Today, we received this question on our forum:

I am almost up with all my unlisted items BUT I have over 35 pants/jeans (men and woman) that needs to be listed. I have such a hard time taking pictures of those; Please let me know how take pictures of them.
I only have a half size mannequins so I am not able to put them on those. I’ve tried putting them on the bed but I can not get high up enough to take a decent picture .

Photographing pants can be tricky!! Little kids pants are fine…but adult pants are a)HUGE and hard to photograph well and b)weird to lay flat. But, never fear—your stork friends are here!! Here are some suggestions this member received.

Member elainelynn suggests: I lay them flat on the floor on my big piece of background fabric. I do sometimes stand on a chair to get a better perspective. Once you get going, it’s easy. Pic of the front, pic of the back, done!

Another member Caroline suggests: I hang my on hangers and take photos outside – if they’re maternity pants or skirts I no longer bother with the manni – takes too much time I agree.

So there you have it! Tune in tomorrow for the next Daily Stork Tip!

Filed under: The Daily Stork, Tips and Tricks by Rebecca
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So we’ve reached the end of our Serious September challenge.  How did you do?  Did you shrink your Mt. Unlisted?  Are you feeling motivated and ready to continue making progress?

A couple of things to keep in mind for this month:

~ Halloween!  Get those costumes, decorations, and any other Halloween-related items you may have listed PRONTO!  This is the time to be selling them, and you need to allow yourself ample shipping time as well.  Also consider listing any team gear you might have – many kids love to dress up as football players, cheerleaders, or even just super-fans!

~ Amazon!  If you want to be eligible to sell toys on Amazon this holiday season, you only have 26 days left to do it!  You must have 25 sales by the end of the month, so get busy listing!

~ Speaking of holiday selling, now is THE time to stock up on your shipping supplies.  During the holiday rush, you can’t afford to run out of anything.  Take inventory now and order what you need, so you won’t get caught in a lurch.

~ You’ll also want to start scoping out those ‘hot toy’ lists for the holidays.  It’s still too early to make major investments in a ‘possible’ hottie so proceed with caution, but definitely start doing your research and watching items you think might take off.  Speed is key when selling toys, so you must be ready to buy, list, and ship in record time!

~ Finally, prep for your own family holiday.  Do your Christmas shopping, make some meals and stock your freezer, and get those Christmas cards ready.  If you want to be a gung-ho toy seller, the more you can do in advance the better off you’ll be!

What did I forget?  Do you have any other great tips for this month, or for preparing for toy season?  We’d love to hear them!

Filed under: Better Selling Techniques, Tips and Tricks by Rebecca
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Have you heard about our September Challenge yet?  It’s time to get serious!  But serious work requires serious preparation.  Are you ready yet?  Here are 13 tips to help you get there!

Don’t be overwhelmed!  I don’t expect you to do all of these today.  In fact, over the next few weeks we will be covering these topics (and more!) in depth.  This is just a sample of what awaits!

1)  Clean your workspace!  A tidy, organized space makes for a more productive worker.  Remember to take pictures of your work, too!  We’re running some contests this month, and I happen to know that those before and after pictures could be lucrative for you…

2)  Organize your shipping supplies.  Group like items together, and find a home for them where they can be neatly displayed and easy to access.

3)  Take inventory of your shipping supplies.  While you’re straightening up, make note of what you are low on and order them now.  It really stinks to be out of your favorite size of polymailer, or the free priority mail boxes.  Stay ahead of the game!

4)  Think about the shipping ‘extras’.  Tissue paper, plastic bags, business cards, stickers.  Is it time to re-evaluate your methods?

5)  Along with re-evaluating comes re-pricing.  Have you compared prices recently?  Look around to make sure you’re still getting the best deal!

6)  Think about where you spend your time each day.  What is the hardest for you?  What takes the longest?  Where are you most in need of improvement?

7)  Go through existing inventory.  Before you list another thing, look at what you’ve already got listed.  Compare your physical inventory to your eBay/Amazon/website listings, and make sure everything is accounted for properly.  It is *so* easy to get off-track!

8)  Branch out!  If you’ve never sold on Amazon before, this is a great time to give it a try.  If you’d like to be able to sell toys at Christmas, you must meet Amazon’s sales requirements now (more on this tomorrow).

