I was really interested in online business since the Internet started. I got involved with eBay trying to make money selling various items as soon as I graduate high school and into college. I’ve been an avid golfer since I was a kid and my entire family is kind of the same way. Two of the first majors fall on two holidays, Easter (The Masters) and Father’s Day (The US Open), and about 10 of us gather around the television before we eat to watch the awesome golfing action. So, it was naturally for me to want to sell golf clubs on eBay.
I found some old clubs in my garage and started playing around with selling them. I made some decent money for an 18 year old kid, cleaned out the garage, but my inventory was now gone! I had to find a way to buy the clubs then resell them on eBay. I began to research the market and found that there was a large price gap for clubs selling on eBay. For example, the same new Titleist golf driver would sell for $325 at one time and $200 at another time. There had to be a reason why there was this huge price gap, right? If I could figure it out then I could exploit the market and make a good profit.
I found tons of trends for both buying low and selling high. Items that ended in the middle of the week in the early morning almost always sold for less than those ending on the early evening of a Sunday. Finding the low prices was really easy, but I had to learn how I would get the highest prices possible. I found that close up pictures in the direct sunlight with a white sheet in the background produced awesome pictures and made my items look much more appealing. Also, I found that starting all of my items at a penny with no reserve brought tons of bidders, creating a bidding war, and drove my prices up pretty high. But the thing that really drove the price up high was the number of people that viewed the listing or hits on the item. But how could do I get tons of hits on my item?
I began doing some more research and played with the search results and found that the criteria for search results were based solely on the keywords in the title. They would limit your characters for the title to 55, so what I would do was maximize that space with as many relevant keywords as I could think of. My strategy for keywords was to start narrow and then go broader and broader. For example, I would start with the products name, serial number, etc. An example of what a golf club product would be a “Titleist 907T.” Then I would go broader and ask what kind of a club it was. Was it a driver, wood, iron, wedge, or a putter. It’s a driver. Then I would go broader again and ask what are they? They’re clubs. And one more time, what sport is it? It’s golf. So, that would create a title that looked like this, “Titleist 907T Driver Golf Clubs.” That title alone would give me tons of more hits because people would look for something like “Titleist Driver” and my item would show up. They would search for “907T Golf Clubs” and mine would show up.
But there was one more thing that I could do to the title to make it better. eBay also didn’t lump together plurals or different syntaxes in the search engines. Meaning if someone searched for “Titleist Golf Club” and my title was “Titleist Golf Clubs.” My item wouldn’t show up. Also, if someone searched for “907T” and in my title I had “907 T” my listing wouldn’t show up. This kind of stinks that they didn’t have this fixed because, there are tons of people that don’t understand this and they get virtually no hits resulting in their item not selling for hardily anything (I loved these people though, because I bought my entire inventory from them!). So, what I would do with my title was include all plurals and multiple syntaxes. Now my title would become something like, “Titleist 907T 907 T Driver Drivers Golf Club Clubs.”
What were the results like? Well, a normal listing for a club like this on eBay would get about 150 to 200 hits at the time and I was averaging anywhere from 1500 to 2000 hits!! With the low fees then, I could make money off of virtually any item I bought on eBay. I stayed faithful to golf clubs though because it was my passion and would sell about 20 to 30 items a week. I did this consistently for about 3 summers making anywhere from 10 to 15 thousand dollars.
I knew the market so well that I found a company that was so terrible at creating listings and I would prey on them every week because they sold tons of clubs. As soon as they listed an item, I would list the exact same item(even though I didn’t have it), just with better tactics. I would buy the item from that company for a cheap price because I knew when they first listed it that it wouldn’t go for much. Then, my item would sell a day later, and I would have that company ship it directly to the winner of my auction! Pretty sneaky but it worked every time and before long I didn’t even need to have inventory!!
So, how did I change eBay forever? There are tons of people making good money on eBay. A few years from when I first started I was still selling a good amount of clubs but I noticed that my profit wasn’t quite as high as it used to be. I was still making decent money but I wasn’t “killing it” with as much ease as I was before. My hits per item dropped down to around 500 and I had to start investigating what was going on. I went to listan item on eBay one day and I saw that they had a new feature in the golf club market and golf club market only. When listing your item you now had two options, the standard way or the pre-file way. So, I decided to see what the pre-fill way was all about. It took me through a bunch of category listing (golf clubs>driver>titleist>907T) that would bring me to the exact item I was selling. When I choose what my item was it took me to the title and description page, where I would put in my formulated title. But it was different than the normal way in one huge way. The title was already filled in for you. But the crazy thing was the title followed my EXACT formula for my listings! As you can imagine I was really upset because it totally took my advantage away.
The next day, I actually called eBay and asked them about the situation. I played dumb and pretended like I was an idiot that couldn’t make it through the selling interface. I asked them, “What’s this, pre-fill information? Why would I want to use that?” The representative explained to me that they had done some research in the golf club market because it was so big and they wanted to help people get higher prices for their listings. They found that this formula for item titles produced the best result. What a bunch of crap!! They saw who was getting the highest prices, me, and copied what I did and made accessible for everyone. eBay probably made so much more money each year from that simple formula that I created because the average selling prices when way up.
In the next few years I got creative and found another way to work around this in the golf club market to still turn a good profit, but it was never as easy as it was before they copied my formula! Selling other items, I noticed that they use the pre-fill information in an others markets outside of golf. By using this method eBay has to make millions more each year. It would be nice if they just gave me one for the idea!
