eBay Hacks

List Your Other Auctions in the Description

Capitalize on a single auction’s popularity by using it to promote your other items.

As suggested in [Hack #46], it’s beneficial to make your other running auctions as accessible as possible so that your bidders will be more inclined to purchase multiple items from you.

The first thing you’ll want to do is tell your customers that they can save money (in the form of shipping expenses) by purchasing multiple items from you at the same time. Probably the simplest and most effective way to do this is to place the following HTML code in your auction descriptions:

<a href="http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.
dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=my_user_id">Check out my other auctions</a> 
- bid on multiple items and save on shipping!

This link is effectively no different from the “View seller’s other items” link that eBay provides, except that your message suggests to customers that they have something to gain by clicking through. And since you customize the link, you also have the advantage of being able to pre-sort the listing and even show more auctions on a single page; see [Hack #12] for details.

Specific Product Links

The next step up is to actually link to specific auctions in your description. This is most useful if you’re selling an item and a bunch of related accessories separately. For example, an auction for a PDA might contain this HTML code:

Note that I'm also selling a genuine leather case for this PDA <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3116521524">here</ ...