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How to Sell Jewelry on eBay (Part 1)

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Why sell on eBay?

Do you want to sell fine jewelry on eBay but don’t know where and how to start?

eBay is one of the world’s largest marketplaces. Selling on eBay means that you’ll have access to 175 million buyers all over the world. If you’ve just started your jewelry business or you’re new to selling on online marketplaces, selling jewelry on eBay can be a massive opportunity. We’ve created this 2-part guide on how to sell jewelry on eBay specifically for new users such as yourself. Everything you need to know from listings to optimizations. So read along and find out!

How to sell on eBay

Selling on eBay is much easier than it seems. There are very little barriers to entry. To sell on eBay, you must first set up an eBay account. If you are serious about selling jewelry on eBay, we recommend you set up a business account. To set up your eBay business account, simply:

1. Go to the Registration page.

2. Select “Business account”.

3. Enter the required details and select Register.

4. Verify your account via email

Once you have registered your account, you will now need to set up a payment method. You can choose from PayPal, debit or credit card.

The next part is to complete your eBay profile. This is critical as an online jewelry seller where you will need to build trust with your potential customers. Complete your eBay profile with information on yourself including credentials and trade experience. Make sure the information you complete is within eBay’s guidelines. In particular, avoid promoting the sale of items outside of eBay and sharing your personal contact details.

We also recommend subscribing to eBay Stores. Starting from only $4.95/mo with an annual subscription, you can brand your jewelry business creating a customizable storefront. Subscribers also have the added benefit of free listings and optimized listings, which something we will touch on later. To see the full list of benefits, you can check out eBay’s Stores page here.

Listing your jewelry

Before you start listing your jewelry, you will need to decide on the number of products you will be selling on eBay. Initially, we recommend you listing a smaller number of jewelry items as it is easier to manage. The listing process itself is quite simple, and if you are using existing e-commerce software such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magneto, Woocommerce, etc., you can sync all of your jewelry products to eBay with a few clicks. Alternatively, you can bulk import a CSV file with your products directly into eBay. To find out more about creating a listing on eBay, check out eBay’s own comprehensive guide here.

Jewelry Photography

This is undoubtedly the most grueling and time-consuming part of the listing process. However, if done properly at the start, you will reap the benefits in the long run. It is possible to reuse the images you have uploaded to your website, however, you should review your images to make sure they fall within the eBay image guidelines. eBay is quite relaxed when it comes to uploading product images. The minimum requirement is one of the following image formats – JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, or BMP, 500 pixels on the longest side and under 7MB per image. eBay recommends 1600px on the longest side to optimize for mobile and a non-distracting white background for your products. You can find eBay’s full listing image guide here, and our guide to optimizing eBay images here.

How to Speed Up Your Jewelry Photography Process

In a previous post, we wrote about how much jewelry photography was costing your business. In this post, we’ll go one step further and discuss the best practices you can use…

If you are new to jewelry photography, don’t worry as being experts in the field, we have written many jewelry photography how-to-guides to get you up and running. Jewelry photography is notoriously difficult because jewelry is very small with reflective properties as well as gemstones producing different colors under different lighting conditions. Jewelry photography is not so much about the camera and lens you use. 90% of the quality in your images is determined by your lighting environment. Therefore, your photography setup must be specifically arranged to capture all the details while bringing the best out of your jewelry. It can be very tricky to create the perfect lighting environment for jewelry, and as such why jewelry photographers charge a premium for their photography service.

eBay also offers 12 free images to be uploaded with every product. Use this to your advantage – the more quality images you have, the more confidence and trust you can convey. If you look at the top sellers on eBay, there is a common trend. That’s right, you can see that they utilize the 12 free images for their products. Therefore if you want to stand out from your competition, use more images.

Multiple angles of your products are especially important when selling high-value goods such as fine jewelry where there is very limited communication between the buyer and seller. There is an alarming statistic that 30% of all products that are bought online are returned for varying reasons. Among these reasons is how the products received look different from the original photos. Multiple images of your jewelry product reduce the rate of returns because your shoppers will have a better and clearer understanding of their purchase and set a proper expectation, saving you from losing big money in the long run.

It can get quite expensive to pay for a photographer for quality images, especially when you have many jewelry products with multiple angles to shoot. Very quickly, your photography budget could get out of hand.

Watch the video below to find out how we used the GemLightbox to capture three killer jewelry e-commerce shots in seconds.

How Much is Photography Costing Your Jewelry Business?

It’s no secret that jewelry photography can be extremely resource-draining for your jewelry business. If you’re doing it yourself, there’s a massive learning curve for the use of your camera…

The next step is to retouch your images. Retouching is a common practice in e-commerce where your products are clipped onto a white background, imperfections and blemishes are removed, and standardized for consistency. Retouching is a very important aspect of your jewelry photography because 75% of all sales are lost due to poor images. Don’t miss a sale because your images weren’t good enough! You can do the retouching yourself by following our guide here, or pay a retouching expert to do this for you. Picup Media can provide retouching for your eBay store requirements. With a lightning-fast 72hour turnaround, your eBay store will be up and running in no time. Picup Media also offers a free trial image which can be accessed here.

Read part two here for creating and optimizing your product listing!

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