” They weren´t. They were sued. They lost.

Use Capitalization Wisely: Do not use ALL CAPS. They are difficult to read and are considered “shouting” on the Internet. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each word (when appropriate).

Make Titles under 78 Characters: Generally, your title should be 78 characters or less (including spaces). We prefer short, crisp titles. Some search engines only display a maximum of 78 characters, so by following this guideline, you are assured your title will not be cut off.

Examples
Your title and description will be the catalyst for traffic coming to your website. Just because your site ranks at the top of the search engine results does not necessarily mean you will receive the most traffic of the sites listed in the results. In fact, if your title and description are more compelling than your competitor´s title and description, you can attract more traffic than the #1 listed website in terms of referred traffic.

Effective Title Example: For a Corporate Help Desk, instead of using the title: “XYZ Corporation—Corporate Help Desk,” use “Corporate Help Desk: Meeting Core Business Demands, Keeping Users Productive.” This title is more effective because it incorporates the main solutions the service provides.

Effective Description Example: “Meeting your core business demands and keeping your users productive is your top priority. It is ours too. Allow us to be your Corporate Help Desk with guaranteed response times and high-quality service.”

Search engines do not alphabetize the results, so refrain from using symbols such as “!!” or “AAA” in your title. Place your most important keyword in this tag, but keep it readable and descriptive, with an emotional pull. Don´t just make your title a list of keywords.

Poor Title Example: For “Hawaiian Vacations,” one website´s title is: “windsurfing vacations lodging Maui budget accommodations Hawaiian vacation ren.” This title fails because it´s not only unappealing, but also doesn´t read well; therefore, few will click on this site, even if it´s listed as #1. The last word, “ren,” is actually “rental,” but was cut off, as the title was longer than the search engine allows.

Suggested Title: “Hawaiian Vacations in Maui—Budget Lodging Available.” Result: A shorter, more effective, and descriptive title.

Don’t Use Two Titles for One Web Page
Although using more than one title on a page is allowed on some search engines, others (including Google) will heavily penalize you.

Questions to Ask Yourself
Read your finished title and description and ask yourself:

• Are my title and description compelling?

• Do they solve a problem?

• Do they suggest that my product or service solves that problem quickly?

If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, you may need to rewrite your title and/or description. The bottom line is, when a search is performed on a search engine, two elements are displayed in the results list—the website´s title and description. And based on that title and description, your website may be welcoming potential customers—or turning them away.

Popularity: 27% [?]

eBay stores are eBay’s version of an independent online webstore. An eBay store is a series of customizable pages, hosted on eBay, where you can post a special type of extended-duration, fixed price auction. In essence, you populate your store with a variety of Buy it Now products.

In some ways, an eBay store is sort of like a really elaborate MyWorld page. You have a certain level of control over its appearance and content, and you can add modules and features to it to give visitors access to your products. Listings on an eBay store have lower insertion fees and longer durations, but the Final Value Fees are quite a bit higher than the ones for a typical auction.

The Types of eBay Store
There are three different levels of eBay store, each with progressively higher monthly fees but also additional features and greater customizability. Even the basic store is not intended for amateur eBay users however; we don’t suggest signing up for an eBay store until you are making a strong number of regular sales per month. But, for users who are making a consistently high number of sales, eBay stores can significantly increase revenue.

Basic
Basic stores are the simplest to set up and use, but offer limited reporting and marketing tools. They are also relatively inexpensive, making them a good choice for hobbyists and part-timers.

Premium
A Premium store adds features for tracking your sales and gives you more advanced tools for marketing. Owners of Premium stores also have access to 24-hour-a-day technical support. These are a good choice for someone who is an established presence on eBay and is selling on eBay as a career.

Anchor
Anchor stores are meant for the most advanced, high-volume sellers. The subscription fees for having this store (before Insertion and Final Value fees) are over $3,600 a year, and many of the features are too advanced to be helpful for casual users.

More information about the three types of eBay store subscription is available here.

