Welcome to the third post in our feature series, The Perfect eBay Listing, in which we explore the ins and outs of selling on eBay.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the eBay listing upgrades that garner true results, separating the good ones from those that don’t perform so well.

Tip #3: Make More Money by Choosing the Best eBay Upgrades

Sure, but what are the good ones? Frankly, I think this is a pretty cut and dry subject, as there are three that you should consider “staples” of your selling arsenal.

First and foremost, you have the Gallery upgrade. At only $0.35, this is the cheapest and easiest way to capture an audience for your item. While it’s not absolutely necessary for all items you might choose to sell on eBay, using a Gallery allows you to include a thumbnail-size image within the search results. On top of that, you can use the Gallery photo to your advantage by showcasing your item in as favorable a setting as possible.

Take Advantage of the Gallery Listing with a Great Product Photo

For example, let’s say you’re selling ladies’ handbags, and the current bag that you’re listing is brown. If you weren’t schooled in the ways of eBay, you might innocently set the bag on your wooden kitchen table and snap a photo. Then, you’d agonize through your ill-advised seven day auction during which you only receive 4 product views (because you had a brown bag on a brown table - oh, and your kitchen walls are an awful maize color), and after that disappointment, you’d be left asking yourself “why?”

Fortunately, you don’t have to make this silly mistake, because you’ve been properly advised! Instead of putting next to no effort into your product photos, go out of your way to display your product as clearly as possible. I recommend buying a $2.49 piece of white Xacto board from Target, and create a nice, clean backdrop for your product photos.

Also, when taking pictures of your items, try to position your item so that it fills up as much of the photo as possible. As a result, when you choose a Gallery upgrade for your auction listing, your product will appear bigger to viewers as they scroll through items that they’re looking to buy. Once again, this is a simple thing that you can do to play on a buyer’s psychology to your advantage (and believe me, you want to do as much of this as possible). In fact, I’d go so far as to say you should adopt the following mantra for utilizing the Gallery feature:

1. If it’s appropriate, I will add the Gallery image to my listings
2. I will use a clean, high-contrast backdrop for my product pictures so that my item will be presented as clearly as possible
3. I will “fill up” the picture area with my product, making it appear as large as possible
4. I will check my photos to ensure that they are clear and not blurry, as simple miscues like that can wreak havoc on a buyer’s subconscious and cost me a sale!

Although I’ve already beaten the photo issue to death, we’re still going to give that horse one more good kick. For my money, it’s worth using a photo-editing software to crop your photos to sizes that are appropriate for eBay (and although I wouldn’t recommend it, you can even use MS Paint to crop photos into shape).

Based on average monitor resolutions, you should make sure that the vertical dimension of your pictures does not exceed 500 pixels. Personally, I make sure that my vertical dimensions never exceed 400 pixels, because I want to ensure that all viewers using 1024×768 resolution will be able to see the entire photo without scrolling. This is simply a good practice to adopt, and I think you can extend this by always trying to make your photos the same size (I use 400×400). You’ll see more of this in a later post when I explain the advantages of a pre-formatted, HTML-based listing.

I hinted at it earlier, and for the sake of completeness, I feel that it’s necessary to mention that Gallery upgrades are not always an advantageous choice.

If you’re cutting very small margins on items that basically explain themselves, then perhaps it’s a smarter choice for you to keep that $0.35 in your pocket, since quick product pictures provide you with little or no selling leverage in some markets. Specifically, I’m thinking of things like coins or maybe other collector’s items where the item condition goes much further than a small photo in terms of making a sale.

Buyers in categories like this already know exactly what they’re looking for, so spending $0.35 to show them again is simply redundant and unnecessary. On top of that, the buyers are going to be more concerned with the larger pictures that you can provide within the auction listing itself, so that’s where you need to focus your efforts.

The second, and probably most potent, listing upgrade that you can use to your advantage is the Gallery Featured option. This expensive add-on (it costs $19.95) is a shoo-in for driving traffic to your listing because it places your item at the top of the search results in your product category. One thing to consider, however, is the category in which you’re listing your item. Some categories are far more competitive than others, so $19.95 over here may not be as valuable as $19.95 over there.

