Hardcover children books

Lot of 5 Hard Cover Childrens Books.


ended - Friday, March 28, 2008

Auction grade: C-

Starting bid: $0.99

Final selling price: $0.99


Up for sale in this eBay auction is a small collection of five hardcover books for children. Seeing the titles, it looks like these are for early children or those looking to help their kids start reading.

The title isn't bad, but it'll need a few changes to help draw in more potential buyers. First, I would combine "hard cover" into one word (hardcover) and also remove the "s" off of "childrens". A lot more people will search for "children" rather than "childrens". eBay does not consider the two words as being the same, so you'll have different search results depending on which version you use.

The seller will also benefit from having the following key words in their title: "early", "young", and "kids". "Books" is the most important key word, and any other relevant terms describing the target age would be helpful.

The auction's description is where the seller gets sloppy and inconsistent with their work. Four of the five listed titles are either misspelled or missing a word. Surprisingly, it looks like all of the author's names are spelled correctly.

"The Wind in the Willow" should be "The Wind in the Willows"

"Danny the Dinosaur" should be "Danny and the Dinosaur"

"Songs of Shiprock" should be "Songs of Shiprock Fair"

"The Horroble Book" should be "Horrorble Book"

Check your work before you post an auction!!!

Despite the stupid mistakes with the titles, I like how the seller listed the books and their respective authors. I also like how one of the books has a short little description. That's also where the seller is inconsistent with this auction. If you're going to tell us about one of the books, then why not also write a sentence telling us about each of the other books? Remember that you don't want to have your customers go somewhere else to research a title and see what the book is about.

The picture is pretty good and all of the books are visible in the image. It's just too bad that the camera's flash is reflecting off of the bottom book. That can be corrected through proper camera techniques.

Overall, this isn't that bad of an auction. The main reason for the low score is from the seller being sloppy and not checking their work. The picture is pretty good and the low starting bid should entice some people to place a bid. The $4.50 shipping cost is a fairly reasonable price for five hardcover children books.

The only serious issue is whether or not to sell books like this on eBay. Unless you have rare out of print, first edition, or autographed titles, it's hard to make money by selling used books on eBay. The best approach for selling common titles is to sell them by the lot in either random collections (like this one), or by a common author/genre/theme.

Movies for children

box of kids movie's


ended - Sunday, February 24, 2008

Auction grade: F-

Starting bid: $10.00

Final selling price: $0 - no bids


In this eBay auction, the seller is attempting to sell a box of VHS movies for children. This is exactly what it says:

"Box of kids movie's evrything from power rangers to disney features. For everyone in the family."

There's no picture of the movies, number of movies, or even a listing of the titles. The buyers are completely in the dark for this auction.

Major work needs to be done throughout this auction, starting up at the title. For starters, it's spelled "movies" (no apostrophe), and partial movie titles would be useful. The seller mentioned "power rangers" and "disney" in the body of the auction. Both of those would be useful in the title. I would even replace the word "box" with either "collection" or "LOT". Using the word "box" makes it sound less important to you, and therefore more like junk to other people.

As it was mentioned before, the seller needs to let us know exactly how many movies are for sale, and which titles are included in the set. Is this for a box of ten or fifty movies? One would be a better deal than the other.

A picture of the collection would also be a useful selling tool. People like to see the actual items for sale when buying things online. In this case, I would lay out the movies into a neat grouping and take a general picture of the collection. Unless one of the movies is rare and deserves special attention, extra pictures aren't needed.

Without knowing any details at all, the starting bid of $10 and shipping cost of $10 is very high. Considering the lack of demand for VHS, and movie rental stores selling used VHS tapes for dirt cheap, that $20 price could be used to support your local merchants. You could have more movies for your family within an hour and without worrying about shipping or trying to contact the seller if there's a problem.


Overall, this needs major work in every part of the auction. If you're going to spend the money for a seven day auction and $10 starting bid, you need to take the effort and physically type out the entire listing of movies. You also need to use a spell checker to catch most of the basic errors. Just because you've heard about other people making lots of money on eBay doesn't mean that you will too.

With an auction like this, you shouldn't have to ask the seller basic questions like "how many movies are in the box?" or "which titles are included?" Don't make the buyers contact you for information that should be clearly displayed in the auction.