Selling on eBay, as with anything can be very hit or miss. But you can reduce the 'utter randomness' of it all by doing some rudimentary research.
I'm not a full time seller, I might sell 4 things in a week, or once every 8 months. I might buy 5-10 things a year as well. If I'm buying, or selling for that matter, I will always check the Completed Auctions first, to get an idea of the overall selling price of items I'm interested in. If your selling, check here first for the item you have to sell/buy. You'll get a good idea of your opening bid you may want to set, and a rough idea of what you should expect to get for the sale. If you recently opened a new account with the purpose of just using it as a sellers account, your going to be in for a slow/dry spell for a while. 99% of the time, I won't ever bid on a item if the seller has a feedback of less than (10). Maybe if the item is <$10 or so I might bid, but nothing over that, thats for sure! If you just started out, and want to build your feedback up, just start buying some small items on eBay. I didn't really start selling until I had 20 or more positive feedback. Make sure your shipping and return policy's are as crystal clear as possible, to reduce the chance of any neutral/negative feedback. If you don't ever want to see the item again, make sure everyone knows by saying so with 'ALL SALES FINAL' or the like. But I've seen a lot of items I won't bid on, as their shipping policies require a Ph.D. from MIT to figure out what/how to send them. Less is more folks. Don't make your buyers jump through a 20 point checklist before they send you the money. For sellers its okay to pad the shipping cost for a very small difference to recover any PayPal/sellers/shipping fees. But don't go overboard or else you'll have a lot of P.O'ed buyers who are just itching to leave you negative feedback, or no bidders at all. If I'm selling a CD, I might charge $2.50 or $2.95 to mail it, even thought it might only cost $1.98 for first class mail.
For sellers, getting Feedback is always a challenge for your buyers who are recalcitrant about leaving timely feedback. About 75% of my buyers leave it within a week of getting what I send em, or they simply never leave it at all. You can only do so much to prod buyers to leave you positive feedback. I mean, what are you going to do, threaten them? Send them a reminder e-mail, after a week or so once you know they got it, just to let them know.
As a seller, I have only had one person back out of my auctions in over 100 or so auctions I've been involved with. And many sellers I know will just pussy out about leaving the deadbeat buyer negative feedback, because you don't want to risk retaliatory feedback. I have a perfect rating of 100 feedbacks, with no negatives, or neutrals and it has taken nearly 4 years to get to this point. The thought of getting my 1st negative, is too much to bear.
I am a very infrequent seller for sure, but I have been lucky with a few things I have sold in the past. One item was a old World War II cruise book for a US Destroyer in the pacific theater. I thought I might get $40 if I was lucky, well in the end I got so many bids and it went for $452. Another item was a old, worn out US Naval Flight suit worn by a F-14 pilot that my dad fished out of a dumpster at the Mirmar Naval Air Station in Mirmar, CA. It had a bunch of squadron patches and stuff on it. Despite the big hole in the crotch, It sold for $170 to some guy in Norway. But not everything is a home run. I tried to unload about 10 CD's I never listened to anymore. Only 3 sold for what I expected, and overall it wasn't worth my time to list everything, with the special HTML editing and pictures and all. The other 7 sold for almost nothing, or not at all. Overall, its wasn't worth it once you take out all the fees and actually going to the post office. For me, getting a good amount of bids really depends on the auction close time that you set for your listing, and how 'hot' of a item it is on eBay that your selling. But thats just me.
Sorry for all the rambling. It all just came rushing out.
RobCur: I'm surprised no one has asked any of these questions, but here goes. What are you selling? Are you trying to do this as a full time job? How many feedbacks do you have? Are you trying to make a set amount each week/month? How many items are you selling? Have you used any of the eBay seller programs for auction batch jobs?
Here are a few links you might want to check out:
Useful Information for eBay sellers
Really good beginner guide for sellers
And of course, there are endless #'s of books about eBay out their for sellers. Try amazon first.
Before eBay put them out of commission, there was a great site called BidBot.net that would search for you on eBay, looking for the best time to list your item, to get the best price/most bids. Hopefully something like this will re-appear?
Well I hope I could help. If you made it all the way to this point, then you my friend deserve a :beer: