In creating an eBay auction, it’s very important to take time and care in your presentationon the goods on offer. After all, anything that looks shabby or messy is certainly going to seem less valuable to a critical public that are considering parting with their hard-earned dollars. In this chapter, we’ll go over anything you need to know to make the best possible impression and really tap into your customer’s desire for the product.
This is a shoe. It wasn’t always looking this pretty, it took some work to improve its appearance. This shoe is one of a pair, but this is the more damaged of the two ( the other being prestine) so I have chosen to use this photo-as it is the most honest first view the bidder is going to get. It is actually quite an old shoe, picked up at an opportunity shop for a grand total of $6 for the pair-I suspect that this pair is worth quite more than this, as it is from a well known company (Windsor Smith) and is over 30 years old, so if nothing more it is a well kept piece of history. My first task for selling this item was to make a nice cover photo for the page. What you see above is the end result. To take this photo, I arranged my shoe nicely on a piece of cow-skin rug (to make a good background) and angled my camera nicely. I’ll go into that later, but first I’ll ty and illustrate a point by showing you a few of my failures.
Failure number one is intentional, to illustrate a point. You get a lot of photos like this on eBay, and they’re often worse than this one. Not only does this photo show very little of the subject in question, but it has two other important problems with it. First of all, there are other bits and pieces in the background. This is messsy. Try and set your photo so that the background is one consistant background (like the rug in the photo) and nothing else unless it is related to the object being broadcast. Second, and I feel slightly more importantly, this shows off the worst qualities (those that exit, anyway, this is a fairly good quality item) of the item in question. It shows the slight wear and tear on the front of the shoe, and what looks to be a cut in the side of the shoe. Try and find an angle that shows off whatever problems the item has, but doesn’t make them look any worse than they are-but most importantly, makes the good qualities far outweigh the problems!
With failure number 2, I just took a very quick snap. A lot of people on eBay like to take this approach to selling their items, and very few will get a good price for their item, if they get money for their item at all. I could go on and on forever about the bad qualities of this photo, but I’ll keep it short and sweet-you should be seeing a pattern here-the background is not constant (part of the door and floor are showing), and there are assorted bits and pieces all around the item distracting it from being the subject of the photo. But another important point about this photo that the first failure didn’t have-it isn’t close to the item, which means you don’t get a good look at it. And because you can’t see the item very well, it doesn’t deliver the best impression.
The last failed photo experiment is getting similar to the end product photo, but there are again some important omissions. First of all, it is horizontally laid out, which doesn’t add a whole lot to the picture. If you turn the item a bit so that it takes up more of the photo from corner it corner (nicely taking the entire frame over, not just most of it), it adds depth and flavor to the photo. You’ll notice the way the light in the end photo climb the length of the shoe nicely, making the shoe look sparky-this is also due to the turn of the shoe. Amazing how much difference a little turn makes, isn’t it? Now, the other problem with this photo ( which I have more or less avoided because it is so blatantly obvious) is that the photo is blurry. Very blurry. A lot of eBay sellers don’t bother to a photo that is not blurry, and with modern photo cameras I’m not surprised-auto-focusing can be quite troublesome. Work on it, it’s certainly worth the bother.
Once you have your photo near perfect, pop it into Photoshop (or ‘The Gimp’ graphics editor) and play around with the levels. Particularly if you are using a flash, the image might look a little washed out. In Photoshop, you can do this quite easily by applying Auto Levels (found under Image>Adjustment) which ninety percent of the time will do a fairly good job making the photo look nicely balanced. If you are feeling experimental, you can try batch-applying an action to a large amount of photos, but we’ll get to that later. Other things you can do to your end product photo are fairly tedious if you want to be a perfectionist. It’s not worth that level of effort, unless you are doing one photo for a line of the same product. So a quick fiddle with the levels is just the right amount of post processing necessary. Once you’re done fiddling, adjust the image size so that it doesn’t end up too large (try to keep the image around a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 for a high detail eBay photo) and then save it in a JPEG file.If you like, you canpaly around with the JPEG “quality” settings (which refer to image compression) so that you might get a slight bit of artifacting but a much smaller file. The smaller the end file is, the faster it loads and the less worries you have about hosting it.
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