My eBay Secret

The Ebay Affiliate Program

2011-01-16T16:00:00.000-05:00

You can earn extra money referring other to Ebay too.

The eBay Affiliate Program strives to make success of its members inevitable. The eBay Affiliate program has outlined some effective strategies and designed some effective tools to ensure you make money and have success. eBay's Affiliate program, is already a success for so many people, and has the benefit of experience to pass on to you. Once you become a member of the Affiliate Program you can be making money in no time flat.

The Program has recognized four models that their most successful affiliates utilize. These models increase traffic or maximize potential in a variety of ways: The first, the natural search, occurs when people go to search engines with a query in hopes of receiving relevant search information.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL return listings from web sites that ranked the highest during the search process. Affiliate Program members who optimize this strategy incorporate eBay's helpful hints for natural searches. Indexed web sites with title pages and other rank-earning components earn more exposure, and increase their earnings with eBay.

The second model, the paid search model, increases hits with search engines because this model pays for placement. This model includes results that would appear in the "sponsored links" section. While these cost money, they are a cost-effective way to target interested leads.

The third model is Content websites. They place eBay ads on their website, and find added success when they choose to advertise for eBay in ways that also relate to their own content and aims.

The fourth model is opt-in newsletters. This option allows websites to broadcast additional information about their eBay Affiliate Program status to potential customers, and increase their customer base. To make the most of eBay, many websites choose to emulate one of the aforementioned models. These models are tried and true, and repeatedly spell success for eBay Affiliate Program members. These models are highly cost and time effective.

Cost and time effectiveness are highly important, as they ensure you are earning the maximum dollar for the effort you invest in your affiliate member status. The eBay Affiliate Program takes your time and effort seriously, and provides you with the necessary tools to maximize your success. Items such as the Keyword Tool, allow you to ensure your keywords are drawing the most attention.

eBay also provides you with options to track the hits your site inspired, statistics for the products and models that are performing best, and additional guidelines for best business practices. All of these options are free with the eBay Affiliate Program, and all of them will increase your earning potential with the programmed.

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How To Drive Customers Away

2011-01-07T14:09:00.000-05:00

ADD CHARGES FOR HANDLING AND PACKING MATERIALS

You want the advantage eBay offers of a million possible buyers, otherwise you could just have a garage sale at home. And, you want to look like an antique store without paying for rent, employees, insurance, etc. What you want is to have the best of both worlds. But, a professional can't have it both ways. If you are selling more than three items a year on eBay, you are a professional.

Has an antique store ever charged you extra to wrap the fragile antique in lots of tissue paper? Did they ever tell you it would be 50¢ extra if you want a bag? Or charge for the bag by a percentage of the item price? There are expenses in a business, and your way of dealing with expenses should be to deduct them at tax time.

Some sellers use a professional shipper to pack all their items. This probably does assure that the item will be packed safely. But that is not why the seller is using the subcontractor. When you see a seller with tons of feedback, peek in and see how many auctions they are running at one time. Maybe 50? Maybe 100? Even more? How could any seller 1) keep track of all those (computer software) and 2) have the time to wrap up all of those items? He doesn't, he pays extra for someone else to pack up each item. Well, no - you pay extra so he has the ability to run hundreds of auctions at one time. This extra expense benefits him, makes his life easier, allows him to make tons more money, BUT does not cut into his profit margin at all. It is just one more "gift" to you - if you choose to accept it.

This is one of the best off Ebay, for some dishes: "Due to the enormous amount of packing and shipping, shipping and handling is $200.00! I have not decided how to ship yet. I'm thinking UPS just because of their handling policies." First, the seller doesn't even know the cost of postage because he hasn't decided on which company to use. Second, here's an important piece of advice: If you don't want to ever pay for bubblewrap and foam peanuts, sell clothing! You will also find ways to possibly get all of your packing materials for free.

Ebay is full of "gifts" of extra charges right now. Many of the newer sellers have seen the example of these over-charging sellers and have followed suit. The handling fee is $1.00 for unbreakables, $2.00 to $5.00 on breakables (depending on size), and some are charging $5.00 for a "good strong box." That's not all. Someone told them that $.55 is a small price to pay for delivery confirmation. Well, it is a small price for the buyer to pay for the seller's peace of mind. The buyer uses trust to send a seller money, certainly the seller can trust the buyer not to say that the item never arrived when it really did. That is all that delivery confirmation is for - telling the seller the date and time that a package was delivered. Tracking is not included. Just one more charge that is unnecessary and is passed to the buyer.

You might get away with extra charges occasionally if the customer doesn't read the small print, or if the customer does read the small print but really wants the item. The sellers who want to get rid of as many customers as possible put in their listings that the bidder agrees to pay shipping, insurance and handling without a warning of how much the handling charge would be. There is not always time to ask the question and get the reply before making a decision to bid or not.

BE SURE TO INCLUDE A HUGE LIST OF ALL THE THINGS YOU WON'T STAND FOR

Man, there is nothing like reading about all the bad deals the seller has had and what they simply won't put up with anymore to make you want to rush to put a bid on his item! It is almost funny that the sellers with some of the longest lists of do's and don'ts for their bidders are brand new to Ebay. Hmm. Maybe they read the woes of so many other sellers that they thought this would nip all the problems in the bud. If you don't mention cheating, fraud, paying slowly, bad checks, etc., the bidders might not ever think of such things. If you treat your bidders with dignity, fairness and trust, that is what you will usually receive from them. Besides, you certainly don't want bidders thinking that the reason you've had so many problems just might be you.

SNEAK IN EXTRA CHARGES

If you see an item listed for much less than it is worth with no reserve, it sometimes pays to ask a seller early in the auction just what postage would be for their item. You can't just assume even postage rates will always be the same. If the item sells for much less than the seller expected, that 1-pound package may just cost you $3.95 or even $5.20 instead of $3.50. It has happened. After all (they think), they need to make up the difference somewhere, and you probably won't ever weigh the package to even know what they did. This is also when you may see the handling fee go from 50¢ to $2!

HOW TO AVOID EXTRA EXPENSES AND FEES

As a seller, you have a few ways to deal with expenses like eBay fees. One is to add their fees to the opening bid. At least the actual price is then out in the open. Another is to just keep track of all expenses so you can deduct them at tax time.

The best way to avoid having to worry about any extra expenses is to simply buy smarter. If you think a platter will sell for $15, spend no more than $5 in the first place. That means that you need to shop around for good deals, buy in quantity for lower prices on your end, and keep informed so you know the current values before you buy. You do deserve to make a profit - first for all your time, and second for making such a wonderful item available in the first place. If you want even more profit, sell only what you already own.

Most sellers don't even worry about charging for bubblewrap and tissue paper because they get more than enough free when they receive packages from others. (Which, of course, they found for a "steal" on eBay by following the advice right here at this site!)

Sellers can avoid even more fees by selecting more carefully the services they use. Lots of photo sites don't charge for you to store your pictures, and pictures there can be used with auctions. Some of the other sites that offer free picture storage will not let you use your pictures in auctions (like Yahoo). Still other services charge per picture, which can really get expensive with auctions. And, some picture hosting sites will cost you dearly in sales if you use them because the pictures never load so do your homework.

Some sellers currently admit in their listings that they will only use one photo per auction now because eBay raised their photo rates. If the item is not worth an extra 15¢, why even sell items like that? Or, just add 15¢ to the opening bid. Many items simply require more than one photo to show their condition or quality. You need to treat your buyers fairly, and most items sell for much more when more than one photo is used.

Speak up when you get hit with extra charges that either were not listed or are higher than expected. You can usually get unnecessary charges removed or high charges reduced. If more buyers spoke up, these practices would stop. Sellers would be out of business totally without buyers, and they should truly see their customers as being valuable. That's what gets repeat buyers. When you find a seller with items you like and no extra fees, be sure to click on "View seller's other items ." In fact, bookmark his seller's list so you can check back often.

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How Do People Get Free Shipping Supplies?

2011-01-07T14:03:00.000-05:00

The United States Post Office is still "pushing" their Priority Mail services. You can order all the shipping supplies you want through the USPS - order in minutes on line - and have them delivered to your door. When you make your first order, the USPS will mail you a postcard to sign and mail back to them. The "payment" for this deal is simply agreeing to (and signing to prove it) use these supplies only for their intended purpose. Anyone caught turning Priority Mail boxes inside out to use a cheaper mail service will be in big trouble. We haven't done this so we don't know if you get a large fine, jail time, or just lose the privilege to ever receive any more supplies. So, this is not for you if you prefer to send your packages by UPS or using the Book Rate.

Just what kind of supplies does the USPS offer? Small boxes, larger boxes, flat boxes, larger flat boxes, small flat boxes, flat mailers, "Priority Mail" tape, and labels. You can't have it all, you have to buy your own bubblewrap! The only real catch is that you must order the minimum, which can be a case of boxes. Since the boxes come flat, this is not as bad as it sounds.

For those that don't want to use Priority Mail or the USPS in general, there are still places to get boxes for free.

Your local supermarket gets deliveries at least once a week. Just ask one of their employees on what day and at what time their deliveries arrive. They won't usually save boxes for you, but you can walk in and get as many as you like before they cut them down for recycling.
Office Depot has great boxes for larger items. They receive their reams of paper in sturdy boxes with lids, and these are always clean. Our local Office Depot receives paper deliveries twice a week. The store manager even agreed to hold the boxes for a few hours. We just need to go in on the correct day. Since these are such handy boxes, you may have to be the first to get to the store to beat others with the same idea.
Check the free ads in the Recycler. Companies go out of business all the time, and they would usually prefer to give their supply of boxes away than to pay someone to haul them away. We found a vitamin store that was closing down and got hundreds of small and tiny boxes. These are not only great for mailing small items, but they are perfect for double boxing a set of smaller breakables.
Liquor stores have the sturdiest boxes since bottles of liquor and wine are so heavy. If you sell bottles, these may even come with cardboard slots in them already to keep bottles from hitting each other when you send out several to one buyer.
Dumpsters behind stores sometimes have good empty boxes. Sometimes you are lucky enough to find the boxes piled outside the dumpster. Either way, you should check them to be sure that they are clean and dry (a box will be weakened forever once it gets wet).
The most obvious is for sellers to BUY on Ebay. Your package will come in a box, and many will come full of styrofoam peanuts or bubblewrap also. Just be sure that the box is sturdy before using it again. And, don't use bubblewrap as padding for delicate items if the bubbles are popped.
Get inventive, you may find even more good suppliers of boxes.

Your local stores that sell breakable items usually have lots of bubblewrap and styrofoam peanuts on hand that they don't need. After all, most of their customers put their goodies into the car and drive home. Talk to them. They will probably be happy to let you pick up all of their extras once a week or so. They get to recycle and have less clutter, and you get to save lots of money.

BUT, you may need boxes - in special sizes. You can get the discounts that the "big guys" do. Global Industrial offers boxes in many, many sizes. Since you buy them by the case, you get the big savings. Using larger boxes than you need drastically raises the postage cost, so spending 25 cents on the right box is a good investment in keeping customers happy and coming back for more. And, don't forget, whatever you sepnd on boxes is deductible at tax time. You can also get all your shipping supplies for less at Global Industrial. If you sell lots of fragile items, take a look at their peanut dispenser. It holds 30 cubic feet of packing peanuts at one time, it hangs from the ceiling out of the way, and you drop in all you need with a push of a button. This is a real time and space saver.

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Some Basic Strategies

2011-01-01T00:02:00.000-05:00

Everyone has something that they can sell on E-bat. The question is, howdo you go about doing so? Is the item you have E-bayable? Where do youlist it, and for how long? Thats what this how-to aims to explain.

1. FIND SOMETHING TO SELL
It must be an item that you enjoy selling. Of course it is always better if you seek items out that are not available widely to many people in the world. For starters you can purchase ANTIQUES, CD's, and CLOTHING at great prices, and then list them on eBay and watch the money start rolling in! If you have a tax ID number, you may even be able to purchase items wholesale and list them on eBay (we will show you a work around if you don’t have one later in this Guide.

2. TIMES TO LIST
You never want to list your items to end during the day, unless you end them on the weekend during the day. I have found that 7-day auctions work the best. If you are selling a very pricey item, you should list this item as a 10-day auction. You will pay a bit more $$$ but it is definitely worth it to allow as many people as possible to see your listing(s). I usually do a bit of listing everyday from 7pm until 9pm. You don't want to list your items too late.

The most exposure you will get will be during the last 4 hours of your auction. That is the busiest time for bidding on items. If you list too late in the evening, no one will be willing to stay up until the wee hours just to bid on your item! This is very important! If you start out listing on the weekends, Sunday is a good day. IF your listings end around 4pm many people will be home to watch your auctions end! This increases your chances on making much more money on your item(s).

3. TOOLS
I highly recommend investing in a digital camera. Film and processing are very expensive. If you plan on selling on eBay full time, the camera will pay for itself incredibly fast. We recommend shipping items via Priority Mail. I suggest you let the buyers pay for shipping. You want to make sure you quote their shipping price correctly. The post office has a list of prices according to weight. It is a good idea to get a list.
Another suggestion: Call the number on the priority boxes, they will send you what ever you need for free! TAPE, PREPRINTED ADRESSES LABELS, BOXES etc.! This is great because you should never have to pay for these items! The profit margin will decrease as you find yourself paying for these things here and there. I suggest shipping all of your items out at once, on one particular day. If you don't want to pay priority to pick up your items, I recommend shipping a few packages everyday. Otherwise it will be a lot of work and there is a chance you can get tired of this very easily! I try to make things as easy as possible! I figure my time is more valuable, and I can be listing more items in the time it would take to go to the post office.

4. LISTINGI don't recommend listing items as reserve auctions. I think it scares potential buyers away. Especially if someone is bidding and bidding, and after a while of seeing reserve not met yet, they are going to get bored and leave your auction. My theory is: If an item is valuable, people will find it!!!

I also suggest starting your auction price LOW!! Even if your item is worth $600.00, for a set of golf clubs. You can start the auction at $9.99. Then in your description you can state that the clubs are worth $600.00. This will get many people interested in your item; they will think they can get a great deal. This is where bidding wars can start!

Remember the more $$$ you start your auctions for the more fees you will have to pay to eBay! Trust me, if your item is valuable people will find it!! Make sure to put as many keywords in the title as you can! For example: you are selling a CD (wrong way) ALICIA KEYS CD (right way) Alicia Keys CD SEALED songs in A minor. This is what is going to help people find your auction!! It is crucial to helping people find you! I also suggest writing out the track listing in your description. People can do searches with words in descriptions as well! I highly suggest using words like RARE (of course it should really be RARE) WOW! L@@K, BEAUTIFUL. This really and truly makes a difference!

I always recommend selling your item with photos! This is very important. No photo usually = no sale! Make sure you list your item in the proper category, so people looking for this type of item will find it automatically. If you generalize your item too much, people may not find it easily.

5. A SERIOUS TRICK TO MAKING LOTS OF $$$$$
I have recently discovered the trick of listing one item in a featured auction. It is a bit pricey, and only should be done when you have many auctions listed. Also make sure you refer other people to your other auctions. If you have a popular item listed on a featured area, chances are all of your auctions will do better in the end. I have paid as much as one hundred dollars to list an item, and I even though I would normally sell that item for one hundred dollars, it made all of my other auctions shoot up to a higher selling point!

Another great trick! I recommend starting a mailing list. Keep all of your bidders and winners e-mail addresses on file and when you list other similar items; send out a mass e-mail telling them you have listed more items they might be interested in. NEVER EVER SEND SPAM e-mail. Make sure all of your potential customers want to be contacted when you have new items up for bid!

Third great trick! Example: Let's say you are selling a sports memorabilia item from the New England Patriots. I would go do a search on all of the fan websites for the New England Patriots. Then I would go to the guest book and write that you have great items from this team for sale on eBay and add your link to the guest book. Then people can paste that link into their browsers and visit your auctions! You won't believe what a big difference this makes!

6. PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE
Everything takes time. Once you get the hang of eBay, you will find your own tricks that work for you. It is all trial and error. Make sure you list a bunch of items at once. This will make all of your items more popular. Eventually you will begin to have repeat customers and your business will begin to grow. This is NOT an easy job; it takes hard work and investing time into your future. It definitely will pay off in the end!

7. BALANCE
Please remember to shop on eBay as well. Support your fellow eBayers. Purchase gifts and items for yourself on the site. Rememeber balance is key! If too many people sell on eBay and no one is buying, than we are all out of luck.

8. NEVER SHIP OUT AN ITEM UNTIL IT IS PAID FOR
I personally only accept online forms of payment because I find the longer I wait for payment, the more of a chance there maybe for someone to flake on paying for an auction. With online payments such as C2IT and PAYPAL, odds are you will be paid right away! It is very easy to sign up with these sites www.paypal.com or www.c2it.com. If you do choose to accept personal checks, make sure the check has cleared the bank before you ship the item. Accepting money orders is usually fine as well.

9. KEYWORDS
Finally the last great tip I have is to submit your auction page to search engines using keywords (This should be items you regularly sell on eBay) this way you can drive even more traffic to your auctions. You can then install a counter program such as Andale www.andale.com on your page. I recommend using a hidden counter, so others don't know how many hits you are receiving. This way you can track the tips that work for you with your products.

10. BE CLEAR CONCISE AND HONEST ABOUT YOUR PRODUCTIf the item has a tear, hole or dent, make sure to write that in your description. This will save you a lot of headaches later.

First of all, please do not be overwhelmed with the information you will find. There are a lot of links to thousands of wholesale companies. Take your time when you look around. You will be amazed. If you have questions about a company or their products, don't be afraid to call them. They need your business more than you need theirs. They will be happy to help you.

We highly recommend you write down your questions before you call a supplier so that you do not forget to ask them what is on your mind. Take your time when talking to them and do not let anyone talk you into buying something you do not want. When you see something you think you can sell, research it on eBay and see how the completed auctions went.

Make sure to look at both the auction price AND the shipping price as many eBay sellers bury profits in the s/h portion of the auction. After the auctions have ended, see which ones had the most bids, when they started, ended, and what category they were in. If you are using this information for offline sales, look around at other vendors and see if anyone else is selling the product and see if you can sell it for less and still make a profit.

Here is a big tip. If you go to a department store like Wal-Mart and see an item you would like to sell, pick it up, check out the packaging, and write down (or record if you have a voice memo recorder) who manufactures it (you can find out how to buy direct from the manufacturer by doing this). Go to the web and see if they are online. A great reference for finding a company online is: Network Solutions WHOIS database http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois

Get in contact with them and tell them you are considering them as a supplier and would like a price list. Don't be afraid to call or e-mail them. Be sure to represent yourself as a business and not just an individual. Be professional. It is really easy. Look around right now. Pick up some items in your home, just by looking at the labels, warranty information, or packaging, you can find out who manufactures & distributes it. If you can't get a phone number off a label or package, you can also try 1-800-555-1212, give the name of the company and get their phone number. When you talk to them, tell them you want a price list and would like to get set up as either a distributor, or retailer for them. If they are not in the 800 directory, you may be able to find them by looking at their warranty address information.

Just call directory assistance for the state they are located in and call them. It works like a charm. If the company only deals with "large" retailers, ask them for a list of their distributors and just keep calling their distributors until you find the one with the lowest prices. Sometimes it takes a little research but when you find what you are looking for it makes it all worth while!

HINT: If you do not have a tax id number, just enter your social security number in place of it (*big tip, you can do this with almost any wholesale company*).

They are the granddaddy of wholesale suppliers & you have seen their products all over eBay. We are giving you special access to their pricing website! Follow the link below. The login button is in the upper right-hand corner of the home page.

http://www.bnfusa.com
Username is: web
Password is: user

Want to save big money & buy at or below wholesale? Go to http://www.storepower.com. This is where you can get many of the same items you find in major department stores. Not off the wall junk items, but name brand quality products.

After you browse there a while & check them out, go to http://www.sumcomm.com . This site has a built in search engine you can use. They have direct links with over 45,000 products at wholesale pricing. Be sure to sign up for their free monthly catalog. It is full of suppliers, and if you do not find what you need there, it is probably not online. If your search pulls up more than 1 supplier of the same item, be sure to shop each company, they are flexible, and will normally go out of their way to keep from being undersold.

Another one to use is http://www.merchantsnews.com . Again, be sure to sign up for their free catalog as well.

One of my favorite sites for name brand electronics (but not the only one) is http://www.hotbuy4u.com. The name of the company is Premier Products.

Once you get your feet wet, and want to make some international contacts, go to http://www.allproducts.com . This site will put you into contact with contacts from all over the world.

Looking for government repos, bankruptcy liquidations, US Marshals items, etc, go to http://www.bid4assets.com . They have all kinds of different items you can get dirt cheap!

These sources are fantastic!! They are going to be very helpful to you. We have never had any complaints on this guide and have had many customers thank us over and over for helping them get their online, or retail business started. We love to help whenever we are able.

Best wishes, and have fun!!

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by My Ebay Secrets, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware.

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The Best Ways To Not Overpay For Items on eBay

2010-12-01T22:23:00.001-05:00

We know you'd pay just about any price to add that special item to your collection, but don't let anyone else know that!

Here are some tips on how to not overpay for items on

Don't jump right in and bid a huge amount as soon as the item is listed.
This lets others know that the item is worth something and makes them want it more.
Keep your excitement in check and don't even bid on the item until the very end.
If you are terrible at remembering auctions, you can bid in the beginning - but make the minimum bid only. (This way you'll be reminded with ebay's daily auction notices, or you can always do a search of what you bid on recently - even if you've been outbid.)
This makes other bidders think you only would have bought it if you got a great price.
Then leave the bidding alone until the very end! Nothing raises bids faster than competition.
Snipe - see our sniping section to find out how. Basically, bid at the very last minute and bid the very most you could stand.
Research the kind of items you collect or regularly buy.
Can you find it just as cheap at the corner store?
If there are usually six of these on any given day, wait for the one with the lowest price.
Look around before you bid. You may find the exact same thing for half the price.

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When is the Best Time to Go Shopping on eBay?

2010-12-01T22:19:00.000-05:00

When you go shopping on Ebay depends a lot on your own schedule. But, when you can find the best deals depends on other factors.

Obviously, you may have the internet just about to yourself at 1:00 in the morning. But, you may not have many auctions to bid on that are closing in that time slot. You are able to bid on any item you want (not just those near closing), but your bidding procedures should be different depending on how much you are willing to spend. There are many auctions closing around noontime, but the internet i.s s..o s...l...o...w then because so many people peek in during their lunch break. It could take you 6 to 10 minutes just to get a bid through, and that is after you finally get the page to load.

One method a lot of people use is to go browsing on a weekday morning or late in the evening on any day of the week. This gives them lots of speed so they can look in on many more auctions. When they see something interesting, they just bookmark it for later. That way, they can go back near the end of the auction to do some serious bidding (more on that is coming in a later chapter). There are many other times you can be assured of speeding through the internet: on a holiday; 7:00 to 9:00 on an important voting evening; while the most popular t.v. shows are on; Sunday mornings; any Saturday night (date night); while the Olympic gymnastics finals are on t.v.; etc.

There are two ways to speed up your internet shopping at any time you want......

If you know the name and description of what you are looking for, you can do your initial shopping without pictures. You can "turn off" the images through your browser. In Netscape, click on Edit on the top bar, then click on Preferences, then Advanced, then click on Automatically Load Images to uncheck the box. You can shop through hundreds of auctions without waiting for any images to load. If you get to an auction that looks like a great one, you can then click on Images (on the second bar from the top) to see these pictures only, and click on Images again to turn them back off and continue shopping.

