1000 Best Ebay Powerseller Secrets

With 1000 tips from an experienced eBay PowerSeller, this book ought to be a great resource for existing and wannabe sellers alike. Unfortunately, it's marred for me by being completely US-centered, out of date, and in places, just plain wrong.

Greg Holden's tips are broadly grouped into four sections: before the sale, dealing with stock acquisition and creating your eBay listings; during the sale, dealing with buyer questions and tracking sales; after the sale, dealing with payments, packing and shipping, dealing with problems and increasing your sales; and expanding beyond eBay.

Though much of the material is common sense and will be very familiar to experienced sellers, the "1000 tips" format makes it easy to dip in and out of, and there are some sections which are genuinely very useful. I particularly liked the section on responding to customer email which had some very practical tips on keeping your temper, and "five ways to maintain a positive attitude" is something that every eBay seller ought to read.

Sadly, the good stuff is mostly overwhelmed with a lot of useless stuff. Though the book was published in 2007, some of it is out of date already. Sellers are no longer allowed to have private feedback, for example: in fact, almost everything said about the feedback system is now out of date and there is no mention of Detailed Seller Ratings. Elsewhere, tips on payment services and tax are useless to anyone outside the USA.

Then there are tips like #300: "if you have had problems with non-paying bidders, consider saying 'serious bidders only!" in your listings". Take it from me, this phrase will have no effect whatsoever on your non-paying bidder rate, and will in fact only make you look like a seller who doesn't know what they're doing.

In yet other places, Mr Holden seems to have just come to the end of his knowledge. The nine tips on making your own website, for example, are worse than useless: I don't think the author has ever made a website himself. This section should have been omitted altogether. So should tips like #653 "if someone uses an acronym like LOL or BTW, use one back". Perhaps "match your customer's level of formality when writing email" would have been a useful tip, so it's a shame he didn't write that.

Somewhere within 1000 Best eBay Success Secrets are around 300 useful tips for eBay sellers. It's a shame it comes with so much else that is so bad.

Aimed more at ebay US (9/9 people found this helpful)

I read this book cover to cover, the feeling of waiting for it to get good and juicy never really left me. Most of it's content is available from ebay itself or is just plain common sense, some of the tips, were so obvious that it was actually humorous. None of the stuff inside was news to me. However that is not the most serious complaint, this book has a very strong US tilt to it, lots and lots of the tips won't work on the ebay UK and lots of the research sites are also irrelevant to a UK seller. A better but by no means perfect alternative is "Make Serious Money on eBay UK" by Dan Wilson, it also is maybe a little vague but it is relevant to UK and would be ideal for someone who is new to ebay.

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1000 Best Ebay Powerseller Secrets

Greg Holden

Reader Reviews:

300 useful tips and a lot of filler (7/7 people found this helpful)

Aimed more at ebay US (9/9 people found this helpful)

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