Do you have to be a professional photographer to get professional-looking shots of your eBay items? No, and many of eBay’s best sellers can attest to that. I’ve never taken a course in photography, and I get good shots with my fairly inexpensive point-and-shoot Nikon camera.

How do you get those great shots that show off your items without forking out hundreds of dollars on professional equipment? I’m far from an expert, but I know what’s worked for me for more than 12 years and 4,000 transactions on eBay. Here are a few pointers:

Get the right lighting. You don’t need special filters, diffusers, meters, etc. to get good lighting for your photos. If you are a professional and have your own photography studio, then you likely have that equipment lying around, so you might as well use it. Us average Joes can rely on what we have handy, for instance, the sun.

You can use it as a light source, and it’s free! Take your items outside into the natural lighting and you’ll notice the difference. Experiment with the lighting. Try setting a plain backdrop on a covered patio or take your photo in the shade of a tree. Take a few shots and see what works best to minimize the glare or shade. Even if you decide to stay indoors to take your photos, open the curtains to let the light in. It’ll help immensely.

Make a lightbox! Light boxes are easy to make and provide a “sterile” backdrop for your smaller items. They provide excellent lighting to take clear shots that really show off your item, and they take away distractions. We recently made a video for our YouTube channel that explains how to make a simple, inexpensive lightbox, step by step.

Use a simple backdrop. I’ve seen some pretty scary backgrounds in some listings, and they definitely didn’t make me want to buy. If your item is too large to shoot in a lightbox, which has a clean, white background, invest in a couple pieces of white or black poster board or a sheet to use as your backdrop. No one wants to see your dust-covered bookshelf or loud, peeling wallpaper in the photo. They’ll be distractions for the buyer and could turn them off your item.

Avoid being too creative with angles. In some situations, one or two fancy angles might be fine. It may seem like a fun and interesting way to show off your product, but put yourself in the buyer’s position: Do you really want to tilt your head sideways to know what you’re looking at? We don’t think so, so keep it simple. If not for the sake of professionalism, do it for those buyers who have neck problems.

Get a photo editing program. Most everyone has access to these, whether it’s a program that came preinstalled on your computer, something you downloaded, or software that came with your digital camera. I use Google’s Picasa more than any other, and I find that it does all the basic editing I need. It’s also free! And if your photo came out a little crooked, you can easily fix that in Picasa. If you got too much background in a shot, crop it. Too dark? Adjust the lighting.

Invest in a tripod. You don’t have to spend a lot on a tripod, just buy a small, table-top model that you can use with your camera. I’ve seen some on dealnews.com for less than $5. If you are a bit shaky and your camera doesn’t have a stabilizer, you might want to invest in one of these gadgets.

Finally, take all your photos at once. Pick a day each week, every other week or every month, etc., and take all your photos at one time. Then upload them, edit them and upload to your Auctiva account. Done. It’s not fun to have to set up your backdrop or lightbox multiple times, so if you get everything shot in one day, you’re all done and you won’t have to do it again the next day.

Try these tips, and when you’re ready, enter our Auctiva’s Best Shot contest. You could win like zodiac_woman did for her travel bag listing and obsessedwithvintage did for the photos of these vintage leather shoes. Congratulations to them both.

Auctiva’s Best Shot photo contest has its first batch of winners. eBay seller chuotdong took first place with his photo for this rare bronze Asian figure, earning him a $50 credit to GiftCertificates.com.

chuotdong ‘s images “showed the item thoroughly, so buyers literally could see every detail in the statue,” says Auctiva Product Analyst and contest organizer Rebecca Miller.

Seller sumptersjewelry took second place and earned a $25 gift-certificate credit for the photos in this vintage Waltham watch listing. Congratulations to both!

Judges received more than 300 photo entries during the month of February, and deciding on just one winner and one runner-up was a lot harder than initially anticipated, Miller says.

“We went through and supersized the images and chose the one we felt had the best close-ups and details, presented in a professional way,” she explains. “We considered lighting, backgrounds, sharpness of the images, if all sides were included, etc.”

Many of the listings submitted for the contest included multiple images, and while the winner and runner-up both had photos that showed the items from every angle, it was the clarity and quality of the shots, not the number of images that set these two apart, Miller notes.

“Lighting is major part in taking great photos,” says runner-up sumptersjewelry. “We use a light box to photograph, but you can use a white sheet for your background as a cheaper alternative. Our secret is setting the camera setting on the largest picture size then cropping and resizing. This gives a better undistorted close up of the image.”

Want more tips to enter your own images into our contest? Check out Auctiva EDU for helpful, and don’t forget that our contest runs through the end of year. Grab your camera and enter today. Good luck!

If you created a listing using our tools this week, you may have noticed a few changes. And if you plan on creating new listings soon—especially if you’re one of our Supersize image users— you’re in for a treat.

The Big Picture

We’ve once again updated our software to help you stay in sync with eBay’s upcoming changes and provide you enhanced value. The big news of this release cycle is that we’ve made our already large Supersize images even bigger. In the past, these images were displayed at a maximum of 1,024 x 768 pixels.