Shopping at any time of the day or any day of the week is always slowest with a dial-up connection. And, most dial-up connections get lost often. Cable modem or DSL can make your shopping (and everything you do on the internet) at least 10 times faster - without disconnects. You only need to be disconnected just before bidding on something once to know how important your internet connection is. And, that is just an example from the point of buying. Sellers listing on ebay who use AOL simply cannot be having successful sales - their photos take forever to show up. Photos that just won't load or take SO long to load cause buyers to go on their merry way.

If the sky is the limit on something you really want, you may want to try to be the first bidder. If an item worth $20 is the one missing piece to complete your collection, you may feel like bidding $200 and not care if the bidding really goes that high. That kind of bidding almost guarantees that you will win the auction. We say almost because you run the risk of bringing extra attention to the auction that way. If two or three people want an item, the bids start going back and forth and the price goes up and up. Let's say the item you really need is a frog beanie baby. Many people who collect beanies will note that the auction has more bids than normal and peek in to see why. If your name is recognizable as a regular beanie baby collector, now their curiosity is really peaked. "If _______ is bidding on this frog, she must know something that I don't know...If ________ doesn't have this frog, it must really be rare!...I've got to get this frog!" Whoops.

If you want to get the best deal, you may want to wait till near the end of the auction. We will tell you in a later chapter just how to get the best deal whether you shop at the beginning, middle or end of an auction.

One other thing. The best time to go shopping is after you have done your research! Browse through many auctions to see how much that item normally sells for and in what condition it is normally available. If you have looked for weeks and never found one at all, you may be willing to spend much more when you finally find one being offered. You may find out that what you want is listed all the time and almost always in great condition, so you may not want to bid at all on one that is damaged or overpriced in comparison. Why do so many auctions have no bids at all? Maybe the opening bid is way too high. But, only an informed shopper would know the difference. Why does that wonderful item in perfect condition have no bids at all? Maybe the shoppers who did their research know that it is a brand new copy. If you don't care, bid away. If you do care, you need to be able to tell an original from a copy. Almost every copy will have obvious signs, you just need to know what they are. (If there are copies available in your item, it is not wise to bid on an item without a picture so you can see the item for yourself.) If you have the time and patience, you can do most of your research through the auction results. Sometimes you have to go to collector or antiques sites on the web to find answers. But, the best source of all is a reference book right by your side while you shop. Books are available on almost every collectible and are often very affordable. But, a $50 book is worth every penny if you could make a $200 mistake on just one wrong item.

eBay For Dummies
eBay For Seniors For Dummies
eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies
The Complete Idiot's Guide to eBay, 2nd Edition
eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days

When is the Best Time to List Your Items on eBay?

2010-12-01T22:13:00.001-05:00

You may think that you should list your items on Ebay on Saturday mornings because that is when you have the most free time or on Monday nights after 10:00 because the family is in bed and you finally have total concentration. You need to ask yourself just how many possible buyers will be at their computers at closing time. Especially when 10:00 p.m. on the West Coast is 1:00 a.m. on the East Coast. There are lots of possible buyers shopping at lunchtime during the week. But, because of the enormous amount of traffic at that time, you really cut down on the possibility of last-minute bidding if the bids are all in an internet traffic jam and can't get through at all.

The amount of bidders available at closing time is of utmost importance to your auction. Most of the bidding on any auction will occur in the first 24 hours (when it is listed as new) and on the last day (when is listed as ending today), with most people only looking at one of these two times. And, the bulk of the serious bidding will be in the last 5 minutes! An auction is truly at its best when two or more people fight over your item, and they may not be awake to do so at 1:00 in the morning.

When to list your items is best decided on actual sales histories of your particular items. Hardware and tools may get more male bidders who are looking on Saturday afternoon, and pokemon cards may get more attention from kids right after school. Etc. So, check the sales of completed items. You should be able to see a definite pattern for each type of item you plan to list. This is the first step.

If your item sells best on a weekday evening, now you need to see if there is also a second pattern. It sold best on Tuesday one week and Thursday the next week. Why? One big factor in evening sales now is "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" There are almost no bidders at their computers when this show is on television. This show happens to be moved around from week to week. On top of that, if it is on at 8:00 p.m., that means 8:00 p.m. on both coasts so West Coast seller has to work around 5:00 p.m. through 8:00 p.m., and the East Coast seller has to work around 8:00 p.m. through 11:00 p.m.

There are many more factors that come into play. Watch the weather forecasts for all parts of the country. If the East Coast is due for heavy rains, more possible bidders will be available at their computers instead of outside enjoying the spring or summer weather - and vice versa. If an area is in the middle of a terrible heat wave, they may be hiding inside at their computer instead of doing anything outside. Great weather is bad for sales. You may not want to have items close on Thanksgiving afternoon when most of the country is sitting down to a great meal - or in the evening on the day of a Presidential election. Contrary to this logic, Christmas morning may be a good time to have items close because many people don't have family with whom to share their day or they are not of a Christian faith. Those people would see this as a great time to sneak in a few bids. Other people may go shopping on Christmas afternoon to try to buy what they didn't receive for a gift!

Selling at the busiest time of the day will make your photos load slower. At any time, using a dial-up connection puts your auctions at risk since they will take longer to load. And, since most dial-up connections get lost often, there is always the chance that your photos will not load at all. When either happens, you will lose buyers. Some could bookmark your auction to try again later, but last-minute shoppers don't have time to come back. Cable modem or DSL will make everything you do on the internet at least 10 times faster - without disconnects. You only need to be have your photos not load during the last half hour of an auction once to know how important your internet connection is.

The real answer to when to list your items is it is totally relative….relative to as many factors as you can think of. You will need to do research on the past and try to foresee the future. Good luck on the latter.

eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days

eBay For Dummies

How and Where to Locate the Merchandise to Sell on eBay: Insider Information You Need to Know from the Experts Who Do It Every Day

Titanium eBay, 2nd Edition: A Tactical Guide to Becoming a Millionaire Powerseller

How to Buy, Sell, and Profit on eBay: Kick-Start Your Home-Based Business in Just Thirty Days

Who is Ebay's Top Seller (In Dollars)?

2010-04-17T12:46:00.001-04:00

Allow me to introduce you to...eBay's largest seller who is ALSO the future Mayor of NY! (and maybe President)

eBay's largest seller is (drum roll please): christopher1428! who goes by the moniker Chris Riggs for President.

Not what you were expecting, huh? You thought I was going to say buy.com or maybe a big auto dealer. Nope. Well, let me walk you through what is going on here and I promise you, it will blow your mind.

Chris consistently keeps about 200 listings live on eBay in his store at the $200-600 range which is probably what this art actually trades at in the real world. The genius move is Chris keeps 5-10 listings running of the same stuff he's selling at lower prices in the $10-30m range. For example:

Here's a green drizzle piece. This can be yours for $21m
Here's more of a comic kind of piece for... $21m (I bet you can get a bulk discount if you buy both)

You get the idea.

Now of course, if someone is going to goof off on eBay, they look for expensive stuff and buy it, and don't pay. I can 99.999999999% guarantee you that chris has never sold a $21m painting (meaning someone paid), but on eBay it's a regular occurrence for someone to 'commit to buy' one of these.

The UPIs are probably a pain for chris, but it does seem to drive a ton of traffic. A TON of traffic.

This has been going on for years....

I first noticed this (because of the top seller reports I maintain) that this wasn't really above board back in 2005 and thought it would be interesting to watch and see when/if eBay put a stop to it. Since then we've seen entire eBay regimes come and go, the feedback system changed constantly and new programs to raise the bar. We now have a money back guarantee and lots of other strides. But here's Chris, for 5 years now selling $21m paintings that nobody pays for. There's also a fair amount of blatant keyword spamming that he does, but I won't go into that.

My favorite part is that on many of the photos, Chris stealthily adds pictures that at first seem relevant (e.g. the first will be a close up), but then they degrade into party pictures and usually Chris or his friends are giving the finger. I'm sure after this eBay will take action, so I want to preserve some of these for posterity.
I've often wondered if this started out as a dare or a gag and they were shocked that a) the items weren't taken down and b) that people buy this stuff.

Whenever you see the top rated seller flag, that's me censoring out something in the photo you should go to eBay to see: (click these to enlarge) - remember, these are from LIVE eBay Listings! (as of 3/19/10)

(This last one is my favorite as it doesn't even have Chris in it (maybe that's his art back there), but check out the T-shirt on the guy on the left - the auction doesn't state if this offer is part of the auction or not - it seems to be $20 extra.)

Phew, that's enough of that - if you want more, Chris has a vibrant myspace page here.

What's your point?

As long as this kind of stuff is happening on eBay (and believe me, this is far from an isolated incident), eBay won't officially have solved their trust problems. All of the other changes are good and positive forward momentum, but they are lipstick on a pig (as we say here in NC) when you have flagrant things like this going on right under eBay's nose for the last 5+ yrs.

The eBay Seller's Tax and Legal Answer Book: Everything You Need to Know to Keep the Government Off Your Back and Out of Your Wallet
How to Buy, Sell, and Profit on eBay: Kick-Start Your Home-Based Business in Just Thirty Days
1000 Best eBay Success Secrets: Secrets From a Powerseller
Three Weeks to eBay Profits, Revised Edition: Go from Beginner to Successful Seller in Less than a Month (Three Weeks to Ebay Profits: Go from Beginner to Successful)

The New Buyer Protection Program on Ebay

2010-04-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

I noticed starting yesterday that eBay seems to be doing a pretty significant 'blanket' (I'm seeing it on most of the major ad networks) of an online marketing program around the buyer protection program. They are doing interactive rich media ads.

I've seen a couple of treatments:

Spinning shield

The first treatment has the shield logo used in the program that spins around (this definitely catches your eye) and then it has some color stripes and reveals the "You're covered by the shield' message you see here:

The Learn More button takes you to the same 'about the buyer protection program' page you are taken to when you click the shield on the site.

Bullet points

The second treatment I've seen is more of a bullet pointed list as you see here:

So the key points they are hitting on:

Program does not cost extra (Absolutely free!)
Quick access to customer support
Covers purchase price plus original shipping

Sign of things to come?
eBay has been hinting that they feel they are making big strides in trust and buyer protection. It's good to see they are ramping up some exposure here. I wonder if this is a ramp up to a more serious multimedia (radio/tv/print/online) push that we could see later this year to prep for Q4.

eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days
eBay For Dummies
How and Where to Locate the Merchandise to Sell on eBay: Insider Information You Need to Know from the Experts Who Do It Every Day
eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies
Titanium eBay, 2nd Edition: A Tactical Guide to Becoming a Millionaire Powerseller

eBay Changes (SR10.1) Series – Economic Changes

2010-03-16T14:39:00.000-04:00

These changes were announced in late January and go live in March 30.

In this post we'll provide a unique view of the economic (fees) impacts of SR10.1. First, we'll look at the fixed-price listing changes (stores and fp30) and then the auction changes in detail. Then we'll look at three new strategies for sellers to consider going into 3/30. Finally, we'll save editorial thoughts for the end.
Fixed-price changes

Historically, eBay has had two fixed-price formats:

Store Inventory Format (SIF in eBay-speak) – A fixed-price listing that does NOT show up in the eBay core search engine, but does show up in a seller's store. SIF items are $.03-$.10 depending on the category and back-end loaded FVF with 12%/8% with the tier break at $25.
30-day Fixed Price (FP30)- A newer addition to eBay, this is essentially a SIF item that does show up in the core search engine. FP30 is $.35 to list and has a tiered FVF starting at 12% for most categories.

For the SR10.1 release, eBay is making these fixed-price changes:

SIF is going away and (this is important and missed by many sellers) – your existing SIF items will be automatically converted to FP30 going forward.
FP30's listing fees are going up from $.35 to $.50, but you now have the ability to 'buy down' the insertion fee by paying for monthly store subscriptions. At the highest store tier, the FP30 listing fee is as low as $.03.

We've received a lot of questions about this topic, so let's dig into it a little.
Here is how the store tiers work:

Before March 30 (old pricing) – FP30 is $.35 to list

After March 30:

No store – FP30 is $.50
Basic store – $15.95/month, FP30 is $.20
Premium store – $49.95/month, FP30 is $.05
Anchor store – $299.95/month, FP30 is $.03

There's obviously some math to think about here and we've run some scenarios to show you the best tier for various listing volumes as illustrated here:

The highlighted areas illustrate that if you list:

> 50 items/month you should be in the Basic plan.
> 230 items/month and it's time to upgrade to the Premium plan.
> 12,500 items/month – welcome to the Anchor plan.

Auction economic changes
Good ole' auction format is getting a price overhaul that significantly lowers the insertion fee (especially for lower start prices) and bumps up the FVF. Also, like FP30, having a store yields a discount.
Here's a chart that shows the changes from one view:

The biggest change in auctions that everyone should be aware of is that before the price change, the FVF for $25-$50 was 3.5%. After the changes, eBay has changed that to 8.75% which is a more than doubling. Sellers that auction items in this level should be extremely aware of the economic impact of that change. (for example, many $1 no-reserve sellers of video games, DVDs and some electronics will see a significant FVF increase here.

Economic changes cheat sheet

Remember that regardless of format, if you are a top-rated seller (eTRS) you can earn a 20% reduction in FVF fees. If you are an 'Above Standard Seller' (ASS), then you do not receive that reduction.

We've looked at the fees from several angles and found this BEFORE (left column) and AFTER (right format) format: (click to enlarge and print out as a handy cheat sheet)

If you have any more questions about the fees, feel free to post them in comments. Also eBay has some great resources available:

General overview is here
Fee details are here
Interactive fee calculator is here

Strategy 1 – Go ahead and pick your store tier today

eBay has generously allowed for sellers to go ahead and pick their store tier and not incur the fee until April. Historically when there are 'BIG' eBay changes, sellers that anticipate and take advantage of the changes can have a competitive advantage.
A couple of tips:

Remember your store items should be considered as well. If you normally have 500 FP30 and 1000 store, you should figure out how many store items (see strategy 3) you plan on converting and make your calculation from that total number.
Remember the 50, 230 and 12,500 break points for the store tiers
To keep your eBay sales where they are today you may need to surge your listings, so make sure you consider this in your calculations (see strategy 2)

Strategy 2 – Prepare for what a flood of listings will do to your eBay business

Old-timer eBayers remember when eBay decided one day in the Cobb/Whitman regime to put all of the store listings in the core search engine. It's commonly known as the 'store in core debacle'. Now a lot has improved and changed at eBay so I don't think we're heading for a crash and burn scenario. But, our data indicates that we are going to see a significant surge in fp30 listings (we are already seeing this three weeks before) across the marketplace.

We're advising sellers to run some 'stress test' secenarios:

What if we see a surge in listings of 2-4X?
- Remember, one view is listings are going from .35 to .03 – nearly 'free' – we could see as much as a 10X surge.
Will your items be found?
What should you do to compensate? Some suggestions:
- Surge as well – do you have inventory you haven't been listing on eBay? This could be a great time to try it to support a surge (adjust your store tier accordingly)
- If you've moved 100% fixed price, consider adding auctions back to the mix – we don't anticipate a surge there, so you may actually have more visibility
- Consider shorter FP durations – we have seen some sellers already having success with FP7. Many sellers forget this is still available and creates a sense of urgency with buyers.

Strategy 3 – Don't look at your store inventory performance and assume under-performers will not work in the FP30 format.

We've talked to some sellers that I believe are looking at things the wrong way. They are looking at SIF listings and for those that don't hit a conversion rate threshold. Remember that SIF items are not seen in core search. So when they convert to fp30 and are in core search, you should see a natural bump in conversion rate (well, we don't know what the surge will do, but generally this is the case).

In other words, don't do an apples and oranges comparison here and under-shoot on items that probably will work in FP30 once search traffic is added to the equation.

Editorial comments on the economic changes

From the 30,000-ft view, I think these changes are very positive. eBay is moving closer to the Amazon economic model which puts more of the risk on the marketplace and not the seller. The result is going to be more selection on eBay which is always a good thing.

I worry that the auction fee changes are going to accelerate the demise of that format, with perhaps the surge of listings helping there a little as sellers have to do some auction for visibility.

Finally, if you haven't caught on, I'm really, really, REALLY worried about the eBay search engine implications. Before these changes sellers are extremely frustrated with BM and the inability to understand why their listings aren't showing up. A 2-10X surge is going to make this problem worse. Regular buyers know that the search engine experience on eBay is still, well, really bad and full of spam-y junk. eBay has made some good first steps, but I fear they won't be enough for the April surge.

Also, someone mentioned in comments, what does this mean for the small seller. I honestly don't know. If eBay could nail the search engine, then I think that unique smaller seller inventory would continue to do well.

ASD / AMD Trade Shows in Las Vegas

2010-03-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

eBay Wholesale Sources

I just returned from the ASD/AMD Wholesale Trade Show in Las Vegas. This is one of the largest wholesale trade shows in the world with over 4,000 vendors showing their products and looking for people like you to buy from them.

Wholesale Products for eBay & Amazon

I listed a lot of these sources in my last newsletter, The eBay & Online Seller’s News. But I have also compiled 44 of the best sources onto an interactive web page where you can click on the links to access the sources. And, I have all of the information in a Free eBook Forty-four Free Wholesale Sources. You can download the eBook in PDF. It is completely free –you don’t even have to supply your email address to get it. And you can freely share of give away copies of the book to anyone you want.

Out of the thousands of manufacturers, distributors and importers who exhibited, I tried to concentrate on those products and companies who had products that worked for selling on eBay and Amazon and that small sellers who cannot buy in large quantities could afford.

eBay dropshippers

On the list are three companies who drop ship for eBay sellers. One is a company that sells outdoor gear including the popular airsoft guns, another sells all types of small appliances including the Roomba Robot vaccum cleaner and a third who will drop ship musical instruments including guitars.

So just click here to get free access to 44 Wholesale Sources for eBay and Amazon Sellers. It’s free and now its yours!

I would love to hear if this information helped you and if you would like more. So leave a comment and let me know what you think and any requests or advice you might have.

Complete eBay Marketing System

I have many more sources available at the Wholesale Resources member’s website that you get for free when you purchase The Complete eBay Marketing System. We update the member’s area every month with new sources and new bonus materials.

Ebay Listing Fees On Sale 50% Off

2010-03-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

For the third time this month, eBay has announced a one-day, 50% Off, listing fee sale.

On March 16th 2010, sellers who list Auction-style item(s), and have a 12 month Detailed Seller Rating of 4.5 or higher on all criteria, will receive 50% off the standard Insertion Fee per item listed. New sellers who don’t yet have DSR ratings are also eligible. DSR rating criteria for this promotion will be based on the previous 12 months. To see your DSR ratings, go to your Seller Dashboard within My eBay. For more information on DSRs, visit the eBay Seller Information Center.

During the Promotional Period, Insertion Fees for Auction-style listings will be 50% off on the U.S. site www.eBay.com, www.eBayMotors.com (Parts & Accessories only) and eBay Canada www.eBay.ca. Listings created prior to March 16, 2010 which are scheduled to start during the Promotional Period will be eligible to receive the Promotional Rate.

When listing items using the Sell Your Item form, the promotional rate will apply after you have exhausted your 5 free listings.

If you list with any tool (Vendio, Auctiva, etc.) other than the latest version of the Sell Your Item form (SYI 3.0) the Promotional Rate will not be shown during the listing process. Instead the discount will be reflected in the “View Account Status” section in My eBay, as well as in your next invoice.

The Top 10 Selling Tips

2010-02-24T22:52:00.000-05:00

Follow these simple and effective tips to attract more buyers and get the most cash for your items.

Find out What It's Worth: If you know what you want to sell, you can get information about the item such as the recent sales activity and price, appropriate listing category and key words, and examples of good descriptions. Simply do an Advanced Search on your item and click Completed Listings. If you want to find out what is selling on eBay, check out the eBay Pulse.
Determine Pricing and Listing Format: Many sellers that sell in an action-style listing format, find that setting a low opening bid with no reserve jumpstarts bidding and increases their final selling price. However, demand for the item must be high to generate multiple bids. Your research in step one will help you with this information. If you know the value of your item or have multiples of the same item, set a fixed price for a quick sale. Learn about how eBay displays items in search results.
Sign up for PayPal: PayPal enables you to accept online payments for your eBay items. Sellers must offer safe electronic payments to buyers on eBay, so sign up today - it's fast and free to sign up.
Maximize Your Item Title: Be sure to include key words that buyers will search for, unique or descriptive attributes, and always check your spelling. Your item title is critical in helping users find your items, so use each character wisely using descriptive key words.
Describe Your Item in Detail: A good description is concise, well organized, and easy to read. Create bold section headlines, bulleted lists, and be sure to include item style/type, brand, condition, and other attributes. When available in your category, use item specifics to help buyers find your item. Depending on category, item specifics include the condition of the item (new, used), size, color, brand, etc. Make sure to include your return policy and handling time, which is now required in every listing.
Include Photos: A picture really is worth a thousand words and your first one is free! Use clear, well-lit photos from a variety of angles to accurately showcase your item. Use good lighting and an uncluttered background to get the most out of your photo. Add additional photos to showcase details and unique features of your item. Upgrade to Picture Pack to take advantage of the zoom feature on item listings. Many categories and Premium and Anchor eBay Store subscribers get multiple free photos.
Include Reasonable Shipping Costs: Specifying reasonable shipping and handling costs in your listing is essential for smart selling. eBay's free Shipping Calculator provides real-time shipping costs to buyers all over the world, so you can increase your chances of success. Providing free shipping can give you an extra boost in search results ranking and sales.
Communicate: Always respond quickly to any buyer questions. Include extras or a handwritten note in the box to really surprise and delight your customers. Make sure to leave feedback for your buyer so they'll do the same for you.
Use My eBay to Track Sales: Your My eBay page is your own personal dashboard to track all your activity on eBay. Simply click My eBay on top of any eBay page to reveal the items you are selling, items that are sold, shipping addresses of your customers, messages from your prospective buyers and to manage your personal information and communication preferences.
Save a trip to the Post Office: The United States Postal Service® offers a variety of free shipping supplies, delivered directly to you within a few days. After the sale you can pay for and print shipping labels for UPS and USPS directly from My eBay. Pay for the shipping using PayPal and print the labels on your home printer. You can also schedule free carrier pick-up online and at no additional charge.

eBay Bidding Secrets

2010-02-24T22:45:00.001-05:00

Bidding basics

This is by no means a complete discussion on bidding. Ebay has a good help page and the Q/A board is tops for getting questions answered. Ebay uses a hidden proxy bidding system for standard auctions. This means that your bid is hidden from the public and Ebay's computer bids for you in your absence up to the maximum amount that you decided on when you placed your bid. The amount bid by proxy in your behalf is governed by how much your adversary bid and a pre established minimum increment. Theoretically, you could bid a million dollars on an auction item, but you will never pay more than the minimum increment it took to overtake your adversary.

