Need money? I found that in my own home there is a boat load of money to be made. Clean out your closet every season. I purchase clothing, and shoes all year round as most do. By the next season, I’ve either gained or loss weight or just no longer want the items. Almost all of my items are kept in very good condition and have barely been worn, many, not worn at all and still have tags on them. I’ll have from, name brand hand bags, shoes, boots, coats, childrens clothes, etc., to hardly touched appliances like that George Forman Grill, I’ve used only a handful of times, to my smoothie machine that I’ve never used. Take that old jewelry, camera, camcorder, wall hanging, vintage item, even items purchased at garage sales, consignment shops, etc. Post them on Ebay, set your price and you are good to go. I have really enjoyed making money on Ebay from things that are just sitting around in my home. Ebay is a great marketplace and there is enough room here for everyone to benefit. So get out those items you won’t use or wear and you will be suprised at who’s looking to purchase what you have!

Gina Cherry

If you look at all the various auction listings out there, you’ll see a wide variety of listing styles. Some people put their personalities into their listings and use words like ” Amazing!” or “Great Deal” Others have a very basic “no frills” style , with clear descriptions, shipping terms and perhaps some photos, but they leave out any glowing adjectives or comments.
Some bidders share information about their backgrounds and expertise while others prefer to keep it strictly business and reveal nothing about their personal interests. Style options also include using templates or special bordersm music or even voice recordings to help sell products.

CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT STYLE SUITS YOUR LISTINGS? THIS SHOULD HELP:

Some tips:

1. Find what you feel comfortable doing. If you like someone else’s listing style, do not copy it word for word but DO learn from the best things that seller did. Now, think about how you’d write that listing, but in a way that reflects YOUR style. Use words that come naturally to you, not another seller. If you think of yourself as open and friendly, maybe you’d like a little of that to show. But NEVER forget - the focus of a listing should be on the product, not the seller. If you do include personal details, be sure to includes ones that focus on your expertise and knowledge of the item. Example: “I’ve sold antiques for 20 years and am a certified appraiser” That kind of detail not only says something about you but may convince the bidder to bid on your item.

2. Consider the item you are selling. If you are selling Clown costumes or gag gifts, you may want to get a little bit zany, even humorous, in your listing. Here’s one item I listed in the Weird Items category, where I emphasized the stranger aspects of this item (okay, okay, to be specific, I called it a Deranged Squirrel ) That casual style worked well, got great bids and over 300 views (many of those viewers looked at my other items as well, increasing ALL my sales that week) - so don’t turn up your nose at listing in the Weird category:

On the other hand, if you are selling a valuable genealogical item or atlas, you may want to be very detailed and straightforward which is what I did with this County History book, a repro of an 1880s book:

In short, suit your style to the item you are selling. Think about WHO is most likely to be attracted to a particular item and what they’d like to see in a listing. Know your potential bidders.

3. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Part of Ebay lore is the story of the guy who wore his wife’s wedding gown to make the sale. It worked! Not everyone would be comfortable with that style of listing, but it sure got attention - and clinched the sale!

4. Be Yourself. Represent your experience honestly. Don’t make things up. If you are real and honest, that will come across. Do not sacrifice honesty and accuracy for “style”. Style is NOT lying or exaggeration.

5. Find out what works for other sellers and adapt the best of what you learn to suit your style. Keep experimenting, trying new things and keep note of which auctions grab the most attention and bids.

SELLING VINTAGE:
A How To Guide

1. Where to Find Vintage Items
   * Is it: Authentic Vintage or a Reproduction
   * Definition of Vintage
2. Researching a Vintage Item
   * Less is More hint
   * Keyword hint
   * Current Listings
3. SELLING (aka Marketing 101)
   * Buy It Now option
   * Photographs
   * Advanced Selling
4. Conclusion
5. My Other Guides & Blog links
   

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WHERE TO FIND VINTAGE ITEMS

Vintage items can be found just about anywhere! In your attic (your grandmother’s attic is a great place too), garage sales, church bazaars, estate sales and yes, even in thrift stores!

