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When Christmas came late...
publication date: Jan 10, 2007
*******
- Editorial
- Auction Feedback - Be Wary by
MichaelBloch
- eBay Shops: Enough Niches For
Everybody! By StevenDempster
- Placing a Link on Your Auction Page
Pointing to Your About Me Page by John
V. W.Howe
*******
Hello,
The results are in for the recent Big Spend
season and high street shops boast
mammoth record breaking profits for
December just gone. Despite warnings of
low profits for the month, high street profit
analysts tell us that 'Christmas came late' -
how did they do that, it's always been
December 25th in my diary - with many
people waiting until the very last minute to
buy Christmas presents and seasonal
novelties.
Well bully for them and by comparison
these analysts suggest the high street still
reigns supreme over online ventures.
What a load of rubbish! Take it from me,
based on my own experience and that of
many friends selling on eBay, Christmas
came late for us too! But when it came,
about the second week in December, it
came with a vengeance and virtually
everyone I spoke to about it say profits also
arrived big time after a disappointing
dribble of orders from late November to
mid December.
Why am I telling you this? Well, first of
all, so you don't take what other people say
with a pinch of salt, don't listen to what
high street analysts say about online
selling, ask people who know what they are
doing, ask people running a profitable
business on eBay. Or let me talk to them
for you and report back on the real truth
surrounding running an online business.
The second reason is, this year I want to
focus more on special seasons with big
spend potential, not just in my eBay
business, but also in yours. I'm talking
Valentine's Day, Easter, Mothers' Day,
Fathers' Day, and whatever new
celebrations are dreamed up Over the Pond
to get people to part with their cash for
products you and I are selling.
This is partly to PayPal reporting, last year,
that spending on Valentine's Day gifts
online had increased by more than 23 per
cent. That's big money, and the company
says most money went on candy (sweets
and chocolates to you and me! Should that
be 'I'? No, it's definitely 'me'. I think!).
This was followed by jewellery, novelty
gifts like balloons and baskets, last but not
least on greetings cards.
That's very good news, great information
for product sourcing in the next few weeks.
I thought the rules would be stricter for
people selling food and confectionary on
eBay yet still I found hundreds of people
offering sweets and chocolates, some quite
ordinary, others obviously gearing up for
Valentine's Day.
Let's go with a few ideas for products you
can source now and sell in the run up to
February 14th:
* Anything with hearts and flowers, cupids
and kisses, we're talking charm bracelets,
greetings cards, prints, lingerie, etc.
* Gift baskets, especially naughty gift
baskets with aphrodisiac drinks, heart
shaped chocolates, sex toys, body
chocolate (use your imagination on this
one: I'm old-fashioned!) But I'm not too
much of a prude to say I would personally
contact any of many gift basket services
operating on and off the Internet with a
view to representing them on eBay not only
for Valentine's Day but all year round.
Look for affiliate programs with gift basket
providers, but don't list the items direct on
eBay, you are not allowed to sell affiliate
products directly through eBay listings.
But there's nothing to stop you contacting
affiliate sellers, ask if you can promote
their products independent of their affiliate
program and subsequently pay to have the
baskets delivered to your buyers after
deducting their normal affiliate
commission. If you make more than the
maker's recommended price, good for you,
you'll make even more than affiliates
working much harder for sales outside of
eBay.
There's something else I need to tell you
before I move on to selected articles from
well-known writers and it concerns the
reason I chose the first article, about
feedback.
Just a few weeks ago, I bought an eBook,
with resell rights, from an eBay seller with
100 per cent feedback, lots of it, well over
200 positive feedbacks and not a neutral or
negative in sight. My eBook never arrived,
nor it seems did products ordered by the
100 or so other people who left negative
feedback for the seller in late December,
just before he or she was thrown off eBay.
I knew all about the trick used to generate
this great feedback, I should have checked,
but I didn't, and like many others I thought
the 200 positive feedbacks were from
buyers. They were in fact from sellers, all
for eBooks costing 1p each.
All those 200 plus 1p purchases, £32 in total,
represented sprats to catch a mackerel.
With 200 positive feedbacks the buyer
turned seller, but not supplier and all
buyers after those 200 or so initial feedback
scores received nothing but
disappointment. I had been conned, as had
people spending up to £3200 a time on CDs
and comprehensive business plans which
looked great on eBay but in fact never
existed outside the conman's imagination.
Just £32 it cost to make many thousands of
pounds without ever fulfilling a single
product!