Whenever it is you find yourself in a situation where it is not possible for you to Snipe an item, you stand the best chance of winning an auction by placing the absolute maximum bid you are willing to pay for an item. By bidding in this manner you are using the hidden proxy method as it was designed to be used. This maximum bid can be placed at anytime during the auction. If you come back later to find that you did not win the item, you can feel confident you didn't lose either. Somebody was just willing to pay more than you. If you are bidding on an item that has a bid placed by an anti Sniping bidder you can rest assured this bidder has bid high enough to protect themselves from your Snipe up to their absolute maximum they are willing to spend.
There is one small catch to using the hidden proxy system. It can cost you money! It can cost you money because when you bid early in the auction and become the high bidder, you stand an excellent chance of being bid bumped or worse, out bid! To prevent this from happening you Snipe the auction. (Details on the Sniping of an auction to follow). At a traditional auction house, the auction house uses an auctioneer to auction off the items. Ebay is not a traditional auction house as they are simply a go-between. The sellers are conducting their own auctions. This means every seller conducts their auctions just a little bit differently than the next. For this reason be sure you read any disclaimer posted by the seller. They do vary. If there is anything you don't like, don't bid. Check the Sellers Feedback! Those high scores and the star do not necessarily mean that things are fantastic. If you find some negatives but you still feel inclined on bidding, email the seller and ask about their side of the story. Most sellers that have been given negative feedback unfairly would be more than happy to tell their side.

Don't be fooled with very low start bids. Human nature what it is, very low starts is a sellers strategy to get you to commit to item early in the auction in hopes that as the auction wanes on you will show some resistance in letting it go. Always keep in mind shipping and insurance when you bid. This is especially true with lower priced items and heavy items. If shipping is a concern, always email the seller and ask for a shipping estimate. As long as you treat the quote as an estimate the seller shouldn't have a problem with helping you. Whatever you do, do not assume implied representations by the seller. Email the seller with any and all questions you may have or can think up if not covered in the item description. This is very important as it is not your eyes and hands examining the item you are thinking about bidding on. The more questions you ask the seller before bidding the better you are able to establish a true value as you perceive the value to be. Save all emails you receive from the seller until you decide not to bid or when the transaction between you and seller is complete. All emails between you and the seller are a legal record. Again, visit the Ebay Q/A board often. Lurk if you don't have anything to say. This is where you can feel Ebay's pulse, learn how to handle problems and pick up on many techniques.

Study the competition

Know your adversary. Most people have bidding patterns that can be readily discovered by doing history searches on Ebay. By using your adversary's email address you can search the last 30 days they have been bidding on Ebay. You can conduct this search on Ebay's search page. Get to know the seller. You can do this by studying the sellers sell history and emailing bidders if you have some concerns. If you find a seller that often lists items you like, bookmark the sellers auction history. As the seller posts new items you can use your bookmark to see what is new. Opportunist/Impulse bidders are the easiest to spot. The opportunist/impulse bidder generally bids on an item because the current bid at the time is low and you rarely see them come back for another bid. Although watch out because some bidders bid early just to bookmark the item with Ebay's daily status reports. Learn who the good Snipers are. If you find that so and so bidder always Snipes the same type of item you are after, discover their average Snipe time by studying their bid histories. If this Sniper wins items a lot give very serious thought focusing on beating this Snipers best average Snipe times. You never know what a Snipers maximum bid is but you do know how many seconds before auction end time they get their winning bids in. If you feel you are no match for a high caliber Sniper, give serious thought to Thunder Sniping the item and of course, bid all the money and forego Sniping.

Study actual auction items

When studying bidding histories be sure to read the item descriptions carefully. There will be obvious and not so obvious clues as to why some bidders stopped bidding. Besides the obvious damaged or imperfect item some possible reasons an item may not have gotten a higher bid is the lack of a graphic, a poor item description by the seller, low seller feedback or feedback with negative comments.

When to bid

Some hold the view that you should never bid early in an auction because if you do you attract attention to the item. Others bid early to make an email bookmark or a bid history bookmark courtesy of Ebay's search engine. Personally I don't buy the attract attention theory. Bottom line is a good item is going to get sold on Ebay and it will be sold for top dollar. Bushwhackers never bid early as they do not want to give themselves up. If there was a reason not to bid early, this could be it as it is difficult if not impossible to establish bidding patterns on a Bushwhacker. Due to the nature of Ebay's proxy system and for the simple reason you know exactly what time an item is going to end, the general rule is you should bid very late in the auction. The only time you would not bid very late is if you were not going to be available for a Snipe. If you can't be present for the Snipe then bid your absolute maximum anytime during the auction. Cricket Jr has been designed to assist you in bidding in the last 15 to 20 seconds of an auction. You increase your odds of winning significantly if you bid in the final seconds of the auction in that if you take possession of the prize with your Snipe bid there isn't enough time left in the auction for an adversary to respond with a counter bid. The one exception would be another Sniper that sends in a Snipe later than you. This Sniper will beat you if their maximum bid is higher than yours. In the event of a tie, the early bidder wins. By bidding in the last seconds you can only lose if you did not bid high enough to take the item away from the current high bidder or another sniper submitted a higher bid just prior to or after your Snipe. By knowing who your adversaries are, you should also know how good they are at Sniping if they use this method.

What to bid

You should bid the absolute max you are willing to pay for the item. If you do not do this then obviously you stand a chance of losing the item to another bidder that Snipes you. In the Doubles Command Control, there is a technique called Never Say Die. You can use this technique to send in a last second bid if things go awry and there is still some seconds on the clock. The key to the Snipe is high bid and last final seconds. Bid in odd dollars and odd cents. With regard to dollars people generally think in even $1 $5 and $10 increments. With regards to cents, 25¢, 50¢, 75¢ are the most common with 5¢ and 10¢ increments being the next most common. When bidding dollars try to use 3, 4, on the low side and 8, 9 on the high side. Use those same numbers with cents also. For example, 23¢, 48¢, 67¢.

Bidding Increments

Ebay's computer automatically uses a minimum bidding increment when deciding what your minimum bid can be. Below a table that shows the increments.

Current Bid		Increment
$0-$1		5¢
1-5		25¢
5-25		50¢
25-100		$1.00
100-250		$2.50
250- 50		$5.00
500-1000		$10.00

Bid Bumping

Bid Bumping is just what it sounds. Bid Bumping is can be used to get a feel for how high a high bidder has gone toward the end of an auction. It can also be mean sport that only devilish people do. Using bid bumping to test the waters can save you time later by not having to come back and try to Snipe an item. For example, say the current bidder is at $30 for an item. You decide you are willing to go to $50 max. Bump the bid $5 to $10. If you take it, stop and come back prepared to Snipe. If you don't take it bid bump another $5 to $10. Bid bump to your max bid. If you still don't take the item, you do not have to worry about coming back later. Go find another prize to spend your time on. Bid Bumping for mean sport can be used to aggravate a bidder. If you do this, be careful as you could very well end up owning something you do not want. The Cricket Jr Cat 'n Mouse Technique uses Bid Bumping.

The Dutch Auction

Dutch auctions

Used by sellers to auction small to large lots of items, the Dutch auction has a lot to offer a crafty bidder. Two important thing to always remember in the Dutch auction is that the date and time stamp your receive when you bid is much more important than in the standard auction. The second is, there is no proxy bid. Your maximum bid is made public. The following is by no means a complete discussion of the Dutch auction. Further information can be obtained by reading Ebay's FAQ.

3 rules

Rule 1: When developing a strategy to bid on a Dutch auction always remember to figure in the law of supply and demand. If demand exceeds supply, the price will go up. In the Dutch auction, if demand remains low, so will the price. This is true in all auctions but in the Dutch auction you can see this law in action more clearly. In a standard auction, stupidity and bidding wars alone can drive up a price! One exception would be wherein the seller has an unlimited supply and repeatedly lists the same auction. A seller strategy used here is to sell a lot of items for one price but the seller is using the auction format to achieve the goal.

Rule 2: Always do a search for more than one of the same Dutch auctions. Often times you can find the same item selling for less in another category. Sellers frequently list Dutch Auctions in multiple categories in addition to listing week in and week out.

Rule 3: Do a history search for completed auctions. You may find that an auction just closed recently and the seller did not sell all of his/her items. You may find that the items sold for less than any current identical items. Contact the seller and make an offer. Rule 2 also helps you establish what the end price may be for the current auction you are looking at. In a nutshell, the winners of the Dutch auction pay the lowest winning bid. Technically it doesn't matter how high you bid on a Dutch auction you will not pay more than the winning lowest bid. Confused? Ok, here are some examples:

How the winners are determined

Seller offers 10 widgets. This means there can only be 10 winning bids. The start bid is $5. All bidders bid for 1 widget. The auction just ended.

Bidder	Bid	Win	Pay
1	17.37	yes	11.45
2	15.00	yes	11.45
3	14.56	yes	11.45
4	12.00	yes	11.45
5	12.00	yes	11.45
6	12.00	yes	11.45
7	12.00	yes	11.45
8	11.75	yes	11.45
9	11.50	yes	11.45
10	11.45	yes	11.45
11	11.00	no
12	10.00	no
13	10.00	no

Bidders 1- 10 win as there are only 10 items available.

The lowest bid was $11.45 by bidder 10.00

Had you come and bid any amount above $11.45 you would have bumped bidder 10 out of the auction.

When demand is 100% each time a new bidder bids more than the lowest bidder the lowest bidder gets bumped.

So to win at a Dutch auction you have to be in the bubble. Notice that the start bid was $10 and bidder number 10 set the final price of the auction.

Bubbles

Some refer to the stack of high bidders as being in the bubble. So that we don't confuse terms we will refer to the bidders that are in reach of winning the auction as being in the bubble. In the table above, since there were only 10 items up for action there can be no more than 10 bids. That is bids, not bidders. A bidder can bid on more than one item. The object of the Dutch auction game is to not end up near the edge of the bubble then get pushed out of this bubble. In the event you get pushed out of the bubble you can go back and make a new bid just like in a standard auction. You can also reinforce your bid before you are pushed out of the bubble. Note: If you come back to place a brand new bid or if you decide to reinforce your bid, your personal date/time stamp will have changed. That means if you bid any amount that is the same as any others still remaining in the bubble, you no longer posses your original date/time position. In the event of a tie, winner is the senior bidder decided by the time stamp . Of course the smartest thing to do when demand is approaching or has already exceeded supply is to pull up young Cricket Jr. and SNIPE!

Supply and Demand

Generally you do not treat a Dutch auction much different than a standard auction. If demand is about to or has already exceeded supply in the Dutch auction, treat it like a standard auction, bid very late. Dutch auctions strategies are easier to form as all bids are exposed to the public whereas in the standard auction the bids are concealed until the end of the auction. There is one major exception that would indicate you do not need to Snipe in a Dutch auction. This is when the seller puts more items up for Dutch auction than can fill current demand. This happens all the time. These auctions will be obvious as quantities will be very high and the general response is low. You can back this up with a completed auction history searches for the same item.

If supply is high and demand is low

When deciding to bid on a Dutch auction first determine how the law of supply and demand may fit the particular auction you are studying. If supply is high and demand is low you can probably safely just bid the minimum start bid and forget about snipers and bushwhackers.

If demand is high and supply is low

Here are some strategies to use in this case. Look at the table above again (use your browser back button to come back) We will use this as the example auction to discuss some Dutch Auction strategies. You have done your research and there is just a day or so left in the auction.

1. Bid deep into the bubble. Using the auction scenario above bidding deep into the bubble means you would bid any amount just over $12. By doing this you would move into the number 4 spot. All bidders below you move down one step. Bidder 10 gets pushed out of the bubble. Bidder 9 goes into 10's spot and in this auction a new low price is set. For you to get pushed out of the bubble all those below you and any new bidders arriving on the scene would have to bid higher than you. In the typical Dutch Auction, that is a lot of bidding and unless the seller intentionally low balled the start bid on a high quality item, you are relatively safe. Another option is:

2. Don't mess around and become the King/Queen of the hill. Bid any amount higher than the bidder in the number 1 spot. It would take a pretty wild end of auction scuffle for you to get pushed out of the bubble. Or:

3. SNIPE it.

Test time!

There is one last thing to talk about with the Dutch auction. A lot of bidders are dealers. They bid in the hopes they will get something at a good enough price to resell it. Here is a surprise test for the resellers. Lets assume Seller is offering 25 key chains at a $1 start bid. You know you can sell all these key chains for $5.00. You begin to think strongly you should bid on all of them. It is five minutes to the end of the auction. The bidding scenario is this: There are 18 bidders. There is a high bid of $3 and the lowest bid is $1. Shipping will be $5 for the whole lot. You have decided to Snipe and of course because you use Cricket Jr your Snipe will win. What is the best strategy to take all or most of the key chains and what price are you going bid? This was a real auction I was asked to help develop a strategy for. The numbers are not exact but the principles are the same. Think it out and write down your answer. Below is the scenario.

Bidder	Quantity	Bid
1	1	3.00
2	1	2.75
3	2	2.30
4	1	2.25
5	10	1.30
6	2	1.00
7	1	1.00
8	1	1.00
9	1	1.00

The answer:

SNIPING

The objective

There is really one objective. To Win! Bid as late as you dare. Bid sooo late in the auction that your adversary does not have time to get another bid in. Whether or not you bid early and then come in and Snipe late or whether you never bid early and always bushwhack is up to you as the jury is still out discussing the pros and cons. More often than not Sniping will save you money.

Stay tuned for more info on how to become a professional sniper...

Ebay Scams - 14 things you MUST know

2010-02-17T13:20:00.000-05:00

Ebay Scams - 14 things you MUST know

1. Know the product. This is pretty simple in many cases, as some brand names and items are well-known, readily available and difficult to counterfeit. But as the economy becomes more global, more and more unscrupulous businesses market knock-offs. It is a safe bet that most of those will show up here at eBay. Do your research. There is hardly a product in the world that does not have at least one web site on the topic. Learn from those who care about the product, not just from those who are selling. Many specialty items - antiques, jewelry and other collectibles come to mind - have clubs who offer quality advice. Another pool of potentially good sources are other eBay guides. If it is an expensive item, check your local library. Make no assumptions about authenticity. Educate yourself.

2. Do not follow e-mail addresses that are included in the text section of postings. If the seller claims that is the only way to contact them, abandon ship and go no further. Send all the questions you have ONLY via the Ebay mail link (Ask Seller A Question). When you do send a message, ask about payment methods and shipping and such, not just about the item itself. If you don't like the options the seller gives for payment method, tell him what you would be willing to do. If he is real, he may try to accomodate you because he has the item and he wants to sell it.

3. Short duration sales may be suspicious. There are a few good reasons to sell quickly (such as a high-demand commodity item where there are many sellers and many items), but it may also be setting the stage for a hit-and-run seller. Scammers want to quickly hook their marks and then disappear into the ether; they do not want their postings to languish for for all to see. It is not a deal-breaker, but should be considered along with other potential red flags.

4.  American laws do not apply anywhere but in America. The bad guys know that. So use great care, if you must proceed at all. Especially do not deal with anyone who is "temporarily" out of the country.

5. If the sale is supposedly in the United States, make sure the bid amount is in American dollars. Non-American currency values are printed in italics on Ebay, so they are easy to spot. It doesn't make much sense for a guy in Texas to convert your bid to Euros, does it?

6. What is the return policy, and how much do they charge for shipping? Don't be impressed by money-back guarentees and dirt-cheap shipping. If it is a scam, they aren't going to give your money back and they aren't going to ship anything.

7. Look at the seller's feedback. Carefully! Don't just look at an impressively large number and call it good. There is a ton of useful information here if you take the time to really investegate. If it is a stolen account, they are somebody else's points anyway. But you can learn a lot:

A. Has he bought or sold anything recently, and what was it? Accounts that have no recent activity are much more likely to be stolen accounts.

B. Is this auction consistent with items bought and sold in the past? If a buyer of $5 trinkets is suddenly selling a $4000 drum set, take note. It may be valid, but it is suspicious.

C. Is the item location the same for this sale as for his last sales? Does the location actually exist, or is it some fictional locale?

D.  Are his accepted payment methods the same as his last sales? If he accepted PayPal before, why is he insisting on a wire transfer or cashier's check now?

E.  The seller's positive feedback points for purchased items are not very useful to you as a buyer, so don't over-value them.

8. What else is the seller posting for sale at the time? Follow the link for Seller's Other Items. If they have a large number of unrelated big-ticket items currently for sale (musical instruments, computers, cameras, bicycles...) that is very suspicious.

9. Look at the photos. Are they just stock pictures from the company web site or are they apparently authentic photos of the item? Scammers can get pictures of anything from the web, including from other Ebay auctions. If you have seen the exact same photo in other auctions, be suspicious. Also, look at the backgrounds in the photos. Does it look like they just took their digital camera into a store and started clicking away?

10. Talk to the seller! How? Place as low a bid as possible on the item. Bidding gives you the right to view the seller's contact information. Go to this link, and paste in the seller's name and the item number. Ebay will e-mail his contact information to you.

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQtZvbQQsofindtypeZ9

If the phone number does not work, that is a major red flag. Use a phone number web-site or directory assistance to verify that the person's name, location and phone number make sense. Don't be afraid to ask very specific questions about the product and sale. If you have tried to contact the seller but cannot (and do give him time to respond), that is a valid reason to cancel your bid. While I am not a big fan of bid cancelling, I will not send my money to anyone who won't answer my phone calls or reply to my emails.

11. Is the item in the correct category? Another device scammers with use to hide their skulduggery is to post items in obscure places. Instead of searching the entire Ebay universe for your item, specify your category.

12. Payment method is a very big deal. C.O.D. is great if they will go with it. Escrow.com is good (though a little pricy), and the only escrow Ebay recommends.  Some criminals set up bogus sites that sound and look like Escrow.com, but do not be fooled. DO NOT use any other escrow site. PayPal is good too, up to a point, but the sale does not qualify for their $2000 protection unless it specifies that on the posting. In that case, the best you can hope for is the $200 coverage extended by Ebay (minus a $25 service fee).

The whole official PayPal safety spiel is here:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/paypal-protection.html?ssPageName:BPM:PPPBP

If you use PayPal, use your credit card rather than your own bank account. PayPal may try to persuade you to draw money directly from your bank account. Don't do it. Many credit card issuers will refund money stolen from you. It is not fail-safe, but it is another layer of protection. Never use Western Union for these transactions. Western Union's own web site will tell you that. Wire transfers and any kind of check is a one-way ticket to fraud.

13.  Some second-chance offers are scam attempts, so be careful. If there is a hot-link on the page, take a look at the URL it points to when you roll your cursor over it. (The URL is usually displayed at the bottom of your web browser) There are fake Ebay and PayPal sites that attempt to steal your login information. If the URL does not start with "https:" it is not a secure site.  Do NOT log in there!

14. Finally, do not wait until the last hour of the sale to get interested in it. If it is something you want, there is some homework for you to do. Give yourself the time to evaluate things and give the seller time to respond to your questions. Do not burn bridges, but do not allow yourself to be burned.

If you think a listing is bogus and want to report it to eBay, this link will get you where you need to go:

http://pages.ebay.com/securitycenter/reportproblem.html

Finally, you are doing business with total strangers here, and don't forget it. Most people are decent and honest, but some aren't, and they can really mess up your day.

Jim Wilson's eBay Secrets : Part 2

2010-02-11T15:46:00.000-05:00

Jim Wilson's eBay Secrets : Part 2

The easiest sale...

Exactly. And in addition to that the CD's also have what I like to call hidden jewels on them. They have affiliate links on them of course. And I make about one sale per week minimum from those affiliate links. I made one again today. I made one yesterday. Just from those CD's.

People are searching through, they find that link, the products are good, I screen them, and in most cases I use them myself, and I put an affiliate link on there and the next thing you know someone else is also using it. Secondary sales. I think I mentioned that in my newsletter.

What type of person would you say buys your CD?

There are those who buy it in order to start a business. There are those who buy it because it's got information on it on how to find people, and how to find information -- like spy software, and there are those who buy it because it's got games and fun stuff on it. It covers the whole gambit, it's just an absolute ton of information.

The thing that I'm selling my advertising on is "Making Money On eBay -- How profitable it can be, and here's how you do it". You can literally take my same CD and sell it as "Do you want to learn how to be an online spy?". And if you look there are other people selling "The Online Spy" -- it is the exact same software and it's the exact same CD in all likelihood.

So let's talk about the day-to-day running of your business, and for example let's take this CD of yours. How many copies of that do you sell -- do you list one a day, do Dutch auctions...?

Well what I do is I do a Dutch auction and I count up the number that I have remaining in stock and I place the Dutch auction for that number remaining. I do list it as if I'm completely, totally selling out, which there is a possibility because honestly if I see that too many people are selling it then I'm not longer going to sell that particular CD and move onto one of my others.

But I work at the Fire Department one day on, two days off, I time out my auctions where they always close when I'm off duty. Because I've found that if an auction closes people want instant gratification.

And that's another mistake that a lot of rookies make when they get on eBay ... they forget that people are paying hard earned money for something that is sight-unseen from someone who is sight unseen. It's a lot of trust involved.

And if you send an email to that person who you just sent your money to by PayPal and they don't respond right away you start getting nervous -- "Oh my gosh, did I just get taken?". So by being off duty and online, I can make certain that when they send that email I get it, and within a couple of minutes most of the time I can reply, makes them feel really comfortable, and once again you end up with a satisfied customer.

So for your Dutch auction, you start them all at 99 cents?

On the Dutch auctions they all sell at the exact same price, and if you look it's sort of strange how this CD is doing ... it sells for 1 penny and I charge $4.99 for the shipping, handling, and CD processing.

What I tell all the people I teach as far as eBay is concerned, as far as markup, you want to use the standard 42% markup minimum, you know make sure you cover all the advertising costs, that you cover your shipping, to make sure that it's worth your time and effort. For the CD processing, there's a company that I contract with, they make all of my CD's and they cost between -- depending on how much you buy they cost between $1 and $4 per CD. I'm able to buy so many now, that they cost on the low end of that.

So they make copies with all the software? Do they label it too?

They sure do. They have the label and the whole nine yards so that when the CD comes to me it's actually ready to ship. It's very, very professional. It's computer stamped, and they actually offered to do my logo on there and I said "that's too much". I really didn't want that.

They do an awesome job and they have extremely good quality control. I know when I shipped out my CD's everything that's supposed to be on there is on there, and accessible and the stuff that's not supposed to be on there isn't. They don't mark the CD with their marking's either which is another important factor. Because it's my product, not their's.

Exactly. So since you're selling them quite cheaply at $5, are you looking to make money through sheer quantity, or do you have a longer term plan?

Basically, in this particular case, it's only one of many items that I'm selling. I have 14 web sites online now. Of those 14, two of those are actually selling for me, and several of them are actually getting lots of traffic. My biggest money-maker of late besides eBay, has actually been hosting. I provide hosting services.

Which web address is that?

ULSO.com. That's my home site as a matter of fact. I pretty much base everything else from ULSO. And it's strange how things have worked out ... because it all happened in very little time ... I went from being an online internet novice to carrying lots of domains, several of which are doing quite well.

Gnuday gets around 20,000 hits per month. That's 20,000 quality hits, that's not trash hits, it is making sales. Both the eBooks that are on there sell and the CD's.

I would never ever tell anyone that it's easy to make money online, that would be an outright lie, it takes work, it takes effort, it takes knowledge, but once you figure out how to write an ad, and once you figure out how to get people to come to your sites, if you've got a quality product, and you back it up, people will buy it.

So let's take one of your sites Gnuday.com. When did you start the site ... how did you promote it, and how do you continue to promote it?

I actually started the site less than 6 months ago, believe it or not. Basically, the idea came to me as far as this site was concerned originally I was going to sell some of the things that I was selling on eBay, on that site. I ended up leaning much more towards informational products on it.

