Welcome to the November 2004 edition of the Auction Orbit newsletter. Within each newsletter you will find a variety of auction-related content including site updates, online auctions in the news, selling and buying tips, and more! If you would like to suggest a new topic for future newsletters or wish to make a comment about anything found within this particular issue, do not hesitate to contact me.

Allow me to once again apologize for not releasing the October issue of this newsletter. Over the past few months I have been working hard at revising a lot of different pages on the Auction Orbit website. For example, many of the links within the 'Free Resources' section of Auction Orbit were invalid or out-dated, so I went through each of those pages and replaced all of the invalid entries with fresh sources and reviews. Also, I am working on revising the 'Tips and Tricks' section to include all of the tips discussed in the newsletters.

Currently, I am working on several quality tutorials that will be completed within the next couple of weeks. The first tutorial will explain how to use the freeware application IrfanView to enhance and manipulate your photographs so they are optimized for online auction sites. In the tutorial, I will walk through the steps required to download and install the software, and then explain step-by-step how to perform 10 different functions using this free application. There will be plenty of screenshots and easy-to-follow steps explaining how to open, resize, brighten, change the color hues, and optimize images for the web (and more).

Some other tutorials that I will be releasing shortly are not auction-specific but still prove to be important when using such sites. One tutorial will describe how to clear your Internet cache using all of the major browsers, and another guide will explain all of the special HTML tags you can use to insert special symbols into your auction descriptions. I will also be focusing my attention at releasing some other tutorials covering steps that need to be taken to resolve some common problems that occur while using eBay or other auction sites.

EBay has recently opened a new area up on its USA site titled, 'eBay Pulse'. Upon entering the eBay Pulse, you will be able to select any eBay category and view intriguing statistics about that particular category. Sellers can use this page to observe what the hottest items are at the current time in any given category. If you are a buyer, you might also enjoy visiting the page to see what the most popular searches are for a specific category. On eBay Pulse, you will be able to find out the following statistics:

- Popular Searches
- Popular eBay Stores
- Popular Products (not available in all categories)
- Highest-Priced Items
- Most-Watched Items

NOTE: Some sellers are known to hide the most popular search terms within their listings in hopes of attracting more viewers to their items. This is known as 'Keyword Spamming' and if reported to eBay your auction(s) will be pulled. If caught using 'Keyword Spam' more than a few times, your account is likely to be suspended. Make sure that you do not include any unrelated words or terms in your listings.

Check out eBay Pulse at: http://pulse.ebay.com/?ssPageName=CMDV:AB

During the last couple of months eBay has added quite a few new capabilities and options for those that have an online eBay store. A list of some of the most major changes to eBay stores is presented below:

- More ways to showcase your Store items
- More accurate traffic for your Stores listings
- Better management for Store Inventory
- An eBay newsletter for store sellers (coming soon)
- Vacation Hold (let viewers know if your away)
- E-Mail Marketing (send your own newsletters)

There have also been some minor changes to the way searches can be performed on eBay. In addition, eBay has introduced some small changes to their recently added 'Buyer Hub' and acquired a Netherlands trading site to further expand their business.

The major shopping season is well-underway! Online sales have reached a record high this year and online transactions are expected to grow even more as the winter holiday quicklt approaches. An estimated five out of six people this year will make one or more online purchases between now and the end of December. Although online shopping is usually an enjoyable experience (no waiting in lines or fighting for carts), it is very important that you be extra careful when making such purchases. Along with online sales being at an all-time high, so is online fraud.

I have picked out a couple of different articles this month which each talk about the holiday season in conjunction with online fraud. It is a good idea to follow the suggestions given in the articles to ensure that you have nothing but safe and honest transactions.

http://rockland.villagesoup.com/Business/Story.cfm?StoryID=28556

http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/business/10268797.htm

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3441941

For the next few months I will be showcasing different online auction sites. Although eBay is definitely the most populated and well-known, there are many other similar sites out there - some of which have benefits over eBay's service.

This month I will be describing Overstock Auctions. Overstock itself has been around for quite some time and has been marketed well, and recently the site launched their own auction service much like eBay. Since Overstock was already popular before they launched the auction section, you will find that a fair portion of the auctions listed do receive bids. Some of the benefits of this service over eBay's include:

- Cheaper listing fees than eBay
- Over 15,000 people registered within the first week
- Faster loading pages and a cleaner interface than eBay
- Registration takes a matter of minutes
- Many categories of items to select from
- A 'feedback' rating system more precise than eBay's

If you are a user of Dominant Ad Creator, I should point out that ads you create with the software are roughly 90% compatible with Overstock Auctions. Unfortunately you cannot apply a page background to Overstock listings and the text will usually align to the left regardless of how it is aligned in your original ads. I encourage you all to try out this alternative auction service!

http://auctions.overstock.com

Each month I will provide one helpful auction tip or trick that will help sellers and/or buyers out while using online auction sites. An archive of previous tips and tricks can be found here. If you have a tip that you would like to display in the next newsletter, please send me a message and I will try my best to include it.

Using Google To Search Sections of eBay

Although many people may not be aware, it is possible to search through eBay's entire help system using the Google search engine. In fact, for several years now I have refused to use eBay's own 'Help Search' tool due to the overly-general results that were returned. Some of the other benefits for using Google to search eBay's own help system include:

- Results are returned much faster (fractions of a second)
- The most popular and relevant results are displayed first
- You can use all the standard query operators (+, -, "")
- More results are shown per page

To use Google to search through eBay's help system, simply insert the following line of text into the Google search field, and replace the 'keywords' with the actual query you want to search for.

site:http://pages.ebay.com keywords

It is important that there be no spaces on either side of the colon (:) or the results will not be accurate. After performing the search, Google will run through every page of eBay's help and return the most relevant matches to you. In addition, you can use the same technique to search through all of eBay's discussion boards, chat boards, and answer centers using Google. The correct queries to enter for each is listed below:

site:http://forums.ebay.com keywords

site:http://chatboards.ebay.com keywords

site:http://answercenter.ebay.com keywords