Subject: Lisi, How Much Feedback Do You Need?
From: "What Really Sells"
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 18:16:11 UT
To: "Lisi"

What Really Sells on eBay
James Jones here from WhatReallySells.com.

I received an interesting email the other day I'd like to share with you because it keys in on something I did when I set up my new eBay account last month.

First off, here's the email:

James,

Concerning selling on ebay, I've heard that to sell successfully you need a FB score between 50 and 100? What's your opinion and why? What's been your experience on ebay RE this FB score?

Pat

When I set up my cellar_door1 account in January I wanted to test two things:

1) How fast I could find profitable product to sell and get them listed and sold on eBay.

2) How fast I could build my positive Feed Back so I could begin selling.

I opened up the cellar_door1 account on January 9th, 2006. On January 11th I started buying so I could build my feedback. My goal was to get my feedback to 10 (10 is the minimum amount of feedback needed to list multi-item auctions)

On January 11th and 12th I bought several cheap ebooks for 1 cent to $1.00. I found these books by searching for the key phrase, "free shipping" and then using the search options on the left side of the screen I selected "Buy it Now" and Items Priced between .01 and 1.00.

I then just browsed through the search results and found cheap items I could buy for 1 penny to 1 dollar. I ended up buying 14 items for a total of $5.66.

Within 2 days I had a Feedback rating of 10. I didn't start selling until a little over a week later because I was waiting for some products to arrive. When I listed my first product I had a Feedback of 12.

The first month that account was in existance I sold $1100.99 in merchandise. (actually, that was just in the first two weeks)

So, in answer to Pat's question I think a Feedback of 10 is good enough to begin selling. Wayne Yeager of www.sellathon.com claims that having high Positive Feedback is way overrated. He has access to the data from millions of auctions -- provided by users of his View Tracker software at http://www.sellathon.com/index.php -- and after studying all this data Yeager determined that while Positive Feedback does have an impact on Final Value it's not as much as most people think. According to Yeager, for every 1% increase in positive feedback, the final price of the item goes up by 0.03 percent.

That's not very much. In other words, if Seller #1 has 50 positive feedbacks, and Seller #2 has a whopping 5,000 positive feedbacks, Seller #2 will realize just a 3% higher price for his item than Seller #1.

So if Seller 1 has an item that sells for $100.00, Seller 2 -- with 5000 positive feedback -- will realize only $3.00 more or $103.00.

It seems that people EXPECT positive Feedback so the impact on having a lot of positive feedback is minimal.

Bottom Line -- Don't let the lack of Feedback hold you back from selling on eBay. It just doesn't make that much difference anyway.

If you'd like to take a look at all Yeagers findings go to: http://forum.sellathon.com

James

P.S. I'm testing out that new technique I told you about last issue. It's looking good. I'll have results in three days to share with you.

P.P.S. Be sure to visit the new What Really Sells Blog at: www.whatreallysellsblog.com













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