Once I started promoting the site, the first thing I'd do is set up metatags. And I make sure that I've got a really good description on there so the search engine spiders are going to be able to find it. I'm by far, nowhere near a search engine expert, but I can say that if you search for certain terms, my sites are on there. My sites are on Google and Yahoo. I do get hits from those search engines.

You're ranked quite high in them are you?

I honestly don't know how high, but I've had people who have emailed me and told me that they found me both through the search engines and I know if you search for certain names, I pop up.

Anyway, I start doing ezine advertising. Newsletters. Basically, I track the newsletter ads very, very closely so now I've got a nice list compiled of which newsletters are really good to run ads in and it's all logarithmic. Once you start getting hits to a site it seems like they never stop coming.

The hard part is getting it started in the first place. I haven't placed an ad for Auction Hints in six months or more, because I focused a lot of attention on Gnuday and Auction Hints still gets 8,000 hits per month. I have people signing up for my newsletter 3, 4, 5 per day every single day, and that's without one ad.

Now the next thing that I do also, and you're aware of this, I post answers in the forums. And in each case when I post an answer I make certain that I put a signature file at the end. It's a subtle advertisement. Hopefully the post that I put in there doesn't make it sound like I'm an idiot, it builds enough credibility that someone says "Hey, I'd like to see what this guy's site is all about".

Well, I have noticed that you're one of the more regular posters and your posts are really interesting. Because you share some of your business -- what's happened in your business, what's worked for you. So I think it interests a lot of people.

That could be because in addition to being a paramedic, I also am an instructor at a local community college and I think sometimes that that pops out in me as far as the activities that I take on, online.

Something that I hadn't mentioned up to this point, which just occurred to me, the person who wants to get started in eBay, they have absolutely no earthly idea how to get started, or what to do, I urge that they look around their own home, they have got to have something laying around they no longer use, they no longer want, they can turn that item or those items into cash.

And it's just a simple matter of looking on eBay to see if it's already selling, looking at the ad that is already selling it, getting an idea of how to write the ad, and sort of mimicking what others are doing.

Certainly not copying that but that is one thing that several of my family members have done. I talked them through what amounts to an online garage sale. And they sold all kinds of stuff. You name it: old golf clubs, collectables, coins, jewelry, the list goes on and on and on.

You mentioned earlier that you do a lot of hunting around for bargains and wholesalers. Is that an ongoing process?

It's a constant ongoing process. If you're not constantly looking for new stuff to sell, then you're going to end up being stagnant and you're going to get left behind.

That is probably the hardest thing to do. Even those people who have found their niche in online sales, are going to end up trying to constantly find new suppliers. Because the fact is you can always find a better price.

When I first started selling the software: I sold children's software specifically, for a long time and I found that I could get 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% savings simply by shopping and comparing. And not going constantly to the same supplier.

And so literally, what you find you end up doing is building what amounts to a list of suppliers and when you need an item or you see a market you contact those suppliers, find out the best that they can do, and then you go with the lowest price. It's a simple common sense approach.

And those suppliers, do they drop-ship, or do they send it to you?

Oh no, I stock it myself and most of the time what I do is any stock that's sitting on the shelf is gathering dust so the goal is to buy as limited amount as you possibly can. And still get a reasonable price. And then move it out fast.

Actually someone else I spoke with -- Jim Straw told me how he structures his drop-ship program, that people buy from him at 40% of the cost so you're basically getting a 60% discount. So let's say the product sells for $10, and you're buying it for $4, and you were selling it on eBay, what price would you choose to start at?

Actually I would have to research the particular item to see what price it would sell at. The reason that I don't do a lot of drop-shipping, actually I can honestly say I don't do any right now, is because of the fact that on eBay people are looking for bargains. And there's so little markup on most items that the little bit of profit that the drop-shipper is going to make, often wipes out the profit that you would have made.

And that's one of the frustrating things about eBay is that you do sort of have to plan on having an inventory at some point. But there are drop-shipping companies out there that you can make a little bit of money on.

I've sold "As Seen On TV" items for a short period of time. And those "As Seen On TV" items ended up doing fairly well. I could actually sell 10 - 20 items per week fairly easily. But the problem was all of the hard work that went into the advertising and the cost, I wasn't really making a whole lot because I had to pay the drop-shipper.

So you tend to look more for Wholesalers?

Exactly. I look more for wholesalers, honestly of late, the greatest bargains that I have found have been at garage sales and at flea markets. My wife and I went to a garage sale a couple of weeks ago just before Christmas. I found an old leather case filled with a travel bar. It had three glass bottles, a liquor shaker, a stirrer, and just all the makings for a travel bar.

It was circa 1970 and the jet-setters used to use them. The woman had a price tag on it of $25, I offered her $5 and she took it. I put it on eBay, and it sold for $46 and the guy paid $12 for the shipping.

That's an instant turnaround of anyway you look at it, by the time I pay for the ad and everything, my gas and my time, of around $40. That's one item. He's extremely satisfied. He's going to use it for parties -- he's a big Buffalo Bills fan and he's taking it to football games.

I love going to the flea market. And to the garage sales. As I said, if it looks old, and it looks like there's any value, chances are it is. You don't have to be an antique expert, if you look at it and you say to yourself "Wow, if I dust that off, take a couple of good photos of it, describe it well in an ad", chances are there's somebody out there in the world, which is literally who you're dealing with, with eBay, you're not dealing with just your local garage sale market, you're dealing with the world. Someone out there probably wants it.

As you say you ship stuff all over the world ... fragile stuff too?

As it happens the travel bar was fragile, with 3 glass bottles in it. That's a piece of cake, because you just wrap it up in newspaper ... I put it in a nice string box, and shipped it out to them priority mail, as per his request, and that's what he paid for.

And no harm. There was absolutely no damage. He even let me know it arrived safely. I shipped a camera just last week. An old collectable camera that actually my wife found in a box of her grandmother's belongings after her grandmother passed away.

This box became my wife's and I asked "What are you going to do with that?". She said "Nothing". And it sold for $50. And it was an old beat up camera. It even had the original receipt and the original box.

People love that kind of collectable item. So that's exactly how I presented the ad as a matter of fact ... I said that "This was made in a simpler time when camera's weren't digital".

Let's say for example you were writing your ad for that, where did you come up with the text? Did you use the documents that came with the camera?

I read some of the documents that came with the camera and took the model, and basically what I do is I've got a template of an ad that I use. What I do is I actually base my work on that template. I've found it's a nice clean template that other people actually -- you can easily apply this template to literally any ad, and as a matter of fact what I'm doing right this moment, I'm going to go and bring up that ad ... so that I can tell you exactly what I wrote on it ...

So the whole process of putting together an ad ... how long would you say it takes?

It used to take me somewhere around 2 to 3 hours minimum. Basically I'm very fortunate now because honestly I can bang out an ad probably in about 18 - 20 minutes. Because I have this template that I base the ad on.

And I'm actually looking at it, I'm looking at the leather bar one that I brought up ... okay it says "Travel bar, leather bar kit" and right below that I had a photo and then I put in a little catchy saying that I made up "This is one bar that never closes".

And then I put a description: "Circa mid to late 1960's, these were actually quite fashionable for the jet-setters to throw a party on the run. The kit is highly collectable and is in near mint condition inside and out."

Then there's a couple more photos that are close-ups of the inside, then I put a description of what was actually in the kit: "leather case, 3 glass bottles, a faux silver tray", faux is a wonderful word too "faux" - a faux silver tray ... AKA plastic. "Comes with complete instructions for some great drinks".

And then I put the terms of the purchase to let them know exactly what they're bidding on and exactly what they're going to pay for the shipping and I have my email address there. And that is the exact same template that I use on each and every ad that I write.

It's got a little place for what I would call the headline, right below that I'll put a nice photo of the item. Below that I'll have some kind of a phrase that sort of describes it or perhaps embellishes upon the photo, trying to add to it ... like if it's picture of jewelry, I'll say something to the effect of "You can actually see in this photo how much this wonderful piece shines" or something like that.

And then I would go into extreme description including all the way down to what's included so that the person knows exactly what they're bidding on, and then I always put the terms of purchase on the ad ... that's an extremely important aspect, and I notice that a lot of people don't do that and then they wonder why customers end up being a little bit upset when they didn't realize that they needed to pay x number of dollars for shipping or that the person had a no return policy, or something like that. The terms of purchase spell it out. Small print so to speak.

So just from the example you read out, it sounds more like catalog copy, rather than a sales letter. Would you say that that was what you were going for?

Essentially yes. It's like you're putting it on an online catalog. It's factual and I go for a lot of pictures. It slows down how fast the ad loads -- yes. But a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. When they can actually see what they're bidding on, they're more likely to bid on it.

I use just about the same format in every single ad, but what I do is I will actually modify the ad to fit the product. If I'm selling something that is somewhat vague then I'll go into an extreme amount of detail and if I'm selling something where I'm up against a lot of competition, I'll go into even more detail, I would try to convince people "Why should they buy from me versus the 250 other people that are also selling the exact same product?"

The gentleman that lost his job and is asking for my assistance, he became very fortunate. It just so happened that as a fire fighter I knew what he was talking about -- he had a whole bunch of shields that he had found in the basement of this house that he had just bought.

And the shield is the front portion of the helmet that indicates the unit number and the station number and from his description these things were quite old. He was able to put those on eBay, and they sold for $200 - $500 a piece. They were 100 years old.

I told him "Put them on there with pictures and I'm not going to teach you at this point how to write an ad, but bottom line show the pictures, and let the item sell itself".

And that's exactly what it did, and he said in his ad ... he was very honest "I found this in my basement, I think it came from Lancaster Pennsylvania, it's probably about 100 years old, I don't honestly know, here's the photo, the rest is up to you, please bid".

And they did. He made a bundle in his first week. So if he could find more of them like that, he wouldn't need my help any more. That's the main thing that I go for: honestly and integrity.

You mentioned earlier that you used to link to your own sites from your listings, but eBay won't allow that any more...

They completely negated being able to do that. I understand eBay's position because eBay works very hard to get people to come to their sites and what they are essentially allowing was eBay's hard-earned customers to essentially click-through and leave.

So they said "No more -- we won't allow that any more". A wise way of getting around that, that I did for a while was I made my eBay ID actually the name of my web site. Check out my old ID it was GolfCFL.com. And that was the golf web site that I sold golf clubs from. It got a few hits.

The main thing was it's all a matter of what you're selling, and in that case I was selling golf clubs that were in high demand. And so it definitely transformed into lots of hits and lots of requests for clubs.

In one week, in August I did $3,500. That's why September 11th, oh boy. That really messed up the economy in the States. And this is something that's also interesting Louis, is the fact that September 11th has actually caused a boom in eBay sales in some facets. I would have thought that it would have wiped out eBay sales but in actuality it increased it because people were looking to save more money and people are looking to make more money so there's more people actually coming to eBay.

Yeah, I remember reading that often when people are laid off it's home businesses or home business opportunities that really boom ... and that it's often when lots of network marketing companies get more sign ups.

But unfortunately, it's only certain things. Obviously luxury items, like jewelry, I would imagine that those sales suffer tremendously while information products that teach people how to make money on line ended up with a boom.

And there again it's just a matter of knowing your market and figuring out exactly what the trends might be and trying to move with the market, as opposed to against it.

Would you say, that because of the eBay rule change, having your site and any affiliate sites you wish to list, on your About Me page is a good thing?

That's definitely something that everyone should do when they join eBay, because in the first place it takes the mystery out of who you are, let's you tell a little bit more about yourself, and perhaps you can put a photo of yourself there, but in addition to that you can link to your eBay store or your own web site and that can definitely lead to more credibility and more sales.

You have an eBay store do you?

I don't have an eBay store, simply because I didn't want to try to justify that particular expense while I'm spending so much on eBay ads. And I rotate -- it would be difficult for me to have a store since I really don't center on one specific theme any longer, I sell literally anything that I go out and find at a flea market or a garage sale.

It would be hard to put those in store, but if I did once again get into the golf again, yes I was building an eBay store for the golf products I was selling. So bottom line is if you have a niche product that you sell specifically then I would definitely recommend that you build an eBay store and write an About Me page.

If I remember one of your posts from the Tony Blake board, you mention that you take pretty much any method of payment ... is that right?

Just about. I don't take American Express but every other form of payment - yes. And I don't hold an order specifically because when I look at the people who are buying online, they're looking for online instant gratification in most cases, so if they send me an electronic check, or if they use a credit card, to me they've paid, and I've only gotten for lack of a better term, in the four years I've been doing this, I've only got burned twice, so maybe I've been real lucky, but it's not hard to imagine that the easier you make it for someone to pay you, the more likely it is that they're going to buy from you because they realize "I can pay this guy using literally any form and I'm going to get that item that I wanted".

So do you actually have the ability to take credit cards by themselves as well?

Yes I do.

So you have a merchant account do you?

I have a merchant account set up through bank locally and in addition to that if a customer buys from me if they would like I can set them a special link that they can go into my shopping cart and literally pay me directly through the shopping cart, and as a matter of fact if you go to Gnuday.com if you click on any one of those links it will take you into my shopping cart. And you can pay using Visa, MasterCard, you can pay with an eCheck, you can pay via PayPal, it's just a really simple way of setting up a shopping cart.

I know that PayPal keeps growing -- would you say it's the most popular method of people paying for things on eBay?

It is by far -- my sales actually went up when I started accepting PayPal. I understand that there are those who are disgruntled with PayPal for whatever reason. I have yet to have any dealings with them as a seller, that was less than ideal.

As a buyer I would never recommend that you use them to buy anything that's not a solid object because they simply don't provide buyer protection, and I didn't know that until it was too late, I bought a series of ads as a matter of fact and the guy was not legit and PayPal didn't back me up, they backed that seller up, but I learned my lesson and I won't make that mistake again.

But I do put PayPal logos on each and every one of my auctions ads. As a matter of fact, out of the 78 that I sold the other day, nearly 60 have already paid, and out of those that paid 4 of them used BillPoint, and all of the others used PayPal so that tells you the mass percentage of people that are using PayPal.

And I remember you saying that to avoid any problems, what you do is download your PayPal balance to your bank account every day.

Daily. As a matter of fact today I did it twice. Because this morning when I got up there was another $44 in there from people who had paid overnight so I processed those orders, and this evening when I got home, there's another $40 from people who once again had paid during the day while I wasn't on the computer. And in both cases I went ahead and sent them to my account. There's a small fee for the transfer -- it's like 50 cents. To me it's worth the peace of mind knowing there's no funds in there to be frozen.

Of course. It's nice to come back to more money each time...

It is. There was a time when I just started out that was a rare occurrence, now I'm happy to say that -- and this is another huge piece of advice that I would give to anyone Louis is this is like the race between the Tortoise and the Hare.

Online marketing is not something to be rushed. If someone tells you "Oh by next week this time you'll be making $10,000 a week" stay away from them, they're probably lying to you.

The fact is though the longer that you stick it out and the more you learn the more likely you are to succeed. And now, I make in a week, what it used to take me a month to make online.

In relation to that ... something I'm curious about -- you said that you sell what's in stock, could you say how many auctions you have running at any one time?

Right now I've only got two, but right around Christmas I had 40. It depends on what I've got in stock and it also depends on what my wife has me doing on my days off! As a matter of fact I would have run more ads this week 'cos I do have some things in inventory here that I bought at garage sales that are just itching to be sold but I couldn't write the ads for them, because I had to clean out the garage.

But the good news is, in cleaning the garage, I found some more stuff out there that my wife would have thrown away and one mans junk is another mans treasure. I put it right into my inventory and I'll write ads for it too. I imagine if you want to check my advertising over the next week to ten days, you'll see that I have more ads on. I imagine that I'll probably run 20 to 30.

Generally speaking I usually run around 20 per week and now because I think it's a combination of what I'm selling and how I'm selling it most of the time just about every item I put on is selling. I'm really, really lucky.

Another of your posts that I saw on Tony Blake's board -- something really caught my eye, you mentioned "this morning I've processed 150 orders". It seems an awful lot of orders. I'm intrigued. How did you do that?

A lot of pre-setup work. What I recommend to those who are going to sell on eBay, you do the work up front. And then it's just a matter of copying and pasting. I had my post-sales emails completely set up. All I had to do is copy them and then basically eBay sends you an email that tells you exactly who all of your bidders were and you get their email address, and you click on their email address, and paste the email into that particular blank email and hit send.

It took me about 15 minutes to process all those invoices. It's simple copy and paste. It's kind of "Oh boy, am I going to make any mistakes here" because you do it so quickly, but after you've done it so many times you get used to it. It's just a matter of making sure you're set up beforehand.

I would equate it to being like an instructor -- when I first started teaching at the college here locally, it took me hours upon hours to set up for my classes because I had to prep for each and every class, but now that I've been doing it for 16 years I'm ready-prepped. So I go in there, and I open the book, and I lecture. I know what I'm going to say.

It's the same thing -- you do your prep work before the auction closes. Actually before you even post the auction. And then it's just a matter -- I've already got my post-sales letters set up and I just change the item, change the amount, and click on the person who bought it. It's all pretty much done in place.

You choose not to use a service like Auction Watch?

No, because they charge too much. The bottom line is I'm still a small business, and they're a wonderful service but you really have to be clearing a fairly decent amount consistently in order to justify that expense. I would much rather put that money, instead of putting it towards AuctionWatch I'd rather put it towards more advertising.

Do you use any auction specific software packages?

I used to use Robbin Tungett's Virtual Auction Ad Pro, and it is absolutely phenomenal. She is like the eBay Queen. This woman is just phenomenal.

I now use Front Page to write all of my ads, I found it's more versatile, but for anyone who's just starting out, I would highly recommend that they visit AuctionRiches.com ... that's Robbin's site, and take a look at her software because it does everything for you in assisting you in writing a decent ad.

And how do you post your auctions? Just manually through Explorer?

I'd rather use Netscape. For some reason Explorer -- another little tidbit of information for people now just getting started, Internet Explorer for some reason after you post your first ad tends to lock up. I don't know why. It's done it ever since I've been selling. I've found that Netscape doesn't so while I'll use Internet Explorer for 99% of my browsing, when I'm posting ads I'm using Netscape and it slides right through.

I can post, once I've got the ads I've already written, and I already have my headline written out also, so it's just a matter of copying and pasting it, I can post 30 ads in less than 30 minutes. And if you talk to the people who are literally selling thousands and thousands of items, they're probably doing the exact same thing.

So all these customers you've had over the years, how do you follow-up on them, what do you do with them after the sale?

That's an excellent question. I make certain as I said to send them that final email once again thanking them and reminding them that I'm still there, and I keep their email address in a data file and when I come up with another product that they might be interested in, I email them to remind them who I am and ask them if they might be interested in hearing about it.

The last thing I want to do is send them an unsolicited business email. I invite them to return my email if they are interested, if they do -- great, I send them the offer. If they don't, then I don't. I definitely don't throw away any email addresses of any past customer because they are another potential customer.

I've ended up with several sales from people I've already sold to by doing that. I have an eBay mailing list -- I actually have more than one depending if they bought software from me, or they bought the CD, and I use Worldmerge to send the mass mailing out, and the mass mailing, the first one that I do is basically an invitation saying "I've come up with another product, you were a former customer of mine, as I told you in a previous email I'll let you know if I came up with anything, the last thing I want to do is interfere with you or whatever you're doing these days, but I wanted to let you know about this offer. If you would like to know more about it please feel free to email me and I will personally email you".

In that case I do send a personal email to those who reply. That way it doesn't seem as if I'm something of a business machine just asking for more money. And I also like adding that personal touch because as I said earlier in our interview Louis, removing the mystery of who the person is behind the auction ad actually makes it a lot easier to sell because people will buy from someone who they trust a lot faster.

Okay, do you have your photo on your listings?

I don't put my photo in my listings, but I make sure I put contact information. I make it very easy for them to contact me. My email address is right there in every single ad that I run, many of the ads that I run actually have my name, as well as my post office box business address, and my phone number and I urge them, I invite them to email me if they have any questions. I even use that word "urge ... if you have any questions please email me" and it works.

Do you use any other contact methods like ICQ ... instant messaging?

I used to use ICQ and then I found that it made me vulnerable using a cable modem, so I took it off my computer because I got hacked, no more, it's not worth it, at one point I was using software that allowed me to actually interface while I was online I could leave a little thing on my web site that indicated that I was indeed online and if they clicked on it they could ask me a question live and in person. That worked out quite nicely, but I found that I couldn't get things done 'cos every time that I was online as soon as I logged on, I started getting questions.

That's it, unlike emails you can't choose when to respond.

Exactly. I tried to use ... and this is something else that I'm now focusing on is my time management, because I've found that I'm so excited about getting email from someone because I love chatting with people, I love answering the email, that I would actually stop writing an ad, I would stop scanning in photos, I would have all of this stuff all set up and right in the middle of writing an ad my email thing would ping, and next thing you know I'm answering the email.

I've got time management down now, and basically I set aside a certain time that I check my email and a certain time that I process orders and it seems to be working out. Actually I have to schedule myself almost as if you would as if you're working for someone. You work certain hours, and you do certain things during those hours, and that's another little tidbit of advice I would give anyone getting started is: make sure to put themselves on a schedule.

Time management is just as important, if not more important than money management because your time is valuable. You would have thought that I'd have learnt that one a long time ago!

It's too easy to be disorganized. I can vouch for that. I think we're kind of coming to the end of this interview ... so what would you suggest to someone who's either starting selling on eBay, or someone who's already selling on eBay but wants to sell more, or take it even full time?

eBay is definitely one thing you can get into online full time and yes it's going to take some time and effort and some learning but there is definitely money to be made. I could do it in all likelihood fulltime already honestly if I devoted more time but the fact is I've got so many years in the fire department I can't give up that retirement. That would be a very silly thing to do.

The big hint that I would give people that want to get started is learn as much as you can and just absorb the information that's out there ... Auction Hints, my eBook is a fairly decent eBook that tells all about eBay.

There's several other publications out there that will tell you exactly what you need to know as far as how to safely sell and buy in the online auction forum. In addition to that I would say start counting on something that you truly, truly love because if you have a passion for it, then you'll find it easier to sell it.

And I loved software absolutely, I still do, but unfortunately I got knocked out of that market but if you find a niche, for example a friend of mine that sells on eBay, she is very much into antiques and she does extremely well selling antique vases and she loves them. How could she help but sell them? Another friend of mine sells fishing equipment. Guess what his passion is?

It was just natural as a golfer -- I love the game of golf, and so for me to sell golfing equipment was awesome. I got to actually see the brand new golf stuff as it came out of the factory. "Wow -- look at this!". Find a niche. If you have urges to keep something yourself, then how hard can it be to sell it.

There's going to be other people out there that are going to want it. And don't overprice yourself, don't try to make a killing on one item, you're far better off selling ten of the same item, and making the profit over the long term because now you've got ten contacts.

Just be honest, and be available, and do unto others. The old ethic of "do unto others, as you have them do unto you" it definitely plays into online sales.

I'm happy to say that the people that I've dealt with, I don't know if I've just been very lucky or what but the people I've dealt with have been very, very honest, and had a lot of integrity, if they did write me a bad check it was an accident and they made up for it, and it's been just an extremely wonderful experience, and I don't regret any portion of it.

Especially now that I'm actually, it's taken some time, but now that I'm now making a nice secondary income. I could actually give up my teaching at the college, but I love that too much too. But I'm actually making as much on eBay, as I was at the college.

