eBay Tips 2008: Pictures Perfect

Having recently moved house, I’m in the market for a lot of new things. As a ‘check eBay first’ kinda guy, I’ve been looking for more than my usual book and CD purchases and spending time in parts of the site I seldom visit, looking at beds, sofas, rugs, kitchen stuff and the like.

I have been astonished by the number of sellers, yup powersellers too, who expect me to splash out hundreds of quid on something I’ll have to live with every day, but who provide me with only a single picture to help me form a judgment.

Pictures aren’t a luxury

A great many sellers do a really good job on photos. Quite right too. It’s such a vital part of a listing that the time invested is surely reflected in profitability. My big ticket purchases have been made from sellers who have given me all the information I needed to login to PayPal and ping them my hard earned. Take a cold, dispassionate look at your pics and ensure that you’re helping convert viewers into buyers with your images.

eBay Picture Tips

Tooled up? Are you ‘making do’ with a crap camera? Better cameras do yield better results and equally things like lights, tripods and backgrounds can give your images a professional zing that gets those bidding fingers twitching. Editing software (which is cheap and sometimes free) can help you improve your pics immeasurably.

Customer Focused Pics: Are you taking the easiest or most obvious photo? Or are you aiming for an image that will encourage bidding. Think about what a buyer would want to see. For instance, I was looking at beds on eBay. Most sellers provide a homely shot of the bed, made up, in a charming room. I actually want to see the bare bones of the bedstead and how it’s constructed.

More is More: There aren’t many things that you’d sell on eBay that wouldn’t benefit from having more photos showing them off. It also strikes me as incredible that eBay essentially ‘taxes’ better listings and a better buying experience by charging for additional images. But you don’t need to pay extra for extra images. Obviously, the first one is free and you should take that, not least because it’s your Gallery image. The rest you should be hosting yourself and popping into your templates with HTML. Learning a few tags could save you a lot of dough.

Top and Centre: When you’re hosting your own pics, you also have greater flexibility in how you position them. Make a photograph the first thing a browser sees by putting your image top and centre. It’s madness to make them scroll down and down and down just to see what you’re selling.