Don Lancaster's eBay and Auction Help

Please note that the Guru's Lair is best used with larger display systems. Especially for our many ebooks, classic .pdf files and high detail images.

Big  Changes  Afoot!
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Besides needing this web responsive update, many changes are now happening in the eBay and auction scene. We have renamed our historic classic auction page as auct01w.shtml and you can find it here. Much of ahsamp1.shtml has also been revised and adaptively updated in this file.

Many, and likely most, eBay sellers have reported precipitous and unsustainable drops in sales. Likely caused mostly by Amazon ( non-auction ) and their significantly lower shipping costs. Plus those Pacific Rim outrageous shipping subsidies. Other alternatives do appear below.

Traditional auctioneers and live auctions are now both clearly endangered species. Owing to online auctions having overwhelming advantages. Your optimum online auction strategy remains to proxy bid your max once one minute before any possible automatic extension.

As before with both types of auctions, particularly valuable are "contents of cabinet" and "contents of room" opportunities. Where a 30:1 BSR Buy Sell Ratio can often be easy to acheive.

And, of course, the few live auction opportunities that remain will work out best when you can arrange to be the only bidder. Especially in hour 15 of a 2 hour live auction where it is 120 in the shade. Not mentioning the scorpions or the five inch hail. Plus, needless to say, the lack of any functional restrooms.

Survival as an online seller demands you minimize your storage charges and other fixed expenses. As well as strictly seeing out a 30:1 BSR Buy Sell Ratio. And continually rethinking your pricing strategies. Limiting your sales to those items you can hold extended at arm's length is one way to attack increasing shipping costs.

Mil surplus is now long gone, and industrial surplus sales have pretty much reverted to using major online auction houses. There is one remaining of these sites that I still use. This is Raytheon via Exostar.

Community Colleges and such are abandoning traditional live auctions in favor of online only sites such as Public Surplus.

As before, web auction sources that not only do not work but remain an outright joke include "buying wholesale", drop shipping ( aka "drop shitting" ), or distress pallets. Just remember that Norfolk and Waay is by far your best web drop shipping resource.

Our own eBay auctions can be found here.

The Auction Help Stuff
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The summaries made use of our Gonzo  Powerpoint emulation software and tutorials. More examples here. The general Gonzo utilities can be found here and their tutorial here. And the larger scheme of things here.

The original title of this series was "Enhancing your eBay skills". We probably should change the name to "Enhancing your Amazon skills" While we have left things as they were here, much of this should still apply to most any online auction sales venture. More detailed menus can be found here.

One advantage of some of these "alternates to eBay" sites is their tremendous savings in bubble wrap, strapping tape and other shipping materials. Because you are rather likely to end up not selling much of anything.

An interesting comparison site can be found here.

Again, both live auctions and traditional auctioneer skill sets are highly endangered, with online web auctions newly running away with all the marbles. Some older info ( including our regional auction locating service ) can be found here. Most of which is now largely historic.

My two insider secret places to find the value of electronic instruments and components are Radwell and OEM's Trade from the above list. Radwell sometimes also buys off-the-wall obscure tech items.

I very strongly feel that decent images are the core secret to long term successful eBay sales. Snapping a picture or scanning an image is only step one in a long process. You often should spend a minimum of TWO HOURS in your image postproc!

Many of these tools ( especially the Architect's Perspective and the Auto Vignetting Backgrounder ) use my PostScript Gonzo Utilities. These are more or less ordinary textfiles that suitably remap a bitmap image. Modified versions can be run by using the Windows command line and sending Acrobat Distiller the secret incantation of //acrodist /F before your drag and drop.

And here's a leftover fragment from way back whenever. These are useful for finding how schools and municipalities dispose of auctionable surplus...

 National Universities
 National Comm Colleges
 Arizona Universities
 Arizona Comm Colleges
 Maricopa Comm College
 Arizona School Districts
 Arizona Towns
 Arizona Counties

Plus this historic file, now long out of date. More details on these older auction related file contents here.

Some "end user" others have been reviewed here.

      Uh, that's all folks. To continue, please...

 Or return to our home page, the back arrow, or you can click for one of these...

BTW, these change every reload! Try it and see. You can extract the banner rotator code from this file with a view page source.