Store Inventory Format
Probably the single biggest reason to open an eBay store is access to the Store Inventory Format for your listings. Store Inventory Format behaves very much like Fixed Price Format; the buyer does not bid against other buyers for the item being listed, but simply agrees to purchase a certain quantity at a “Buy it Now” price. Store Inventory Format listings can also have significantly longer duration than normal listings. In fact, they can have a duration of as much as 30 days.

The Insertion Fee for Store Inventory Format doesn’t change with the quantity of items listed. That means the fee will be the same for listing a thousand of a particular item as it would be for listing one. Incidentally, Store Inventory Format cannot be used for items that have a price of less than $1.00.

Additionally, Store Inventory Format has a unique option available called GTC. GTC stands for “Good ‘Till Canceled,” meaning that GTC listings will automatically renew until the seller either cancels them. This allows you to have a particular item continuously available for sale, while paying the lowest possible Insertion Fee every month for doing so. GTC listings won’t stop auto-renewing until the quantity of items in the listing drops to zero or you cancel the listing.

Store Inventory Format does have its disadvantages, however. First and foremost, items listed for sale in an eBay store do not have the same visibility that standard auctions do. Listings that use Store Inventory Format don’t come up in an eBay search unless one of two things happen:

The potential customer specifically searches for results in eBay Stores (most don’t)
The search returns fewer than 30 results (very uncommon)
That means the vast majority of potential customers won’t even see listings in your store when they do a normal search, even if they are searching for exactly the product you carry. How does anyone ever sell things from their eBay store?

Getting Customers into your eBay Store
The thing to remember about Store Inventory Format is that, for the most part, it relies on getting potential customers into your store so that they can browse your products. Most of the time, successful eBay store owners do this by running a few standard auctions of their hottest items while keeping other items up for sale in their store. When potential customers are already considering bidding on those listings, they often tend to visit the seller’s eBay store to see if they can find other interesting deals.

This is where Niche Marketing fits into the equation. Successful eBay stores sell items that are related in some way, so that customers who visit the store through another listing find themselves in a place full of other things they might want to buy. This is where your potential customers will find related products that they never would have searched for on their own, because they didn’t even know about them!

Conclusion
eBay stores aren’t a benefit for every eBay seller, but they can be a powerful tool for those who are in a position to take advantage of them. Furthermore, managing an eBay store is excellent practice for managing an online business outside of eBay—many of the same procedures and techniques apply.

Popularity: 29% [?]

What is a Niche? What Has It Got to do With My Online Business?
A “niche” in economics refers to a very particular segment of the marketplace that is set apart, for one reason or another, from the mainstream. If you think of the economic marketplace as a literal marketplace or bazaar, niches are the isolated little corners, away from the main promenades where most people shop. The places where the mysterious and rare items are bought and sold, by mysterious and rare people.

What isn’t a Niche?
One useful way to define the idea of a niche is by establishing what it isn’t, rather than what it is. Niches are not the place for high-volume, “economy of scale” businesses. A niche doesn’t just sell jewelry; it sells a particular kind of jewelry. A business that is interested in a niche market doesn’t carry large inventories of dissimilar items; every product that it carries and sells is related to some very specific purpose or activity.

Why do Niches Form?
Niches are the natural side-effect of the “one-size-fits-all” trends in the mainstream marketplace. Most people, most of the time, shop for things that are similar to what other people around them are shopping for too, so big retailers compete for the attention of customers in those areas. But occasionally individuals are interested in something different from the norm, and that’s where niche markets flourish.

Take your typical supermarket as an example: despite their different names, all supermarkets sell pretty much the same stuff, for pretty much the same price, right? Occasionally a customer might want a something that is different from the norm though, and the supermarket doesn’t carry it. In those cases, the consumer heads for some sort of specialty store to get their product instead.

Niches aren’t always about the availability of products, either. They can form for all sorts of reasons:

• Price: for bargain-hunters, people who are more concerned with price than the mainstream shopper.

• Performance or Quality: for people interested in a higher grade of the same product than the mainstream shopper.

