ebay Mobile Challenge: Using the eBay Selling App to Get a Clean Start for the New Year

By Reena Jana
January 10, 2011

With every new year comes a New Year’s resolution, right? For 2011, I’m pairing a classic goal—cleaning out my family’s closets—with a very 21st-century one. My resolution? Using only the eBay Selling app for the iPhone, I'm planning to sell the handbags, toys, kitchen appliances, DVDs, and other goodies that we no longer use, but which others might enjoy. For me, this is a big deal; while I’m an avid eBay shopper, I’m a bit of a virgin when it comes to utilizing the marketplace to sell my stuff.

I had always imagined uploading beautifully produced listings, but I’d been somewhat intimidated by eBay’s multitude of professional-looking pages, with their sharp descriptive texts and crisp photos. And I admit, figuring out how to price items for auctions and fixed-price sales (a.k.a. “buy it now”) always seemed mysterious to me. But to my delight, the eBay Selling app for Smartphones really lives up to the tag line “Selling just got easier” that appears on the application’s home screen when it loads on an iPhone or 4th-generation iPod Touch. I’m not exaggerating when I say that all of my eBay-selling-virgin fears were addressed by the eBay Selling app. It allows you to create a polished eBay listing in a snap.

I kicked off my end-of-2010 closet-cleaning extravaganza by selecting items that were in good or even great condition, and asked myself if I’d be happy receiving these goods as a regular eBay buyer. I started with my handbag collection. I had a surplus of stylish bags bearing labels such as Gucci and Coach that both my mother and mother-in-law have generously handed down to me after their own closet-cleaning extravaganzas. (And yes, I discussed with both my mom and my mom-in-law that I was thinking of selling these purses on eBay, and even offered them some of the profits, which we three agreed would go toward my young son’s upcoming preschool fees.)

The eBay Selling app offers a handy three-step process that couldn’t be easier. First, you research an item using eBay sales data; then, you create a listing; and finally, you can check the status of the sale. (Note that you must first create a secure Selling account on eBay’s Web site before you can use the app, which you can do via a link on the iPhone app or on your computer.)

To figure out the eBay pricing for the listing I wanted to create for a lovely used Gucci bag that my mom bought new from a Gucci boutique in the mid-1980s (and is in near-perfect shape), I typed “vintage Gucci handbag” into the Selling app. The app immediately pulled up 121 recently sold items matching this description, along with their sales prices, eBay shipping prices, photos, and the dates that they were sold.

The eBay Selling app also showed me the average price of all of the online auction items that the app’s search engine found, as well as the low and high prices for all sold products with the listing's name, in the form of an easy-to-read graph at the bottom of the screen. My particular eBay app search indicated that the average cost of a “vintage Gucci handbag” on eBay was “$145.22.”

RESEARCHING A LISTING

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The eBay Selling app home screen.
The app features a streamlined three-step selling process.
You can research high, low and average selling prices for an item by typing in the appropriate search term.

Now that I had an idea of how much I could expect to make, I created my listing. The app features a template in which you simply enter a title for the listing, choose a category, and then take photos of your item directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can also upload photos taken with another device, too. Now, I’m not the best photographer, I admit. And I’ve always wondered how successful eBay sellers took such compelling pictures for their listings. Well, the help button on the app has some truly useful advice, including a list of “Photo do’s." Among them: “Pure white backgrounds are great for very dark items and sometimes jewelry.” Using that tip, I snapped four shots of my Gucci bag positioned against a white sheet and white wall.

Then, I wrote a quick and enticing description of the used Gucci bag. I chose to auction the purse because the prices on vintage Gucci handbags varied so much, and chose a starting bid of $25.00 that seemed a fair auction price to begin with as an absolute minimum that I expected to receive. I then entered information on the bag’s condition, and shipping price (based on the research I’d done using the app’s search for recently sold items that were similar). Et voila, my listing was complete! Look at the time on my device in my screenshots, and you have proof that I created my entire listing within five minutes. Yes, five minutes.

CREATING A LISTING

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When selling an item on eBay, it's smart to include multiple angles and product details. I shot the front and back of the this Gucci purse, a close-up of the logo and the inner metal tag that says "Gucci" and "Made in Italy."
My listing description.
My completed listing.

Empowered by the eBay Selling app, I decided to sell a few more things even faster. No kidding—there are tools that can streamline the process even more, using some super-cool tech, namely a built-in barcode scanner. I had a stack full of great workout DVDs that were gathering dust because I’d moved on to other exercise discs. Knowing that the barcodes appear on DVD cases even after they’re opened, I decided to try out the eBay Selling app’s scanner.

Dear reader, I felt like I was in a science fiction movie. I pointed my iPod Touch’s camera toward the barcode on the DVD case for “A.M. Yoga For Your Week with Rodney Yee,” and heard a beep. The app had scanned it, and magically I had a half-completed eBay Selling app listing for this disc. Not only was the listing title automatically entered, but a standard photo of the DVD’s cover also appeared. I didn’t even need to snap my own shot. A brief summary of the disc’s content and even the year of its release appeared in the item’s description. I then used the research tool to determine the best price for the online sale. And again, in less than five minutes I had completed my listing.

CREATING A LISTING USING THE BARCODE SCANNER

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The iPod Touch's camera functions as a barcode scanner.
Once the item is scanned, its title, image and description are pre-populated into the selling app.
You can use the research tool to determine the best sale price.

I spent the next few hours alternating between the barcode scanner and the traditional photo approach, placing everything from Coach and Orla Kiely handbags to a never-been-used Wusthof knife-sharpener that was still in the original box to an unopened portable bassinet. I got so carried away, my husband hid a few of his Christmas gifts for fear I'd decide they weren't worth the money after all! Closets cleaned out, I sat back and watched the tuition money roll in.

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