The biggest shopping season of the year is over, but that doesn’t mean that your sales have to slow down. Yes, there are less “buyers” in the marketplace, but that just means that you have to get more creative. For me, I use a technique that I call the “One Cent” technique. It’s an easy way for me to get the traffic I need and to sell multiple items to one person. No, the “One Cent” technique isn’t putting all of your listings at $.01 and hope that they sell. It’s more strategic than that.
First of all, I am not a fan of the auction style listings. I much more prefer a Fixed Price, but the “One Cent” technique requires you to have at least one auction. So here is how it works: Let’s say that you have many listings right now that are not selling. What seems to be the problem? More than likely it’s the amount of traffic that you are getting. It only takes one interested buyer for your item to sell, so the more views you have, the better chance you have of selling it. Makes sense, right?
So here is what you can do. Create another listing that is in the same niche as the item you are trying to sell, but this time make it an Auction style and start the bidding at $.01. You will want to set the duration for 5 days or longer. Obviously, you want this new item to be cheap enough to not go crazy if it sells for $.01. For example, if your primary item is in the fishing niche, then you should have your $.01 item be fishing hooks. It can be a really low costing item, but the main point is to make it $.01.
As you may already know, ebays search algorithm is set up for best match, and not for ending soonest. So although you set your duration for 5 days or longer, your listing has a good chance at being close to the top. You of course will want to use good key words when creating your $.01 listing. You may be thinking by now, “How does this make me more money?” Well, I’m getting to that.
Here is the important part: At the bottom of your $.01 listing, you need to have a hyperlink to your main item your trying to sell. For example, if we are staying with the fishing niche, you would want to have a message that said something like this, “If you like what you see, browse my other Fishing products, and find more items you love.” If you have a store, then point them to your store category, or if you don’t have a store, then you can point them to a specific listing.
You now have capitalized on all of the traffic that your $.01 listing was getting, and you should see more sales! Before using this technique, I had items that sat around for 6 months or longer. When I started to get the traffic from my $.01 auction, the items sold within a month. This takes a little work to set up, but it’s worth the time. I also recommend coupling this technique with ebays “Cross Promotion” tool!
For more ebay tips and tricks, check out “The Keys to a Successful eBay Business” HERE
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent tip, one of your best!
I really like this idea, too! I have the 100 item limit in place, and not that long ago, ebay was doing the fixed price special. I have a lot of things that are fixed price………and I hate fixed price cause it seems like I get hardly any traffic. Sometimes if an item isn’t heavy, I’ll offer free shipping on the fixed price. Of course, it’s added in the price cause we all know there’s no such thing as free shipping.
I bought quite a few clothing items today for $.25 each, so starting an item at a penny wouldn’t be a major thing. I would for sure have to charge separately for shipping though. I wouldn’t want to lose completely if that makes sense.