• Quantity: for people who are interested in buying larger commodities than the mainstream shopper.

• Special Needs: for people who have particular requirements that the mainstream shopper doesn’t have.

• Special Application: for people who are looking for products all based around a specific, unusual task.

• Exclusivity: for people who want something the mainstream shopper don’t have access to.

And these are only a few ideas; niches form for all sorts of reasons beyond these. Additionally, sometimes the reason for a particular niche will overlap. Costco and Sam’s Club base their business models on serving clients who have particular interests in price and quantity.

The watchword of Niche Marketing is focus. A business that is successfully focusing on niche marketing has a very specific reason for carrying the products that they do. They know the needs of their customers (more closely than most mainstream business do, in fact) and are doing their best to fulfill those particular needs.

Why Focus on a Niche?
So, why are we encouraging you, the small business entrepreneur, to study out, select, and sell to a particular niche? Why not go for the mainstream instead, where there are more customers (and thus, more money)? It has everything to do with the economics of competition.

Big retailers (like WalMart, for example) run their business in a very particular way. Their corporate model involves carrying a large amount of very popular items and selling them at very low margins but doing it as quickly as they can. It’s a pretty safe bet that anything you see on a shelf at WalMart hasn’t been there for very long, simply because the store knows that turning over inventory is the key to profitability for them.

That’s a fine way to do business, but it actually places some pretty stern limitations on what a big retailer can carry: WalMart has to carry the products and sell them at prices that will make them fly off the shelves fastest. They don’t carry the highest quality products. They don’t carry the cheapest products. They don’t carry specialty products. They don’t carry the most effective products. They don’t carry the most interesting products. They carry the fastest selling products. Period.

When you think about it that way, you’ll start to see what makes niches the more interesting parts of the marketplace. A business in a niche market isn’t a slave to turnover the way a mainstream retailer is, which makes them free to base their business strategy on something more than simple product popularity. A niche can be focused on things like product quality, or performance, or price, or rarity, or application or all sorts of other things. Choosing a niche offers an entrepreneur more freedom.

Why a Niche Online?
Online businesses have a lot more success targeting niches then big retailers in brick-and-mortar retail stores ever could. In fact, they are probably the biggest reason why e-commerce has changed the way the world does business.

Before the internet, if someone wanted to buy something they pretty much had one choice: find and go to a store that sold it. That meant the store owner could only make a living by selling a product that people near his store wanted to buy. Most brick-and-mortar stores were stuck following the mainstream model of selling what was popular because their wasn’t any choice; you weren’t going to sell exotic food if there were only three people within a twenty mile radius who want to buy it.

E-commerce changes all of that. If you have an online store, the world becomes your marketplace. You can sell something that no one in your hemisphere wants to buy, and still make a living doing it, if there are enough people on the other side of the world who want it. That means you can sell to any niche you want to when your business is online.

Conclusion
Finding and focusing your business on a Niche isn’t the only way to make money online, but it’s certainly one of the very best ones for a small business entrepreneur. It lets you be creative, focus your attention on something you are really interested in, and tailor your business to the customers you want, all while avoiding the restrictions of being a normal retailer or selling from a brick-and-mortar store. All it takes from you is knowing what niche you want to pursue, and being willing to learn that niche inside and out.

Popularity: 27% [?]

You’re a business owner! Whether on eBay or through your own custom website, you regularly provide products for customers to buy, and you are ultimately responsible to that they get what they ask for. Since your business is online, most of your contact with those customers will come through e-mail. What can you do to make sure that correspondence is positive?

Limitations of E-Mail
Talking to someone through e-mail isn’t like having a conversation face-to-face. In fact, it isn’t even like having a conversation over the telephone or using an instant-messaging service like Microsoft Instant Messenger. Instead, e-mail is very much its own method of communication, with special rules and courtesies that you need to keep in mind as you compose. If you don’t follow the rules, an e-mail can be easily misunderstood. And the last thing you want is for your customers to misunderstand you!