* Is it AUTHENTIC vintage or a newer reproduction? *

Since the ‘vintage look’ (also called Old School, Boho, Hippie, Retro, Mod, etc.) is really in right now, most designers have created reproductions in the last few years and it can get really tricky trying to figure out whether something is old or new. The vintage look is everywhere from clothing to household appliances and furniture. To try and differentiate between the 憆eal?stuff and the æ…ºake? we抣l first need to define VINTAGE.

* DEFINITION of VINTAGE *

For an item to be vintage, it’s technically supposed to be at least 20 years old. However, that definition is only loosely applied to things on Ebay. Basically, if it’s more than a decade old -that’s ten years or more- it’s called VINTAGE on Ebay. Now with that in mind, at the end of this guide we抣l take a look at the past VINTAGE decades: what was going on then and what the lifestyles were like. Even if you remember just a little bit about an era, it will help you in deciding whether you抳e just bought the bargain of the century or if you should start digging a hole in the back yard to bury it in!

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Researching a Vintage Item

The following information can also be found on my ‘Buying Vintage Merchandise’ and “Everything Vintage: Find, Sell, Buy & Authenticate’ Guides.
The goal of researching an item is to find out more information. We want to learn not only how old it is and how much it is worth but we need to find out where on Ebay we need to list it and most importantly, we need to find out how to list it! To research an item there are two main sources:

EBAY:
The first of course is Ebay! All you need to do is type in the item name and look around. At first this can be quite time consuming, if you don’t know anything at all about what you are researching, but in time you will learn little tricks that help you reach the information you need more quickly!

1) You click on the link UNDER the Search box (located on the upper right hand of your Ebay screen) titled ‘Advanced Search’.

2) You type in what you are looking for in the ?STRONG>Keyword or Item Number’ box.

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* Less is More hint *

Here is a HUGE hint when it comes to doing this: When researching an item, LESS IS MORE! What I mean by that is, if you are trying to find out about let’s say a groovy looking, psychedelic colored, mini dress with a Bleeker Street tag, DO NOT type in “psychedelic groovy Bleeker Street mini dress”! Chances of finding that are very slim because it is TOO specific! However, a great place to start with vintage items is a label name, if it is clothing, or a maker name, if it is something like furniture, pottery, glass or kitchen gadgets. Obviously, books would be looked up by the title and copyright date. Now, once you have your ‘less is more’ information in the Keyword box (for the psychedelic dress stated above, ‘Bleeker Street’ would do for possible information about the era it was made in or where it was made), you can fine-tune your search even more!
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3) Choose an area for the Ebay search engine to look in, by clicking on the downward pointing triangle to the right of the ?STRONG>In This Category?box, a drop down menu will show (for the dress above, I would have chosen ‘Clothing, Shoes & Accessories’). If it is pottery, glass or a set of dishes, this can get tricky because it could be in ‘Home & Garden’ or ‘Pottery & Glass’ or even antiques! You get the picture… anyway, if you’re not sure, leave the Category box set to ‘All Categories’ to have the search engine check ALL of Ebay.

4) Click to check off the ‘Completed Listings Only’ box; this is how you see HOW MUCH something has sold for. This is a very very very important thing to do!! When the listings pop up, you can see what category they were listed under (vintage clothing shows up in the vintage and regular sections) and how much they sold for! If you have something that you think is worth $100 dollars and you see it selling for just $25-$50, it would be foolish to start the bidding or make a reserve for $99! You’ll end up paying higher fees AND your item won’t sell! Remember, this information is only for you to get a roundabout figure to help determine what your item is worth. The 慍ompleted Listings?box only lets you see items that have sold within the last 30 days, which is good! You don’t want to sell something out of season, if at all possible, so you want to see what has sold recently. If a bathing suit sold at the beginning of August for $300, chances are you won’t sell it for that much at the beginning of October. So always keep the seasons in mind too!