9)  Get your ducks in a row.  Your paperwork *must* be in order before the busy fall and holiday season is upon us.  Trust me – if you get it together now, you will be very glad you did come tax time!

10)  Consider your image.  Does your store represent you in the way you want to be represented?  Is it time for a makeover?  A new listing template or a new storefront design can bring a spark of energy to your store, and motivate you to take your business to the next level.  I don’t for a second believe that my cute storefront increased my sales.  But I definitely believe that it made me happy, thus inspiring me to list more and work harder.  And if you list it, they will come!

11)  Give us your feedback.  What do you need to change?  What are you looking for in this month’s challenge?  Please share below and we will use your input to tailor our blog posts this month.  We want to help YOU!

12)  Encourage your fellow storks!  We’re all in this together, and we ALL benefit from a positive, encouraging atmosphere.  HCTS is known for being friendly and helpful, and as Emeril would say, this month we’d like to kick it up a notch!

13)  Comment!  Every comment you make on our September blog entries will earn you an entry into a prize giveaway!  By reading the blog you will gain motivation and inspiration.  By commenting on the blog, you could gain even more!

As I mentioned earlier, don’t let all of this scare you off!  We will be writing about all of these topics (and more!) in depth over the next month, and we will be here to help you every step of the way.  We’ve got fun games along the way, and prizes that I know you’ll love.  It’s gonna be a great month!

And if you aren’t a HCTS member yet, what are you waiting for?  Please, click the link below and join us now – you won’t regret it!

Filed under: Listing Challenges, Tips and Tricks by BellaBuggy
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Chances are, you already know how awesome neighborhood yard sales are.  You can hit a large number of sales in one fell swoop, saving loads of time and money (gas ain’t cheap these days!)  If you shop with a friend, you can even spread out to cover maximum territory in minimum time.

My #1 tip for shopping at a neighborhood sale?  Be prepared to haul things!  In a busy neighborhood, it’s often quite crowded and traffic and parking can become an issue.  It’s not always easy to move your car from street to street, so I like to find a central spot to park and walk back and forth from there.  To make it easier on myself, I like to take a small, folding luggage rack with me.  It is small and light enough to fit in a tote, and folds out easily to haul a lot of heavy stuff.  See that little old lady up top?  That’s exactly what I look like!

Of course if you still have young children at home, a stroller works nicely as well, but for the stroller-less this luggage cart is hard to beat and it definitely works for me!

Hop over to We Are THAT Family for more great tips!

Make money from home, in your spare time, by selling your great yard sale finds – we can show you how!

Filed under: Shopping, Tips and Tricks by BellaBuggy
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This weekend I had the pleasure to go yard sale-ing in the rain.  When I woke up on Saturday morning and saw the cool temperature and the pouring rain, I was very tempted to fore-go it.  Very tempted.  But I was on a mission to buy some Bibles, and our church youth group was having a sale to raise money for camp, so I forced myself to crawl out of bed.

Besides the rain, another factor was working against this yard sale – it was Derby day.  The Kentucky Derby may not matter in most towns, but in Kentucky, and near Churchill Downs, this is a huge deal.  As a church member I was sad to see the youth not having a great day, but as a buyer – wow.  This worked out very well for me.  Lesson learned – no matter how much I want to stay in bed, don’t.

On a lousy day, all the other buyers want to stay at home too.  If you brave the elements, you are rewarded with more selection and less competition!

From now on, I will definitely look for sales held on holidays and other ‘bad’ dates, and I will never cancel my plans because of the rain.

If you’d like to share what you learned this week, or read lessons from others, please visit From Inmates to Playdates.

Would you like to indulge your love of shopping, and put it to work for you?  Check out Here Comes The Stork- your guide to selling online!

Filed under: Shopping, Tips and Tricks by BellaBuggy
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Today’s post is about getting stuff done. Do you ever feel like you’re running in a dozen directions at once? House always messy, ebay work never quite caught up, laundry piling high, meals to cook and kids who constantly need you to do/fix/play/read something?

When I found this picture for today’s blog post, I looked at it for a minute and thought……I envy that cartoon mom. Sure she’s multi-tasking, but she looks like she’s got it all pretty much under control. Baby happy? Check. Meal cooking? Check. House cleaning done? Check. I mean, she’s even got clothes on that are not sweats, her hair done and make-up on. She probably even showered today. You go girl! Someday I aspire to be like that cartoon lady.

