03.21.06
The Ultimate eBay Selling Tip
Honestly, I was a little reluctant to post this tip simply because it is too good. Without a doubt this one suggestion trippled the number of bids to my auctions on eBay and I used it almost religiously. So what is it?
Use VIDEO in your auctions.
How much easier is it to sell something when you can actually SEE it? Now, this isn’t just limited to selling products. When I was selling web design services on eBay, I recorded myself giving a speech at my desk and then streamed the video directly within my auction text, and it couldn’t have been easier to do. Think about it. How much more effective would your auctions be if visitors could actually see a product being used in action, and watch you describe it. Below is a short clip from a recent trip to Quebec City as an example of video which you can stream. It was recorded on my Canon SD100 digital camera (only 3.2mp, and video @ 640×480).
So what’s the secret? Macromedia Flash MX 2005 or higher. Flash 2005 has a new feature which had not yet been introduced in prior versions: native streaming support.
First, you will need a video to stream. Show off your product being used, or deliver a speech to your audience. Many people are still afraid to purchase over the Internet, and this may be a way for you as a seller to gain their trust. Once you have your video prepared, you will need to use the Flash Video Encoder to convert from .MPG or .AVI to Flash Video (.FLV), which can then be streamed from any HTTP server.
In Flash, create a new project and drag the FLV Playback Player onto your stage. Then set the contentPath to equal the file name of the generated FLV file. Then save your project to a known destination, and afterwards hit SHIFT-F12 to publish your streaming video player.
You’re done! You can now upload the generated HTML and SWF files to your destination server.
Now that you have your streaming files generated, you will need to insert some HTML code into your auction to stream the video. Firstly, make sure that all of the generated SWF files are available on a public server. Next, open up the generated HTML file and view it in Notepad. Copy everything within the object tags. Now in the eBay auction editor, switch to HTML mode, and paste the Flash code in the place you would like the video to appear.
You’re done! Not too painful, was it? And now you just greatly improved your auction.
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Steve Gill said,
March 21, 2006 at 9:32 am
That’s a great idea - differentiating yourself from the crowd is always a good way to not only increase viewings but also increases the perceived value of the product.
The only deterent for this specific way of adding video to your auction is that your hosting/server can take a hit if you get a flood of viewers. Drawing lots of eyes to an auction is always a good thing, but a 1 or 2 meg video can eat up resources pretty fast if you start getting 1000s of visitors (i.e. someone mentions it on a popular and related discussion group or for some reason it goes viral), especially simultaneous video streaming…
Another option would be to have the video hosted at one of the relatively new video host sites out there - including Google, Youtube, etc. Once you upload the video, most of those sites offer an html code that can be cut and pasted right in the auction page. That way the video streams from THEIR server and not yours, which saves money and lessens the chance of downtime (if you suddenly use up all your alloted bandwidth for the month).
That’s my 2 cents - but either way, adding video to an auction is an excellent idea!
Steve — Sorry about that. I had to do some maintenance and needed to remove your comment for a moment.
Nice article..
You have a nice blog!
I am pretty sure ebay doesn’t like people actually streaming the video directly in their auction listing. They might not notice as easily if it’s a SWF since lots of people have flash pics in their auctions. I would recommend checking ebay’s recent announcements/rules about video. The last time I read them they seemed to say you can only LINK to the youtube/google video which, in my opinion, would decrease the numbers of people actually viewing the videos.
Thanks for this great plugin! Works fine - only my old PDA doesn’t understand UTF-8 - most blogs are coded like this - so special characters aren’t displayed correctly.