And as you say, you've got the system so automated, how much do you actually spend on it ... an hour a day?

It depends if it's a day I'm scheduled to post ads. If it's a day that I'm posting ads then I go over the ad with a fine tooth comb to make sure I didn't add something in there that was dumb. You know you're tired, you're writing 30 ads, and you could absolutely put the wrong description or something. And people will hold you to it. And they expect the item to be exactly what's advertised.

And once I've done that, by the time I've posted, probably maybe 2 hours, 3 hours, and that's maybe twice a week. And then every other day it's about an hour on eBay, and then I spend several hours reading online forums and posting, which is a great form of advertising, but in addition to that it's an awesome way to meet people, like yourself, and end up learning even more about online marketing.

And it's also another passion ... it's almost like a hobby, because you really enjoy reading a lot of the posts because some of those people are just so intelligent and in addition to that you like seeing the fighting too ... it's almost like a soap opera. You gotta laugh at some of the posts.

I'm constantly looking at new and better ways of improving things. I just registered EzineAdResults.com and as a matter of fact the gentleman that's working on it with me is in the UK and he and I are working diligently to put together a nice info-package on how to advertise successfully in newsletters.

That's basically another thing that I'm working on that's sort of behind the scenes, so you constantly keep learning and moving forward. And as a matter of fact my plan is once the product is 100% completed I will be marketing it on eBay. Just one more thing that we market.

There are people on eBay that sell certain types of items exclusively, and they continue doing it, and they do quite well. I envy them in some ways, but in other ways honestly I enjoy selling a diverse measure of items because there's little side businesses that end up popping up.

Once you get very decent at selling on eBay, as a matter of fact I've got a gentleman today that contacted me about selling one of his golf clubs for him. It's a used golf club. It will probably sell for around $100 on eBay, and he'll give me 20% of the sales price. I've already got golf club ads written, all I've got to do is take a photo of his and then I'll put it on and he'll pay the ad cost by the way, and I'll sell his golf club. That's another potential business. I hadn't really thought about it, until he mentioned it to me.

Okay, thanks very much Jim. In conclusion, anything you would like to say ... any final points?

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this. I still consider myself a little guy, who's a fire fighter paramedic first, and online seller second. But eBay has definitely made a difference in my life, I make money on eBay. Others can certainly make money on eBay also.

It affords people opportunities that most online endeavors simply don't because they're too difficult. eBay is simple. It's a very, very good place to start. And it's inexpensive. It's fun, and they have made it as safe as they possibly can as long as you add your own common sense to the measures that eBay has taken then it's a perfectly safe place to also to buy and to sell.

Jim Wilson's eBay Secrets : Part 1

2010-02-11T15:32:00.000-05:00

Jim Wilson's eBay Secrets : Part 1

Jim Wilson has been selling successfully on eBay since 1999 making a very nice secondary income, that fits in with his job as a Firefighter Paramedic.

And I was lucky enough to speak with Jim for almost two hours recently, picking his brains about every aspect of his eBay business ... and how anyone, even with little money or experience, can start profitting on eBay.

Hi Jim ... well firstly, could you tell me about your background please?

Sure, I am a firefighter paramedic, have been since 1982 and I am in what I like to call the twilight of my career looking at a potential retirement. I was looking at ways of making supplemental income and online seemed to be the way to go. And the easiest way to make money online seemed to be eBay.

Okay. So when did you start online?

I actually started marketing online in 1997. A friend of mine was already doing it, told me what he was doing and built a web site for me and unfortunately I did not know how to get traffic to the web site or anything really about marketing so that utterly and totally failed but it did lead me to the direction that I ended up with eBay. I actually started selling on eBay in mid-1999.

Okay. So two years later for you?

Yes. And because I'm still full time at the fire department I would imagine that if someone really devoted more time full time to an online effort it would be less time as far as learning but I worked full time so I couldn't devote as much time as I wanted to my online endeavor.

So it really started taking off in 1999?

I really got very lucky twice. In the first place I met a gentleman on eBay that took me under his wing and explained to me some of the basics as far as writing the ad and a little bit about finding some of the products.

He instructed me that I needed to find a niche that I was comfortable in, and that I felt comfortable selling. And that led me to software. And that was the first thing that I really focused on ... was selling software.

I was extremely fortunate shortly after I got started ... within one month of getting started on eBay I found a supplier that was selling software that he had no idea what it was worth. It was a title called the Neverhood and it was like a cult classic. It wasn't made any longer.

It was selling on eBay in droves for $70 - $80 per title and I got it for $6 per. I bought 200 of them and that really inspired me! I sold out in a couple of months.

What was the Neverhood exactly?

It was a game, by DreamWorks Interactive, and it became quite popular and unfortunately it wasn't made any longer and I assumed that it was a lot of college students, that seemed to be who I was selling the most to. Actually that really inspired me. And it became clear that there definitely is money to be made online. That was the one that really set it off.

Definitely a good return on investment there.

An incredible return on investment.

Just out of interest you say that it was a hot item and that you bought for $6 and were selling for about $70, how many bids would each one have?

It was incredible, I would start them out at 99c and often that's what I do with most of my ads as a matter of fact, that's a tip that I tell people that subscribe to Auction Hints start it low because once you get bids, bids get more attention. People always seem to want something that someone else has.

I've noticed that actually.

And I would end up with sometimes 30, 40, 50 bids, with people getting into bidding wars, and that really amazed me even though I had other titles that had less bids and cost less, people were still bidding on the more expensive copy of that exact same title.

I've noticed from my auctions that often there's very little activity until maybe the last two hours.

That's typical. Most of the time when they get to the going, going, gone ... people on eBay are looking for bargains. The main thing that they're looking for is something that they're going to save money on and they were going to buy it anyway, and so those last two hours are the key two hours.

But if you're selling something that people are looking for like in my case the Neverhood, it got bids almost immediately and continued to get bids throughout. I would run them for 7 or 10 days and they would get incredible bids.

And back then eBay allowed you to actually put a link on your ad on their site to your site so I actually built a site called TonsOfSoftware.com so I got a ton of hits on it and sold other software too.

So where were you getting your copies of Neverhood from, at such a bargain price?

I got it from a software company actually based out of Houston, Wholesale Software Incorporated. I found them completely, totally by accident.

They were selling on eBay, I was looking for a software title, I found that they were selling the one that I was looking for, one thing led to another and since I was also trying to sell software the next thing you know we started chatting and she said that she had found this guy locally that had some software that was hot on eBay and she was going to buy some and she suggested that I did.

And she bought 200 of them and I bought 200 of them and we were the only Neverhood suppliers probably worldwide. We held the market. I sold those things literally all over the world. I shipped them everywhere, you name it I shipped it there.

A great position to be in...

It was fun. My only regret is that there wasn't more than 200! Even to this day, if you check eBay the Neverhood still sells for $40 or $50. It's just an amazing software title. People are still collecting it.

So you mentioned that you start your auctions low and in that case you were starting it at 99 cents, was that with a reserve?

Actually no, because I knew it was going to get bids I felt very safe in running a no reserve auction.

There's two trains of thought where the reserve is concerned: You run a reserve auction ... there are those who may feel that there's no point in bidding because they probably won't meet your reserve and you might want too much for it. And that scares some bidders away.

However if you don't put a reserve on it and it's an expensive item such as real expensive golf clubs or jewelry or something like that then obviously you take a chance of losing quite a bit of money if it doesn't meet it's reserve.

But in that case on a hot item like that I knew for a fact it was going to get bids and I felt quite comfortable, and actually my headline mentioned that it was no reserve. My headline was "Neverhood, brand new, factory sealed, 99 cents starting bid, no reserve". And that got tons of attention.

So you've developed software as your niche on eBay have you?

That was actually the original thing that I sold and unfortunately what happened was I sort of got bumped out of the market for lack of a better term.

eBay is constantly changing, when one thing becomes hot and everybody starts selling it, then those who have been in there long enough realize it's time to go ahead and find something else somebody is going to want.

There are those who set the market trend, and they make the money first and the other people sort of follow behind. And so actually I've sold several things on eBay. Software was just the first of many: jewelry, collectables, info-products, books, toys, electronics, just about everything.

One of the funnest things that I sold was laptops. I got 14 laptops free of charge, because this guy was throwing them out. I bought them home, they worked, he didn't know how to charge the batteries I guess, he didn't know they worked.

I put them on auction figuring that I'll be lucky to get $50 or $100 and every single one of those things sold for around $200 a piece. So in two weeks time I turned those around.

And that's the whole thing about eBay, it's actually fun, as well as profitable. I go out to garage sales and my wife and I actually look around for, you know the old saying "one man's junk is another man's treasure".

And we look to see if something looks old. That might sound silly but if it looks old it probably has some potential value. And then it's just a matter of negotiating. People sell things at garage sales for 50 cents. I turn around and sell it on eBay for $50. It's amazing.

So is that where you found the laptops?

The laptops were actually from a company that were going out of business locally, and he was throwing all kinds of stuff away and I went down there to help him clean out the office and there were those laptops in a box and I asked him "Where are these going?"

And he said "Those are going out to the dumpster".

"Do you mind if I take them?"

"No, not at all. Take them, they don't work".

He had no idea how to charge the batteries, it was amazing. They had all of the software and everything.

Were they decent specs as well?

They were old IBM 386 laptops. They sold like hotcakes -- I was very interested to find out why in the world people were buying old technology, this was around the time that 5, 6, 700 Mhz was state of the art and these things are 386's and I was asking people "What are you buying this for?" and most of them said they were going to use it for the calendar program that was built in and just for traveling. It was a nice cheap way of keeping track of their information. As long as the customer is satisfied. That's the number one thing.

I have noticed a lot of old computers still selling well on eBay, Pentium 166's -- you can run Word on it but it does crawl along, but I've noticed those auctions always getting bids.

What's amazing is some of the old stuff is collectable now. The older IBM's are actually considered collectables, you never know what's going to shoot up in value.

One of the things that I tell the people that ... as a matter of fact within the last week I had a gentleman that wrote me a heart felt letter how he got laid off and I've sent him several emails and I'm walking him through the steps of how to sell on eBay.

And one of the first things that I told him is "Things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them". Your ad is going to have to try to convince them that they want to pay that amount.

And online sales are very impersonal. You have to remove the mystery of who you are. That's why I have no problem giving my email address on my ad, I have no problem whatsoever if people want to contact me, and I'm very open and honest about the product. If they ask me a question about it I'm not going to mislead them and say it's better than it really is. Treat people with integrity.

Absolutely. Can I ask out of interest: what is your eBay ID?

Gnuday -- G ... N ... U ... D ... A ... Y

The same as your web site? Gnuday.com

That's right. The original was Gernsbid. My nickname as the fire department was Gern. And I started out with Gernsbid and then I was making an absolute incredible amount of money on golf products. For about 3 months there. And I changed my ID to GolfCFL.

I found a Golf supplier, I was able to get golf equipment at a fraction of what it would sell for and September 11th wiped that out. All of a sudden people were more interested in more important things than golf, and the golf market went from a club selling for $325 to selling for $175. My cost was $225 so that sort of wiped that out, so then I changed it to Gnuday.

I own that site and I said "that's a good name", so that's it. I think that I've got 300, something like that, probably 300 feedback ... only one was negative and that was a guy that got impatient about his golf clubs, and he came back, changed it, and said "Yeah, you did me right".

The golf clubs were late from the manufacturer and ultimately I ended up sending him some golf balls and all kinds of other stuff. And an apology. The thing that I've noticed, is that people simply want to know that you're still there, that you're communicating with them, and I have avoided negative feedback when quite honestly Louis I should have gotten it.

I had software in stock, sold more than I had in stock, promised someone I would send it, the supplier says "It's on the way", and it drags out ... as long as I kept emailing the person every single day "...I'm still working on it..." and I sent them another title in the mean time and told them "This is on me".

I avoided the negative feedbacks. Honestly, I don't think the feedback matters as much as people put weight on, and that's because of the fact that for so long there you could get fake feedback.

A lot of the people on eBay that have literally thousands in feedback, it's not hardbacked. When eBay started, you could get false feedbacks simply by, you could actually give yourself feedback. It was strange...

The guy who taught me -- his name is Leo Richardson, he's moved on now, his name on eBay was LCRR ... just an incredible mentor, he sold martial arts items and software, and Leo showed me how you could ... basically back when eBay first started and for about the first 6 months that I was on there, you could get feedback 50 or 100 at a time simply by sending other people feedback because feedback was not tied to an item number.

So if you gave Leo feedback, chances are they'll feel obligated to give you feedback, so you could just go through a whole list of eBay members and send them positive feedback saying what wonderful people they are and they would reciprocate.

I never did that. I promise I never did it, Leo said that he didn't either but I noticed that his feedback went from 800 to 1,100 in one day. So I don't know! Because back then, you could click on an eBay's member ID and actually send them an email directly. Whereas now it goes through eBay.

Unless of course you put your email address in your sales letter.

Exactly.

Actually I think that's a good idea because sometimes people don't actually want to bother clicking to ask a question ... and I think I remember this from your newsletter, rather than expecting people to click on "See All Auctions" actually adding "Click Here To See All My Other Auctions". Really spell it out. Because it's too easy to be lazy and not bother searching for a link.

It's too easy to be lazy and complacent. You also have to realize that the average knowledge level of the people that are on eBay, they're those who have 1, 2, 3, 400 ... 1, 2, 3, 4000 feedback, and there are those who are brand new.

Those who are brand new far out number those who aren't. You see the people who are brand new are probably also brand new to the internet, relatively speaking, so you have to write your ads around that idea, and you have to treat them like they are brand new, and sort of walk them through all the steps, make them feel comfortable bidding on your item.

Yes, I think it's too easy to take knowledge for granted. It's too easy to forget that you weren't actually born knowing how to use the internet...

It's easy sometimes to forget that people may not know what a URL is. So if you say "You can go to my URL to pay for your auction" they have no idea what you're talking about!

So you're far better off spelling it out in detail and that covers the whole gambit from the brand new person all the way up to the expert.

I have yet to have anyone say that I ended up making them feel like I had degraded them by sending them too much information. I send actually, my customers, and this is something very important that I would stress to anyone starting out in eBay, is I send out an email initially right after the auction closes thanking them for the bid and telling them that they're going to receive an automatic invoice from both Billpoint and PayPal, but in addition they can send me a check or a money order, I send them a second email once their payment has been received letting them know that it has been received and that their item is packaged and that it's on it's way, and then I send them a third email letting them know that I gave them positive feedback, thanking them for the manner in which they handled the transaction, and reminding them that I have other auctions and I would love to do business with them again.

It leads to positive feedback for me, and in addition to that it creates a comfort zone. They know that I'm a real person. I get literally hundreds of emails a week from people that read Auction Hints, people that are customers, that are telling me "you are actually making me feel a lot more comfortable about buying online". And that's kinda neat.

Something, related to what you said earlier... about you going to garage sales, I would say that now I've been online for a few years I've found my niche in sites I often visit, and it's very rare that I actually venture beyond it ... and occasionally when I search on key words, I find that there's a whole other world out there. I think it's the same with eBay ... they get millions upon millions of visitors every month, there's something for everyone there. But often you don't see it.

There definitely is. There is items on there which actually are astounding. There was a young man that was offering to sell his kidney. He actually had bids in to the seven figures, before eBay yanked the ad because it was illegal. There was a nuclear submarine on there. And it had six-figure bids. And eBay yanked it.

I mean, it's interesting if you go onto eBay if nothing else, just to do the searches and see what other people are actually trying to sell. It's actually amusing, and very educational.

And that is exactly what I do Louis, in order to follow the trends of what's selling, I find those people who have a lot of feedback and I go to their auctions. If they've got a lot of feedback, chances are they're selling a lot. Look at what they're selling. And then it's not hard to find their suppliers now that there's so many suppliers in the world.

I was going to ask you actually about something you said earlier -- how do you spot a trend, how do you see what's popular on eBay, because you say you try to get in early before it gets saturated, what do you look for?

That's an excellent question. The thing that I look for is hot items. An item becomes hot after 32 bids. If it gets 32 bids it's getting a lot of attention for some reason -- let's take a look and see what in the world it is.

Then actually something like a car, those things are hot items, become hot bids items all the time, but as it turns out informational CD's right now are extremely hot and it's obvious why because a lot of people in America are out of work now and are looking for ways of making money and one of the ways that they can do this is by buying CD's and information as far as teaching them how to make money online.

And they're selling like hotcakes. And that's one of the things that I've sold that's the item that I sold 78 of in one auction. An informational CD all about selling on eBay. I figured out that that was going to be a hot item simply because other people were already selling it and what I did was I took the idea and modified it and centered it on eBay.

I've seen those too actually. A hot topic at the moment on the internet is selling ebooks with reprint rights and a lot of people do that on eBay, and as you said you're doing the same thing with CD's, and you're selling a CD like that on Gnuday.com...

That's the exact same CD...

The one you sell from Gnuday, and on eBay?

Yes. But actually I have 4 different CD's and the one that I'm actually marketing and really marketing heavily right now is the one that I developed that centers on eBay.

I noticed that. It has eBay software, eBay ebooks...

Exactly

Have you managed to fill all the CD?

Oh, it has over 650 MB of information on it. It has a tremendous amount of information. A lot of that info is what I would call fun information and wasted information as far as the person who is putting in the CD in order to start a business.

The ebooks that are on there, the information that I put on there personally as far as advertising and eBay tips ... it's a very, very good CD, it's very effective. It can end up taking someone from being a novice brand new to eBay and actually bringing them to a level where they know how to make money.

eBay affords everyone an equal opportunity to make money online whether you know how to get traffic to a web site or not. eBay already does that for you. All you have to do is write a good headline, write a good ad, and have a product with communality. A product that has mass appeal.

That's true actually. To sell on EBay, you hardly need any money at all.

Absolutely not. 30 cents ... that's dirt cheap and then a small portion of the sale, assuming that the item sells.

Anyone can get started with that.

Exactly.

As you've been doing this for a good few years now ... I'll ask you this: I would say that people tend to go through eBay by searching more, rather than trawling through categories. Would you agree?

Definitely. They go to eBay, and in most cases if they are the shopper as opposed to the seller they're going there looking for one specific thing.

When I was shopping for my Christmas presents I found myself exactly in that position. I was actually shopping on eBay for something for my wife and I specifically typed that search term in. And people that had used that term in their headline ended up getting hits and ultimately I did make a couple of purchases that way.

That's the thing. On the front page, the search only looks in headlines and I think if you go beyond that you can click on "Search Descriptions" as well. So your heading is very important. What would you recommend, for putting together the most effective heading, for choosing the best keywords in the heading?

In the first place, make certain that you don't use quotation marks or wasted space. You're only allowed so many spaces in the headline, and the quotation marks actually negate whatever term is inside of the quotation marks and a lot of people don't know that.

If you put something in quotation marks on eBay as far as the search engine is concerned it negates it. It no longer exists. So if you put in there "FREE" or whatever ... guess what? You've lost that particular search term.

I didn't know that.

Most people don't. Leo is the one that told me that little tidbit of information. The headline needs to have what I would call the words that catch attention: "bonus", "success", "free", which you've got to be careful about using that because eBay frowns on anything that's free, "controversial", that's one of the reasons that I sold those 78 is because I said that my CD is very controversial.

And people like that term I guess. Honestly I think they searched for "software" but when someone goes into eBay you have to put yourself into the mind of the potential buyer. They're coming in there and they're looking for software.

There could be 10,000 other people selling the exact same title that you're selling so the key is to try to get them to buy from you as opposed to those 9,999 others. The only way you can do that is by making your headline really stand out.

And don't be afraid of the competition. That's another thing that I tell people that I'm trying to assist, a lot of people shy away from the competition, they see somebody selling an item and they say "Shoot, I know where I can get that" or "I could make that" or "I could sell that " or "Oh, he already is so there's no point in me doing it" and that's simply not the case.

Because if they can sell it, you can sell it. Chances are you can sell it better. You take the idea ... they're setting the trend, you're just taking their good idea and making it better.

If you look right now, for that "Most controversial CD" on eBay, they're several of them now. And I was one of the first ones that did that. And people are copying the idea. Some of those people that are copying the idea, bought the CD from me! And I have no problem with that whatsoever because I'm going to move forward. They can continue selling that ... in the mean time I'm already developing another one.

Because of the sheer volume of people selling CD's which are very similar ... either selling them all separately, or with Dutch auctions, how do you compete against such quantity?

The guy who comes out new, is going to have a hard time competing against that quantity because they don't have the feedback and chances are they don't have the resources financially to have that kind of a mass quantity of stock.

So the thing to do is to try to set yourself up to build up to a level where you can compete. I'm up to that level now and I don't want to end up sounding like "Wow, boy" because that's certainly not the case because there's people out there that out-sell me every single day of the week.

But I'm up to the level now where I know that I can write a good ad, I know that my ads will sell and most importantly I know that once I sell something the people are satisfied and I make certain of it. 100%. I can't speak for the other people who are selling the same item.

Word of mouth Louis, it's amazing. I sold three today off of my web site that were sold specifically because of the fact that I sold to other people who were satisfied and told those 3 people about me. No advertising. No work on my part. Word of mouth. And they came to my site, they sent me an email ... they said "We've heard that this CD is wonderful, that you're a great salesperson" and I mean it's flattering.

How To Become A Computer Reseller on eBay

2010-02-11T15:23:00.000-05:00

How To Become A Computer Reseller on eBay

First you have to choose a business name. Think of something that is easy to remember, something that sounds good and something that will make sense as a .com name (if selling on the web, which you probably SHOULD do).

Call your town hall and ask them where you can get a business certificate, they should inform you on which local county office to go to, to fill out the paperwork. When you get to the office you will talk to a representative who can assist you in the aperwork (minimal) and they should ask you to look in the records to make sure the business name you take has not been taken (locally). They may do this with a computer system in their office. Once you get the paper work done they should notarize it and you will be on your way.

So far you have registered with your county office as a business doing business as whomever. Now you need to be legally allowed to sell products or services and collect sales tax. This will require you to obtain a resale certificate.

You will need to register with your state as a reseller (to obtain a resale certificate, anyone who owns some sort of business has to do this). In New York the Department of Taxation and Finance handles all of this (they are in the phone book). Call the town hall to obtain the name of the agency if you are outside of New york or New jersey. Another way to do this is to simply go to a store and look at any resellers License posted in a local business and see what Department issued it, EVERY business is required by law to post these in a visible area, if you can not find it at your local grocery store as someone, they have to show you it.

The total cost for a startup sole proprietorship in New York State (all the paperwork and filings) was $25 in 1998. Each state varies but the fee is usually minimal (< $100)

You Can Become a Business Entity in Several Ways

1. PROPRIETORSHIP: A proprietorship is the simplest business entity to start and usually requires nothing more than a D.B.A. (doing business as) name and a Tax ID number (your Social Security number).

This type of ownership allows you to have the maximum control over the operations of the business, but also creates maximum liability. You will be personally liable for all debts by your business. This is a popular choice for a one-person operation.

2. PARTNERSHIPS: If you need a business partner, either for financial or expertise reasons, the best way to outline your business relationship from a legal standpoint, is to form your business as a partnership.

Maybe you have one or two partners wanting to join with you in your decision to sell computer hardware. You may be the outgoing salesman, and your other two partners love to just be working in the back room configuring client's systems. Maybe you have someone with more accounting abilities. Let them take care of ordering or helping wherever needed. These roles should be worked out between all involved before you get started.

