Model railroad dummy engine

N SCALE GP 38 DUMMY MINT NEW IN BOX SOUTHERN PACIFIC


ended - Saturday, April 5, 2008

Auction grade: B

Starting bid: $0.99

Final selling price: $0.99


Up for sale in this eBay auction is an N scale dummy train engine for use with model railroads. The seller claims that the engine is in mint condition and new in the box.

For model railroads, the N scale is the second smallest size of trains that people will build and have running around their home. The trains and scenery pieces are roughly 160th the size of their real life counterparts. This is ideal for people who have a limited amount of space but still want to enjoy this hobby, or those who want to build large and elaborate train sets without it completely taking over their home.

The auction's title needs some adjusting to help draw in more potential customers. Aside from not typing in all capital letters, the seller can also remove the "NEW IN BOX" part and just replace it with the common abbreviation NIB. Being in all caps with the rest of the title, "NEW IN BOX" isn't going to catch the person's eye, and most people won't search for that phrase when looking for more train parts. NIB or just "new" will work fine in its place.

In addition with that, the seller needs to find a way to add "train", "engine", and even "railroad" as key words in the auction's title. Remember that the default way of searching on eBay is just by looking at the titles, so you want to take advantage and have your listing exposed to as many relevant searches as possible. It doesn't cost you extra, and the more people that find your auction then the more likely you'll get a few bids.

The auction's description also needs to be rewritten. The bold print in all caps with unusual spacing needs to go. The seller did a good job listing information about the engine, but this looks very sloppy and unprofessional. Information about the engine itself should go in the first paragraph (or by using bullet points), and general information about model railroads should go into a second or even third paragraph, depending on your knowledge and experience on the subject matter.

Apart from fixing the title and description, the rest of the auction looks pretty good. The picture of the engine looks very good and I like how the seller added detailed information in the "item specifics" section of the auction.