Not every item up for auction on eBay sells. (eBay’s “close rate” is right around 50%which means that half the items listed at any given time don’t sell.) If you reach the end of the auction and you haven’t received any bidsor you haven’t received high-enough bids in a reserve auctionyou need to drop back ten and punt, and figure out what to do next.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do if your item didn’t sell is to try again by relisting your item. eBay makes this easy for you, by including a Relist Your Item link right on the original item listing page. Click this link to create a new item listing, based on the old item listing.

When you relist an item that didn’t sell the first time, eBay still charges you a listing fee for the second listing. However, eBay will refund this second listing fee if your item sells the second time around. (But not if it doesn’t.) You will, of course, have to pay the normal end-of-auction fee if the item sells the second time around.

The post What If You Don’t Sell Your Item? first appeared on Tips For eBay Sellers & Buyers.

Whatever your reason might be, eBay makes it relatively easy to update your item listing. If your listing hasn’t received any bids yet (and there’s more than 12 hours left in your auction), you can actually edit the original listing. eBay lets you edit your title, description, and picturesas long as no one has yet placed a bid. To edit your listing, follow these steps:

The post Editing eBay Auction first appeared on Tips For eBay Sellers & Buyers.

These codes are distinguished from normal text by the fact that they’re enclosed within angle brackets. Each particular code turns on or off a particular attribute, such as boldface or italic text. Most codes are in sets of “on/off” pairs. You turn “on” the code before the text you want to affect and then turn “off” the code after the text.

For example, the code <h1> turns specified type into a level-one headline; the code </h1> turns off the headline type. The code <i> is used to italicize text; </i> turns off the italics. (As you can see, an “off” code is merely the “on” code with a slash before it.)

Codes to Format Text

Effect	On Code	Off Code
Bold	<b>	</b>
Italic	<i>	</i>
Underline	<u>	</u>
Center	<center>	</center>
First-level headline	<h1>	</h1>
Second-level headline	<h2>	</h2>
Third-level headline	<h3>	</h3>

Just surround the text you want to format with the appropriate on and off codes, and you’re ready to go. For example, to format a piece of text as bold, you’d write something that looks like this:

<b>this text is bold</b>

Codes for Graphics

Adding pictures and other graphics to your listings really brings some excitement to the normally plain-text world of eBay. You can add pictures the eBay way, which puts all your pictures at the end of your text description or you can put a picture anywhere in your text, using HTML.

Before you can insert a graphic into your listing, you need to know the address of that graphic (in the form of a web page URL). Then you use the following code:

<img src="URL">

No “off” code is required for inserted graphics. Note that the location is enclosed in quotation marksand that you have to insert the http:// part of the URL.

As an example, if your graphic is the file graphic01.jpg located at www.webserver.com/mydirectory/, you insert this code:

<img src="http://www.webserver.com/mydirectory/graphic01.jpg">

The nice thing about inserting graphics this way is that you can include more than just picturesyou can add logos, starbursts, you name it. (And you can put the graphics anywhere in your text description.) You use the same technique to link to any graphic image anywhere in your item listing.

Codes for Links

You can use HTML to add links to your own personal web pages (a great idea if you have additional images of this specific item) or to related sites. Many sellers also like to provide a direct email link in case potential bidders have questions they need answered.

To insert a link to another web page in your item listing, you use the following HTML code:

<a href=”URL”>this is the link</a>

The text between the on and off codes will appear onscreen as a typical underlined hyperlink; when users click that text, they’ll be linked to the URL you specified in the code. Note that the URL is enclosed in quotation marks and that you have to include the http:// part of the address.

You can also create a “mail-to” link in your listing; users will be able to send email to you by simply clicking the link. Here’s the code for a mail-to link:

<a href=”mailto:yourname@domain.com“>click here to email me</a>

Codes for Lists

Finally, if you have a lot of features to list for your item, you might want to format them in a bulleted list. Using HTML codes, it’s easy to create a neatly bulleted list for your ad.

First, you enclose your bulleted list with the <ul> and </ul> codes. Then, you enclose each bulleted item with the <li> and </li> codes.

The code for a typical bulleted list looks like this:

<ul> <li>item one</li> <li>item two</li> <li>item three</li> </ul>

When you're dealing with complex coding like this, it's easier
to understand what's going on if you indent the different levels of code.

Bulleted lists are great ways to run through a list of attributes or specifications; it’s a lot cleaner than just listing a bunch of stuff within a long text paragraph.

The post List of Simple HTML Codes for eBay first appeared on Tips For eBay Sellers & Buyers.

But then there are those ads that shout at you with colored text and different font faces and sizes and multiple columns and sizzling graphics and…well, you know the ones I’m talking about. How do you go about creating a dynamic listing like that?

Those colorful, eye-catching listings are created with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the engine behind every web page you’ve ever viewed, the coding language that lets you turn on and off all sorts of text and graphic effects.

Here’s a secret known to successful sellers: eBay lets you use HTML in your item listings! All you have to do is know which HTML codes to enter in the Description box when you’re creating your item listingor you can use eBay’s built-in HTML text editor and skip the coding altogether. Even easier, you can use eBay’s Listing Designer or any number of third-party programs to create HTML-based listings without ever seeing the HTML code.

As you’ll see, creating HTML-based listings isn’t that difficult. And it’s not just a tool for power sellers; it’s a relatively common technique that any eBay seller can use to spruce up an eBay listing.

You can make your listing great looking in the following ways:

The easiest way to create a listing that goes beyond plain text is with eBay’s Listing Designer. This feature is available to all users, right from the Sell Your Item pageand it costs only $0.10 a listing.

Listing Designer isn’t the only option you have for creating fancy eBay item listings. There are many software programs and web-based services that let you create great-looking listings without having to enter a line of HTML code. Most of these programs and services let you choose a design and fill in some blanks, and then they automatically write the HTML code necessary to create the listing. These programs and services are easy to use, even if they do come at a cost.

Probably the most popular listing-creation program is eBay’s Turbo Lister (pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/). Turbo Lister uses the same templates found in eBay’s Listing Designer, but it lets you create your listings in bulk, offline.

If you place a lot of listings, eBay’s 10-cent Listing Designer fee can start to add up. Fortunately, there are lots of free auction templates you can use; it’s always good when you can cut your auction costs.

Free eBay Listing Templates:

Here are some of the most popular of these free auction template sites:

• Auction Riches Free Auction Ad Creator (www.auctionriches.com/freead/create.pl)

• AuctionSpice Templates (www.auctionspice.com)

• AuctionSupplies.com Free Auction Templates (auctionsupplies.com/templates/)

• K&D Web Page Design Custom Auction Creator (www.kdwebpagedesign.com/tutorials/tut_template.asp)

• ListTailor (www.listtailor.com/quickstart.html)

• Wizard’s Free Auction Template Creation Form (www.ambassadorboard.net/hosting/free-form.php)

• Xample.net Auction Templates (www.xample.net/templates.htm)

The post Create Good Looking eBay Listing first appeared on Tips For eBay Sellers & Buyers.