Free EBay for Dummies by Marsha Collier Page A

preferences:
    Notification Delivery: This is where you let eBay know which method of notification works best for you. You can also indicate whether you want HTML or text-based e-mails.
    Buying Notifications: Be careful here. If you indicate that you want all this e-mail and you plan to be active on the site, prepare to be deluged. Select wisely! But remember, you can always make changes. You can get real-time notifications on your shopping for the following:
    • Watched Item (also daily, weekly or monthly) e-mail
    • Watched Items that were relisted by the seller
    • Confirmations for your bids
    • E-mails when you’re outbid in an auction
    • Winning buyer e-mails
    • Losing bidder e-mails
    As you can see, this is way too many e-mails, especially if you do a lot of buying and selling. They will send you e-mails for even more than I mention here. For sanity’s sake, narrow your selections to the minimum.
    Selling Notifications: If you’re selling on the site, most of these notifications will be useful. You can indicate you want to receive the following e-mails:
    • Notification that you’ve saved a draft on the Sell Your Item Form
    • E-mail confirmation each time you list an item for sale
    • Yay! The end-of-listing e-mail when your item has sold
    • Boo. The e-mail you get when your item doesn’t sell
    • Notification when your buyer performs Checkout
    These are all important, especially when you’re a new seller. When you become more active as a seller, you might want to whittle these down a bit — but not too much! Information is power.
    Other Transactions and Notices: Again, up to you. These can be overwhelming. eBay gives you the option to receive e-mails in the following areas:
    • Member-to-member communications
    • Indicate whether you choose to receive Second Chance Offers
    • Reminders to leave feedback
    • Account preference changes
    Without enumerating everything else (I can see you’re about to doze off), you can also opt in (or opt out) of eBay surveys, promotions, telephone update, and direct USPS mail from eBay.
    Next on the Preferences hit parade are your actual site preferences — how you’d like to conduct business on the site. These are settings for the more advanced seller. You can make most of these decisions on the Sell Item Page. If you have time, though, click through each of the individual links to show the options and be sure the default settings work for you.
    When you finally get your My eBay page set up the way you like it, save yourself a lot of work and time by using your browser to bookmark your My eBay page as a favorite. Doing so saves you a lot of keystrokes later. If you want to send a shortcut to your desktop, in Internet Explorer choose File⇒Send⇒Shortcut to Desktop. This way, you can open your browser directly onto your My eBay page. Some eBay members make their My eBay page their browser home page so that their My eBay page appears the minute they log on. That’s true dedication.
    Your Feedback link
    Next (after the Seller Dashboard which I explain further on) comes the Feedback option. In the Feedback area, you see all the items that need your feedback attention, and you can see the recent feedback that has been left for you. Save yourself a trip; you can more conveniently leave feedback from the item page, your Sell page, or your Buy page.
    Account links
    Not surprisingly, the My Account option leads you to more links for your PayPal and eBay Seller accounts. After you start selling, your Accounts pages become powerful. Figure 4-4 shows you the Seller Accounts summary section of my My eBay page. There’s also a drop-down menu so that you can view past or current invoices. You can look up every detail of your account history, as well as make changes to your personal preferences (such as how and when you want to pay fees).
    Figure 4-4: The Seller Accounts section of my My eBay page.

    Before you jump into the money game, you may want to review the links