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Using photos at eBay, I've rediscovered the
obvious: "seeing is buying." Words bring traffic to a Web site (that's a
favorite theme of mine), but pictures sell. Text conveys information.
Photos convey emotion. Text can tell you about a product, but a photo
can make you fall in love with it. A picture's value for conveying
information is over-rated -- in most cases, it is certainly not worth
1000 words. But the emotion conveyed can be very important when you are
selling and especially when you are selling by auction, where price is
not fixed, but rather is set by the irrational, emotional decisions of
bidders.
Once I was able to take good digital
photos of my comics, I found myself literally falling in love with some
of those old comics, with their amazing cover art. It became hard for me
to part with them. Fortunately, bidders fell in love with them, too.
(Keep in mind that decorative graphics and photos that have nothing to
do with products for sale are still of very questionable value, and are
often negative. But for e-commerce, you need to show what you want to
sell.)
Whatever you have to sell will probably
sell better if you include a photo in your posting. You could take
traditional photos and when you get the film developed request them in
digital form, on diskette or on CD ROM. Or you could use one of those
low-cost video cameras you plug into your PC for online two-way video,
and save still images. But it's simplest if you use a digital camera.
At first I used the "Big Picture" video
camera and capture card from US Robotics, because I already had it
installed for videophone kinds of things. But that confined me to taking
picture a short distance from my computer, because it was connected by a
short cord. And it was difficult to get the lighting right. But even with
those drawbacks, I could see that my items sold better with than without
photos.
I signed up at Xoom (www.xoom.com) for
11 Mbytes of free space and uploaded my photos to Xoom using FTP. Then I
entered the URLs of the photos in the auction form at Ebay, along with
the descriptions of the items, etc.
After a couple of months and a few
thousand dollars in revenue from selling comics and bottle caps, I
decided to splurge and buy a digital camera. I decided on a Sony Mavica,
because it is so simple to use and stores photos on ordinary 3-1/2 inch
diskettes, that I can pop right into my computer for viewing, editing,
and uploading.
The new camera cut the time it takes me
to take photos down to about a fifth what it was before -- which is very
important if you are selling dozens of items at a time. It also allowed
me to take the photos wherever I like, because there is no cord. That
makes it far easier to set up for the best lighting. In addition, the
resulting photos were larger and sharper -- giving a much better idea of
the true condition of collectibles.
If you've been itching to get a digital
camera, this could be the excuse you've been looking for. |