Twelve Rules to Improve Your E-Mail Skills
These twelve rules will help you to keep your e-mails sounding professional and clear so that your customers will get what they need and want out of them.

Rule #1: Answer Quickly
Customers expect a quick reply when they send an e-mail! Never make your customers wait more than 24 hours before they hear back from you; you should get used to checking your e-mail box at least once a day, and usually more often than that. If you cannot completely answer an e-mail query when you receive it, send a reply answering what you can and promise to get back to them once you have the information they need. Always keep your promise.

Rule #2: Answer All of Your Customer’s Questions, and Pre-empt Further ones
Make sure you read incoming e-mails carefully, and double check them before you send your reply to make certain that you’ve covered everything the customer needed to know. At the same time, use what you know about your customer to predict additional things they will need. Customers appreciate a business that takes time to anticipate and attend to their needs.

Rule #3: Be Concise and to the Point
Never make an e-mail longer than it needs to be. Reading an e-mail isn’t like reading a printed letter; don’t intimidate your customers with something long and unwieldy! Sending an e-mail that is too long can make your reader feel like skimming what you have to say, which is often a sure recipe for misunderstanding.

Rule #4: Use Proper Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation
Remember, grammar rules are there for a very good reason: they make your text easier to understand. If you neglect your spelling or punctuation, it doesn’t just make your business look unprofessional; it makes what you are writing difficult to understand. Most e-mail programs have spellcheckers now, be sure to use them!

Rule #5: Personalize
Sometimes it’s appropriate to use a template for responding to your customers, but do everything you can to avoid letting your e-mails sound canned. Use your customers name, and make whatever changes to the text are necessary to specifically address their questions and concerns.

Rule #6: Mind Your Structure & Layout
Since reading from a screen is more difficult than reading from paper, take care to structure the text of your e-mail in a way that will be easy on the eyes. In general, use short paragraphs and simple sentences and make sure your e-mail software leaves enough space between the lines. Also keep in mind options like bulleted and numbered lists.

Rule #7: Never Write in ALL CAPITALS
Remember; uppercase letters are designed to make text easier to read when they are used in combination with lowercase ones. Uppercase letters by themselves indicate shouting however, which is rude as well as difficult to read. It’s best to simply never use all capitals at all.

Rule #8: Always Read the E-Mail Before you Send it
Although it might seem silly, it’s amazing to see how many people are too quick to click the “Send” button. Take a second after you compose your e-mail to make sure it reads well, is appropriately personalized, and covers all of the points that it should.

Rule #9: Be Careful With Formatting
Remember that different e-mail services have different formatting abilities. As a general rule, keep formatting simple, with few colors, and keep everything easy to read against a white background.

Rule #10: Use a Meaningful Subject
Always use a subject for your e-mails, and make sure it is specific and useful. Generic subject lines can be easily mistaken for spam, either by the user or by automatic spam filters, and your carefully crafted e-mail could end up being discarded without being read. It is usually best to include your name (or company name) as well as the name of the product your customer is purchasing.

Rule #11: Avoid Long Sentences
As a general rule, sentences in an e-mail shouldn’t be longer than twenty words. Your customer is going to want to get the message quickly; don’t make your sentences too complicated or you risk them missing something important.

Rule #12: Use Active Voice
Sometimes, in an attempt to sound formal or well educated, e-mail writers use passive voice. Remember: “We will process your order today” sounds far better to your customer than “your order will be processed today.” The second example doesn’t just sound stuffy; it sounds like the task of processing the order has been passed on to someone else.

Conclusion
Your business exists to serve your customers, and you want your e-mails to reflect that fact. Follow the rules outlined above, and your communications with your customers will always be clear and effective.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Things change in every industry, and the online world is certainly no exception. Our successful clients aren’t simply folks who came up with a good idea and ran with it; they are entrepreneurs in the truest sense, who have learned to cope with (and thrive through) change.

eBay has instituted several changes recently, and this post today is going to focus on two of the biggest ones that will impact your eBay business.