5) Go to the very bottom of the page, left hand side, where it says ‘Sort by’ and click on the little downward triangle to choose ‘Price: highest first’. We do this because we want to emulate the listings that sold for the MOST money, not the least!!!!! (I have even gone so far as to set my Ebay preferences to show the highest priced items first whenever I do a search 杦hich of course I manually change whenever I am looking to buy something!) When the listings are shown, you’ll see the items that sold for the most money FIRST! (You’ll also see the items that didn’t sell and this is important too…. so you DON’T emulate those listings!) The items that actually sold are shown with green prices, items that didn抰 sell are shown with red prices. Just look at the GREEN ones! It does you no good to check out how the red priced items were listed, because they didn抰 sell! Those listings are not something we want as our example!!

The second place to research your vintage item is
GOOGLE:
The other great place to look things up is on GOOGLE! You can Google anything and everything. AND Google will also show Ebay listings! Using the ‘Less is More’ hint above, you can find just about anything AND you can click the link that says ‘Images’ to see photos of what you are looking for. I found out through Google that ‘Bleeker Street’ is a famous street in New York City! I could have listed my dress as a ‘Vintage New York City Mini Go-Go Dress’ rather than Bleeker Street. After all, people all over the world know where and what New York City is! Lastly concerning Google; if you look at someone抯 online store, the prices tend to be higher than your item would sell for on Ebay, so DO NOT go by other online stores to set your Ebay selling price! The good thing is though, people from these online stores tend to buy merchandise from Ebay to stock them and that can lead to some nice selling prices for you!

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* KEYWORD HINT *

Once you have the list of sold/unsold items in front of you, look for keywords in the titles. -Using the psychedelic dress listed above as an example again, I learned that it would be foolish to use the limited character space in the title by placing ‘Bleeker Street’ there! However, if I had a really well known name brand, like Pucci, then definitely I would use that. If it’s a lesser-known name brand, then you have to make the call. For mini dresses, I found that it’s more important to use keywords like ‘mini dress scooter go-go 60s & psychedelic’ than a name brand, if your item wasn’t made by a famous designer or design house. Also, if you’re not sure, try looking up a few things. For instance, ‘Bleeker Street’ showed listings going for $3.99 to $19.99. However, ‘Mini Dress’ showed listings in the $100s! And $100s is obviously what we are striving for! Also, the æ…£itle?section of an item also gives you the æ…–N?words that people are using to describe things. An example: Cropped pants were called 慍lam Diggers?in the 1960s; today they are called 慍apri?pants! Another example?Hippie, Cool, Groovy, were all acceptable terms to call the clothing from the 1960s to the 1970s; now that time period抯 clothing is referred to as BOHO (bohemian)! If you want to sell your item, you need to cater to your buyer and that includes the language that they understand! In the end, look for what sold for the most money, what category it was listed in, and at what price the auction started (Start your auction too high and you抣l scare off a lot of potential buyers.

CURRENT LISTINGS

* * You can also look to see if something is selling currently on Ebay by entering in your ‘Less is More’ information into the Basic Search window. This won’t show you a final sale price but it will show you what types of things are currently selling. HINT: Look for things that have bids.

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SELLING (aka Marketing 101)

How do you SELL vintage items?
In the section above, we learned how to research our vintage items.
We learned how to look up a similar item, using the Less is More strategy, and we saw what keywords were in the title, how much the item was selling for and under what category the item was listed. That’s all you need to know to sell your vintage item! By looking up items that sold for the most, we know what keywords to use to list the item, what price we need to start the auction, and under what category we need to list our item. One last possibility in listing your vintage items is using the Buy It Now option:

