Use Your Own Photo To Increase Your Auction Sales

Filed Under Business |

by Chris S. Chan

The true fact about photo is that it worth thousand of words, a good photo can increase your auction sales instantly. A simple picture together with your ads can boost your sales up by 200% or more. Like I’ve said before, people are not comfortable bidding on an item unless they are absolutely sure what they are bidding on.

A buyer will have strong image of what they are buying when they see your own pictures. Seeing is believing is a simple fact, browse the most bidding items on any category on the auction site, you will see that the items with more real and good pictures will have more bids than items has no picture or a pictures from original manufacturer site.

Ok, you got the idea that a photo will increase the sales for your auction item. Now asking yourself, how do I get the photo on the auction site? That is a good question, the next paragraph will show you exactly how to take a photo for your online auction.

The first step is you need to get photo to your computer: this is simple, even for newbie but there are some ways to do it. The first way is a old technique that you take photo on normal camera and take to local development shop to get printed. Once you get the photo in hand, you need to scan it to your computer.

A scanner is cheap, you can get it for around $50 and up at local computer stores, or you can take your photos to many local copy shops and they can scan your photos for you, and save them on flash USB.

Another way which consider better and more popular now is you use a digital camera which can take photo and synchronize to your computer instantly. These camera cost about $200 to $700.

If you already have a camcorder device, or buy it for around $50 to $250 at local shops. You can also use this small device to hook any video sources and grab images to your computer immediately.

The second step is to process the photo: you have the photo in your computer in either .gif or jpeg files. Now you need to proces the photo in a graphic program. Paint Shop Pro or Lview are available as shareware on the Internet. With these programs, you can use to adjust brightness and contrasts of the pictures, or you can even add some cool text over the photo to create a cool advertisement. If you have Adobe PhotoShop then it is perfect, this program is can help automate some tasks like processing photo and adding cool text, even create some effects to both graphic and text any way you like.

Take a look at the photo of the item you want to sell. The first thing you need to do is crop the photo to only show the item that you are selling. Each program will do this fairly simply. All you need is to click on the tool that select a rectangular area of your photo. Then you will need to draw a box only for the area you wish to keep, and then select crop command from the main tool bar or edit menu.

Next, you will need to adjust the brightness, contrast and sharpness of the picture to the way you need. Try to get as much visible detail as possible. Remember that the better the picture is, the more bids you will get!

You can also add text directly over the picture of the item. This may or may not be useful for you, since you can type in as much text as you want before or after the image on web page. You can add text simply by click on the menu button where the “T” present, the select the area you you to add text and type it right away.

The third step is to post photo to the auction site: the photo is taken and ready to used in you auction ads. Most of the auction site like eBay only allow you to upload one picture to their site for free, additional pictures are chargeable, so you need to have some place to host your own pictures. A good place is Auctiva which have plug in store to your auction site, and the most important is free.

Now you get the idea a tools to do it, hope this article can help you to increase your auction sales. Good luck.

About the Author:

Selling on auction site can generate a very good additional income, implement auction tips, tricks and follow success auction sellers can boost your success instantly. Article Talent has fresh articles on auction tips, tricks and more.