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How to Go About Listing Items

Pictures First

Selling guns or firearm accessories on the Internet makes it imperative that you have photographs of the items for sale. Your potential customers are likely to be much more interested in something they can see for themselves. The cleanliness of your gun, its condition, and the other important details revealing the quality of your offering are easily shown with photos. Making good photos is the single most important step towards successful selling on the Internet.

You may upload up to ten photos on GunsByGoophie.com at no extra cost.

Here are some things to keep in mind.

• If at all possible, use a digital camera capable of downloading picture directly to your computer either by a connecting cable or by a memory chip (FlashCard, etc.).  If you are a dealer taking a fairly large number of pictures, an immediate investment of around $150 will provide you with a suitable camera for volume photo sessions. We use a Nikon Coolpix S4000 and have found it to be ideal for the purpose. There are many other choices for cameras such as this.

• Set up a work space where you can quickly move guns in and out of the “photo studio” area. We use a white terry cloth towel or white felt as a background. White is a non-color and will allow the true colors of your guns to gain the attention of buyers.  Set up some suitable lighting for your photography sessions. Natural light is best, if available.  Keep the photography area brightly lit so you do not need to use flash.

• Depending on the type of camera you are using, consider a camera stand or tripod if you find any of your shots blurred.

• Take pictures of each gun in the following positions.

1. Right side of the gun, entire gun if a handgun. [Note: The first uploaded photo is the “lead” photo.]
2. Left side of the gun, entire gun if a handgun.
3. Top of the gun, looking down on it.
4. Bottom of the gun, trigger etc., looking down on it.
5. Butt plate if a rifle or shotgun
6. Muzzle of the gun.
7. Addition photos to show notable features, blemishes, etc.

• In some cases you might want to take several additional shots of each position to provide some selections when it comes time to upload photos on the Internet. Also, remember the lead photo is the one buyers will see in special or featured listings, so it should be the “best of the batch.”

[Hint:  If you are advertising several guns, place a unique “item number” tag where it will be photographed along with the gun. It need be only large enough to read in the photograph. The item number is then used to keep track of which photos belong to which gun. This will be invaluable when it comes time to upload the photos. If you are a dealer, consider placing your business card in the “lead” photo, too.]

• After your photo sessions, carefully examine each photo using a simple “Gallery” computer program. Windows 7 has one called Windows Live Photo Gallery. Using your available software, “process” each photo to:

1.      Crop the photo to reduce the size of the final image and better place the gun in the frame. Get rid of the non-essential part of the photo.
2.      “De-fuzzy” the photo to sharpen the focus, if needed.
3.      Brighten the photo if it looks dark.
4.      Adjust the contrast of the photo if it looks pale.

Some of these adjustments are very similar to adjusting the picture of a TV set; easy to do and invaluable for advertising purposes.

Description Text Next

For each gun, a description will be needed. Usually the text will include the following “ingredients.” Blue items are required.

Type of gun (pistol, revolver, shotgun, etc.)                             A selected category
Manufacturer                                                                          A data field and selected subcategory
Model                                                                                     A data field
Caliber                                                                                   A data field
Shipping by:                                                                           A data field
Features                                                                                Text you provide
Description                                                                            Text you provide

Well thought out descriptive text is worth the time spent. After you finish creating your text, read it back to yourself, out loud, to see if it works for you. 

Pricing

Auctions

Please keep in mind, auctions are “offered contracts to sell” and when your auction has a bidding winner, a legally binding contract is automatically established between you and your high bidding buyer. [Note: Goophie, LLC and GunsByGoophie.com will have fulfilled our role of advertising and managing your auction according to universally accepted auctioning rules and is not  and will not be a party to your auctioning contracts with your buyers.]

Using Google or another search service, determine what new and used guns similar to yours are selling for.  After you have satisfied yourself as to a fair and practical asking price, and have the photos ready, create you listing.You have several choices for auctioning you gun(s). You may choose:

• Standard auction – standard bidding with reserve price. Set a “starting bid” price, and a reserve price (may be zero).
• Dutch auction – like a standard auction except is used to auction several exact same guns, winning auction to set the price items in the batch. [Warning:  be very careful using this feature. See detailed description below.]
• Buy Now auction – same as a standard auction but with the buy now feature added. [Note: Be sure to set the price you are willing to accept!]
• Buy Now Only auction –  the first person to click “Buy Now Button” is obligated to buy the item. [Note: Be sure to set the “buy now” price at the price you are willing to accept!]

Notice: You can edit your auction listing anytime BEFORE the first bid is received.  You may delete your auction listing anytime. You will be charged for recreating a deleted listing, as if it were a new listing, if you decide to relist the it later.

After the item is sold, return to “My Account” and, after clicking on “Manage This Item” click on the “sold” icon. 

Classified Listings

Using Google or another search service, determine what new and used guns similar to yours are selling for.  After you have satisfied yourself as to a fair and practical asking price, and have the photos ready, create you listing.  

You may edit the listing any time. 

After the item is sold, return to “My Account” and, after clicking on “Manage This Item” click on the “sold” icon.  This will mark your item as sold so your will not be bothered by potential customers, wanting to buy a sold item, in the future.

Footnote:

Dutch auctions are a form of auction where the quantity of items within the dutch auction are sold separately. Within a dutch auction the bidder enters their bid and the number of total quantity within the auction they are bidding for. If they bid $1.00 for 3 of the total 10 items in the dutch auction they could potentially win those 3 items at the possible cost of $1.00 each. At the end of the auction the amount paid for each item auctioned is determined by the amount bid and amount bid on. The highest bidder gets the number of items of the total they bid on (as long as not more than the total quantity). If there are any quantity left the next high bidders amount bid on is removed from the remaining total. This is done until the total quantity is accounted for. The last winning bidder may not win the full quantity of items they bid on. At this point the final bid for all items in the dutch auction is fixed as the bid made by the lowest bid actually winning any of the total quantity. All bidders pay this same amount for each item of the total quantity they won.

If you have any questions or constructive suggestions regarding this page please contact us.  Thanks...

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