Read the following article, learn how to
spot this common scam, or lose out as I did
(just a fiver and well worth that for the
experience and advice to pass on to you!)
Happy eBaying,
Avril
P.S. If you are new to eBay Confidential,
welcome! Make sure you take a look at my
newsletter, packed with eBay tips, tricks
and money making tequniques.
Take a look here:
***
Auction Feedback - Be Wary by MichaelBloch
***
eBay and similar auction sites have created
fortunes for some and a few extra bucks for
many others. On the flip side, these sites
have allowed millions people to purchase
goods online at very competitive prices;
everything from common items to missile
silos (I kid you not).
I recently needed to buy some office
dividers so I thought I'd check out eBay. I
wasn't really expecting to find anything,
but lo and behold, there they were - cheap
as chips and only a 10 minute drive from
here. They were in excellent condition and
I figured I saved about $150 with my 30
minutes of shopping, bidding and pick-up
time. I also picked up a brand new VOIP
phone for around US$25 (including
delivery) a few weeks later and it's worked
a treat.
I wouldn't say I am a hard-core eBayer by
any means, but every buying/selling
experience I've had to date has been very
positive. Merchants have always been
polite and attentive; the items always of
good quality. Of course, as in any trading
environment, eBay and other auction sites
has its share of sharks.
Like many others, when purchasing or
selling an item, I check out the feedback
ratings of the other party as it seems to me
to be the most accurate way to determine
risk. The higher the number of positive
comments, the safer the person is to do
business with, right? Unfortunately, with
some unscrupulous parties engaging in
feedback exchange scams, that's no longer
such a foolproof method; although auction
sites are cracking down on these people.
A common feedback related scam is where
a merchant (sometimes with full
knowledge of what he/she is doing) offers
extraordinarily cheap items such as an
eBook for $1. If I wanted to crank up my
feedback rating, I could get a hundred
pieces of positive feedback for just a
hundred bucks by shopping around for
these merchants - enough to give me
substantial credibility to pull off a bigger
scam. Or as the merchant, I could make a
hundred people happy with my cheap offer
and wind up with the same amount of
glowing ratings; nicely setting myself up to
sting others.
I am not saying that anyone who sells or
buys one dollar items are actively engaged
in setting themselves or others up to scam,
nor do I have any idea of how rampant this
kind of scam is, but you should go past just
the feedback numbers and positive/negative
feedback ratios.
An easy way to tell if the person you are
doing business with may be engaged in this
is to check out the value and *type* of
recent items they were involved in selling
or purchasing. If you see a stack of items
with a transaction value of just a couple of
bucks and are basically just garbage items,
be cautious.
MichaelBloch has been working the web
as a successful marketing and development
consultant since the late 90s. Michael owns
and operates TamingTheBeast.net; a
popular Internet marketing and ecommerce
resources site providing online business
owners and affiliate marketers with
valuable free advice, articles, tutorials and
tools.
***
eBay Shops: Enough Niches For
Everybody! By StevenDempster
***
You have probably read plenty about niche
marketing on the internet - but what does it
really mean? This article takes a look at
niche marketing in its context as an eBay
shop based business.
eBay: who would have thought ten years
ago that this little project of Pierre
Omidyar's, started in his living room,
would now be the global phenomenon it
has grown into? Many things have changed
in the last ten years and opportunities for
business online have mushroomed to the
extent that there's now almost 'too much
information'. One thing that seems to baffle
people who want to get on the eBay
bandwagon - and it's nothing to do with the
mechanics of having an eBay account
which, let's face it, are pretty simple. No -
the real stumper for many people is this:
what do I sell? What do I trade in? And
what's the best way to get exposure for my
goods?
These questions are not asked by the casual
eBay member; the one who wants to sell
off some unwanted household goods or
hold the online version of a garage sale.
That type of trading, although still
massively widespread amongst the eBay
community, is not what niche marketing is
about. In fact, it's not what an eBay
business in 2007 is about at all.
I personally don't know any eBay
millionaires but they doubtless exist and
let's get one thing straight: eBay did NOT
make these people rich - they made
THEMSELVES rich. They had the savvy
to see that eBay is what it is - a superb
turnkey operation simply begging to be
taken advantage of. They learned how to
take advantage of the plethora of tools and
reports that eBay waved in front of them,
tools that elsewhere could well have cost a
fortune. And do you know what? You can
do exactly the same! It's just a question of
learning how to use the eBay system.
One of the must-knows for anyone setting
up or operating any trading business is this:
know your market. What do your
customers want? Where are they? What do
they want to pay for your goods? These are
questions that all business owners must
know but, before that, before anything, you
must know what you are going to sell.
