Pictures are vital to your selling success on ebay. With the rising costs of ebay listing fees, and Paypal handling fees, it is important to find ways to lower your costs to make more profit.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PICTURES

Sometimes it just doesn't matter what you put in your description. You spend a lot of time to make a nice looking listing, full of information and details about your item. Then you start getting the bidders questions. Questions that are needless, had they taken the time to read the listing that you spent so much time putting together. What is the fabric content?....What is the length of the skirt?.....How much is shipping to California? All of which you have already included in your description.

That is why your pictures are so important. The first attract the bidders attention. Gallery photos are necessary for this purpose. Once a bidders attention is peaked, they will then pull up the listing looking for more pictures. It is important to have several good photos to browse. Different angles, fronts and backs, tags or labels, close ups and distance all to show the best features of your item.

Ebay allows you one photo fro free. Since pictures are so important to the success of your listing, it can get very expensive to add more photos through ebay. There is no getting around the expense of the Gallery photo, but you can add as many pictures as you like in the description area of your listing for free, as long as you have a host for your pictures. Please read on and don't be discouraged. This is very easy to do, and saves you a lot of money.

THIRD PARTY HOSTING

EPS is ebays website for hosting your auction photos, but you can use other websites too. When not using ebay hosting for auctions, it is called third-party hosting because the hosting is off site. If you already have a website, that is the place to host your pictures. Many people will discover that they have personal web space from their internet service provider, a rather common example is AOL, and those sites may allow you to use your space for auction photos. Then there are sites that are dedicated to hosting images, where you can have your own personal account.

When using third-party hosting, you will want to be aware of the storage limits and broadband limits. Storage is the amount of disk space allocated for storing all of your images and files. You can delete old images and add new ones to manage your storage space, but the images must remain untouched on your host site for the duration of the auction if you want those images to continue to appear in the auction. If you delete a photo off your host before your auction ends, you will be deleting the photo from your listing also.

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your images generate for the server storing the images. Using a few images in a few auctions with normal traffic of around 30 hits per auction is pretty nominal bandwidth usage, and most hosts will support that. But Power Sellers with a lot of items, or auctions with a lot of hits, like motors auctions, can quickly run over the daily bandwidth limit allowed by the image host. You may find your images disappearing from your auctions during busy periods if your bandwidth is exceeded. Most of the image hosts have upgrade options for more storage and bandwidth.

A GOOD EASY HOST

I use Photobucket. The tools are very simple and easy to use. You get a FREE 25MB account and if you want to upgrade, prices are as little as $2.00 a month. I have never gone over my usage, but I do have three seperate accounts set up so I can avoid andy additional fees or upgrading. I just have to remember which account I have uploaded my pictures to! It is literally a point and click website, very easy to use and the picture quality is excellent. Photobucket even has a tutorial showing you how to upload your pictures to your ebay listing.

INSERTING FREE PICTURES ON YOUR LISTINGS

Once you have your photo hosting account set up, and your images uploaded to the host site, you are ready to add the HTML code to your descriptions to have your pictures appear FREE in your ebay listing or auction.

To use third-party hosted images in your auction, the images are added to the description area, rather than using the image slots on the listing form. I like to write my description and place my photos beneath my description. You could just type the photo's web address into your description, but using the special HTML codes allow the images to actually appear on your listing page. If you use Photobucket, it will generate the code for you, whether you want one photo or five, and it is as simple as copy and paste. Best of all it is FREE!

You've heard the saying 'A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS'. THE PICTURES ARE WORTH EVEN MORE TO YOU ON EBAY, WHEN YOU CAN ADD THEM FREE!