While this size gave users good, detailed shots of their items to show off their products in all their glory, we’ve made adjustments so your images can now be up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels in size. Supersized images that were saved before this week’s update will still display at their current size, but you have the option to reload them at the larger size if our old Supersized size is not large enough.

Talk about letting potential buyers see the smallest detail of your item! And remember, these super-Supersized images cost you nothing, and are now standard  features of our Basic, Unlimited and Premium plans.

Updated eBay fees estimator

You’ll also notice that we’ve updated our eBay fees estimator to reflect the new eBay fees, which take effect March 30. We’ve also put a note in our One-page Lister to remind sellers that eBay’s Featured First listing upgrade will only be available to Top-Rated Sellers when eBay’s changes go into effect.

Store Inventory listing format

Don’t forget that the Store Inventory format will soon be phased out. Going forward, these listings will be displayed as fixed-prized items. So if you’ve sold in that format in the past, you should revisit your saved listings and make the appropriate changes before relisting them . We’ll help by removing the Store Inventory format option from our One-Page Lister beginning April 1.

These are just some of the changes we’ve made. For more information on our recent updates, please read our Forum Post.

Happy selling!

If you’re like me, you probably have a number of items that you waited to sell specifically for the holidays, but they went unsold in the previous weeks. Now you’re wondering if it’s too late to relist them and get them into a buyer’s hands before Christmas.

I can tell you, it’s not too late. There’s still more than two weeks before the big day—plenty of time to list your remaining goods on eBay for those last-minute shoppers to buy!

While it certainly can be stressful listing or relisting items during the second week of December—and wondering if they’ll sell—here are a few things I do during this selling “crunch time.”

Choose short durations. Try a one- or three-day duration instead of the common five- or seven-day durations. The sooner the item ends, the sooner it will ship.

Use Fixed Price or Buy It Now. Buyers are in a crunch, too, and want to make their purchases ASAP. They may not have the patience to wait for an auction to end, especially as the big day nears.

Require Immediate Payment. If you are using Fixed Price or Buy It now, click the box that says “Require Immediate Payment” in the Checkout Options section of the Auctiva lister so you won’t have to worry about waiting for payments. (Yes, you can use this option when you list with Auctiva—it just isn’t compatible with our Auctiva Secure Checkout. Buyers will be directed to eBay’s checkout instead).

Pictures, pictures, pictures. Since you don’t have to pay extra image fees on eBay when you list with Auctiva, why not add extra photos? This way you can show off your items in all their glory. Buyers can never have too many photos when they’re bidding on an item.

Don’t use slow shipping methods. Buyers don’t want to wait two or more weeks for that DVD or video game to arrive. Sure USPS Media mail is cheaper than First Class Mail, but it could cost you much more in the long run if the buyer isn’t thrilled about getting their package in January.

And finally: Use holiday or seasonal Listing Templates. I know we say this a lot, but having a professional-looking listing complete with an eye-catching template really does help. It attracts buyers and shows them you’re a serious seller.

Go ahead, start listing. You still have plenty of time.

There are only eight weeks left of 2009, which means now is the time to kick your eBay selling into high gear!

Auctiva has many convenient tools to help you get organized and get your listings posted on eBay efficiently—and to help them look great, too! Here are a few tips to make the best use of our tool set during this holiday selling frenzy:

1. Use Auctiva to schedule your listings. Create your listings whenever it’s convenient for you and schedule them to launch on eBay at the optimal time. Remember, you won’t have to pay eBay’s 10-cent (or more) scheduling fee when you use Auctiva to schedule your listings. Just create your listings, and specify a time and date when you want them to launch. Auctiva will take care of the rest.

2. Browse through our great selection of holiday-themed templates. Whether you want a basic wintery background, or one with elves and toys, we have a template for you. What better way to make your listing stand out from the rest, look professional and attract buyers?

3. Bring on the images! When you list directly on eBay, you can include one image in your listing for free (except if you list in a few selected categories), but each additional image with cost you 15 cents. That can really add up. But you want to show your buyers exactly what they’re bidding on, or thinking about buying, right? Well, if you list with Auctiva, you can use more than 24 images in each listing without incurring additional image fees from eBay. Now that’s a deal.

4. Take advantage of our Profiles to list faster. My favorite feature of Auctiva is the ability to easily create a new listing from one I already have saved in my account using our Profiles. They save you time by automatically inserting into your listings the information you use most often, with just a few clicks.

Want more tips for his holiday season? Check out our Auctiva Education section to hear from other veteran eBay sellers. Happy selling!

We introduced several new features last week to help our users keep their image-hosting usage down.

Have you ever wanted to delete an image folder and all the images contained in that folder? Well, now you have that option!

We have also taken the first step to automate image deletion by allowing users to enable our new “Auto Delete” feature when they upload images. This allows to set your images to be deleted at a specified interval after you upload them, which will help to keep your Image Hosting usage down and your uploaded images organized. And, for your security, we’ll ensure these images aren’t in any Auctiva-launched listings before we delete them.

You can also choose to view 250 images on a page–instead of 100 per page–which will be very helpful when you’re managing/deleting large numbers of pictures at one time.

We’re committed to helping you save time and money, and these recent updates to our software will help you do just that.