Anyone selling on eBay has to answer one question every time they list something for sale.  What price shall I list this item at?  How do you know what is the correct price?  Here is some advice to help you answer that question…

The first thing you need to do when deciding what price to list your item is do research on your item.  The easiest and most cost effective place to look is on eBay itself.  You need to do a number of different searches on eBay to help you determine your optimum selling price.

The first search you should do is a search on the same item or similar items to what you are going to list.  You want to see what similar items are currently being sold at.  In the eBay search box, do a search on your item.  Take notes on these items.

Write down how many items your search came up with.  This will tell you how much competition you have.  Wite down the lowest price you see listed.  Also write down the highest price you see listed.  Write down some of the bids you see listed.  This will give you some information on the current activity on eBay for the item you wish to list. 

The next thing you want to do is search on items similar to yours that have already closed.  You can do this by using the advanced search options on the left hand side of your original search results.

On the left side of your screen you will see a number of blanks and check boxes to help narrow your search.  If you click the box next to “completed listings” it will search all closed listings and you will end up with results showing all of the closed listings for the last four weeks.

Write down how many items your search came up with.  Write down the lowest price of a successful bid.  (Note, your search will show all items closed, even items that did not sell).  Write down the price of the highest successful bid.  Look at the starting prices and see how many bids there were.

Now analyze your results.  Look at the highest completed sale and see what the item started at and note the duration.  Look at the lowest completed sale the same way.  Look to see what current prices are at.

You want to price your item at a price that you will feel comfortable selling at, but you don’t want to price it so high that no one bids.  The lower the starting price the more bids you will get.  A good rule of thumb is to start your item half way between the lowest and highest ending price of the completed items.
 
One of the things you always need to take into consideration is how much you have invested in the item.  If you purchased the item to resell it, then of course your goal is to at least cover the cost of the item.

I have always advocated selling eBooks on eBay.  One of the main reasons is because you have literally no costs to worry about.

No matter what you are selling on eBay, ultimately it takes practice to learn what prices work best for each item.  Trial and error is the common way to find the optimum price.  The more information you have from eBay history, based on your searches, the more accurate your decisions on pricing will be.  The better your pricing decisions, the more sales you will generate and the more profit you will make.