eBay Shopping Secrets

Jerry Work asked:


I am a professional Internet marketer. I deal with the issue of driving traffic to web sites and converting that traffic into customers. My wife runs an eBay-based business selling vintage clothes. She likes using eBay. It has a built-in user base of well over 100 million users and offers the tools to allow her to accept several different forms of payment, including credit cards and PayPal. eBay also allows her to operate a Web store, while also selling items via auction. eBay allows anyone with a computer and Internet access to go into business for themselves. A lot of people are making a lot of money on eBay.

However, a letter my wife recently received from eBay has bothered her to the point where she is seriously considering pulling out of eBay and running her business through her own standalone site. eBay claims that it is losing money on the stores that it hosts, because so much of eBay’s inventory is now contained in the stores rather than in the auctions. To counter this, eBay is dramatically raising its fees for items listed in eBay stores.

The argument that eBay is losing money by hosting stores sounds like crap to me. Web hosting is dirt cheap. Web hosting for a small business can be purchased for $5 per month, with more hard drive space and bandwidth than a typical web site would ever need. eBay store hosting starts at about $16 per month for the basic store, which is heavy in mandatory eBay-branded top level content. eBay is raising the base fee to list an item in a store from 2 cents to 7-10 cents - up to a 500% increase.

So the question is: is it worth it to continue to do business on eBay when it is so much more cost effective to do business with a standalone web site?

I believe the answer is to use a combination. eBay delivers customers. It is a great way to build a customer base. If you are just establishing your online business, the following would be a strong formula for acquiring customers:

1. Set up an eBay store. Make it look as good as you can. Stock it with products.

2. Start running auctions. Use the auctions to drive eBay traffic to your stores. Do this consistently, placing some number of items up for auction every week. I suggest ending your auctions on Sunday night.

3. Maintain consistent inventory in your store. Try to get visitors to your store to leave their email address. What you want to do is get people returning to your store on a regular basis to check out what you have.

4. Build a standalone web site, outside of eBay. Populate your new store’s inventory with the same products you sell on eBay.

5. Contact your eBay store customers and tell them about your new web site. If your ecommerce platform allows, give your existing eBay customers a coupon to use at your new site.

6. Use search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, articles, etc., to drive new traffic to your site. This step will be a lot of work and will require a lot of planning, but it is critical to your success.

7. Gradually phase out your eBay store. When you are confident that all of your old customers now know about your new site and the new site is picking up customers on its own, then shut your eBay store down. Give yourself a pat on the back.

OR

You may choose to continue to run your eBay store in addition to your own web site. If eBay continues to generate business for you and the fees still allow you to show a good profit on the items you sell, then you might as well continue to use it.

When all is said and done, you will have used eBay as a stepping stone to establish your online business. If you already have an eBay store and have been running auctions, then you may start at Step 4 above.

Now…this is probably not the way eBay wants its customers to operate. The company has built an incredible platform to allow anyone to conduct business online. But the fact is, with its recent hike in fees, it is becoming less and less economically feasible to use eBay as a way to conduct business. We believe that using this kind of strategy is a good way to take advantage of eBay to build your business, but then shift to a more economical ecommerce platform to maximize your profitability.

This article is a very high level sketch of a way to establish an ecommerce business. There are many details to fill in. You might want to seek the help of an experienced web site designer and Internet marketing professional.

anonymous asked:


You’ve probably heard about how much money can be made on eBay. With dreams of quick riches and easy money, you are probably ready to jump in with both feet-right now! The best thing you can do if you are serious about making money with eBay, however, is to slow down. In fact, just stop for a minute. Don’t rush straight in. Take your time, and do it right.

eBay has over 100 million members. Think about that number for just a minute or two. When you get your eBay business set up, that is how big your customer base will be-instantly. 100 million people-100 million people who are just waiting for you to get set up and running so that they can throw money at you! Well, not quite. It is true that there are over 100 million members, but at this point, they do not know that you exist. In fact, no matter how well you do on eBay, most of them will never know that you exist. 100 million is a very large number.

There are many ways you can make money on ebay, from selling stuff you no longer need, all the way up to selling merchandise from a wholesaler. This is not the limit however, of the wonderful methods of generating cash off of the world of ebay. You can sell property, cars, boats, and even businesses. There have been transactions as low as a dollar, all the way up to business transfers that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ebay is clearly here to stay, now it is time for you to get your feet wet on this great money making opportunity.