External Links
Although they were regulated previously, links to other sites from eBay are now restricted even more strictly. It used to be legal to put links to your online store in your eBay MyWorld page or your About Me page, but that is no longer the case. Furthermore, links that take customers to informative pages about a particular product can not advertise, or link to, a site that offers any products or services for sale off eBay. That, unfortunately, includes your online store.

This change takes effect as of July 1st 2008, and violation of it can have serious consequences including cancellation of listings without refund, dings against your seller status, or even account suspension.

Buyer Feedback
Previously, buyers and sellers both left feedback for each other at the end of a transaction. As of May 19th 2008, eBay’s feedback program has changed regarding this. Sellers no longer control what feedback they leave buyers; all transactions are considered “positive” for buyers. Naturally, this may be a concern for you, because it seems like there is now nothing you can do to protect yourself from unethical or unreasonable buyers. In fact, there are several other changes that have been made which should help to balance the matter.

The biggest tool you have is the Report a Problem page. This is a Seller’s utility that you can use to report malicious buyers. Using this tool, you can report:

Unpaid Item
You didn’t receive payment for the item you sold.

Feedback Extortion
The buyer is threatening to leave negative or neutral Feedback for you unless you provide goods or services not included in your original listing.

Feedback Abuse
The buyer included your name or phone number in a Feedback comment or is bidding on your item solely to leave you negative Feedback.

Unwelcome and Malicious Buying
The buyer does not meet the terms you’ve outlined in your listing and is not permitted to bid on or buy the item.

Customs Fraud
The buyer is requesting you to provide false information on a customs declaration form.

Report Another Problem
Get help with other eBay transaction problems or safety concerns.

In addition to providing this tool, eBay has also taken a new policy on negative feedback: if a user leaves you negative feedback and they are later disciplined for abusing the feedback system, their negative feedback will be removed from your record. This makes it especially important to use this system to report violators; it’s the way they are caught and disciplined.

You will find the Report a Problem page at this link: eBay Problem Report for Sellers. We advise that you bookmark this page in case you need to use it in the future.

Conclusion
Things change. eBay changes. But you have advantages that other eBay users don’t have; you have someone in your corner, watching out for the changes that might affect your business and reminding you to stay on your toes as they come up. Keep your head up, follow the rules, and remember that new regulations also mean new channels of opportunity.

Popularity: 24% [?]

This week I’ll round off the series with an overview on using auction research software to your best advantage. This article will help you decide whether or not you can benefit from auction research.

Introducing Auction Research Software
In a nutshell, auction research lets you look at a group of closed eBay listings to discover:

• Whether a product will sell and for how much

• Ways to increase a listing’s chances of selling

• Ways to boost your profits on each listing

• Market trends for your specific product

• The size of the market and your specific competition

I know what you’re thinking. This is all really great, but how does it work? Research uses licensed data directly from eBay to research market information on your specific product, a category or a specific seller. This takes out all the guesswork for you as you create you listings.

With auction research, you’ll learn answers to these questions, and more, for your eBay listings:

• What auction type should I use?

• Which ending day will bring me the greatest success and profit?

• How long should my listing duration be?

• What starting price will create a bidding frenzy?

• What keywords should I use in my titles to hook buyers?

• What listing features will work, and which ones can I live without?

• Which category will give my listing the greatest amount of exposure?

And much more!

How Does Auction Research Work?
Auction research analyzes closed eBay auctions and shows how various listing features (starting price, closing day and time, auction duration, special features, etc.) affected the success of the auctions. Using auction research software, you can determine how successful your chosen product will be in the eBay market, what features to use to optimize your chances of selling, and how to create a listing that will give you an edge over your competition. You can also use auction research to anticipate changes in the eBay market (holidays, seasons, etc.) and learn from your competetors’ mistakes and successes.

