Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share five tips to get your items listed faster on eBay.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast – 5 Tips To Get Your Items Listed Faster
Rob: What's up guys? On today's episode, we are talking about five key steps to get your listings, your eBay listings done faster.
Melissa: So one thing that holds most people up in their reselling business and is kind of the bottleneck of their business is usually the listing process. So we are going to dive into five things to help you get your listings done faster.
Rob: Shortcuts. We love shortcuts. So we are going to jump in and give you guys some great tips, how to get to that next level in your business with listings.
Melissa: So the first one is to pre-write your listings in your notes, and you do all of your listing from your phone pretty much, right?
Rob: I do.
I absolutely. And that's one of the things where I am thinking about a listing and sometimes in listings, I'll go to the manufacturing. If it's like a something expensive or, something that has, a couple different details, I'll go to the manufacturer's website and I will copy and paste some of the stuff that I wanna make sure that I don't forget, features of that item that I'm doing. So I'll copy and paste that, throw it over into my notes, to where it is ready to go onto the listing when I have the listing pulled up and I'm running through it. So, if you do do that, make sure you're giving credit to manufacturing.
If I do that, if I do copy something, I specifically put from the manufacturer's website and then I put in quotations what I'm taking from it. So people don't think it's my own words. So that's definitely one thing to do is get all of your thoughts together, get your description all put together and put it into your notes before you even jump onto eBay to do a listing.
Melissa: And you do that with your terms and conditions too, you have, 'em all saved and you just copy paste, right?
Rob: Absolutely. So the terms and conditions we typically use on the majority of our listings, and it is thought out it's done, it's already into notes. And I can find it quickly by eBay terms and conditions as the title.
Jump into that search for that into my notes. Cause I have tons of notes anyways. When I'm doing a listing, I can go to that copy paste, everything, pull it over to eBay. It takes very, very minimal time to do that, to get the listing up and going for sure.
Melissa: Alright. The second one is to batch your photos.
So I'm a big fan of batching things. Like whenever we're doing content or whatever, whatever it is. It works in my brain, easier to have several things of the same task. And there is some, I can't remember where I heard it or read it or something like it takes your brain so long to switch tasks. So if you're in the zone of this task and you're just doing it over and over, it's a lot easier than if we went to go where now we're switching tasks.
Now we just have another 20 or 30 minutes before we can really get into the zone of that new task. So yeah. So batching really, I enjoy batching.
Rob: This will totally help. Yeah. If you can do that, if you can get a couple items that you wanna get listed, get them all together and then do like what Melissa said is the batching, take multiple pictures, start with one item.
Get your, whatever you're gonna do 5, 10, 12 pictures. We typically recommend people doing 12 pictures for everything that you're you're selling, just because it gives the buyer a better idea of what they're getting. You get every angle you can, any imperfections. But if you do all that at one time, for multiple items, it will make your listing process go a lot quicker than having to go into eBay, pull up the whole app and go through the whole listing thing. Once you get to the picture section, you go and you find a good place to take pictures. If you have all that stuff done and it's in your phone in your picture section, it will go so much quicker and you'll be able to get so many more listings outta the way quick.
Melissa: And yeah, you could, if you have you just pictured five items. Now you just go and you just go list. 'em you sit down, get 'em all bang 'em out. Now you're on list, list, list, get everything done. So.
Rob: Yeah, I love to do that before we actually go on like a road trip or something like that. I'll try and get a whole bunch of items, that I have that are sitting around that I wanna get listed and I'll knock out all the pictures and I don't typically do the descriptions, because it'll take me longer to do that, but I can do that on the road where I can get all the pictures done, where I have them with me, they're on my phone. And I can get stuff listed from the road versus, having I, once we're gone, I don't have access to the item, so we can't do it.
Melissa: And you add a video too, to most of your listings, right?
Rob: Absolutely. Definitely. For higher value items. I definitely recommend people doing that just because it's a lot of people are not doing videos yet. And some people that are doing higher value items will do videos into YouTube that you click on a link or, you can put it into the listing, but now eBay's allowing you to put, and from the iPhone, I think it's 150 megabytes.
Don't quote me on that. For me on my iPhone, when I do a video, it is, I think it's 50 seconds. Anything, 50 seconds or below I can upload in there and there's enough room to do it. Anything over 50 seconds, eBay makes me cut it down because
Melissa: and your phone's recording, it sure is different.
Rob: And I don't know exactly, like I said, the amount of storage that it takes up, but that's what eBay will limit you to.
So I try and do that. Along with when I'm getting pictures, I try and get the video in there, put them all. The other thing is when you have 'em all in one section versus taking five pictures of something and then coming back, after you take pictures of one or two other things coming back and get more pictures.
It keeps it where if you get all your pictures out of the way in your video and in your pictures, on your phone in one spot, that's gonna be easier to go and find those versus searching other pictures, scrolling and finding pictures, you know, sporadic throughout your phone. So definitely do that.
Melissa: Good organization hack would be to put them in a separate album and different album so that you have, you know, your items that you're selling. And then if you really wanted to like clear, clear them off your phone, but you still want, to keep them a Google Drive is pretty easy just to upload things to.
