How do you view your eBay selling? This is not a silly question. If your answer is "a way to make money" then you are looking at it as less than it is and can be. If you really want to make money on eBay, you have to think of it as a job, not a hobby, not something that you like doing and happens to make a little money on the side.

It is often some or all of those things as well, but if you want your eBay sales to grow, you have to work on making your eBay business grow. Aren't they the same thing? Noooooo! Business is not just sales but also involves merchandising, marketing, and customer retention. You need to be able to promote yourself and keep the customers you sell to.

CREATING A BRAND

When you buy off of eBay, by the time you get your package in the mail do you remember who you bought it from? When I get my stuff I have no idea who the seller was. The name on the package isn't the same as the seller's UserID and it's too much of a hassle to go digging through all my emails to figure it out. Some sellers send invoices or packing slips, which is nice but often still doesn't have their UserID on it. You want your business (userID in the case of eBay) to be obvious in every element of the transaction.

I think that this is one of the hardest concepts for starting sellers to get ahold of, especially if they haven't had much prior business and/or selling experience. You don't want people buying off eBay. You want people buying from YOU off of eBay. You have to be able to recognize and utilize whatever opportunities you run across or can create yourself to promote your business.

You want people to recognize an auction right away as yours. Having a unique background and pictures that look the same from auction to auction make it easier for people to notice right away that they are all from the same person and that they'll remember sent them lovely clothes that were shipped quickly. This idea of having your auctions be instantly recognizable as being yours is basically the principle of branding.

AUCTION TEMPLATES

There are many good auction template sites out there that make it much easier to personalize your auctions so that they stand out from the myriad others. My favorite is SellerSourcebook.com, which is a more full service site. They have not only tons of auction templates but matching About Me page templates (very cool and this fits right in with the idea of branding), picture hosting, automatic listing launch, and tons of seller articles and resources. It is a very complete site, very easy to use, and is worth the pricing, which hasn't gone up for as long as I can remember.

BUSINESS CARDS

Business cards are another great way to keep your business in people's minds. Mine have on them the name of the newsletter and the url for the signup page, my name and eBayID, and a quick description of what I sell.

These go in my pocket to take garage saling or to give to people when they ask me what I've been up to (plus it's a more interesting conversation starter than "you know, laundry"). The business cards also go in all the auction packages that I mail out.

VistaPrint.com will send you 250 free cards for just the price of shipping (I chose pokey shipping which was about $5 or $6). The free ones have about 30 different style options but the $9.95 ones have about 250 style options. You can browse around before you decide.

So there's a few ideas for keeping your business in your customers' minds (and reminding yourself that you are a business). Now go make a recognizable brand for yourself and make your hobby into a money-making business!