3. CORPORATION: A corporation is the most formal form of business that one may consider. You can have a corporation even if you're the only one in your business or even have partners involved This is the more expensive way to go, but offers the least liability.

The best way to become a corporation is to start off using one of the above forms of business and then later on after the business is prospering file to become a corporation.

Business Checking Account

You will also need to open a BUSINESS checking account. Make sure you bring in the original copy of your resellers permit, they will need that before you even try to open an account. There might be other things, like a copy of the DBA statement receipt. Call ahead and ask.

Pick a bank dedicated to serving the business community. This way if you plan on doing business outside the U.S., they will be more inclined to accept checks from foreign companies.

Information Before You Begin Reselling or Distributing!

When contacting a manufacturer and distributor of hardware, these companies will mail or fax you forms to fill out on your business. They will need the name of your bank, a copy of your resellers permit in order for you to buy wholesale.

Ordering from a computer wholesale company requires you to have a "resellers permit". When you buy from a distributor or wholesaler with a resellers permit they do not charge you sales tax because it is a business to business transaction, YOU or your corporation are expected to collect and pay sales tax to your state government institution. Some states don't charge sales tax, and every state has it's own rules which you will have to learn once you talk to the states Taxation and Finance department (or otherwise known)

Secret eBay Marketing : Part 2

2010-02-11T15:10:00.000-05:00

Secret eBay Marketing Part 2

A lot of people sell info-products on eBay ... I've done it myself ... but often you have to make do with very low dollar amounts: 2 dollars here, 3 dollars there, and unless you're running perhaps 100 or 200 auctions, it really doesn't come to much.

Whereas I've noticed you run auctions selling your Silent Sales Machine on eBay at full price through Dutch auctions. Could you talk about your reasoning behind that ... how you structure the whole sales process on eBay and how it works for you?

Let me start here with the fact that this was all one big experiment for me originally. I played around with many ideas until I found the one that worked. But here's what I found ... and it may save people some time to hear someone that's had some success discussing the topic of selling eBooks on eBay.

There's a right and a wrong way to do it. There's also some ideas out there which I haven't come up with I'm sure. There's people doing it better than me possibly, but I know what doesn't work ... and I will never sell one and two dollar books on eBay one at a time. It's just too much of a hassle to deal with all the delivery, and helping people download ... and if you have even one email with one question from the person that's bought it you've just lost your dollar.

And some people use that as a lead generating system and there may be something to that, but even there you have to be careful not to violate eBay policies.

I don't like the one and two dollar eBooks, because it makes you look cheap. It makes it look like what you have to say isn't of much value. I would much rather play around in the upper end -- 17, 18, 19, 20 dollars for a book selling one title at a time instead of an entire package and I think the way to have success is to make that one title your own book ... because if it's something anyone else can sell and they can make up any price they want, the customer will find it for a penny somewhere else if you're selling it for $18!

It has to be your own book. One thing I did in my Silent Sales Machine book is I emphasized the fact that no one else can sell this book. You won't find it anywhere else on eBay. This is my book. I'm the author. And that's how I started having success.

I don't know that there's a magic formula to sell someone else's book ... resell rights on eBay ... I think that's a risky path because it's all over the place and people know to shop around. There are some things you can do to keep people from shopping and to make them find your product only ... but I think the best way if you want to have success is make it your own product. There are some other options, but sell your own product on eBay ... that's where I had a lot of success. I sold a lot of copies of that book on eBay.

About one and two dollar sales ... when I was playing around on eBay I obviously got some of those as well, and a lot of people chose to pay via PayPal ... and then with the 50 cents minimum and then a percentage PayPal takes, that's a lot of your profit gone already ... so if you're selling a product for two dollars and PayPal takes 50 cents you've already made 25% less.

Yes, the numbers get small real fast. It's not worth your time to sell the low price products on eBay. It just isn't. I want to make profit on any auction that I do ... if you're doing it just to generate leads you can generate leads with a $20 product just as easily as you can with a $2 product, but the leads you generate are people willing to spend $20, instead of the people willing to spend a dollar. Now what kind of customers do you want?

So how did you start marketing your ebook on eBay?

Well the way I started ... I had the good fortune of some common sense, and this is a great story, you'll like this:

The first ten copies of the book I sold on eBay ... the book wasn't even finished yet, I just created the ad and I put it on eBay thinking "If people start bidding I'll finish the book and sell it". And now I've sold thousands of copies of that exact book. So I'm very glad that the people did bid, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even got into this business.

But I sold ten copies of this book Silent Sales Machine in 4 days. People had bid on it, and one of the bidders as fortune would have it was Marlon Sanders. I didn't know who he was, had no idea who he was, and he had an eBay feedback rating of like 3. He'd been on eBay for a couple of weeks just toying around, came across my book, bid on it ... again I had no idea who the guy was.

But the deal I struck with everyone who bid: once the auction was over I sent them an email and said "I have a confession ... the book is only 80% done ... I'll have it done within a few days ... I'll send you a copy no charge, it's free to you ... all I ask is give me a review, let me know what you think".

So you see what I did there was I didn't even have a complete product to sell yet ... I was just testing the waters to see if anyone would be interested in the concepts.

Nobody was upset that there wasn't a product at the end because it's free, they hadn't lost any money, they were going to get a free product in the next couple of weeks ... and it worked beautifully and what I got was feedback from ten customers, one of which happened to be a guru of internet marketing who gave me some fantastic ideas and feedback.

And so I didn't even have a finished product when I started marketing it. And as I say I was testing the waters. And anyone can do the same thing.

I've actually found it quite incredible who you bump into on eBay. I started out just testing my own product cheaply on eBay and it was quite amazing who you make sales too.

Yes, you can build up a lot of relationships very quickly if you're the original author. That gives you so much more credibility to people even if you don't necessarily feel like you're an expert in your topic ... the fact that you wrote the book yourself makes you an expert to 90% of the people out there. It's a great way to establish yourself.

So you've got your reviews and testimonials ... do you use them in the sales letter now?

At SilentSalesMachine.com I've got a very large page of feedback and testimonials that people can read and any time I get positive feedback I'll post it there so other people can see. And I even copied some eBay comments ... there's eBay feedback comments on my testimonials page as well.

Why do you think people buy the same product at the same price from eBay rather than from your web site?

Good question. I don't mention the web site in the auction. That way I don't violate any eBay policies.

I make a very consistent effort to stay aware of eBay policies and not violate them, because that's the life blood of my business and I want to keep them happy. Now I've used eBay as a spring board ... as a great starting point ... but I don't use eBay as much as I used to any more.

It's a great starting point for someone wanting to get into this industry, but once you start seeing a lot of sales there's no need to pay the eBay fees, you can use your own web site. And that's kind of where I've drifted with that product.

How is your eBay sales letter for the same product different to your web site sales letter? Have you changed it a bit for eBay?

Yes -- on eBay it's very important that you have good feedback. And within your sales letter no matter what you're selling, emphasize your feedback. Stress it. Put a clickable link in there that shows people exactly what your past customers have had to say.

And the sales ratios on eBay are much better than the sales ratios on my web site as a result ... and I'll give you an example:

One in fourteen people that visit my eBay auction for that book, place a bid. That's a great sales ratio. Whereas on my web site about one in 27 visitors or one in 22 depending on where the traffic is coming from end up buying the book.

It's the same price, but what I'm doing on eBay is I'm gaining credibility that they can see, that they know is real solid proof. When people visit my web site they don't know if the testimonials are made up or legitimate, there's no way for them to know. When they visit an eBay auction they know those testimonials are legitimate. I can't make those up. That's one of the beautiful things about eBay is the credibility of the testimonials ... of the feedback system that they have.

If you don't mind sharing this -- what's your eBay ID for selling the Silent Sales Machine?

It's kind of ugly to spell out ... but it's basically www.321tix.com and you need two asterixes on either side of that. The reason you need the two asterix before and after the web address is because eBay doesn't allow web addresses as your ID, but if you put asterix before and behind, there's some free publicity for you.

Is there a space between any of that?

No space.

Visiting your eBay pages might be useful for people to see how you sell from eBay, as opposed to how you sell from your web site.

Yes. As I said though I'm starting to pull away from selling on eBay. My theory on that is if you're just starting out: sell on eBay. Sell as much as you can on eBay. But you need to transition to your own web site ... and the reason is I've got enough publicity now and enough people aware of who I am ... and one of the strange phenomenon's you'll start to see is people like hurting people on top. They like leaving negative feedback, or if they know you're getting a lot of publicity they like just doing something to throw you off.

And on eBay it's very easy for someone just to leave just one negative comment and all of a sudden I've lost credibility. So what I did was quit while I was ahead. I have about 400 feedback, no negatives, I went ahead and quit while I was ahead. I felt it would be too easy for a competitor to buy my product or somebody who is upset with me for some reason or another to buy and leave a negative feedback.

I've got way too many people looking at that eBay account ... I've got so many people visiting that link to see how I've done it the last thing I want is someone going there and messing up the whole thing and putting negative feedback in there ... so I quit while I was ahead. I could continue to sell ten or fifteen copies a week of my book from that account, but I'm focusing my marketing efforts on my web site now.

So you've done exactly what you've written ... you've leveraged the massive traffic on eBay to build up a newsletter list, and get traffic to your web site.

I've used it as a spring-board, that's exactly right. And I have other eBay accounts that I don't make public.

I buy and sell regularly on eBay with other accounts and that's one of the things that I emphasize: is have multiple eBay accounts ... you need to have more than one. I certainly do ... and I sell regularly and buy regularly.

But that one particular account ... it got so much attention going to it, I probably have two or three hundred people take a look at it any given day, I don't want any negative feedback on it.

How do you deliver your product when you sell via eBay ... do you manually send out the emails with a download link?

I use ClickBank, and most people are probably familiar with ClickBank. On my web site I use ClickBank. And also for my eBay auctions ... I fire out an email to everyone who won my auctions with a ClickBank link in it and most people took advantage of it.

And I actually had some affiliates then that were able to get paid by referring people to my auction. Which may sound a little odd, and it took a little work for me to figure all that out ... I had people able to refer traffic to my auctions using their affiliate link and then get paid for the sales I made.

Now not everyone took advantage of ClickBank ... some people used PayPal, and unfortunately I never did get PayPal set up to pay my affiliates but that is possible to do, I know people are doing it. You can sell using ClickBank and PayPal and make sure your affiliates are getting paid using both.

Would there be a different way of marketing a physical info-product on eBay as opposed to an eBook?

I can't say that I can think of any major differences really. I think more people will bid on a physical book, than they will on an eBook ... there's still this hesitation about ebooks.

Lack of perceived value maybe?

Exactly. They think "Well, all I'm getting is an email -- why do I want to pay for that?". But I sold a lot of them. I sold a lot of books at $17.95 a piece.

And you run those as Dutch auctions?

That's correct.

And how items do you have in those auctions - is it 50 a go?

I would usually put an odd number in there like 39. Some people will think "He only has 39 left, I better bid". I never used round numbers. If you go to the store they never use round numbers. So I never do either.

It's always $14.95 or $39 ... whatever. So I always use numbers that are off just a little bit. There's something about the psychology of numbers. I never use 50 or 100 or 1,000. I see some people put 1,000 copies and I go "You're not helping yourself there."

Put a smaller number that's just bigger than the number of people you think will bid. I found most of my auctions ended with 20 or 25 bidders most times. I didn't want people to start raising the price, so I put 39 to be well ahead of the number of bids I expected to get.

What ways can you suggest of getting traffic to an info-product auction?

This is a great tip ... it's just come into my head in the last few days again. I've remembered that I used to do this a lot and I never really shared it with other people.

On eBay there's a big advantage to understanding the rules. You can refer people from one auction to another auction of yours, even if it's under a different ID ... so long as you're the owner of both auctions.

For example ... let's say I have a pair of tickets for an NBA basketball game ... some big game. And they're really hot tickets, and I know those tickets are going to get a thousand lookers because these are great tickets.

There's going to be a thousand people looking at that auction. Well at the bottom of that auction I can say "Please visit my other auction where I sell a book about ... " whatever. Or you could say "Please visit my other auction where I have a sports card up for bid" ... you can send traffic over and you can use that as a strategy for your ebooks.

You can even use that as a strategy for ebooks that are all over eBay. Because what happens is you've got a captive audience. You've got someone who's gone right from one of your auctions straight over to another auction and they weren't searching eBay ... it's a two-step marketing program ... and we've all heard of two-step marketing before.

You've got them locked into your offer now, they're not shopping around for other people with that same offer, you've held their hand and taken them from point A to point B and they're not shopping around other people ... they're just looking at your product.

So my first book was that ticket guide we talked about before. I would sell tickets ... I would get a lot of hits and I would hand-hold that person over to that ticket guide. And even though there's other people selling ticket guides on eBay, my shopper didn't know that, nor did they care. They'd just seen my auction.

So where would you put the link in your auction? At the bottom or at the top?...

It doesn't really matter -- a predominant place. If it's your main profit source list it right at the top. If you're just wanting it to be like an add-on and it's not your emphasis in the auction, put it down at the bottom, but you'll get plenty of click-over traffic if you control those hits.

It's all about managing the hits. Very few people look at eBay that way. Most people think of eBay as trying to get maximum bids for one item at a time. I look at it as a swarm of traffic that I'm trying to control and get to the point that I want them to get to without violating eBay policies.

Do you ever add a link "Click here to see all my auctions" or do you tend to redirect people to one particular other auction?

I like to redirect them to one auction. I think it's much more effective. Especially for people that are selling many items at a time.

Which statement sounds more powerful? "Please visit my other auctions". Who cares? So what? You're selling other stuff.

"Click here to find out how to get the best tickets to the next NBA game". People are going to click that link a lot more often than "Please visit my other auctions".

I don't know what you're selling. Are you selling dog toys? ... I don't care what else you're selling.

But if you tell them exactly what you're selling and say "Click Here" ... don't even tell them it's another auction, you don't have to, they'll click it and go right over to your other auction.

That's a good point -- because it gives them a direct benefit.

Exactly. Sell the benefits.

Where can you get a reference for the level of traffic eBay gets?

I use TrafficRanking.com to stay on top of those kinds of statistics, and eBay is consistently on the top. They'll be in the top 20 of any given category every month.

TrafficRanking.com -- that's a free site is it?

Yes it's free. It's a great tool. By the way if you want to check out the credibility of anyone you're dealing with if they claim to know what they're talking about especially if they claim to know how to get traffic, check 'em out on TrafficRanking.com and see where they're ranked.

And I challenge people all the time to check me out. I tell them I'm in the 3,500 most visited sites on the web. And people go "How can you prove that?". TrafficRanking.com.

It still astounds me -- I can't believe the success I've had but I owe it to my affiliates. I owe it to the creativity of the affiliates that bought my product, thought to themselves "I can sell this", and they started selling it. And they keep half of every sale. And they're much more creative than I am and they bring me a lot of traffic. And I appreciate every visitor they bring me. But I'm paying them for it too. In book sales.

Of course they wouldn't send you traffic if your product wasn't selling.

That's right. If it wasn't selling or it wasn't quality it won't work.

Would you say any type of information would sell on eBay if there's an interest for it?

Yes. That's a good question ... because I think you have to start with topics that are of interest to a great number of people. Don't try to write a book on some obscure topic ... and I've had people come to me with some of the most obscure topics that they're interested in and they want to know how to find their niche market. That's the wrong approach.

You need to start with a topic that you know is popular and then become an expert at that topic. And then it's very easy to find those people, especially on eBay.

There's only a handful of topics really -- it's money, relationships, and those two make up 90% of it. 'How to make money' or 'How to make more money' or 'How to manage your money' ... there's a million topics you can have out of money. And relationships. Those make good titles as well.

A growing topic too ... I've noticed this on eBay seems to be self-improvement.

Self improvement, and self-development. Yes -- I've seen those as well. I've never been a big fan of that genre of books ... I have my gurus that I've bought but as an ebook they just don't hold much credibility for me ... I haven't bought many of those ... but I do notice them popping up a lot on eBay.

In many ways that's related to 'make money'.

Oh sure ... or relationships. If people are looking to improve themselves they're looking to have a better relationship, have more money, have a better career, which makes them more money... so for me money is a great topic.

But I've seen some people try to turn their hobby into an eBook. Say some obscure hobby "Bug collecting" or something -- you're not going to sell thousands of copies of that. That may be fun to do, and that's great and you may have a mailing list of people interested in your book, but you're not going to make it big time, you're not going to make hundreds of thousands a year on that book. It's just not popular enough of a topic.

Something very interesting I heard, and the more I think about it the more it appears to be true to me, is that when it comes to information products ... either digital or physical products ... people tend to collect. So there's not really the same level of competition as with different types of products, since if you're interested in something you tend to buy a lot of books about it.

Yes. Info-junkies I call them.

For example -- my marketing book collection is not huge but it's going to keep growing, I will keep buying more books, manuals and tapes.

Right. There's an interesting phenomenon ... when I first wrote this Silent Sales Machine book I encountered some other books which were similar ... I think mine was better but they were similar, they had some similar ideas in them. And my first thought was "Those are my competitors".

Well as I've come to find out now that's the furthest from the truth. Those are my best sources of leads. And we've cross-marketed our products ... and I've sold a bunch of theirs, and they've sold a bunch of mine, and we've both made more money and our customers are happy because of the phenomenon you've just mentioned -- the info-junkie phenomenon ... where you're interested in a topic and you're going to buy books related to that topic even if there's some cross over of the same information inside of them ... the fact that there's one or two new nuggets of info in each one, you'll buy it.

If it's from a different author, if it's a new title, if it's got some new information in it ... you'll buy it. And that's a great phenomenon to keep in mind. Don't look at your competitors as enemies, look at them as sources of fantastic leads, fantastic warm leads ... that are ready to buy your information.

I'm slightly concerned this is a huge subject ... I was going to ask you how you structure your ads for eBay?

How about a brief philosophy of selling on eBay? Rather than giving you specifics ... my philosophy of selling on eBay. There's a few "Do Nots". Don't use huge fonts. Don't use more than two or three colors. Don't include a picture that takes more than 5 seconds to load.

Here's some Do's ... Do think benefits. Do use HTML code to make it look nice. To make it look professional. And it's worth your time to learn a little HTML to do that.

It's very easy isn't it?... For example I just do the formatting in Dreamweaver ... or you can use FrontPage or anything similar ... and then just copy and paste the code into the eBay box.

Exactly. I love FrontPage for eBay auctions and that's what I use. And Dreamweaver like you said is another great product -- buy a simple HTML tool and just copy-paste. What You See Is What You Get right over into eBay and it looks fantastic.

It looks so much better than just typing up the text. You're not going to sell anything that way -- you're not going to sell anywhere near as much as you could otherwise I should say.

And be honest with people. That's one of the great sales techniques -- is tell them exactly what to expect, exactly what they're going to get, be 100% open and honest with them and most people are 100% open and honest right back to you and leave you good feedback, and you're building your business.

It's very easy to smell a scam -- especially on eBay, it's kind of ridiculous at times ... you see people promising the world and they've got one or two feedbacks and one of them is a negative -- they're not going to do anything on eBay, people aren't stupid. You can't pretend that they are and build a business. You've got to treat them as adults, that are intelligent. You're not going to grow a business if you can't do that.

I read something online, and not surprisingly this guy was scammed on eBay. He bought something from someone who was hiding his feedback rating. As you say being open and honest -- if someone's got something to hide, then it should make you think twice.

Yes. I've never understood why people would hide their feedback rating on eBay. It totally defeats the purpose of eBay. From my vantage point eBay is all about the feedback rating system. There's so much credibility to be earned there. It takes time, it takes energy, and it's an honest look into someone's business.

So would you structure an eBay ad for an info-product, the same way you would do it on a web site, just with a few tweaks for eBay?

Right, and emphasis on feedback. On eBay emphasize your feedback, and keep it positive. Beg, borrow, and do whatever you've got to do to get people to leave you positive feedback ... don't let them leave you negative, and don't leave them negative.

There's never a good reason -- remember I mentioned have multiple eBay accounts? On the one that you use to sell a product, especially an information product ... but any product ... the one you're using to sell never, ever, ever leave someone negative feedback using that account. Because you're just asking for it. They're going to come right back at ya.

And they're going to leave you negative, and what have you accomplished? Nothing. So use a different account to buy, and that way if someone rips you off you can leave them negative feedback and warn the world. But don't let that negative feedback touch your selling account. It's suicide.

So just to run through it -- as usual have a headline, bullets with lots of benefits, instead of testimonials you would link to your feedback?

I would emphasize my feedback.

Can you actually list your feedback within a page?

Yes you can. I've seen people do that. I never did it myself but you can list actual feedback comments from your other customers on that specific product. Especially if you're selling multiple products, it's good to help the customer find the specific feedback that relates to the product you're selling.

If you're selling 50 different products on eBay, just leaving a link back to your feedback doesn't help the customer see that you have other happy customers buying that specific product.

So you can help them by leaving feedback for that exact product.

Rather than generic feedback about yourself ... pointing towards what people have actually said about that product in mind?

Exactly. And that's totally within eBay's rules to do that, to put feedback right in your auction.

So eBay doesn't mind if you copy and paste text from your feedback listings into your sales letter?

That's completely acceptable.

Okay ... so what would you say is the best way to structure your auction title to bring the most traffic?

I still debate with myself over what the best ways to do this are, because I get different results at different times. The first thing I need to say is you only need to sell eBooks in one category on eBay.

There's only one information product category that's allowed, and you can find it very easily by pulling up any information product on eBay and looking at the category it's in. It's in Information Services.

And oddly enough as I experimented around, the Weird Stuff category on eBay is the hottest category you can put a product in. So if you can sell something in the Weird Stuff category that gets a lot of hits, and direct that traffic over to your eBook that's ideal.

It's hard to get people to look at an eBook product just pulling it up through the eBay search engine. You don't get a lot of traffic that way. I got traffic to my eBooks on eBay several ways.

I would use other auctions to direct traffic over. Believe it or not I used Overture. Then it was known as Goto.com -- and I would buy keywords that related to my products and I would send people right to my eBay auction.

It worked fantastically. I used Overture key words to send people over, because then the thing I emphasized in my auction was "You can buy this information from somebody you know nothing about, or you can buy under the protection of eBay ... here's my feedback ... here's other people that have bought this book from me ... here's what they had to say ... now here's my information..."

Who are you going to believe? The guy that you don't even know who he is, that has a little web site out there that has these testimonials that could be made up, or that could be legitimate. Nobody really knows. Or are you going to buy from me ... real, live, feedback.

And one thing you can do as well: you can harness those eBay registrations. Because not everyone who goes to the Overture keyword is going to be registered for eBay ... you can help them register and get $5 and then they bid on your stuff. Even if they lose the auction or if they don't end up bidding you've got their $5 because you helped them register for eBay.

So would you mention eBay specifically in your Overture classified ad?

Well you have to make sure that whatever link the people are being clicked over to pertains to the word that you've bought. Overture is very strict about that.

They're very strict about making sure that there's integrity in their system so if you buy a word, and for me I bought "eBay Book" for example. You want to make sure that the site they're going to pertains to an eBay book. So if you're going to send them to a little web site first, it's got to have information pertinent to it.

Again you can make it a two-step process. Two-step marketing is fantastic. So you can send them to a little page that invites them to register for eBay, tells them a little bit about your eBay book, then has a link on it to click to your auction where they can see a live auction for your book and buy it from you.

