eBay. Everyone knows the name whether they work in e-commerce or not. It’s a powerhouse that is synonymous with online shopping worldwide. Essentially eBay is an advertising agent whom you pay only for results. ie: you create a listing, they make it available to view to the masses and then when your item sells you pay eBay a % of the sale price for their service. What many people don’t seem to grasp -and why my eBay stores have historically been much more successful than my competitors- is that eBay will still charge you the same % (in most cases) whether your advertisement is wildly successful, or just barely makes a sale.
One of the ways I made sure my store listings destroyed the competition is by incorporating the use of video in my listings, a feature which even to this day still seems to be widely unused. It doesn’t cost you 1 cent more whether you have boring plain black and white text in your listing or a vivid, engaging informative exciting video selling your product. As far as I know, I was one of the first eBay sellers in Australia pushing this style of listing back in 2010. Yes, I’m sure there were many, many others doing it before me, but as far as a ratio of video/non-video eBay listings goes I would have been in the first 1% to take advantage of this feature.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Get a camera. (nowadays phone’s are good quality video anyway so you can use them). Then set up your product and either video yourself demonstrating how it works, or simply show in detail how it looks from multiple angles. You can either film this as 1 fluid shot or film a series of shots and edit them together. (There are even apps on phone which can now do basic editing for you!)
2. Upload your video to youtube.You don’t have to use youtube to host your video but I would highly recommend it for many reasons, here’s a just a few: Youtube video’s are compressed and play fast on most computers, youtube has ’embed-features’, people can accidentally stumble upon your video on youtube, people can share the video easily, youtube has editing software free for you to use, you can link your video to your advertisement or ebay store, it’s 100% FREE to use. The only viable alternative really is vimeo, for High Def but I’d still use youtube 100% of the time over vimeo.
3. Make some adjustments to your video. Here’s a couple of things I always like to add. If you have used your own professional editing software then you can probably skip most of this but for those of you who are non-tech savvy this is how you can make your video look a bit fancier easily. Youtube will allow you to adjust the lighting, add annotations (popup comments throughout the video) and clickable links (to your ebay store or listing is where you should send people!) you can also add royalty-free music from a wide variety of artists.
4. Allow embedding for your video. Make sure when you are editing your video to ‘allow embedding’ of your video. This is essential for you to make it a part of your eBay listings. It also means that if people want to share the video with their friends by embedding it then they can, which is good for you as it is essentially free marketing!
5. Copy your youtube video’s embed code. To copy and embed your youtube video simply go to the video’s url where you can watch it > Click SHARE > Click EMBED > Tick Use old Embed code > Copy the Embed code (ctrl +c). You can also make some customizations to how you would like your video to appear like change the physical size of it by adjusting the dimensions.
6. Put the video into your eBay listing. Edit your eBay listing in HTML mode. In this mode you can embed your video wherever you like within in the listing. Just paste the embed code you copied wherever you like! (ctrl+v) To see how it looks just switch between Standard and HTML view mode to get it to appear exactly as you like.
7. VOILA! Congratulations, you can now use the virtually unlimited free power of video in your ebay listings to destroy your competition and/or stand out from the crowd!
Want an example? One of the very first products I made a video for was Light Up Programmable LED belt buckles. It is essentially a belt buckle with LED lights on it and you can program the buckle to say whatever you like! (the video is crude and low quality but it was VERY effective!) With the use of video and a few other marketing strategies I sold my LED buckles at double the price of the competition, sold 300% more than without video and eliminated all my competitors from the market as they just weren’t making any sales! I filmed the video on an old, cheap digital camera by putting the buckles on my black bed sheet showcasing the different colours and their features then filmed it in 1 shot and followed the steps above. Here’s a link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRVd7uZDGhY
I Hope this article has helped some of you with your eBay stores. I’d love to hear from you if you have since implemented this to your listings.
By Aaron – Captain @ Recal Media
