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Using eBay: What Can I Sell?

You can sell almost anything on eBay -- almost, but not quite. You can't sell illegal items, like illicit drugs, or government-controlled products like liquor, tobacco, guns or prescription drugs. You can't selllock-picking tools or surveillance equipment likewiretaps or hidden cameras. You can't sell human body parts or remains, like your extra kidney (that's been tried) or your dead uncle's foot, and you can't sell something that doesn't exist in some concrete form -- for instance, you can't sell your soul to the highest bidder. An eBay user named David Finn tried that and got shot down. Just for a glimpse into the complex nature of running a site like eBay, here's an excerpt from the letter Finn received from an eBay representative regarding the decision to pull the plug on his auction:

If the soul does not exist, eBay could not allow the auctioning of the soul because there would be nothing to sell. However if the soul does exist, then in accordance with eBay's policy on human parts and remains we would not allow the auctioning of human souls. The soul would be considered human remains, although it is not specifically stated on the policy page... Source: http://www.randi.org/jr/121203jref.html

For a complete list of no-no's, see What items may not be sold on eBay?. If your item is not listed anywhere in that section, it's probably okay to sell. The author has a refurbished Samsung Yepp MP3 player that she bought on eBay a couple of years ago and never uses. That's definitely OK to sell. In the next section, we'll list this MP3 player on eBay.

Using eBay: Selling Items

We are going to try to sell a refurbished Samsung Yepp MP3 player on eBay. To sell something on eBay, you don't need much -- a few descriptive details is about all it takes. And if your item is in tangible form, it's good to have a picture of it. If we click the "Sell" button at the top of the homepage, we arrive at the first step in the listing process:

We don't have an eBay Store, so we're not going to be selling at a fixed price. And we're not advertising real estate. So we're going to choose "Online Auction." The next step is to choose the category we want our item in. MP3 players definitely belong in the consumer electronics category.

At the bottom of this page, we can choose to list our item in a second category for an additional fee, but Consumer Electronics is the obvious place for buyers to look for an MP3 player, so we'll just stick with that. On the next page, we'll choose "MP3 Players" as our subcategory, "Samsung" as the brand and "Yepp" as the model.

Now it's time to describe the MP3 player we're selling.

The field for the freestyle item description is at the bottom of the page. You don't need to know HTML unless you want to do something fancy with your description (see How Web Pages Work to learn HTML). If your description will look fine as a block of text, you don't need any HTML tags at all. If you want any font changes or spaces between paragraphs, you can use this simple HTML template, which includes a header setup and a few paragraph tags:

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 810