While it’s a powerful tool for generating traffic and making a sale, the Gallery Featured option is most effective when used intelligently. Particularly, I enjoy using this when I have a decent sized inventory of items that I want to sell in a Buy It Now format. Using this technique, I was able to roll through 50 items (at $7.99 apiece) in 5 days and 1 hour — 1 hr and 23 minutes short of my chosen 7 days! A friend of mine sold 39 bumper stickers, which he manufactured, for $13.99 apiece in only 7 days!

If you have something that people want, choosing the Gallery Featured option is one of the most effective ways of “blowing out” your product. Although I set my price at a point that I knew would get people jumping on the incredible deal, you don’t necessarily have to set a bargain basement price in order to get this type of listing to work to your advantage.

It’s really all about exposure, and I think you should simply resort to using common sense in order to maximize the effectiveness of the Gallery Featured option.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the use of this upgrade solely as a traffic generator within eBay. Let’s say that I’m selling Christmas ornaments that retail for $6.99. If I chose a Gallery Featured option for one of these things, I would almost be guaranteed to lose money on the deal, because my listing alone would cost me $0.25 + $19.95 = $20.20! The odds of a $7 item getting bid up to $20+, although not unheard-of, are simply not very good.

On the other hand, though, I’m a savvy seller, and I know that coughing up some money on this one listing is going to triple my traffic at my 50 other ornament listings. This, in turn, is going to help me sell 75% or more of my other auction items, and I’m going to make way more money than I would have made if I hadn’t Featured that one listing.

It’s advertising, and I’m here to tell you that it works on eBay…So use it!

After reading that, you’re probably thinking, “wow, that’s a no-brainer,” and you’d be right! However, the truth is that many, many categories in eBay are “underserved,” meaning that a majority of the sellers are not savvy enough to take advantage of a wonderful tool like the Gallery Featured listing.

Of course, categories like ipods and Xbox 360s are going to be awash with featured listings, but tell me…why in the world would you want to mess with a category like that?? Your margins are essentially fixed, and the competition is fierce — hardly the kind of thing from which you’d want to try and build a sustainable business. Remember, that’s why we’re here.

Anyway, now that we’ve looked at the two most powerful listing upgrades, it’s time to move on to a third, less-heralded one, the subtitle. At $0.50 a pop, the subtitle is not something that should be used too loosely, but at the same time, intelligent use can lead to many more views for your products. I look at subtitles as an opportunity to gain more search traffic for your listing. By choosing the right words for your subtitle, you can significantly increase the scope of your product’s “web.”

To illustrate, let’s say you’re selling a memory cartridge for a PlayStation 2 game console. Well, thanks to demographics and colloquialisms, a simple memory cartridge can become a “packet,” a “card,” a “pack,” a “stick,” a “chip,” or probably a bunch of other terms I haven’t even heard of yet. Since you only have 55 characters in your default Title tagline, you may not be able to include all of these colloquial terms. Enter the Subtitle upgrade! Once you’ve added the upgrade, include something like this: “memory card, memory stick, memory chip, memory packet, memory pack.” You’ll gain more search traffic, and you’ll probably beat out the guy who lucked into writing “memory chip” in his listing title.

Finally, I’m going to close by touching on some of the other upgrades that I’ve deemed less effective. Namely, I’ve dissed Bold, Border, and Highlight, because they simply don’t provide much market separation in your typical, everyday product categories, and they’re expensive to boot! In order to be thorough, I need to mention that the only time to really use any one of these three upgrades is when you’re listing a product (probably a one-off) in a highly competitive category. If you’re selling a 20 gb ipod that’s a year old but in MINT condition, then you may want to highlight your listing (for 5 freakin’ dollars) in order to really grab the attention of potential buyers. Honestly, I think these three less-effective upgrades can be summarized in the following way: if you need to go out of your way to achieve product separation, then use them. Otherwise, steer clear, and save up for that Gallery Featured listing down the road.

Be a smart lister, and dust your would-be eBay competition with ease!