What is your stock-in-trade? Where will
you buy it from? What investment do you
need and (and this is a really important
one) - how are you going to get those
products in front of these potential
customers that your research tells you are
champing at the bit to buy from you?
In a redbrick business there are several
avenues to market - direct mail, yellow
pages, mailshots, catalogues - all tried and
tested and all ranging from quite expensive
to ruinously so. Just try pricing a minute of
prime TV airtime - but have the smelling
salts ready! On eBay things are a little
different - simply get an eBay shop.
For those who don't know what an eBay
shop is, in some ways it's a return to the old
virtual shopping mall idea of the late
'nineties, with all the pros and none of the
cons.
The virtual malls were a good idea let
down by clunky servers and snail-speed
connections. By contrast, an eBay shop is
quick, easy to maintain and, importantly,
easy for your prospective customers to use.
It's also inexpensive and will put your
goods in front of more prospective
customers than you could ever realistically
hope to contact by other means.
Where an eBay shop can really come into
its own is when you have your own
website. Why? Simple. Your eBay shop
can easily be embedded into a page on your
site - where of course you can offer other
goods or services and have targeted ads
such as GoogleAdSense on the page,
giving you more opportunities to earn
income. An eBay shop can be as simple or
as complex as you like and can grow as
your business and experience does. Many
people start off by selling products that
they are interested in - a niche interest! But
there are many, many niches within the
eBay marketplace and ways of discovering
them do exist - unfortunately these are
beyond the scope of this article.
eBay shops are ideal for those niche
businesses I mentioned above. If you want
to sell pottery figures from Wade - great!
Bakelite inkwells - no problem! I'm not
saying you'll ever make your fortune doing
this but the important thing is that you will
'cut your teeth' in a real business
environment - and there are enough niches
for all. Maybe you'll spread to a broader
product base and make your million after
all - maybe you'll just have a very nice
niche business that you understand and are
good at. It's all up to you!
SteveDempster writes informative articles
for the web and is also a ghostwriter. To
learn more about levering your eBay sales,
take a look atwww.anewlife4u.co.uk
***
Placing a Link on Your Auction Page
Pointing to Your About Me Page by John
V. W.Howe
***
The About Me page on eBay is a very
powerful tool when used correctly. This
page can be used to sell the reader, sign the
reader up for your list, or communicate
with the viewer of your auction to establish
a closer relationship.
In order to increase the chance of a person
going to your About Me page from your
auction page, you should put a link on
every auction page that points to your
About Me page. Let's discuss how to do
this.
We will need some HTML tags to do this.
In order to show the HTML tags as text and
not have the browser execute them, I will
use the XMP tag to start. Browsers are
supposed to ignore HTML tags in the XMP
tag range and not execute them.
Unfortunately, not all browsers handle the
XMP tag in the same way. I do not know
how it will display on your browser so if
you see XMP, that is the reason.
You place the link to your About Me Page
in the Description box that you create when
you post a sale on eBay. The eBay
Description box has tabs in the top left that
allow you to switch back and forth between
Standard view and HTML view as you are
creating the Description. Start writing your
description in Standard mode until you get
to the place where you want to insert the
link to your About Me page. Here you click
on HTML and the box will change to
accept HTML code. You will also see the
HTML for what you have already entered.
Position your cursor where you want to
insert the link and copy and paste the
following HTML code. This will create the
multicolor blue and red eBay icon for the
About Me and link it to your own About
Me page.
Replace the "Your-eBay-Name" with your
own eBay name.
<XMP>
<a
href=3D"http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/Y
our-eBay-Name"><font>
color=3D"#0000ff"><b>About</b></font><b
><font color=3D"#0000ff">M</font><font
color=3D"#ff0000">e</font></b></a>
</XMP>
Now switch back to Standard view and you
should see the red and blue About Me icon.
Go ahead and finish writing your
description. When you finish, click the
Preview link at the bottom left of the
Description box and a new window will
open to show you how the auction listing
will look. If you need to put spaces around
the link, you can add the spaces in the
Standard mode.
There is a short video that explains how to
do this at: http://www.boomer-
Good luck. I hope you get a ton of traffic to
your About Me page and that you convert
all of it.
JohnV.W.Howe is an entrepreneur,
author, inventor, patent holder, husband,
father, and grandfather. He has been
involved in entrepreneurial activities for
over 40 years. He founded
help Boomers (baby boomers) become
entrepreneurs when they retire.
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