• The total price paid includes postage costs
• The “Item sold for” is the price received for the antique, less costs. (doesn’t include postage received)
• The profit is the “Item sold for” – “total price paid”

I paid £180 for this in total and it made £297 on eBay, which after costs leaves £256.70 which is a profit of £76.70 – yipee!

It went for £22.43, which after costs leaves me with £19.20, a loss of £14.65.

Lets hope the rest do better!

I often find when I’m looking at items to buy that the sellers give very vague and not very descriptive information about their antiques, and this is usually coupled with quite poor quality photos.

I have to admit that I tend to try and steer clear of any item with blurred photos, photos from a distance, etc, because these are often items that aren’t quite what they seem, with the seller sometimes (I’m sure) deliberately trying to mislead potential buyers.

Having said that, the vast majority of people who add photos tend to use the eBay system which is far from perfect really.

Firstly, if you’re a seller and you want to add lots of photos this will cost you money, and really we want to keep costs to a minimum.

Secondly, the eBay photo system doesn’t give very large, clear photos for buyers to look at, you are limited to what you can show potential buyers – and since buying online is all about confidence and trust, it can’t help to get the best prices possible for your items.

For this reason my top tip is to make sure that you take lots of clear, in focus pictures of your items and to insert them into your eBay listing using HTML (I’ll explain how to do this shortly).

When you take your photos try and keep the background clear of clutter so that attention is focused on the antique itself, and try to take your photos with as much natural light as possible rather than having the flash on your camera going off.

Natural light helps to catch the true colour of an item rather than distorting it, something that a collector will be extremely wary of.

Once you’ve taken your photos crop them so that the antique is framed nicely without lots of unnecessary background. This keeps attention focused as mentioned above AND helps to reduce the size of the image so that it will load faster.

You can use a free program like GIMP to do all of your image manipulation. It’s very easy to use.

Once you’ve done that resize your photos so that they are all the same size (I opt for a width of 750), so that when your images appear in your listing they are all a uniform width and look nice and neat rather than being higgeldy piggeldy all over the place.

Then you want to insert them into your listing.

This is pretty easy, you can either use a photo hosting service like a lot of eBay users do, or host them yourself if you have a site.

All that I do is create a folder on my server called something like eBayphotos and then upload all of my pictures to that.

Then when I create my eBay listing I type it up as normal, and when I’ve finished with the description I click the tab that says “HTML” and add the simple code to insert the images, which is:

<img src=”">

In between the ”" you add the address of the photo, so in my case it would be:

http://www.antiqueshunt/eBayphotos/photo1.jpg

giving: <img src=”http://www.antiqueshunt/eBayphotos/photo1.jpg”>

and this will bring up the image that you’ve saved. To add more just repeat the code changing the name of the photo as appropriate.

You can see an example of this on my listing for my Bow Tureen here.

This gives potential buyers lots of clear images showing them all sides of your item and gives them the confidence that your item is as you say it is.

I hope that you find this useful and that you’ll call back for more top tips!

I’ve gone a bit mad with this one and rather than just listing it for 99p, I’ve started it at 99p, put on a reserve, and a buy it now of £125 which has added listing costs of £5.89 on top of the £42.25 I originally paid for it and before any final value fees!

Will it sell or am I going to regret that choice – keep calling back to find out!

heres a quick update for round 3.

The Bow tureen is listed, and the pearlware mug is also relisted.

I got a full refund for the firewood box (antique rosewood writing slope), so that will be added back into the kitty, and the walnut box will be added shortly.

Keep watching to see what happens.

I went to a fantastic ceramics seminar this last weekend at Ironbridge and took the “antique Derby tureen” with me for some second opinion. Before I get onto that I’d like to say that I highly recommend going to one of these seminars if you get the chance.

Apart from the fact that the incredibly beautiful and historic Ironbridge Gorge is well worth a visit by itself, these ceramics seminars stand alone as the best possible way to learn about early English ceramics.

Not only do you have experts there to help you, like Geoffrey Godden, Harry Frost (ex curator of the Worcester museum for 16 years), Maurice Hillis (well known expert on Liverpool porcelain), authors like Michael Berthoud, Pat Preller, and a whole host of other extremely knowledgable people like Roger Edmundson, Barry Lomax, and lots more, you also get to handle lots of pots up close and personal, and have help to identify them, AND it only costs £40 per person which includes a very good lunch!

It’s brilliant and you’ll learn so much it’s well worth the money, we always try and have a couple of extra days there to enjoy the museums too.

Anyway, the concensus of opinion was that the tureen is definitely Bow rather than Derby, and as such I’ve listed it – starting at just 99p – on eBay here.

Now, I have high hopes for this antique tureen since I have some history with it!

I first bought it off eBay when it was wrongly identified by the seller as a Staffordshire tureen, and I snapped it up for maybe £100 (I honestly can’t remember it was so long ago, but it wasn’t much).

I then sold it back on eBay for £390 correctly identified as Bow.

Last week I bought it back of eBay wrongly described as Derby for £180 – so really I’m already £100 in pocket and I have the tureen again before I even think about selling it!

I’ve made sure that I have taken lots of very clear photos, that I’ve given a good description, and I have high hopes that it’ll sell again for around £300 to £400, which would give me a great profit.

Will I make a profit from it this time around? Well you’ll just have to keep coming back to find out, won’t you!

It’s only been listed for 4 hours and has 3 watchers, so hopefully it’ll appeal to some of them this time and will make more than the 99p that I’ve started it at – I must be CRAZY!

Keep watching to see how it does!

The problems (and there are a few!) are that the description really didn’t explain the damage enough, and amazingly (thats sarcasm) all of the photos omitted the true extent of the damage.

The listing on eBay said that it had “some losses” to the veneer – try huge swathes of it missing, a huge bubbled bit that needs ripping off, missing mother of pearl inlay, and the top of the lid has been walloped at some point with a steam hammer or similar meaning that it is about a 1/4 of an inch out of skew with the rest of the lid.

Obviously this can’t be easily repaired, since the veneer has also been seriously damaged at this point (as if the rest of the veneer damage wasn’t enough), which renders this box to be little more than firewood.

On top of that the lock wasn’t a Bramah lock either – so all in all it’s a disaster of a buy and I just don’t see how I’m going to get my money back from it.

I’ve contacted the seller to inform them of my dismay, we’ll see what happens on that front, but otherwise I’m not even going to bother listing it – I’d be ashamed to put my name to it – and I’ll just have to write off the expense as a loss if the seller won’t refund the money.

I’ll let you know what happens, but I could have done without this setback!

For round 3 I have bought yet another piece of antique porcelain, an “antique Derby tureen” (which might actually be an antique Bow tureen), an antique rosewood writing slope, and an antique walnut box.

I’ve spent a total of £251.09p on these 3 items, hopefully they’ll help to get my profit to over £500 by the end of this round!

Call back to see how they do!