Everyone knows what eBay is. Started in 1995 by a computer programmer, it is the world's largest online auction house. On eBay you can find whatever you want, no matter how strange or old it is.

Buying on eBay is a piece of cake. All you have to do is not be stupid and you'll end up with a cool thing that probably cost less than if you bought it in a store. Selling stuff though is a little more complicated. Some people might disagree with some of my methods, but that's because they have their own which is cool. Nobody sells the same way on eBay.

To start selling you need to have an eBay seller's account and a Paypal account. Paypal is technically optional, but it makes things so much easier when it comes to paying fees and accepting payments. EBay has all of its listings in different categories, which are separated by the type of item and how old it is. It helps to search for the thing you're selling first so you can get an idea of how much you want to sell it for, and what category to sell it in. After you choose a category, you have to describe your item. You do this with a title and a description. You can also have a subtitle, but I never use those because of the fees. In the title you want to give a brief description of your item, saying only good things about it. Don't say anything bad about it, the people interested can look at the description for bad things. There is a size limit on the title so you have to be brief. Try to abbreviate and use positive words, like "Good condition!" or "Works!" Once you get to the description, you can be more thorough in your description of it. The description is unlimited, so write as much as you can about the thing, but try to focus more on the good things about it than the bad. If there are a couple scratches on it, mention them casually and then move on. EBay descriptions also support HTML, so if you know that language you can make your listing look a little better than just plain text. Recently, I've started to put links to my personally hosted photo galleries, and I've even embedded Google Video into the description.

After you describe your item, you have to give eBay pictures of what you're selling. You have two options when it comes to pictures. You can upload your pictures to eBay for a small fee, or you can host them yourself for free. I don't know if you can use photobucket, but if you can then it would be a good way to get around fees. The problem with hosting yourself is that eBay doesn't give you a nice picture interface like they do when you upload to them. Unless you use Turbo Lister, or put the pictures in with HTML, the best you can do with multiple pictures is have them is a little slide show at the top of the auction page. This slide show will handle up to 8 pictures, and only the picture you specify as first will appear on both the slideshow and the picture at the bottom of the page. If you use Turbo Lister, which is a program you can download from eBay, you can use the description builder to automatically put all of your pictures in the listing, although they will be scaled down.

Once you're done with the pictures, you get to deal with pricing and shipping. Putting a price on your item can be tricky. You have to decide what the lowest amount you would want your item to sell, and then set this as your minimum bid. The fee structure for minimum bids is listed on eBay's help pages here. The fees you pay when you list the item are known as insertion fees. These fees are based mainly on how much your minimum bid is. The higher the bid, the more you'll pay in fees. Next is the shipping. Shipping can be one of the most stressful parts of the whole process, because you as a seller need to estimate how much the item will weigh when it's fully packed, and where it's going to be shipped to. I prefer to use the shipping calculator that eBay provides, but some buyers would rather have a flat rate for shipping. It's up to you what to do. To use the calculator, all you have to do is put in the weight the final box will weigh, and which services you want available to the buyer. When finding the weight, I always weigh the item and then add a pound or two to account for packing materials and the box and other things. The worst thing that can happen this way is the buyer pays a little extra for shipping, and you get a little more profit. It's better than underestimating and then you get stuck with paying too much for shipping after the buyer has already paid. The calculator will also allow you to specify an amount to add on to the shipping cost for shipping and handling. This should be a relatively small amount, and you are supposed to say something in your auction about how much you charge for that shipping and handling. The traditional way to complete a transaction is that the buyer pays, and after that the seller ships. Once the buyer has paid for the item with Paypal or whatever payment type they pay with, you need to ship the item and make sure that it gets to the buyer in the same quality as it was when it left you. When you ship a package, try to make it as tight as you can, but still have a bunch of padding in the box. If the item won't be able to bounce around inside the box, chances are that it won't break during transport. Of course, the item you're shipping has a lot to do with how well you pack it. If you're shipping something that is already pretty solid, you just need a good box and some newspaper and you're good to go. If the thing you need to ship is fragile, you're going to want to wrap it in some padded material along with a good sturdy box that won't let it bounce around.

Once you have shipped the item, you can go ahead and give the buyer feedback, or wait until you receive feedback from them. The comments you leave in your feedback is entirely up to you, some people like to describe what they liked about the transaction or how cute the item was. I usually don't worry about the feedback content, all that I worry about is whether the feedback is positive or negative.