eBay Sellers!  Here’s A Sneaky Way to Turn Something Few People Know About Into Something They Can't Wait to Own!
 

Some things seem never to sell on eBay, often because they have no obvious listing category and, as such, no one knows where to find them on eBay!  If no one knows where to find them there’s little chance of anyone bidding on them, and so those items languish on eBay even with potentially hundreds of interested bidders. Yet these items might interest hundreds of people and even start a bidding war. All you have to do is apply a few simple tricks of the trade. Here’s how:

A good example is topographical ephemera, such as prints, posters, maps and old guide books about specific towns and cities.  Offer an old postcard of some little known town or village and you could have dozens of people bidding to own it.  That’s because 'Postcards' is a huge category on eBay which thousands of people visit daily to key in place names to find new cards for their collection.  'Postcards' even has a Topographical sub-category which is further broken down by counties or states.  It's no big deal to find some postcards attracting double figure bidders.

But what about prints?  They're very collectable and often fetch far higher prices than their topographical postcard counterparts? But prints are not categorised in quite so tight a fashion as postcards, nor are topographical books, ephemera, posters and maps.  That means even the best topographical non-postcard items often go unsold.  That’s no big problem where potential bidders key their collecting area into eBay's search engines, where they'll find anything remotely connected with their topographical interest. But doing so could still run into many thousands of listings for related and unrelated items which might deter most of us from looking further.

There is an answer, and it’s a sneaky trick I use all the time:

The idea focuses on postcards, and the trick is to buy all the cheapest and most common topographical postcards you can find at boot sales, flea markets, collectors' fairs and yes, even on eBay. They’ll cost you cents apiece and almost certainly no one will even consider buying them on eBay. But they might if those common views are couple WITH a related topographical print listed under 'Postcards'.  That way, when people search Postcard topographical sub-categories for their collecting area they'll also see the print and are quite likely to buy. 

I told you this was sneaky, but it really works! I've seen this work well on countless occasions - I've done it myself many times.  I've also seen two items, listed together, start an almighty bidding war between two or more people wanting one or other individual item, many wanting both.

The technique works with all manner of items that lack an obvious selling category on eBay, but which are part of an overall collecting subject. For instance, the other day I wanted to list a small trinket box, made many years ago, and featuring a neat collage of early Australian postage stamps varnished on the lid. I was unsure where to list it: it doesn’t belong properly in eBay’s collectable stamps category, and it isn’t really an antique or a specific collectible type.

But I reckoned it would attract most interest among postage stamp collectors but there’s no obvious place there for novelty items. So I bought a bundle of early Australian postage stamps and postcards at a local flea market and photographed the entire caboodle along with the box and listed them under eBay’s collectibles categories for stamps and postcards. The payoff was huge and my listing attracted double figure bidders and fetch ten times the price I paid for those three items.