But in the meantime, how do YOU get it all done?

I’m sitting here in a very messy office filled with Ebay stuff that needs worked on. My son is out in the living room wanting me to come play Star Wars with him. I just heard the washer stop, which means I better go toss clothes in the dryer. I did cook us a nice lunch but now I have a pile of dishes to do. Most days I feel like I have things pretty much a little bit under control, while other days the “to do” list seems to grow by 5 items for every 1 that I check off.

I’d love to hear from you….any tips/tricks/hints or shortcuts that you find helpful in just getting stuff done.

Filed under: Tips and Tricks by jmk_akk
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This week I have shared some things we can do to increase sales in our eBay stores.

Today’s topic:  Cross Promote

The idea of cross promoting is to get someone who is already looking at one of your listing to go and look at more of your listings.

How can you do that?  Make them want to and make it easy for them.

Make them Want to…

Offer them an incentive. An easy way to do this is to offer a shipping discount. You can have a very specific discount like “Buy 3 & Shipping is Free” or simply state something like “Discounted Shipping Offered for Multiple Purchases”.
A word of caution:  If you offer a specific discount like “Buy 3 & Shipping is Free”, you may want to state right below it “Shipping discount applies to clothing only” if you sell other things as well. You don’t want to eat up all your profits on a shipping mistake. (Ahem…speaking from experience here.)

Let’s take this a step further. We don’t want your customer to miss this! Here’s what it looks like on one of my listings:

Purchase 3 or More Clothing Items From My Store
and
SHIPPING IS FREE!

Plus, this is a clickable link directly to my eBay store! Which brings me to my next point…

Make It Easy for Them…

It is “eBay legal” for you to include a link in your listings to other eBay listings.  So, make it easy for your customer to find your other listings.  Again, here’s what it looks like in one of my listings:

Please check out my other listings!

But how do you make a clickable link? You need to put the html code in your description area of your eBay listing. Here’s the code for you:

<a href="YourStoreURLHere"><font size="6"><font color="#f3a7b6">
Your Clickable Words Here</font></font></a>

There should be no space between the top and bottom lines, I just couldn’t get it all on the same line.
You can make the font any size and/or color you want!

So there you go!  Enjoy customizing and driving more traffic to your listings!

I hope you have learned something new this week that will help increase your eBay sales.

There is so much to learn!  Want to learn more?
Consider a membership to

We are a community thousands strong of online selling success. Our members share tips and information daily as we grow together and help each other along the way.
Join us! We can never have too many friends!

Filed under: Better Selling Techniques, Ebay Listings, Tips and Tricks by Melisha
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Welcome back!
This week we are discussing things we can do to help increase sales in our eBay stores.
Today’s tip:

Rework those Titles

The words you use in your titles are VERY important!  Those words are what determines how high your item comes up in the search results. (There are other factors as well.  Some of them are out of your control.  So let’s focus on what we can control.)

How do you know what words are the best to choose?
There are lots of ways but here is something easy anyone can do…pretend you are shopping for your item.

I recently sold some of my kids’ used video games.  That’s what I will use for an example today.
Let’s say I’m selling the game “Mario Party 8″ for the Wii. Go to eBay and do a search for that game.
I typed in “Mario Party 8 Wii”.
Make sure “Best Match” is selected at the top of your search results here:

Now scroll down the page paying attention to the “Time Left” column all the way to the right. You are looking for anything that is out of order.  The list starts with a game that has 31 minutes left. However, the very next one has 23 days left. Also notice this listing has a “Top Rated Seller” badge beside it.  Top Rated Sellers get placed higher in search results (one of those things I mentioned earlier that you may or may not be able to control). Let’s skip this one for now.

Keep scrolling down the page. Remember you are looking for anything out of order that does not have a Top Rated Seller badge. A little further down I see this:

One day, one day…10 days! This one does not have a Top Rated Seller badge. Let’s look at the title they used.
It says MARIO PARTY 8 Wii Manual Guide Book 111 Pgs 2007

These are good words to include in your title!
Remember, you can only include words that apply to YOUR item. If your item does not have the manual, you cannot include that.

Here’s another title that was out of order.
Mario Party 8 (Nintendo Wii) MINT Complete w manual

These are more good words to consider for your title.

Get it?
So, go check out your listings. If something is just not selling, do a search and see if it’s getting the exposure you need.
Changing just one word can sometimes make a big difference!

