Your new items aren’t selling on eBay? Try lowering the price…then make it higher than you had it!

Jason Guarino is the Author of the Part Time Selling series dedicated to helping eBay & Amazon sellers improve their experience on eBay & Amazon. His site and books offers advice for understanding how to source product to resell on eBay & Amazon as well as proper business practices to reach the eBay Top Rated Seller & Amazon Featured Merchant Status. He can be reached at PartTimeSelling.com.  His most popular book can be found at Part Time Selling: 90 Days to Online Success by Selling on eBay & Amazon.

 eBay has a bad habit of burring items that are freshly listed. Even if you are a Top Rated Seller, adding a new item to sell can mean waiting some time for it to gain any sales. If you have more than one of these items to sell, this can even be more frustrating. For this advice, I am going on the assumption that you have done your research on your item and can clearly see that your item sells by your competitors at your unsuccessful price point.

eBay rewards anything that sells. The more sales you have on a specific listing, the better exposure you will have when someone is searching for your item organically (typing that items title keywords into the search field). This is all thanks to Best Match, the eBay algorithm that determines who gets front and top placements within a search result. Many customers that search for something will only search the first few pages for the best deal. If they have 5,000 results, they are not going to go through hundreds of pages to find you. You need a way to stand out.

So how can we combat this? Simple, we lower our price. Search out your competitors and see what the lowest price the identical item is being sold for. Now, change your price to beat that price by a small amount. Many buyers will search for your type of item by changing the Best Match search results to Price + Shipping: lowest first. There they will see your item and make a purchase as it is the lowest price one.

As time goes on you will generate sales. eBay will see this and the algorithm will start to give you better placement with the Best Match search results. Start searching for your own item with some key words and use Best Match. When you see your item appear on the first page or two, you can start to SLOWLY increase your price. Just a little increase at a time and keep it there for a few days. Then a little bit more a few days later. Eventually you will be able to surpass your original price that you could not sell the item at.

Patience is always key here. Now if you sell out, be sure to use the RELIST button when you are restocked. If you do this within 2 weeks of the item being sold out, and don’t change the title, then you will retain the positive eBay algorithm data associated with the item.