Why You Should Always Include Images In Your eBay Auction Listings - By Mike Paolieri

When you put a item up on sale on eBay don't forget to include some product images in your listing. By not doing so you will lose a lot of bids.

Even if you write a detailed description of your item, product images are still essential.

Despite your past history as eBay seller and even if you have a very positive feedback score, people are always somewhat reluctant to buy online due to the lack of a personal contact with the seller.

And I couldn't honestly say that this attitude is injustified because unfortunately eBay frauds do exist!

Images will help you demonstrate that you aren't hiding anything with regards to the quality of the product you sell.

Depending by the nature of the item you sell, several pictures from different angles can be the optimal choice.

eBay sellers often offer slightly defective items at a greatly discounted price. If this happens to you and even if you have well documented the item conditions in your listing, try to include a detailed picture of the flaw. You will show to a potential buyer that you are completely honest about the nature of the item you sell.

Selling tutorials available on eBay site will give you some tips on the best way to take picture of your eBay items with a digital camera or a scanner. They are very basic advices, but still useful if you are completely inexperienced with digital photography.

- Optimize your images

Images have also some drawbacks. You should always try to find a good compromise between details and image size as biggest images can considerably slow down your eBay listing page and make you lose some bids. Buyers are impatient and not everyone has a fast Internet connection.

Usually digital cameras or scanners are sold with a photo retouching software that allows you to convert images in a file format suitable for the Web (JPEG) and reduce the file size by reducing image dimensions or the number of colors.

- No broken images please

Nothing will drive potential buyers away from your eBay listing page more quickly than a broken image.

When you create your listing you are allowed to load images from your hard disk and store it on eBay server. This is the safest choice because your images will be surely available when people visit your listing.

But you can also include externally hosted images by using the HTML img tag in your listing.

If you choose to do so, be sure to host your image files with a reliable service. If the host where your images reside becomes inaccessible for any reason, eBay users visiting your listing will see a broken image.

If you run your own website you can save the images in a directory on your hosting account. Be aware that some web hosting services don't allow remote linking of images, i.e. using your host web space as a storage area for images you use on other sites, in this case eBay. This is usually true for free hosting services, so if you have a paid hosting account you should not have problems.

Alternatively you can utilize one of the many image hosting services.
You can find many of these services with a simple search on Google. Usually every site offers clear instructions that will make the entire procedure really simple even for the most inexperienced users.

Whatever is the service you use to store images for your eBay auctions always preview the listing page to be sure that images are displayed correctly.

An image is worth a thousand words. This is true also when you sell on eBay. Make good use of images in your auction listings and you will always receive more bids.

Mike Paolieri helps managing Arakne Links Directory ( www.arakne-links.com ) a human edited web directory listing quality websites categorized by topic including shopping and auction sites. All site submissions are reviewed, a reciprocal link is not needed to get listed.
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