On eBay, you have several photo options. You can try to get by with just one photo (the free one) and hold your listing costs down. Or, you can pay extra to upload several photographs and hope that higher bids will help you recoup your investment. For a small extra charge, you can choose a picture layout.

On the Yahoo! Auctions site, your only choice is to upload one, two, or three photographs. Since they are free, try to use three pictures to illustrate your item.

Amazon.com makes the photo options simple on its auction site: You can download one image. It can come from your computer, or you can add a link in your listing to a photograph or other image out on the Internet.

Unlike Yahoo! and eBay, Amazon specifies that picture files or image files must be no larger than 100 kilobytes (KB). The recommended size is just 10 KB to 25 KB, with a resolution of 300 by 300 pixels. Files edited in image-editing software must be saved in JPEG (.jpg) or GIF (.gif) format. Amazon allows you to include a hypertext link in auction item descriptions. This link can display additional photographs and information stored on another Web site.

Excellent advertisements are not difficult to write and assemble for an online auction site. Still, many people feel challenged and even threatened by the amount of work that is sometimes required. You can learn from the examples of others. The ads you create may never be perfect, but, in the online auction world, they will often be better than good enough.