* BUY IN NOW *

Using the Buy It Now option is nice because you know what the item will sell for and you generally get your money more quickly! You can set preferences that say 揃uy It Now items must be paid immediately following the listing抯 end?or 揃uy It Now listings must be paid within 3 days?or something to that effect. If you decide to do a Buy It Now, you must really be careful in researching how much your item is worth! You pay for your listings dependent on where you start them. Set a Buy It Now item at too high a price and you抣l pay listing fees but your item won抰 sell! Set it too low and you抣l not get what your item is worth. So once again, look at how much something has sold for (using the methods shown in the 慠esearch?section above) and set your Buy It Now for slightly above that amount!! I say slightly above because if someone doesn抰 have to watch an auction, doesn抰 have to bid to try and win the item, it抯 usually worth it to them to pay slightly more to guarantee they will receive that item.

* PHOTOGRAPHS *

This is a very important part of the sales process! You can抰 expect someone to pay an arm and a leg for something they can抰 see! Your photographs need to be clear, bright, and have detail. When taking your pictures, try filling up the entire viewing area with the item?not tons of background with a little tiny item somewhere in the center! Also, make your pictures pleasing. Backgrounds of junk lying around in your house will make people think twice about the cleanliness of the items you are selling and also, it抯 distracting! A nice touch is to use a live model in your photos; for clothing, footwear and jewelry, your potential buyers can get a better idea of what the item will look like on. For other items like kitchenware gadgets or tools, it helps to place a ruler next to the item or if it抯 small, place a penny or a dime next to it!
Lastly, use some kind of photo editor!!! I cannot stress this enough! There are some very basic ones out now and that抯 all you抣l need to start with. A photo editor can go a long way to fixing less than perfect pictures! You can generally rotate (turn those sideways photos upright), crop (remove unwanted stuff), resize (make those babies smaller!), and lighten (perk up a dull photo) any digital photo, using only the most basic photo editor! It makes a world of difference in your listings!

* ADVANCED SELLING *

The advanced seller will definitely want to look into doing his/her own HTML. It is much easier than you think and there are programs out there that do the HTML for you, and work just like writing a Microsoft Word program. These programs are called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). You simply write up your description, place your edited photos wherever you want on the page, and by the way you can use as many photos as you want, and you抮e all set. You click a button and that shows you the HTML, which you copy and past into Ebay抯 HTML window! Lastly, you抣l have to upload your pictures to a server but this is incredibly easy and very inexpensive! If you really want to do a lot of listings and pay minimal fees, this is definitely the way to go.

** That said, I would very strongly advise the computer illiterate and Ebay novice to begin by using Ebay抯 services only. It抯 quick and simple and much less apt to make you feel overcome or frustrated! Once you抳e been around the block a few times, you抣l be ready to step out on your own and try some new things!

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CONCLUSION

That’s it! Easy right? By the time you buy or sell something a few times, you’ll be an old pro! Ebay is the door to the world’s marketplace and learning how to buy and sell vintage items there is like being able to shop or set up market anywhere in the world. Not only is it fun, it’s exciting!! After all, we are the ‘IT’ in “You can find IT on Ebay!” If you keep your buying and selling practices fair and honest, I guarantee that you’ll not only earn yourself some wonderful feedback but you’ll make a few friends along the way!
Keep safe and Happy Vintage Ebaying!

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Check out my GUIDES
EVERYTHING VINTAGE: Finding, Authenticating, Buying Selling
SELLING Vintage Items
BUYING Vintage Items
(as of 10/10/06: I should have these Guides up shortly)

See my BLOG of VINTAGE ERAS in
Everything Vintage -by Delbodacious
This will help in determining whether something is authentically vintage,
as well as helping you find out when it was made.