That's I don't know. I've fallen in love with Google Drive from the last couple years. It's so convenient. So we put a lot of stuff up there for sure. But photos, I think are the, that's the one thing that's takes up the most of your time. Right? Like getting stuff ready to go.
Rob: So yeah. Yeah. Definitely photos because it does, it takes time.
Making sure that you have a good background, we recommend no clutter and other stuff around. Don't just snap a real quick picture. The thing about eBay is people do not get the opportunity to see the item before they pay for it. So you want to give them the best quality pictures that you possibly can and imperfections. We don't hide anything either. Our motto is definitely underpromise overdeliver. So you want to make sure, yeah, the photos will take a little bit of time, which goes into probably our next tip.
Melissa: Yeah. The next one. Set up an area, where you do take photos. So like consistently, like that's kind of your area that you do it and it's, it's a designated area.
Rob: So yeah, for us, you can see, we have this wall behind us and the desk that our computer's sitting on. If I have anything that will fit onto this desk, I pull it over back to the wall and use the, the wall as a background. And it just takes me a couple seconds to do that, but that is a easy, easy way that I have a good background.
I have a nice desk or a nice platform to do it, and it, I can get almost every single angle of the item, from that. So if you can set something up like that, it might be a kitchen table, that you pull over to the wall. It might be a countertop that you have room and maybe you move, microwave if it's on, whatever it is, you might move some stuff out of the way so you have a nice spot, but if you have a nice spot that, you know, you can go and take five, 10 different items, on that one spot, it will help out help out a lot for sure.
Melissa: But if you can carve out even a spot in your office, like that's just for pictures, like a lot of people do smaller stuff.
We do bigger stuff. So it does, it's not easy, not as easy to have a spot, but the smaller stuff you definitely can make a little, you can get even a light box. Some people like those, but just have like. A separate area, where it's set up constantly set up. So you don't have to try to clear it out and it's just there and it's ready for you to go take some amazing pictures.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: So did you have anything to add that?
Rob: Nope. That's it.
Melissa: And another one, number four is you can use a crossposting tool to help you get onto other platforms. So sometimes the copy paste works too. The, from one platform, just copy paste, titles and descriptions, or you can use a crossposting tool.
So there's a couple different ones out there.
Rob: Yeah, no, that's a great thing. And it will save you time. Crossposting tools are set up to save you time versus having to go from eBay to Poshmark, to all these other platforms, jump in and go into their listing, or their listing, whatever it's called, software, for that individual platform, a crossposting tool will usually have the generic stuff, you fill all that out and then it'll go to each platform and list it for you once you're signed into each one inside the tool. So, definitely a way to save time if you are multiple listing onto different platforms, that will save you a lot of time being able to get with a crossposting tool for sure.
Melissa: Yeah.
And it does make, it has to make sense for your business, for it to, you know, you're doing a lot of volume or you're, you know, you need to cross post to all different platforms and it can, it can increase your sales for sure to be on all the multiple platforms. I know we mostly sell on eBay, but we keep saying, we need to get, keep on posting on other platforms too, cuz it does help more eyes to your stuff can get it sold.
So absolutely. And then the last one is repetition and you'll get faster. I mean, right. You just do it.
Rob: Absolutely. This is huge guys, because when you first think about it, maybe you're starting out and you wanna jump on eBay and list stuff. It's gonna take you five minutes, 10 minutes to get your first thing listed.
But then the more that you do it after you get 50 under your belt, after you get 75 to a hundred under your belt, you're gonna be flying through these things like it's the back of your hand. You're gonna know the sections. You're gonna know what you have to add. It's gonna be very, very quick to do that.
And that's the case with anything, the more that you do it, the more consistent you are doing it, the better you're gonna get and the quicker you're gonna get at it. So, don't get frustrated, you know, first one through 10 listings that you do, you're gonna get better and better, and you're gonna, it's gonna be such so much more efficient the more that you do it. So stick it out. You guys can do it. Absolutely. But you will get so much better by just keeping on doing what you're doing.
Melissa: Yeah. Cause when you first sit down and do a listing, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming if you're just getting started and you're, and then a platform changes and now you need all these details and all this stuff.
So eBay is the most complex listing one. So if you can tackle that one, then you got the rest of them and it asks for usually the most details. So at least as of right now, so if you got that and you can get through it, then you can just start getting faster and faster and faster.
Rob: For sure. So that's five tips, guys to help you really rock and roll with your listings, how, how to get so much better at your eBay listing.
Melissa: And then the last a bonus one oh, bonus let's motivate you get it listed. So I think a lot of times it's just, you see your death pile there and it's like, ah, I need to go get it listed. So here's your little push to go do it.
And I like, that what somebody called it, I've heard a couple people say it now call it a cash pile instead of a death pile. It's just like, oh, way better. Way better.
Rob: Switching that mindset.
Melissa: Instead of just going from, oh, this negative thing, death pile to it's a cash pile. Let's get that stuff listed.
Rob: That's it. That's it. So awesome. You guys rock. If you guys are a return listener, please guys go subscribe, like this video. It means the world to us to get your guys' feedback on this. So please go and do that and we will see you guys on the next episode.
Melissa: Thanks.