Here we will focus on selling for a wholesaler, this is where you will promote other peoples products and sell them for a cut of the profit. Lets say for example you find a product you are interested in such as say, stereo speakers. You will then search for a wholesaler that will accept a contract with someone that deals in affiliates and ebay, with the proof that you are an ebay seller and can verify the account on ebay this should not be hard. Once you have landed this contract with the wholesaler, it is time to set up market strategies, and make sure they conform to what the wholesaler finds acceptable. Make a plan, check it twice and get to work selling.

Once you have the site available for the public to view, you need to weigh out some of the business expenses that will ensure you are not spending more than you are making. By having multiple payment options you can be sure you have all your sales basis covered. One of the biggest expenses you will encounter will be shipping and storage costs. It is not likely that you will have the space in your home to store a couple thousand pairs of home speakers, and this notion would require some sort of insurance that will be required in order for the wholesaler to relinquish the product to you. Any notion that you can rent space for cheap is improbable, and again will still require insurance as a measure of protection for you and the wholesaler. So what do you do? Well the answer is simple; you have the wholesaler keep the product, and ship when necessary to the customer when purchased.

This will keep the entire product in one place, alleviate the need to worry about shipping, and still ensure that you are able to make the sale. Once the product is sold to a customer, you simply place the order to the wholesaler, they will in turn send the product, charge you for the wholesale cost and the holding and shipping cost and the rest is yours to keep. This is not a difficult task and you do not even need to leave your seat. What you really need to do is research the product, and its competitors and finds a price that is reasonable, and will generate the best profit for what you are doing. What you are really doing is selling the goods like a salesman on a store floor. All the while not even leaving your home, you do not even really need to monitor this whole process, as the customer’s invoice will come in to you via e-mail.

The most successful eBay sellers started out as buyers-and you should too. This will give you a sense of how everything works. It will also show you how things are from the buyer’s side of the fence. Let’s call this period of time consumer research. You are literally studying how eBay works, from a customer’s point of view. You may not realize this, but this eBay buyer experience will actually make you a much better seller-right from the very start.

Really pay attention to the customer service you receive from the buyer. Think about how you want to be treated as a buyer, and take notes. Take your time during this process. Interact with the sellers. Get involved in hot auctions to see what they are like. In your spare time, start making notes about the hot items that you see. These notes will come in handy later.

eBay works just like any other business. You have to determine what people want to buy before you can hope to be successful. There are very specific items that sell really well on eBay-you just have to figure out what those items are. There are many resources for finding out this information. Start with the lessons that eBay offers to their sellers. Strongly consider attending the eBay University as well. This is the next step in the process. After you have had the eBay buyer experience, it is time to learn how to be an eBay seller.

Read all of the information eBay provides for you at the site. The information is free and you will learn a great deal from it. Take full advantage of this-before you start setting up your first auction or your eBay store! By reading through all of the resources, you will avoid making numerous mistakes that so many before you have made. This is another step towards building a successful eBay business. Once you’ve made it through the learning process, you should know everything you need to know to get started with a money making eBay business of your very own.

Gary Ruplinger asked:


The Fast Way To Become A Trusted eBay Seller

If you’re just starting out selling on eBay, you may find it tough to sell your products are decent prices, especially if you’re selling high priced items like electronics.

The problem is that when you’re a new seller is that you lack feedback, and a low or nonexistent feedback score is a red flag to any buyer that you might be a crook trying to scam them.

To make the problem even worse, there are some features that you can’t use on eBay until you get enough feedback.

So what’s a person to do? Well, if you’re serious about selling on eBay, then you’ll embark on what I like to call a Fast Feedback Campaign.

You’re going to want to budget about $50-$100 to start buying small items, like $.99 reports, CDs, or other low priced items. Try to buy at least 20 different items, and try to find items that you can either resell (even if you lose money on it - that’s okay), or buy cheap reports that teach you how to make more money on eBay.

Make sure that you pay promptly for everything. Within just a few days, you’ll have built your feedback score up from nearly nothing to just a small but less suspicious looking number.