For example, let’s say I want to sell portable DVD players through eBay. Using auction research software, I can type in my product keywords (portable, DVD, player, and whatever brand name I’d like) and retrieve statistics on successful portable DVD player auctions. Using that information, I can determine which keywords will attract the most buyers, when to open and close my own auctions for the best chances of a sale, how much my opening price should be, whether I should use a gallery picture, and more. Knowing what’s worked for other eBay sellers helps me create the best listing possible. And knowing my competition gives me an edge in the eBay marketplace!

Popularity: 22% [?]

This week I’ll share advice about eBay’s rules. More specifically, I’ll share advice about staying out of trouble.

The Most Common eBay Beginner Errors
Did you know that eBay devotes a whole section of their website to their policies about what buyers and sellers can and cannot do on eBay? If you haven’t the time to study all eBay’s rules before you begin, I offer the following advice on common rule violations for beginners:

Be Polite
In general, if you are polite and use courteous language, you will avoid violation of several eBay rules.

Play Fair
Remember that good old Golden Rule, “Do unto others…”? It works particularly well on eBay. If your auctions are fair and ethical, you will avoid violation of several eBay rules.

Do Not Misrepresent the Name Brand
As I’ve mentioned in a previous article in this series, name brands are important on eBay. Therefore, it’s important to note that according to eBay’s rules, sellers can’t include any keywords in the title that do not apply to the item for sale. This includes name brands. So, if you have a nice-smelling perfume, don’t be tempted to say: “Compare to Body by Victoria Secret” in the title unless, of course, it is Body by Victoria Secret.

Don’t Include a Link to Your Website, Unless…
In general, I advise you not to include a link to your website from your auction listing. However, as mentioned in the rules above, eBay does allow you to include links to outside websites that provide more detail about your product. The trick, then, is to include the link to a product description page that does not lead directly to your shopping cart. But (and here’s the good part), the page you link to can contain links to other pages in your site. These pages can lead directly to your shopping cart or catalog.

This is an approach worth thinking about if you are trying to increase traffic to your website! (And who isn’t?)

Be Careful About the eBay Users You Add to Your Marketing Contact List
One of the major reasons for you, as a website owner, to sell on eBay is to increase your marketing contact list. But you need to be careful about who you add to your list. eBay states that you can only contact eBay users who have won an auction from you or who have contacted you first. This means that you should not contact bidders who haven’t won your auctions unless they contact you first.

And when you do contact an eBay user, don’t try to sell a product directly (that violates another rule). Just advertise your website.

Don’t List High-Priced Items at First
As long as your feedback rating is low (under 100), don’t try to sell a high-priced item, such as a $2,500 flat-screened TV. Extravagantly priced items send up red flags to eBay’s fraud department and, if you’re feedback is low, they will shut down your account. Once they shut it down, it will be a few weeks before you can go back to business on eBay.

My advise is to start with low-priced items and gradually work up from there. Eventually your track record will speak for you.

Verify the Mailing Address
Before shipping the item to the winning bidder, verify the shipping address your buyer has provided you first. I sent an item to the eBay-registered address for one of my winning bidders and had it returned to me. Why? I was using UPS to ship the item and the address was acceptable for USPS (United States Parcel Service) but not for UPS. I eventually had to resend the product to a different address. This not only cost me more, but it also irritated my customer.

Always Give Feedback
Don’t neglect to leave feedback. The person on the opposite end of your auction is hoping to increase their feedback rating, just like you are. It’s also important to leave the most positive feedback possible. If there were glitches in the transaction, be fair. If it wasn’t intentional and the user did everything they could to correct the situation, give positive feedback.

Ironically, if you leave too much negative feedback for other users, it will hurt your own eBay reputation in the long run.

eBay Rules Every Seller Should Know
I’ve highlighted several eBay “no-nos” below, but if you’re interested, you can view the complete list at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/index.html.

General Rules

No Unwelcome Email/Spam: Do not send unsolicited email to other users.
No Offers to Buy or Sell Offsite: Do not offer to buy or sell listed items outside of the eBay site.
No Profanity: Do not use racist, hateful, sexual or obscene language anywhere in a listing.
No Using the eBay Logo: Do not use the eBay logo without a written license agreement from eBay. However, eBay offers buttons for your your site that link to the eBay home page or to your auction list.