And you've got a few different ways to make money from that person. You've also got an invitation to your newsletter on that mini-page maybe, so ideally the person comes over, they sign up to eBay, they join your mailing list, and they jump over to your auction where you've got a lot of credibility and you've got a great chance of ... remember the sales ratio's of eBay? They're much higher than the sales ratio of a web site.

So you have an eBay page specifically set up for people coming from Overture?

Yes I did.

You mentioned some sort of special wording at the start of that auction. You emphasize 'Rather than buying from other people ... you're buying from eBay with the feedback rating and the security of eBay'?

Specifically, I offered live verifiable feedback on my products that they could review and actually contact the people that had bought my product if they'd like. I said "Who else offers you the opportunity to do that before you buy their ebook?".

Basically challenging them to contact my previous customers and oftentimes they did ... and how could you possibly have more credibility than that?

That's a really interesting concept of rather than sending people from Overture to a website ... rather sending them directly to an eBay auction.

Right. I suggest you have a little page between eBay and Overture. And on that little page you can do a lot of things that you can't do on eBay: you have an invitation to join your newsletter, you can't do that on eBay ... not within your auction.

You give them the opportunity to buy the book right now, that's fine -- you can skip over the eBay fees ... that won't bother me ... that won't bother the customer to have the book right now ... that's fine. So I've got a ClickBank link there where they can buy the book now.

I also invite them to go visit my auction. If they want to visit it that's fine. I tell them they can read the feedback there, and then I challenge them with an unprecedented amount of credibility.

People aren't used to that much credibility on the web, they're used to having to make a leap of faith and believe that all those testimonials are real and believe that all those numbers are real. I'm laying it all right there for them. I'm giving them the email addresses of people who have just bought my book in the last few days that they can contact and ask "What do you think?".

So it's quite a short landing page ... or is it actually a sales page?

It's a very short page ... it's very short, it was maybe two screen-fulls scrolling down at the most. I found if I could get people to that page I had an extremely high conversion rate. Everyone who visited that page either joined my list, bought my book, or emailed me for more information ... we just had a tremendous conversion rate. It's a fantastic way to start out promoting a product.

For someone who has either their own info-products, or products with reprint rights and they want to sell them on eBay ... what would you suggest?

My first suggestion would be start small, and don't spend a lot of money. There are too many ways to waste a ton of money trying to promote a product. Don't be pulled into any of those ways.

An eBay auction costs you 35 cents. Experiment around with selling a few copies on eBay, and figure out a way to distinguish yourself -- that's where the magic starts to happen once you've got a captive audience.

If you're selling the same book that hundreds of other people are selling on eBay, and you hope to sell a bunch of it and get rich, it's not going to happen. They're not going to look you up in the search engines on eBay and find your product. It won't happen that way.

You've got to figure out another way to distinguish yourself. Even if you have a lot of competitors you can do it but you can't do the same thing everyone else is doing and succeed, you've got to have a slightly different approach ... and even the smallest changes that distinguish yourself can make you a lot of money because you've now got a captive audience.

So becoming a unique eBay character in a way?

Exactly.

Something I heard that many people don't do on eBay, but which is recommended -- just offering a guarantee for your product on eBay.

Oh definitely. That should be standard part of anything you sell on the web. I even have on my book Silent Sales Machine ... I've got a five times your money back guarantee. If you use this system for six months and don't make a certain amount of money I'll give you five times your money back. Just because I'm showing a great deal of confidence and I know it can be done, and I want to encourage people to do it ... and that guarantee gets me a lot of sales too.

So you say differentiate yourself from all the other eBay sellers and that will help you make more sales?

And find creative ways to get traffic to your auctions. I firmly believe that I could take any product -- if you gave me the most common, ordinary product being sold on eBay right now for a dollar ... let's say there's 500 other people selling that same $1 product ... you could give it to me and I could find creative ways to sell it for $10 to way more people on eBay using the ideas that we've discussed.

If you distinguish yourself, if you put a professional ad together, if you find traffic from other sources, if you build up your credibility and your feedback ... I'd be the number one seller of that cheap little product and I'd sell that for a lot more money than anyone else on eBay.

Because people just aren't that creative about selling their items -- they expect people to type the title in the eBay search window, find their auction among all the other auctions which are selling the same thing and then bid on theirs hopefully instead of somebody else's. That's the old-school way to market on eBay.

As a quick example, let's say you were given a product which has been around for quite a while -- Internet Cash Machines.

It's a good product, but it's been seen by an awful lot of people now. If you were to take that, how would you choose to position or present it on eBay to really stand out and make more sales ... and make higher priced sales?

Good question. That product has been seen by millions of people, right? But there are also hundreds of thousands of people getting on the web for the first time every day ... a good majority of them are going to end up on eBay because it's one of the most popular sites on the web. So I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to promote a product which is that popular ... if I had the time I'd do it myself. And here's how I'd do it:

I would sell other items on eBay that get a lot of hits. And in the auctions that are getting a lot of hits I would invite people over to check out this really cool book that I've read that changed the way I looked at the internet, called Internet Cash Machines.

They click on that link, they go to my other auction where I'm selling that book for $14.99, not 50 cents, and a good number of people would buy that book from me right there. From the auction.

They've not shopped around for "Internet Cash Machines" on eBay and if they do they're going to buy it from somebody else for 50 cents ... but a good majority of them aren't going to do that, they're going to see my feedback, they're going to see what I personally think about that book, and they're going to buy it from me for $14.99 and they're going to be happy they did because they've now got an opportunity to get on my mailing list ... and I'm going to offer them other products in that great niche, etc.

Another way I would market that book is I would go to Overture.com and I would buy a few key words that direct people to a mini web site that then redirects people to my eBay auctions for that book. And again I've got a captive audience. I've held their hand from step 1 to step 3, I've held their hand all the way through ... and I'm selling a bunch of books that's already been sold millions of times over.

Even with products with reprint rights, people forget that there's always new people coming on the web, and as you say you can pull people from different interests and put the book in front of them.

Everybody's interested in making a little more money. There's very few people that aren't.

So you could sell dog bones ... if it's getting a lot of hits, sell it. Go to the store, buy a bag of dog bones, break even buying the bag of dog bones on eBay ... you know you buy it for $5, you sell it for $4, that's fine. If it's getting 1,000 hits that's a great product.

At the bottom of your dog bones auction offer people to jump over to your other high margin auction. Your Internet Cash Machines book for example. You're making all your money back and then some by selling 5 or 10 copies of that book from your break-even front-end product. Two-step marketing ... it's magic ... it's a beautiful thing.

Secret eBay Marketing : Part 1

2010-02-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

Secret eBay Marketing Part 1

Hi -- could you tell me about your background please?

Sure. I've only been in internet marketing for a little over a year now. About a year and a half.

Previously to that I'm a sales rep -- actually sell Microsoft software for a living so I've been in sales for 7 or 8 years now ... but I was very interested in earning a full time income from the internet and I've been experimenting with that and playing around with that for probably three years and I got really serious about a year and a half ago ... decided I was going to make some things happen.

My first business on eBay was selling tickets. Event tickets. Concert tickets to popular bands like U2 or Creed or Madonna ... whoever the hot artist was at the time. I started learning how to get my hands on the best concert tickets and then selling them on eBay -- which is completely legal if you follow the rules.

eBay has rules and there's laws in each state in the United States, and there's different laws in different countries, but once you know the rules you can make some money doing it ... and I was doing quite well just selling tickets on eBay. That's where I started.

And then out of that came my first book and that's where things really picked up. My first book taught others how to get the good tickets too. And that was my first eBook.

What's the domain name for that book?

The web site for that first book, and it's a very amateur web site but it still makes me good money ... if anything it's great proof that you don't have to get real fancy to make good money on the internet. The web address is 321tix.com. Tix being an abbreviation for the word tickets.

So on that site I provide people a little proof that I know what I'm talking about, and that ticket guide still sells today. And that was one of my primary items that I sold and still do so on occasion.

Can I just ask out of interest -- obviously not giving away all your sources but I'm curious how you found out about that? Where did you go for special deals on tickets? It sounds quite unique.

Well, there are about 40 tips in that book and they range everywhere from how to use your computer to it's maximum capability on TicketMaster.com -- for example the speed of your connection and how to manipulate the different windows that you have open at any given time.

Very technical things like that all the way down to some phone tips and some tips when you're calling Ticket Master how to make sure that you get to a live operator at the right time and what things to say to delay them if you get through a little early. It's really a game. It's a game ... and it's all about increasing your odds.

Interesting. Did you find that out just through trial and error?

Yes - trial and error. It took me about 6 to 8 months to kind of teach myself and learn the ropes.

It must have been something you were really interested in to play around with it that much?

Yes -- I did talk to a few experts I found -- people that knew what they were doing. And after a while I had a good foundation of knowledge in my head ... I put it on paper, turned it into an ebook, and it started selling very well and that became the premise of my now much more popular book The Silent Sales Machine Hiding On eBay. It's quite a system that I put together and I've got a lot of people that are really enjoying success using it.

Out of curiosity concerning 321Tix.com -- you say you'd been playing around with selling over the internet for a while ... how did you actually start promoting that site?

I started out without much information -- without much useful information. I've just kind of experimented, and a lot of things I tried didn't work very well. I had some success with pay-per-click search engines and initially that was my only success. Like GoTo.com now called Overture.com. I still use that today with a good deal of success.

But by far the most successful way that generated traffic to my sites is via eBay ... and I don't want to mislead anyone: eBay has a lot of rules, they don't just want to be a sign post for other web sites, they don't like being treated that way, but they do leave the door open, and they do allow you to grow your business off eBay.

I've noticed that actually -- I've done some selling on eBay and I've noticed the rules getting more and more stringent and it's often quite difficult to keep up with them all. They used to be a lot more relaxed about it. For example -- you could link directly to your site from your auction, but not anymore.

It was getting very abused, and so eBay did get stricter with the rules about what you could and couldn't do from within an auction, but then they started -- recently they've been doing some things to make it friendlier.

They're getting a lot of push back, and there's a lot of businesses, big name businesses that people around the world will recognize, that are trying to sell on eBay and they want to put some name recognition on there as well.

So those big businesses are really pushing eBay to allow them to do both -- to promote eBay and to promote their own business at the same time and that's where eBay has left the door open for us little guys to get in there and do some things ... and I stay on top of those rules, as the rules change I let everyone in my audience know ... I've got a newsletter list of about 8,500 people right now and it's growing by 100 or so a day, and that's one of the primary purposes of that newsletter: helping people stay on top of eBay and the developments there.

So do you find it quite a job staying up to date with all the rule changes?

Not really -- there's only been a couple of changes in the last year ... only two changes that will even affect things.

I think when you're new to it though, it looks a bit overwhelming the sheer amount of rule pages eBay has ...

Yes -- it can be overwhelming but it only takes a short time to get comfortable buying and selling on eBay. The concept is pretty simple and the rules ... they do fluctuate and change but eBay has competitors out there that are keeping them friendly. Let's put it that way.

There's new auction sites popping up all the time and keeping the pressure on eBay. eBay sellers keep the pressure on them. I think eBay is trending friendlier. As a tool to promote any business they're getting friendlier ... they have to. They can't keep burning bridges with their top sellers. They're trying to attract more sellers, and to do that you have to keep your rules friendly.

eBay are far and away the biggest auction site, but just as you said I've noticed huge companies like Sun ... I think Sun were selling servers on eBay ... so there's some huge companies using it as well.

Right, and I guarantee that Sun has their logo in their auctions, and they have a link to their web site somewhere in those auctions.

It doesn't matter if you're one guy selling out of your garage or if you're a multi-national company trying to sell things on eBay ... the rules are the same for everyone and you need to learn to take advantage of the rules and use them to your advantage.

Actually -- I think people would be interested ... where can they sign up for your newsletter?

By simply sending a blank email to newsletter@silentsalesmachine.com. They'll be signed up automatically ... they'll get an autoresponder reply immediately letting them know that they've been signed up ... and it's free. And it's very eBay and internet-success focused.

And that comes out once a month or so?

It comes out as often as I have something worth saying. Or a good article to share. And it's not more than 3 or 4 times a month at the most ... so once a week at the most but in August there were two issues for example.

So when did you start selling on eBay exactly?

I was playing around on eBay ... I've been on eBay for three years, but it was just a hobby ... I would sell an occasional item ... I sold an old pair of Nike tennis shoes for $650 just one time ... you know people buy the most insane things on eBay. You never know what sort of money you have just sitting in your closet 'til you throw it out on eBay and people will just go nuts for it.

So I was doing that kind of thing -- just playing around with it ... but as far as turning eBay into a money-making 24/7 profitable system, I've only been doing that about a year.

Something you mentioned to me the other day -- you said that eBay is one of the best starting blocks on the web ... why do you say that?

For the brand new person ... let's say they've bought a computer two weeks ago and they're now on the internet for the first time and they're thinking "I want to make some money from all of this -- what's the best place you can start on the internet to start to get a feel for financial success -- what works on the web?".

A great place to go, to start to really learn the ropes, to have some fun, to keep it interesting, is eBay.com. And that's just not my opinion, that's a fact. Every day 9,000 sign up for eBay and become either buyers or sellers.

eBay is just massive and it's growing every day. It's a vibrant community and if you want to just start out somewhere and get a feel for e-commerce with no risk -- you don't have to pay a ton of money to check it out, it's not real complicated, it's fairly simple and straight-forward, you can learn all you need to know in a day or so if you're willing to just check it out and play around ... it's a great starting point.

And the reason I say that it's a good starting block is because you can get out there and sell a few things within 5 or 6 hours of checking out eBay.com for the very first time ... and you can have an item up for sale on the web, have a worldwide audience seeing your product, and have people from all countries around the world bidding on your item wanting to buy it.

It's just an exciting prospect. It's a way to jump in fast. And that's why I say it's a great starting point because of the simplicity, the low upfront commitment that you have to make as far as money goes.

It's 30 cents an auction isn't it?

30, 35 cents for a basic auction and you're on the internet. You now have a web site. Your auction is a web site.

And traffic as well.

And you have traffic, right. And you have people contacting you with questions that are potential future customers. You're set. You're rolling. And you've spent very little money. And very little time.

A very interesting story I heard along those lines is about someone who had never sold on eBay, and they'd just moved house, and in the basement of the new house they found very old badges for firemen's helmets.

And he didn't really know anything about them so he literally just described them for his auction, took photos, and put them up on eBay ... and each one was selling for hundreds of dollars!

Yes, it's insane. I have customers of mine that full-time all they do for a living is go to estate sales, yard sales, junk sales of any kind ... pick up unique, unusual, interesting items that they think will sell well on eBay without actually knowing a whole lot about it in some cases ... and sell it on eBay. And see what happens. They do that for a living.

Now what I've encouraged them to do is to turn that into more of a business and attach information products to it. Teach others how to do the business ... get a mailing list where you teach other people what to look for ... and start to grow -- turn that passion and that interest into a business. And Bay is the best tool in your toolkit to make that happen.

You mention linking info-products and your own mailing list to your eBay auctions ... how would you do that?

Well, let's start with how you don't do it. You don't turn eBay into a sign post ... and what I mean by that is: Don't list an auction with the sole purpose of trying to build your mailing list or get traffic to your web site.

You can't just put right in your auction listing "Please Join My Mailing List -- Click Here" or "Please Visit My Web Site -- Click Here". eBay doesn't like that. They frown on that. They won't let you do that ... so it's not that simple.

But what you can do is offer some other features that eBay offers ... and anyone that contacts you as a result of your auction, you can certainly give them more information ... whatever email response you send to that person be sure to invite them to join your mailing list and tell them why they should ... and offer them a free report of some kind ... and hopefully it's all related back to the product that you're selling so you know that you've got people who are potentially pretty interested in whatever you're offering.

So once someone's contacted you they're inviting you to give them more information. Answer their question first and then ask them to join your free mailing list, offer them a special report of some kind that might be of interest to them, tell them where your web site is ... you can put anything you want in an email.

Something I've done that eBay does allow is I have a link to my web site on my About Me page. However, my auctions never get huge amounts of traffic, so I was curious ... you mention you have a lot of back-end sales and make a good living from traffic redirected through eBay. How do you get the numbers to such a good quantity?

Sure. Let's go back to my tickets ... remember I started on eBay selling tickets for events? One of the nice things about event tickets is they tend to get a lot of hits on eBay. So it is a numbers game. You need to sell items that get a lot of hits or you need to sell a lot of items that get a few hits. It's much easier to find a handful of items that get a lot of hits. It's a lot less work.

But what I was doing in my auctions was simply inviting people that wanted more information about the ticket business or my ticket business on eBay, to click and check out my About Me page. And when they did that they were offered the opportunity to visit my web site. And there's things you can and can't say, and you've got to follow eBay's policies. But I got a lot of traffic from that.

At it's peak I was making between $80 - $100 a day selling ticket guides, just from the traffic being generated from eBay auctions.

And that sells itself doesn't it since everything's set up ... the web site and the order taking and everything?

Yes -- it was all automated. I'd wake up in the morning and have two or three orders ... they'd already been fulfilled and the customer was happy. It was on auto-pilot ... all I was doing was putting tickets up for sale.

And that was purely from traffic from people who visit your About Me page in your ticket auctions?

Yes, that's correct. I also did some pay-per-click search engine traffic but that was nowhere near as effective as the eBay traffic. The people who were coming to me from eBay were highly qualified leads that didn't cost me near as much as pay-per-click leads that I was paying for. And they were more likely to buy too.

I was using pay-per-click ... I think I was paying 25 cents to get a decent ranking on Overture.com and the traffic just wasn't that responsive. There were people searching for "Ticket Master" for a lot of other reasons than wanting to buy a ticket guide ... but people who came from my About Me page, they were very interested, they were highly qualified, they wanted to be on a mailing list, they wanted to learn the tricks of the trade, so it was great traffic ... it was very qualified high-quality traffic that wanted my products.

So is that all you did to redirect people from your auction to your About Me page -- just a single link? Just offering them to visit?

Yes. That's correct.

So very straightforward -- no tricks -- very upfront. Simply "Find Out More About Me, Click Here"?

Yes -- and I did do some other things as well. None of it's any more profound than that. There are other things that you can do and as I discover new tricks and techniques I publish them in my newsletter, and I let people know about it.

And I've even held contests in the past where I get all 8,500 of my subscribers thinking creatively the same way I think. Coming up with ideas. There are a lot of really good ideas that have come through the newsletter as a result. And that's exciting for me when I've got other people thinking that way and bringing me ideas. It's a lot of fun.

So for somebody starting out, you would say all it takes is simply a link saying "Visit My About Me Page" and just trying to get as much traffic to the auctions as possible?

Yes. That's a great start. That's a great place to start to convince yourself that this really does work.

So then what would you have on your About Me page? I've visited quite a few out of interest, and in comparison I would say mine's quite impersonal because it really just prompts people to visit my site ... whereas I've seen others where they have family photos and other such things. I'm just curious what you actually do with yours?

Well, it really varies. What I have on mine ... I've left it alone for quite some time now so it ties in very well with my book. I actually send them right to my eBay About Me page from within the book. So I've left it alone so all the examples in the book make sense as I teach people about it.

But I think there's a few key elements. There's things that you want to do: you want to make people an irresistible offer of some kind. Offer them something for free. Give them an incentive to click to your web site.

You only have their attention for a very brief moment and you want the customer to feel compelled to click over to your web site ... so a free special report, or a really good reason to join your newsletter, a free ebook maybe that might be of interest to them ... and it's the same techniques you use on the web in general to draw people's interest.

The more professional and the more interesting the offer, the more likely you are to get clicks. So your About Me page is a mini-web site and it needs to be treated as such.

And in your case is it always related to the auctions you run?

Not necessarily. If you're getting enough hits to an auction you can promote whatever you'd like from your About Me page and a certain percentage of people will be interested.

Keep in mind the big challenge on the internet is getting traffic. Everyone's trying to get traffic. Get qualified traffic, or just get any traffic. You go to eBay, you put something up for sale, you've got traffic. Now what are you going to do with it?

Make sure you're capturing as much of it as you can. Your About me page is an important piece of that and needs to be professional, it needs to have some good information on there to make people interested in what you have to offer.

So does your About Me page at the minute focus exclusively on getting people to your Silent Sales Machine web site?

It focuses on getting people to my ticket web site, since that's how I started ... to my ticket guide. And that still sells pretty well. I do a split-screen, and I've also started to promote my book as well from there. So people can take a look at either.

So you cater to two audiences then?

Yes. And you can split your page up and make it look like two pages.

You don't want to get it too busy or too crowded. I try to discourage people from putting pictures of their dog or their kids or their boat on the About Me page. That's a waste of space ... you're not going to make any money from that.

It's a nice touch, it's friendly, but you're not going to make any money. If that's all you want to do ... have a nice, friendly, pleasant web page that you can refer people to so people can learn about your dog and your birds, an About Me page is great for that. But you won't make any money doing that.

So do you have a mailing list for your 321Tix.com site as well?

You know, I don't. But I didn't want to do a disservice to those people. I do have a resource page for people that have bought my book and I do add tips to it on a regular basis but I've never started a mailing list for that particular book.

If we could run through an example for somebody reading who's starting anew ... so they set up an auction which let's say gets a reasonable amount of traffic, they set up their About Me page and it links through to their web site ... you would say in the first instance they must capture the email address?

I've learned over the past year that that is a very important element to what we're doing here. Because if you lose their email address, you'll never see that person again. So you want to get the email address first and foremost. Do whatever you can to get that. The most important thing you can do with your traffic is to build your email list.

Secondly, present them your products. But products will come and go ... the item that's great and hot today and that's selling like crazy ... perhaps six months, eight months from now could be worthless ... and you've still got the name of that customer that was interested in you at some point and you can stay in contact with them and you can educate them on what's working now. What the latest and greatest is in your field.

If they showed an interest at one point there's a good chance they'll continue to stay on your mailing list and you can continue to educate them, and tell them what you're doing with your business. So getting that name is the most important thing for sure. That's the best focus you can have on your About Me page.

Whether or not you even have a web site ... I have some people that don't have a web site. They simply invite people to join their mailing list from their About Me page. They say "If you want more information send an email to ..." and that person is now on the mailing list.

So do you always offer something like a free report?

I suggest people offer a free report, or an ebook that they've got resell rights to or giveaway rights to. Something that might be of interest to their audience.

It could be just about anything ... use your imagination. The more creativity that you put into it, the better your results will be. But something that will be of interest ... and just about anything will be of interest to some people. But it's all about finding that perfect combination.

On your web site I notice for capturing email addresses you have a popup. Have you done tests with and without a popup? Have you found popups help increase your sign up rate?

Popups are very annoying ... I don't like them ... they drive me nuts on other people's sites, but the results are fantastic. I've seen a 50% - 60% increase in newsletter signups as a result of having a popup. So I'll continue to use them.

I never get complaints from people. Well, I've had maybe two complaints in the past 8 months, from people saying "I hated the popup -- I'm never going to go visit your site again". That's okay, I can handle one or two people in 8 months sending me an angry email when I'm adding an extra 30 or 40 people a day to my mailing list.

And that's purely from eBay traffic?

Well, my affiliate program is spreading to the point where I'm getting a lot of traffic from that. It's a snowball effect.

Start small. Don't be afraid to start small. Don't be ashamed of a mailing list of only 50 or 60 people. With the right product promoted in front of those 50 or 60 people things can take off really quick.

