Keeping the Home by Lori Seaborg

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Selling Homeschool Books & Curriculum on eBay

Summer is the best time to sell homeschooling books and curriculum on eBay! The time is now!

I had some extra Sonlight and A Beka curriculums lying about that I was not going to use anymore, so listed them on Sunday. We've sold items on eBay for several years now. We used to sell regularly (garden plants!), but now we just use our account for the times when we have something extra on hand to sell.

To keep this article short, I will not go into how to sell on eBay. Instead, I'll focus on how to get the most from selling homeschooling items.

Sunday is eBay's busiest day. List your item on Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening, for best results. Always keep other time zones in mind, if you hope to sell to them, too (eg. If you are in California, don't list at 9pm or you might miss all the Eastern Time Zone customers who are already in bed!)

Homeschool items get top price in June-August, with July being the best month for selling your items. You may sell all year round, but will get a better price in the Summer when parents are shopping for the upcoming school year.

Use eBay's free download, Turbo Lister, to create your auctions. This is entirely optional, but TurboLister is easier to use than eBay's forms, and you can upload all of your auctions at once, and at the time that you prefer. In the "old days," we had to list an auction as soon as we finished creating it. Now, I can create several auctions and list them at once. Why is that cool? Because then my customers are more likely to purchase from my other auctions, since they are ending at the same time and not later.

TurboLister lets you create different fonts and font color (just as you do with a word processor, or while creating a blog entry). You don't want your auction to be hard to read, but changing the fonts around keeps the auction interesting and more professional-looking.

Here is a link to one of my current auctions, so you can see how I chose to use the different font options.

If you are selling books that go along with a curriculum, you may want to consider grouping them and selling them as a unit. On eBay, individual books, unless they are valuable or unusual, do not sell particularly well. Do a few searches on completed auctions (see below), to find out if you would make more money selling them individually or as a unit.

This is my most important tip: Do your homework! When I wanted to sell a Sonlight Year 3 Instructor's Guide this weekend, I needed to know how well that item had been selling. I did a search from eBay’s home page. My search was written as:

Sonlight 3 (Instructor's Guide, IG, Curriculum, Plans)

My search words told the system to find any auctions with the words Sonlight + 3 + a CHOICE of the words in the parentheses (Instructor's Guide and/or IG and/or Curriculum and/or Plans) in the auction title.

Look at the current auctions (those listed in the search results) and note their current prices. Also note how many bids they have received so far (this tells you if they set a low initial price or a high one) and note how many “watchers” they have (these are people who are “watching” the auction and may bid on it later). These auctions are what will be the competition for your auction.

Now you need to see how well other auctions did in the past. Keep your words (eg. Sonlight 3 (Instructor’s Guide, IG, Curriculum, Plans) in the search box. Look at the left column under "Search Options" and click the box next to "Completed Auctions." Press "Show Results."

When the search results come up, you will see the Completed Auctions for items with the words contained in your search.

Write down the prices that the seller received and the title that the seller gave their auction. The latter is very important!

When I typed in "Sonlight 3 IG," there were 3 results. When I typed in "Sonlight 3 Instructor's Guide," there were 5 results. Most of the results were not from the same auction. I don't want to lose the buyers who type in "IG" instead of "instructor's guide," so I will try to fit both into my auction title.

As I said, THE TITLE IS VERY IMPORTANT! On eBay, when someone enters text into the regular search box, they are doing a search on the TITLE of the auction.

The title is NOT the place to say, "Fantastic Homeschool Curriculum!" Perhaps the word Curriculum will be searched, but if someone types "Sonlight 3 instructor's guide" in the search box, your auction will not show up for them, even if you are selling that item. You may likely lose the sale because of this. (a note: yes, the buyer can do an advanced search and still find your curriculum, but most buyers do not do advanced searches, so you really must make the title count!)

Remember abbreviations, too. For example, many who search for instructor’s guides type in "IG" instead.

The title needs to be composed of words that you think will get searched on. My title for my Sonlight curriculum ended up being:

Sonlight 3 Core Instructor's Guide IG American History

Keep spelling mistakes in mind! Many people mistakenly write "Abeka" instead of "A Beka" (the company was named for Beka Horton, so the books are A Beka Books). Knowing that is a common misspelling, I titled my A Beka auction as:

A Beka Abeka Arithmetic 1 Curriculum Lesson Plans

I would have loved to add "math" to that title, but there wasn't room and I felt the other words were more important to the searches after doing my homework on completed auctions.

One more very important tip: You MUST have a photo. If you do not put a photo up on the auction, you will sell the item for much less money.

I don’t purchase any of eBay’s options except one: I always purchase “Gallery” for a few extra cents. When you purchase Gallery, your photo is displayed on the search results page. This is an eye-catching feature.

Please let me know in the Comments if you have any questions! I’ll be happy to help you out!

by Lori Seaborg 2006