However, you’re still not out of the woods yet. After all, some savvy buyers will notice that all your feedback is from buying items, not selling, so they might still be suspicious of you and will be reluctant to trust you. Your next step is to start selling items, but don’t start out with high priced items. If you can get your hands on cheap items that you can sell on eBay (try to at least break even, but a small loss is okay - this is still feedback building), such as CDs or books, do it and start selling cheap items on eBay. Sell these items as quickly as possible so that you can get your feedback built up. Once you have your feedback score up above fifty (you’ll need to sell more than fifty items to get to this number as not all buyers leave feedback), and when people look at your feedback, they see that you already have satisfied customers, they won’t be reluctant to purchase from you anymore.

If you’ve done a really good job of pleasing your customers, you may make it more likely that your customers will purchase from you than someone who has a higher feedback score but also has some negative remarks in their score.

Remember that good feedback becomes especially important the higher the cost of your items. People are far more likely to take a chance buying a DVD for $10 from a low feedback seller than they are to buy a $1300 video camera.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have not trouble building up trust with your potential customers right from the start.

jeffrey wolf asked:


Our introduction to creating a niche store on Ebay will include the basics, which will be followed by a more in depth look at making money on Ebay..

When you consider”eBay” and “money” in the same phrase you perhaps think of being a eBay seller.

You place product listings in the eBay marketplace, buyers bid, you pay your eBay seller fees and what you have left is your profit margin.

There is, however, another way to create a business which still revolves around eBay but which doesn’t entail you selling a specific item in the eBay marketplace.

This “other way” opportunity is based on the eBay affiliate program and a great tool which makes entry into this opportunity not only likely but also super easy. This tool is called “Create A Niche Store “.

Now if you don’t know - an affiliate program permits you as an individual internet entrepreneur to promote the products of a company in exchange for a commission on all sales that you refer.

You are mostly working as an internet middleman and connecting internet browsers to particular products and companies through your own network of websites and marketing methods.

If we revisit to the eBay affiliate program, eBay actually invites you to promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange for your efforts it will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each transaction you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer.

What this means is that you can earn up to three quarters of eBay’s revenue plainly for connecting people to the products listed in the eBay marketplace.

Not only do you get to partner with the best branded marketplace in the world, you also get access to and monitor over ALL of the products listed in this marketplace. The eBay product inventory becomes YOUR product inventory and yet you do NOT have to keep inventory products, be involved with customers, manage shipping or handle refunds.

You are no longer regulated to selling only those products which you can buy and sell for a profit margin. You can select ANY niche market and promote those eBay products relevant to your selected niche outside of the eBay marketplace, directling targeted traffic through to eBay and into your own affiliate commissions.

Golf clubs, sewing kits, laptops, dog collars, diamond rings, Florida real estate…

If you know eBay you know how BIG it is - there are NO confines.

At this stage you might be wondering - well this sounds interesting but in reality is there any money in it? Well, here’s the bombshell - eBay’s top affiliates make over 1 million dollars a month. That’s right - 8 figures a year without stocking, selling or shipping a specific thing!

Now eBay does grant some necessary tools to help you thrive as an eBay affiliate and create an affiliate business BUT it has been the development of a tool outside of eBay that has really opened this up as a legitimate business opportunity.

The tool, as I mentioned previous, is called “Build A Niche Store ” and what it permits you to do is create eBay affiliate websites targeted to any eBay niche you want. These act as the avenue through which you direct targeted visitors to eBay.

Here are a pair of examples, one targeting Race Cars and the other Golf gear:

Race Car eBay Affiliate Website

Golf eBay Affiliate Website

As you can see, these are professional looking websites that includes all of those eBay products related to their target niche inside a searchable store front format, each of which automatically encloses your eBay affiliate id.

These stores then automatically revised as new products are listed for sale and old listing expire from the eBay marketplace and the software has built in development features which permit you to produce new store pages, add content to these pages, create content pages, alter your template etc etc.

In the space of about 10 minutes (once you are acquainted with how the software operates) you can produce a fully functional eBay affiliate website targeted to the niche market of your choosing.

Your store content is all search engine friendly which will allow the foundation for drawing targeted traffic from the search engines and you can then use the development features to draw more targeted visitors which will in time mean more eBay affiliate commissions.

It really is a brilliant model and I’ve been hearing great things about the guys behind the project and the member forum which you get time access to when you buy the product.

Create A Niche Store comes with a step by step manual which will walk even the most technically inexperienced through setting up their eBay affiliate website, 9 professional template layouts which can be customized (from inside your admin panel) to attain your target niche, lifetime member forum access, comprehensive product support and perhaps most importantly - an INFINITE domain license which means you can create as many of these niche websites as you want.