JUST TO THROW MY 2 CENTS IN HERE ARE SOME OF THE SCAMS THAT I HAVE HAD SENT TO ME. #1 QUOTE, ” AS PER EBAY RULES AND VIOLATIONS ACT I AM SENDING YOU A 2 ND CHANCE OFFER ON THE ITEM THAT YOU DIDN’T WIN. IF YOU WOULD LIKE IT WESTERN UNION ME A DEPOSIT” NOT HAPPENING! #2 FED EX GUY KNOCKS AT YOUR DOOR WITH A MONEY ORDER THATS BEEN OVERNIGHTED AND IT’S A FAKE MADE FROM A GOOD COPY MACHINE. OF COURSE YOU DON’T KNOW UNTIL DAYS LATER WHEN THE BANK INFORMS YOU THAT YOUR DEPOSIT IS NO GOOD. #3 I’M SENDING YOU A MONEY ORDER THATS MORE THAN THE WINNING AMOUNT DEPOSIT IT AND SEND ME THE DIFFERENCE BACK TO A DUM ADDRESS OR P.O. BOX AND WILL GET TOGETHER IN A FEW DAYS TO ARRAINGE SHIPPING OR PICK UP. DON’T FALL FOR ANYTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY, OR JUST DEPOSIT THE FUNDS AND WAIT 20 BUSINESS DAYS BEFORE SENDING THE ITEM. AND NEVER SEND ANY CASH BACK. GOOD LUCK HONEST PEOPLE.

Whether you have only a few spare hours a month, or would like to devote FULL TIME to your business, you can make big profits fast! The demand is here now! Internet sales of consumer products are soaring every month. It is estimated that by the end of 2007, Internet sales will reach as much as 900 Billion! We can put you right into a wholesale business, making you a vital part of a multi-billion dollar industry. Your business will be accessible to over 400 million users worldwide! The Internet works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and on the Internet, any business can look like a Big Business. Somebody has to supply merchandise to potential customers and we just opened the world to you! We offer hundreds of wholesale items that can be drop shipped anywhere within the United States and Canada! You never have to carry any inventory. There is no start up fee, no investments, no contracts and no obligations. This is a NO RISK 100% satisfaction guaranteed offer. You make your own hours and you are your own boss!This is not a “GET RICH QUICK” program, but a program that you can work part time or full time and make extra money. How much depends on you. Take the time to look at the products and decide for yourself. Your success is very important to us. We will do whatever it takes for you to become successful. We help people’s dreams come true! 3-Ways to Start Your Own Business…….. RISK FREE! 1. Set up an Online Store Front and let it run it’s self. Order directly from Buyers Paradise Online Store. The instant orders are placed we automatically begin processing your orders.. We will Blind Drop ship for you with no name on the box! 2. Sell our products on E-Bay , Yahoo, or other online auctions. Now your customers can buy direct from EBay without having to wait for an Auction to end with E-Bay’s “Buy it Now” feature!You may use our pictures and product descriptions from our website.After you sell an item, we will drop ship directly to your customer for you. There is NO CHARGE for this service! After an item is sold, all you will need to do is collect payment from your customer, (paypal is a good way to collect if you do not have a merchant account) Then, place your order on our website order page, and we will ship the item within 48hours! It’s as simple as that! 3. Sell our products on your existing web site. We will “drop ship” directly to your customers .You can even track your packages at www.ups.com, or track your packages directly from our website using your order number.Whatever you decide, you’ll be in business for yourself, but not by yourself! We are with you all the way! This is a 100% risk free opportunity and you have absolutely nothing to lose by trying, so why not try? We will buy, warehouse, drop ship and warranty wholesale merchandise for you. Your success is very important to us. The next step is up to you

I have just had a most amazing experience, and I wanted to share with everyone.

The banner on my blog was acting up, and I couldn’t get the image to resize either online or on my own desktop. I posted a message on the blogs, asking for help, and lo and behold! there was onebighoax, a PowerSeller with a the power to help me. She offered to resize my picture for me, then e-mailed it back and it was perfect! So here’s a giant thank-you to onebighoax, and an encouragement to all of you:

If you need help, just ask, no matter how silly it may seem; we’re all here for each other!

This was proved to me in a huge way tonight, and I just hope you will all take advantage of the expertise and kindness you will find on the blogs! Good luck with your sales, buys, and friendships here on Ebay.