Seller Guidelines
No Circumventing Fees: Do not try to find ways to avoid paying eBay listing fees.
No Duplicate Listings: Do not list more than ten identical listings as separate auctions.
Use Keywords Correctly: Do not add irrelevant or misleading keywords to listing titles.
No Links Outside eBay: Do not include links to websites, home pages, or any page that has items for sale outside of eBay.

Note: I found a loophole to this rule. If you link to a page that further describes the item, it’s allowed, even if the page has links to your catalog.

No Catalog Sales: Sellers can’t list catalogs from which buyers may directly order items.
Categorize Items Correctly: Items must be listed in the appropriate category.
No Choice Listings: No auctions that allow winning bidders to choose from a variety of options.
Shipping and Handling: Shipping and handling fees must be reasonable and cannot be listed as a percentage of the final sale price.
No Misleading Titles: Titles must accurately describe only the actual item or items you are offering for sale. Use of words such as “like,” “style,” and “not” in the title of your listing will often result in a comparison violation.
Payment Surcharges: Sellers may not charge eBay buyers an additional fee for their use of ordinary forms of payment.
Reserve Price Violations: Do not include a reserve price anywhere in the title or description if the auction isn’t officially listed as a reserve auction.
No Want Ads and Trades: No advertising a desire to buy or trade items.
No Shill Bidding: Do not bid against your own items to increase the price (friends and relatives can’t bid, either).
No Misrepresentation: The item you sell must meet the description you entered in the listing.
Non-Selling Seller: Sellers cannot refuse payment or delivery of an item at the end of a successful sale.

Taxes

You must comply with all applicable tax laws.

Feedback
Feedback Extortion or Solicitation: Do not threaten negative action to achieve the desired feedback. Likewise, do not solicit a desired feedback in return for a favor.
Feedback Abuse, Withdrawal, and Removal: Use caution and good judgment when leaving feedback. If a court were to find that your remarks constitute libel or defamation, you would be held legally responsible for damages to that member’s reputation.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Every registered eBay user has a “My World” page. It’s a personalized profile that any other eBay user can look up in order to find out more about you and what you sell. Whenever a potential buyer visits on one of your auctions, your eBay username in the “Meet the Seller” section of the page becomes a link to your My World page.

Checking out a sellers’ My World page can tell you more about them then you might get from simply looking at their auction, including a more detailed summary of their feedback. Additionally, having a good My World page yourself can help you make sales. The easiest way to get access to your own My World page is to log into eBay and click on your user name, right beside where it reads “My eBay” near the top of the page.

My World is a relatively new eBay feature, designed to help eBay buyers and sellers to become a more active part of the eBay community. Your My World page is highly customizable and easy to use; you don’t need to know HTML or even be particularly eBay savvy to use it. There are several different types of content you are allowed to put up there, and all of it is very simple to edit. Each type of content is called a “module” and can be added or removed whenever you wish.

Choosing Modules for Your eBay My World

You add a module to your My World by clicking the “add content” button at the top of the page and then picking the module you want from the list and clicking the “add” button next to it. But what do they all do? And which ones should you use?

The easiest way to learn about the different modules is to add them one by one and check them out. Click edit next to a newly added module to see the more detailed description of what it is meant for, and then try it out. If you aren’t interested in the features added by a particular module, simply remove it.

Remember, though: keep specific goals in mind as you are adding modules to your My World page. Only keep modules you really have plans to use, not just ones that sound neat. Will having that Guest Book or joining that eBay Neighborhood really help your online business? If the answer is no, then don’t keep the module. Too many modules can easily make your page so cluttered that visitors will have a hard time seeing the things you want them to.

Using Your My World Page to Help your Online Business

Your My World page is useful for more than simply introducing yourself to potential buyers; if used properly it can also help you make future sales.

The Listings Module
If you use the Listings module, you can entice visitors with other interesting auctions you have running besides the one that brought them here in the first place. If you sell similar or related products (niche marketing) visitors may see other things they like among your other auctions.