There is so much more information on this subject!  Way too much to include in a blog entry.
If you would like to know more about this subject, one of our very own Storks, Cindy, has written an eBook about it.

Writing Listing Titles for eBay’s Best Match Sort eBook

is a great comprehensive guide to help you get your listings near the top of the Best Sort match.  Enter code HCTS and receive a $5.00 discount on the eBook. Thanks, Cindy!

Filed under: Ebay Listings, Tips and Tricks by Melisha
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Who doesn’t love a sale?
Did you know with your eBay store subscription you can create your own sale?
Your sale can happen at any time and can last for up to 45 days!
I’ll walk you through the steps to create your sale and get those customers shopping…

Go to your “My eBay” page and look for the section called “Manage My Store”. Mine is in the bottom right hand side.
Under “Manage My Store”, click on “Markdown Manager”. You should see this:

Click on the “Create Sale” button.
On the next page you can choose a title for your sale, a start/end date, the type of discount you want to offer, the listings to include in your sale and send out a newsletter to your subscribers…all on the same page!
Here’s what I like to do.
Title: $5 off
Dates: Varies, but I like to do at least 2 weeks. I also like to make sure 2 weekends are included in my sale because traffic on eBay is greater on the weekends (generally speaking).
Type of Discount: I prefer a dollar amount as opposed to a percentage off.  The prices in my store vary a lot. 10% off might be too much on some items.  I run a lot of $5.00 off sales.  I simply pick the listings I can afford to sell for $5 off and still make a nice little profit for myself.
Choose Your Listings: Under this option, I like to choose “Select Listings Individually”. It’s a blue link as seen below:

The next page allows you to see your store items complete with gallery photos, titles and quantity listed information displayed.
Simply check the box next to the items you wish to include in your sale. If you have more than one page of items, click the next page number to continue selecting items for your sale. Do NOT click continue until you are done selecting sale items.
(This part was a little confusing to me the first time I did it.)

When you are done selecting items for your sale, click “Continue”.
You now have the option to change any information you need to before officially starting your sale.
Once you are satisfied with your choices, simply click “Create Your Sale.”

That’s it! You will get an e-mail confirming your sale has begun.

Sales almost never fail to stimulate some selling. So give it a try!
Create your sale today!

Come back tomorrow for some more great selling tips.

There is so much to learn about selling on eBay!  Want to learn more?
Consider a membership to

We are a community thousands strong of online selling success. Our members share tips and information daily as we grow together and help each other along the way.  Your membership will start out as a business investment, but if you’re like me, it will quickly become a community of friends.
Come on in! We can never have too many friends!

Filed under: Ebay Listings, Tips and Tricks by Melisha
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When creating a stand alone web site, it is best to specialize in one thing. It’s easier to drive traffic to a web site and attract a specific kind of buyer. This is not exactly the case on eBay.

eBay is…different.  There is already lots of traffic. You have to get that traffic to your store.

How do you do that?

Diversify!

Let’s say you have a store selling Children’s clothing.  You keep adding more clothing, more brands, more sizes, etc.
Who is shopping in your store? Who is your customer? You have to think about this.

Your customer is a Mom.

So, think about what else a Mom might shop for and add those items to your store.

Let’s make it easy for this shopping Mom. She’s already shopping for her kids.
Think, think, think…
Kids have birthdays…they might need presents. Toys!
Kids also have brothers and sisters…sometimes baby ones.  This shopping Mom that is already in your store might have a baby as well.  Let’s add more things she might consider buying and get her to look around a little longer.

This strategy will also help attract NEW shoppers.  Someone searching for a toy or baby item will now be drawn into your store!  You would have missed this potential customer by offering only Children’s clothing.

Another bonus: Clothing sales are seasonal. Birthdays and babies happen all the time. Having these items in your store can also help keep sales steady during off-season selling time for clothes.

You can apply this strategy to anything you sell:

Selling jewelry?  Add jewelry cleaning items and storage containers or displays.
Selling dinnerware?  Add napkin rings, napkins, table decor, silverware.
Selling hair bows?  Add other hair accessories like headbands and some storage items for all those hair accessories.

So start really thinking about who your customer is and what they might be looking for.
It might be time to diversify!

Join me again tomorrow for another tip for improving your sales!

Filed under: Better Selling Techniques, Tips and Tricks by Melisha
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