The first question you have to ask is, “Am I getting any traffic to my web site?” You need a way to be able to track the amount of people that are visiting your site. If you do not have any people stopping by then, of course, you are not going to be making any sales. Thus, you need to find a way to get more people to come to your web site. More traffic = more profits to your online business. Its as simple as that. Website traffic is the blood of your online auctions business. After that you need to look at the quality of your leads. Even if you find out that you have a lot of people coming to your website, that does not mean that they care about your site, they may have ended up there by mistake. If this is the case then usually they will only spend a few seconds on that page. There are different tools that you can use to check and see how long people stay on your auctions site.

Now it’s time to take a look at your hosting service. This is one of the main things that can kill sales on your web site. If you have a slow hosting site, that means that your, web page is going to run slow, even for the world’s fastest computer. Thus, you may find out that people get sick of your website speed. They prefer to go to a different site that can get them in and out a lot faster. For online businesses time is money. Always remember that. Does your web site have a shopping cart, and if so, is it a fast shopping cart? This is another question you have to ask yourself, because if you do not have a shopping cart on your web site then you are killing the sales yourself. People love shopping carts, because they can add all their stuff together, and just make one purchase. Last but not least, you need to see if you have a FAQ. This is a place where you can write the most asked questions about your products or services and post the answers. Even if people can ask you the questions, sometimes they would like to just look at a FAQ. That way they can get their answer right away.

Online auction sites are the largest online marketplace in the world. Including the U.S., eBay has a global presence in 39 markets. A few of these markets include Singapore, India, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Canada and Taiwan. There are thousands and thousands of different types of items that are currently up for auction on the site. eBay has approximately 276 million registered users worldwide that trade more than $2,039 worth of goods on the site every second. The online auctions has hosted over 532,000 stores worldwide and has over 276 million registered users worldwide that trade in over 50,000 categories. eBay calculates that there were 637 million new listings added in Q4-07. At any given time, there are approximately 113 million listings worldwide, and approximately 6.7 million listings are added per day. Approximately 54 percent of eBay’s profit comes from international markets with the rest coming from the U.S.

As mentioned above, eBay believes that one can achieve success if they are in the right place, at the right time, with the right product. Therefore, it becomes very important for would be and current sellers to do their homework and perform research into the nuances of the categories eBay offers. Sellers, if they master the act of choosing the correct category, can build “insider strategies” and insights that will give them a real, and potential profitable, advantage over other auctions sellers. Speaking of other sellers – if a “competitor” is selling the same type of item be sure to investigate which categories they are utilizing. Some sellers specialize in selling a particular product in a particular category. Other sellers place auctions in multiple categories. In the end, a seller must choose which item he/she prefers to sell. According to eBay, based on Q4-07 GMV, the following categories delivered $1 billion or more in worldwide annualized GMV: eBay Motors at $17.2 billion; Consumer Electronics at $6.8 billion; Computers at $4.1 billion; Clothing & Accessories at $5.6 billion; Home & Garden at $4.1 billion; Collectibles at $2.9 billion; Books/Music/Movies at $3.3 billion; Sports at $2.9 billion; Business & Industrial at $2.3 billion: Toys at $2.7 billion; Jewelry & Watches at $2.5 billion; Cameras & Photo at $1.8 billion; Antiques & Art at $1.2 billion; Coins & Stamps at 1.2 billion and Tickets & Travel at $2 billion.