The Bio Module
Like your eBay About Me page, you can mention your online store on your My World page without breaking eBay policy. The Bio Module is probably the most well-suited place for this reference: the very first entry of this module is entitled “what everyone should know about me” and gives you up to 250 characters to describe yourself and your online store.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Graphics are a major part of every successful website, especially retail sites like yours. Unfortunately, graphics are also tricky, and one the easiest things to get wrong. Today I’m going to talk about one of the biggest make-or-break concepts in using graphics: Resolution.

Don?t panic! Resolution sounds like a big, scary word, but it really isn?t. All resolution really means (at least when you?re talking about computers) is how many little colored squares a picture is made out of. The colored squares on a computer screen are called ?pixels.? See the five blue pictures below this paragraph? They each show the same letter ?R? made from different numbers of pixels. The numbers above each picture tell you how many pixels it?s made from. See the difference?

Resizing

Most of the time, the pictures you?re trying to work with don?t start out exactly the size you want them to be on the webpage. This is where resizing comes in, and where resolution can mess you up if you don?t know how it works. If you want the same picture, with all the same stuff in it, but you want it to be a different size you need to either ?blow it up? (make it bigger on the page) or ?shrink it down? (make it smaller on the page).

Here?s the problem though: computers are not good at blowing images up. Shrinking a picture down is easy for a computer to get right: it just throws away a certain number of pixels and presto! It?s got a new, smaller, picture. But when you tell the computer to blow a picture up, you?re making it guess where to stick in new pixels and what color they should be. You end up with something that looks blurry and unprofessional because of that guessing.

So, how do you blow a picture up without making it look crummy? The short answer is: you don?t. You can blow a picture up a little bit without much trouble, but most of the time you?re just better off getting a new, higher-resolution picture that?s bigger than you need and shrinking it down. This makes a good argument for always getting the highest resolution images you can and always keeping a copy every image saved at the highest resolution you have.

Proportion

The other trick to resizing is paying attention to proportion. Proportion is another big word that isn?t really as scary as it sounds. It just means how long one edge of the picture is compared to the other. Look back at the top of the page and check out the ?R? in the right-most box. The top and bottom edges are the same length as the left and right ones. But what would happen if we reduced the top and bottom edges by half, but left the side edges the same?

Doesn’?t look right does it? We haven?t maintained the picture?s proportion as we changed its size. The really scary part is what happens when you try doing this same thing with a more complicated picture. It looks terribly unprofessional:

Resizing in the Builder

Fortunately, the resizing tools in the builder are easy to use and can protect you from making mistakes with proportion. There are two ways of resizing an image in the builder, and both of them are done from the Edit Text Window. You get to the edit text window by clicking on the words Format Text above any text box on any page of your website.

The first way to resize an image is simple, but not very precise:

1. Left click on the picture in the Edit Text window.
2. Eight little white squares will appear around the edges of the picture. If you click on one of those squares and drag it, the size of the picture will change.

Note: As long as you only drag the corner squares, the picture?s proportions will be maintained automatically.

The second way to resize an image is just a little bit trickier, but also more precise:

1. Right click on the picture in the Edit Text window.
2. A popup menu will appear; click Image Properties.
3. The Image Properties window will open. Notice the two text fields on the left side: Width and Height.
4. Click on one of those text fields.
5. Type in the exact size of the picture you want (measured in pixels).
6. Click OK.

Note: As long as the little ?lock? icon next to the text fields is closed, the builder will automatically change the numbers in the other text field to keep the picture in proportion. To open or close the ?lock,? simply left click on it.

Conclusion

Resolution mistakes: there aren’t many things that can make a website look more amateur. Using the tools in the builder properly can get you past all of that, though. The two rules are simple:

1. Always keep proportion.
2. Always resize down from the highest resolution you can get.

Follow these rules and you can’t go wrong; your site will look professional and potential customers will know exactly the sorts of quality products they can expect from you.

Popularity: 33% [?]