I do agree with you about the popups. It is the dilemma. They do work, but they're annoying as well. So it's always this compromise.

Yes, exactly. But as annoying as they are I think people understand that they're effective and for that reason they put up with it. Especially internet marketers ... we've all learned to kind of put up with it. But we all know it's annoying.

My site is a very decision orientated site. People are forced to make one decision when they visit my Silent Sales Machine site. Maybe two decisions. Do they want to join my mailing list? Yes or No. Do they want to buy my book? Yes or No. And that's all there is.

There's no other distractions. There's no other links. The great majority of people visit my site one-time, and then never come back. And that's fine. I'm not looking for heavy repeat traffic. I don't need it. I just need people to see my product one-time, decide if they want it or not, and if they leave that's fine. Ideally they join my mailing list and they'll get some great information from me from time to time, and they'll get reminders about my book too.

So they may come back one other time and buy the book ... so most people will visit my web site two times maximum. That's fine. That's completely fine. I'm not trying to run a content based web site that I have to update daily and keep fresh and put fresh new images and pictures and graphics all the time. People come once or twice -- to them it's new.

Your book's very affordable ... I admit that I'm quite a conservative purchaser online ... I've had my big spending moments but now I try to choose very carefully. And your product when I visited the site really stuck in my mind and within an hour or so I'd already picked up a copy.

And it has a lot of interest online -- why do you think that might be? Why has it done so well ... what is it that people really like about your product?

I think I know. I'm not sure I know ... but I think I know. I think the reason why it's so interesting and has caught on so quickly is the simplicity, the freshness of it ... it's a new idea.

There are literally no other 'gurus' out there ... there's no other eBay experts or eBay teachers that take the approach that I do to eBay. Most people that teach you about eBay will teach you how to sell the junk in your closet and make some money. But my book takes over where they leave off.

My book says "Now that your junk has gone -- and you've made a few hundred dollars, what are you going to do now? Are you going to abandon eBay now because you don't have anything to sell? Or are you going to create a system that can live on? That can grow your offline or online business using eBay as a tool?"

And that's just a neat concept for people because everyone's asking "What should I sell on eBay? How can I make money from eBay?". And I have a great answer to that question. And there's a lot of people asking that question. And they're getting a lot of bad answers.

So tickets is obviously something you're interested in, and as you say it gets a lot of traffic ... have you noticed other types of auctions that get a lot of attention?

I hesitate to create competition for my customers that have found a successful niche ... let me say that before I answer your question. Because I would be doing a disservice to some of my most successful students if I were to tell you "Go buy 100 of this item and sell it on eBay -- you'll be amazed" because I've just created 50 or 100 new competitors for my loyal customer, and I won't do that. I can give you some categories...

Maybe I can rephrase it in a way that would actually work more long-term -- do you have any suggestions for spotting a popular trend?

I do have a tool that will be on the resource page very soon that helps people determine exactly what is popular on eBay ... what's selling well ... what's getting a lot of bids ... and you can a lot of times tell just by browsing on eBay -- you'll find some auctions that have a lot of bids and they'll be a hit counter on that auction ... and you'll see a thousand people have seen this auction ... and that's just amazing traffic, and chances are the person that's selling that item doesn't even know what they're sitting on.

They don't even realize that they've got a gold mine right there. They've just lost 999 customers and they have one winner of that auction. One person won the item but they lost 999 potential future customers of that item or for similar items. There's no contact being made there.

And that's just sad, and I have people who have turned it into a business ... just contacting people like that on eBay that are already successful, already selling, and helping them set up a system to capture those leads. Becoming partners with them and showing them how to do it ... consulting with them or becoming their partner ... developing a web site for the back end.

It's another business opportunity.

Yes -- a huge opportunity there for someone that finds an interest in that by just contacting Power Sellers that don't get it. And showing them the goldmine they're sitting on and helping them tap into it.

You mentioned there are some categories people can keep in mind for big sellers ... would you mind mentioning those?

Collectables. Collectables are generally very hot. They have very passionate audiences. A lot of the big bidding occurs there. When I say collectables I mean anything that people might collect: antiques, stamps, or old items of any sort, or unique items of any kind.

That's kind of where eBay has it's foundation. That's where it started. Those are the people that grew eBay ... and that continues to be where the most vibrant activity is. And I encourage people all the time to find a hobby or interest that has an associated collectable item with it and become an expert at that collectable.

A great example would be baseball cards or sports cards of some kind. Learn all you can learn about it, become interested in it, and become an online guru of that topic.

And you can start on eBay with just a handful of auctions and within a short time you can be considered a guru of that industry because of the traffic and the web site you have on the back-end ... and the number of sales you're making ... and the newsletter that you have.

Your audience can grow very quickly because people who are interested in baseball cards know other people that are interested in baseball cards and if you start giving good information on a regular basis, pretty soon you've got a large mailing list and you can cross-market to them.

What else might your list need? They might need binders to store their cards in, or decorative shelves to display their cards ... sell those items to the people on your list ... keep a percentage of the profits.

Sell someone else's product and keep half -- it's a joint venture. There's all kinds of directions you could go. But it all starts on eBay with a few simple auctions.

And really spending time going through the categories, looking at different auctions, and checking out the hit counter and also their feedback quantity as well?

Yes. I'm glad you bought up feedback. That's actually a great mini-topic for us to go into for just a moment. Without feedback you don't have credibility. But that's only the bad news. The good news is once you have some feedback you've got tremendous credibility and you need to take advantage of it.

One of the biggest downfalls on the internet right now is it's hard to tell who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't. Who are the real experts? Who should I be listening to? "Who can I trust?" is a big question with people on the internet. "How do I know I can trust this guy?"

eBay gives you a great way to establish yourself as a trustable, honest, fair person that should be listened to. And that's their feedback system. Every time you have an auction that ends both the buyer and seller have the opportunity to give each other feedback.

And so when people who are just starting out on eBay ask me "How can I build my feedback?" I tell them "Go buy a few things -- get some positive feedback. Buy a few real inexpensive items ... get some feedback rolling ... sell a few items ... get your feedback built up to 30, 40, 50"

30, 40, 50 feedbacks looks really good. Especially with someone brand new to eBay. And you have a lot of credibility then and you can capitalize on that in many ways.

Plus of course at 50 you can do Dutch auctions.

Yes -- when your feedback reaches 50 you can sell more than 10 of any single item. You can buy a lot -- 100 items at a deep discount and sell them all at once to 100 different buyers.

And at 10 feedback you can do Buy It Now.

Yes. That's correct. You can take advantage of the Buy It Now feature. And they don't want people who are new to eBay messing up auctions. There's some restrictions when you start out and have zero feedback. You don't have much credibility yet ... you need to spend some time and teach people that you know what you're talking about.

But my strongest eBay account has feedback of 400. I'm not one of these guys that has 21,000 feedback. Those people are sitting on huge goldmines ... those people with feedback ratings of 21,000 or more. But I'm making more money that they are. And I'm spending a lot less time selling things on eBay. But eBay is still my foundation.

So you have more than one eBay account?

Yes -- I have multiple accounts. And there's actually several good reasons for that...

First you need to have a separate account for selling. Separated from buying. When you first start out just have one account. But once you establish yourself and you're trying to build a business around your eBay account you don't want to be buying a lot of things with that account.

The reason being is because that's an opportunity for someone to leave you negative feedback that you don't necessarily want having access to your account. One negative feedback looks bad -- you want to avoid that, so if you do get into a dispute with somebody as a result of having bought something keep it separate from your business. Keep it separate from your eBay business.

And hopefully people can understand the reasoning there. It's just a smart move to keep it all separate. A lot of times you'll get on eBay and you'll buy something and it will come, and it's not quite what you expected or you're a little disappointed and you'll try to get your money back and send the item back and if there's any problems at all that can look ugly on your records, so keep it separate.

Another good reason is you can participate in the eBay chat rooms anonymously. There are some very mean people that can lurk on those chat rooms and they could try to sabotage your auction or run up false bids on your auctions ... or not like what you have to say and try to do something mean to you on your account. So have an account that you use for the chat rooms ... when you have questions to ask.

And some of the other reasons: you can promote more than one business that way ... you can have completely separate businesses ... maybe two or three businesses with different web sites, with different products, different front-end products that you're promoting.

Another reason -- you might be able to sell that account in the future if you've built it up and got the feedback level high enough. Right now eBay won't allow you to sell your account, that's actually against the rules, but it's such an asset that at some point if eBay does ever change the rules some of the people with the high feedback rating accounts, they could make some great money on those.

That's a very interesting point. In a way it's like selling a business.

Exactly. It's like selling a business with a solid reputation and history. Businesses change ownership all the time -- it happens all the time in the real world. Why not on eBay?

And my theory is eventually eBay will allow that to happen as long as they get a percent of the sale. So I think we'll see that change in the future. But right now you can't do it. But why not have four or five of those assets with some real good feedback ratings built up, and when eBay changes the rules if they ever do you've got some things to sell that can make you some good money.

Sometimes I find it a bit hit and miss actually getting feedback after auctions. I was wondering if you have any pointers for actually boosting the chances of getting feedback to help your rating go up quicker so your business can grow quicker?

What I recommend is that you contact the customer as soon as the auction ends and let them know that as soon as they're happy please leave you feedback. And then a few days later you contact them again ... you can automate this and there's tools ... I like Auction Watch and there's other tools that help you with the whole feedback tracking systems.

You want to contact them more than one time. And also when you ship them the item be sure to put a reminder in there: "Please leave me feedback" and don't be afraid to go back through your records and look at people who haven't left you feedback and drop them an email with a simple link saying "Please click here and leave me feedback -- I'm trying to build my eBay business" and people will do that ... you just have to make it easy for them. And if you do that they'll leave you feedback.

Do you generally give them feedback first and then say "Would you return the favor?"

I don't actually recommend that. It may sound a little strange but I like to wait for them to leave feedback first if I'm the seller. Simply because I don't like being burned by feedback. And typically people buying on eBay are less experienced than people selling on eBay and you want to be able to remind them that "Hey, as soon as you leave me positive feedback I'll do the same for you" and that's a bit of an incentive for them.

Now when you're dealing with a seasoned eBay pro who's got several hundred feedbacks it really doesn't matter who leaves feedback first -- if the transaction ended successfully and both people are happy you can go ahead. But when I'm dealing with someone who only has three or four feedback as a customer or maybe no feedback, I want to be very careful that they understand the impact that feedback can have so I hang a little reward out there for them: "Leave me positive feedback and I'll do the same for you".

So they don't accidentally think that because my shipment arrived a day later than they thought it should they can now leave me negative feedback. That's not what feedback is for. It's for people who are truly very disappointed with a transaction and they're trying to point out a dishonest person to other eBay sellers.

You need to be very upset before you leave someone negative feedback on eBay. You need to work it out first because it's such a black mark on somebody when you do that. I've never left anyone negative feedback on eBay. I've always found another way to work it out. And I've never had anyone leave me negative feedback.

And you need to be very protective of that. Just because you get one negative mark doesn't mean the world has ended, but that's also a good reason to have multiple eBay accounts.

If you start to have some problems with one, and you feel like your negative feedback's holding you back, you've got some other accounts already rolling that you can switch your business over to while the one with negative feedback recovers.

And if you do get negative feedback respond professionally. One of the worst things you can do ... and you've seen this before ... someone will leave negative feedback, and the next thing you know the seller's responding by saying "You jackass, you should have paid attention".

Now is that going to win you more business? I don't think so. Who wants to risk being called names if they mess up. Just be very professional and polite no matter how mean the other person wants to get ... that will carry you much further and will actually probably win you some business if you can put some humor in there.

And let people know that the situation's been resolved, be light-hearted about it, be generous, be humorous, and the negative comment can even turn into a positive for you. That's almost an art -- your first instinct is to blaze right back at that person but the last thing you need is enemies on eBay and that guy's now trying to nail you back for what you did to him and you don't have time for that. You don't make any money when you're playing those games.

Concerning using Auction Watch and similar tools -- how do you manage your auctions? How do you make the whole process of selling easier?

You have to remember that my primary focus on eBay is to sell as little as possible, but generate maximum traffic and profits. Although there's a lot of money to be made in selling multiple items, and selling a lot of items all at once ... those people running 2, 3, 400 auctions at any given time ... they're doing very well but the problem I have with that is when do they go on vacation? How do they leave town for three days?

If you've got multiple auctions ending every day, it's just a very busy way to operate an online business. Some people love it, and if you want to do that use Auction Watch -- there's several other tools available and you can look around on eBay and see what other Power Sellers are using.

I've never allowed my business to get that big to where I had to use an auction service just to survive. The most auctions I've ever had going at any given time will probably be 25, 30, and the simple features of Auction Watch have allowed me to stay on top of that very easily. It wasn't a big struggle for me.

You have 3 seconds to sell your eBook on eBay

2010-02-01T23:17:00.000-05:00

They say you should never judge a book by its cover. While this maybe true in the book world in the eBook world it is a different story. Especially when selling your eBooks on eBay.

When you create your eBook it is important you make it the best you can, taking care to avoid spelling mistakes and grammar errors is extremely important. But what you may not realise is your eBook cover is almost as important as the eBook itself. This is because on eBay the 1st thing any potential customer sees is the free image eBay provides with every listing. And they will usually make a decision to keep reading your sales page within 3 seconds of viewing your eBook cover.

So always have an eBook cover created for each eBook you write. And always use this as the 1st image on your eBay listing. As this will be the 1st thing any potential buyer sees it is extremely important that your cover looks the part.

While there is software available that will enable you to create your own covers I would recommend if you can afford it to invest a few dollars and get your cover professionally created by someone else. There are many professional cover artists that will create a cover for you and a simple google search will bring up a ton of results. The cost can be anything from $10 onwards.

Here are a few tips to creating a quality cover that will help sell your eBook.

1. If you are getting your cover professionally created by someone else ask to see their work or when viewing their website look for a portfolio of their work. Almost all professional cover artists will provide this information. If you don't like what you see look elsewhere.

2. Use your own graphics or have them created from scratch. Don't steal your images from another website. This could land you in extremely hot water and you could find yourself getting your listings ended by eBay or even worse, legal action being taken against you. So make sure your images/graphics are original. If your cover is getting created for you by someone else make sure they understand this.

3. Include the title of your eBook on the cover. This sounds obvious but I have seen a ton of covers with no title. Your cover sells your eBook and in my opinion must include the title.

4. If your eBook has resale rights include as many different variations of your cover as possible. You should include different sizes, colours and angles. Give your re-sellers as much as they need to sell your eBook on. They may want to include images on their blogs, newsletters, websites and more and they may struggle if you only provide one image.

5. Include your cover at least once in your sales page. What I find works best is a large cover on the left of the page with text to the right explaining the benefits of your eBook.

Just remember, people do judge an eBook by its cover and if you don't have a cover for your eBook and are struggling with sales on eBay a professionally made cover could make all the difference.

10 Tips for Success : For Beginners

2010-02-01T23:14:00.000-05:00

10 Tips and Tricks for Success

You've been buying on eBay for a while and naturally, your thoughts turn to selling your own items. Yet, you're not quite sure where to start. First, you will need to sign up as a seller and provide all the information asked for and a credit card number. Once that is complete, you're ready to begin listing your items. Below, I've outline ten tips that will help make your auctions a success and reap you better profits from your sales.

1. Your title should be authoritative and tell exactly what the item is. Instead of saying Turkey Platter, list specific info such as Turkey Platter, stoneware, late 70's and maker. You are limited to around 80 characters for your title, so be sure to choose it wisely. Avoid words like 'look', 'must see' etc., as most experienced eBay shoppers don't pay attention to them.

2. Choose the category for your listing carefully. With hundred of different categories to choose from, this can be a bit difficult to determine. If you feel your item fits in more than one, feel free to select a second category. More than one category does incur extra fees, so be aware of that as you list.

3. A picture is worth a thousand words in an auction listing. All items need at least one picture. Higher priced items need more than one. Use a good quality digital camera or a scanner if the item is flat. Proof your pictures to make sure they are clear and crisp, crop where needed.

4. List all the details of your item in the description box. Be sure to point out any flaws in the item. Think of any keywords that you would look for if you were searching for the item and include those in the description. Also list what payments methods you will accept, how long the buyer has to get payment to you and what shipping methods you will use.

5. Determine the lowest amount of money you will take for your item and begin the bidding at that amount. Think about using a 'Buy It Now' price if you're willing to let the item go for another few dollars above your opening price. Avoid using 'reserve' auctions as many eBay buyers will skip over them as not worth the time and effort.

6. Choose your listing time wisely. Many sellers feel that eBay has a higher traffic ratio on the weekends. Some feel that Sunday afternoons (between church times) are best, while others close their auctions late on Friday or Saturday night.

7. Answer any questions that you receive from potential buyers promptly. Some buyers may ask for a clarification on your listing or additional pictures. Be ready to provide them the information they request.

8. After the auction has ended, make sure you correspond with your buyer. eBay will send you notice to your email account of how much the item sold for and the email address of the high bidder. Keep the lines of communication open until everything about the transaction is complete.

9. After receiving payment for your item, ship it promptly by the stated method. Send an email to the buyer to let them know their item is on its way. You can leave feedback at this point or wait until the item is received and the buyer posts feedback for you.

10. If you plan to do a lot of selling on eBay, you may want to consider signing up for a PayPal account. Many eBay buyers only purchase items from those sellers that do accept PayPal as a payment method. It is free to sign up and all you will need is a checking account.

Selling on eBay can become addictive and for some a very lucrative venture. If you find that you enjoy the online garage sale, you may want to download eBay's Turbo Lister to help make listing your items much faster. Good luck with your eBay selling.

How Good Customer Service Will Help Your eBay Seller Ratings

2010-02-01T23:11:00.000-05:00

Anyone hoping to make money selling goods on eBay should be aware of the eBay quality of service ranking system. Sellers are rated through feedback from customers who have bought goods from them previously. There are thousands of sellers competing on eBay and potential customers will naturally gravitate towards the sellers who have a positive feedback rating. Developing a good customer service policy and maintaining it in all your eBay dealings is vital to your success.

The first thing to do before you plan your customer service strategies for selling goods on eBay is to read the rules. The regulations and policies that govern eBay transactions are clearly set out on the eBay website. There are a lot of them but it is worth spending time to get acquainted with any rules that will apply to your eBay sales. Once you have a fair grasp of the rules, you can develop your own customer service policy.

Your customer service strategies for eBay sales should start with product description: eBay is not the place for advertising puff or hype of any description. A clear photo of the item for sale is a great aid. You must be completely honest and accurate when describing items for sale. If applicable, include the manufacturer's name and model identification number. The provision of a full description is doubly important when you are selling used goods. If an item has a flaw, describe it fully. For instance: if you are selling an article that has sustained a minor scratch, don't describe the damage in words such as "minute" or "insignificant". State the exact position and dimensions of the mark. Your customers will not receive goods below their expectation and, if the merchandise exceeds what was expected, the customers will be satisfied and give you postive feedback. If you try to play down the extent of any defects when describing items for sale, people will not trust you enough to make a purchase; if the goods are sold, you are more likely to receive complaints, requests for refunds and negative feedback.

You must keep up your eBay customer service strategies during the time people are bidding in the auction. Prospective buyers often want more information than you have provided in your description of articles on sale. If a potential customer contacts you to ask for further details of goods you are selling, make sure you reply without delay and give clear answers to any questions. An enquiry that seems immaterial to you might be the one factor that persuades a purchaser to buy from you rather than a competitor offering an almost identical article.

Maintain your good customer service levels through to delivery of the items you have sold. This means despatching the items as soon as possible (this should be the same day unless it is a weekend or public holiday). To ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, make sure you never ask for an inflated sum to cover postage and packaging. Your customers will know how much the postage and packaging materials cost you and they won't mind being asked a fair price to cover those expenses. It is not unusual for the cost of postage to exceed the price of the goods and people don't mind this because they still feel they are getting a bargain. One thing nobody likes is the feeling that someone is trying to rip him/her off and that is the impression you will convey if you ask an excessive amount for postage.

Customer service policy on eBay should be no different from good customer service in any online transaction. The key is to maintain honesty, provide fast service and make it clear you have nothing to hide.

Why it's a BAD Idea to Promote Hot Selling Products on eBay

2010-02-01T22:42:00.001-05:00

Do a quick search on Google, Yahoo, or your favorite auction resource site, and you'll quickly discover there are several software programs targeted to vendors who want to promote hot selling products on eBay.

The infatuation with hot selling products exists because sellers believe if you target items that have a robust sales pattern, you'll have a better chance at profiting on eBay. This is both true and false.

Yes... hot selling products can improve your bottom line. But unfortunately by the time the average eBay seller (a) realizes what the hot selling products are, (b) purchases stock to sell on eBay, and (c) actually puts the items up for sale, the demand is already being met by other eBay sellers who probably started the hot selling product trend some time ago.

Not only that, with thousands of people also having access to the same hot selling product lists, you'll have to contend with other eBay vendors who have the exact same ideas that you do. So you'll be up against the original sellers who are currently feeding the demand, AND doing the tango with newer sellers who have jumped on the same hot selling product bandwagon that you did.

Okay maybe this won't happen to you.

But suppose it does.

What if competition becomes so great that prices start dipping below the wholesale cost that you paid for the item? (It happens all the time on eBay.) And what if you lose $100, $200, or even $1,000 on inventory that you thought would be flying off the shelf? Suddenly that hot selling item is looking rather cold sitting in your garage collecting dust.

So if not hot selling products on eBay, then what?

Do what the majority of PowerSellers do. Sell what you want, instead of what's hot. Repeat after me, "Every day ordinary items sell extremely well on eBay... Every day ordinary items sell extremely well on eBay... Every day ordinary items sell extremely well on eBay." Allow this to become your mantra, because it is very much true.

I know this from first-hand experience as I analyze top sellers instead of hot products. And my research has continuously shown me that mediocre products don't necessarily translate into mediocre sales.

For instance, there's a seller right now who clears about $1,000-$2,000 a week selling magnets. And that's AFTER eBay and PayPal fee's. Another seller promotes homemade CD's to a specific audience and clears $900-$2,000 a week. A few sellers make $500-$700+ a week - after expenses - promoting public domain information. And the cool thing about public domain information is that anybody can sell it because it's free. So that's pure profit by selling something they never paid for. Talk about the ultimate arbitrage opportunity!

The ultimate key in succeeding no matter what product you end up selling, is to build a successful strategy. To figure out 'how' to profitably market what you have, instead of chasing after the next great thing. Because once you have the strategy part down, you can sell anything on eBay and make it a hot seller to your bank account.

Ebay Do's and Dont's

2010-01-20T15:26:00.000-05:00

eBay Do #1: Ask Questions

Never place a bid, or “Buy it now”, without a careful examination of the auction first.

Make sure you know exactly what it is that you’re bidding on at eBay. This may sound like common sense, but it's amazing how many new eBayers lose themselves in the excitement, they forget to pay attention to the details..

Be aware of any conditions the eBay seller might have placed in the ad. These could include: method of payment, shipping and handling cost, amount of time before item will be mailed out, or any extra costs such as taxes or duties, etc. Also, when it comes to an article of clothing, or shoes, make sure to note the size, color, fabric, finishing, any possible flaws, wear and tear, or damage. This is especially important if the item is “used”, “pre-loved”, or “vintage”.

If there is anything you are not quite sure of, get more information from the eBay seller before you bid. You can do it by clicking “Ask seller a question”, either on the right-hand side or near the bottom of the listing.

The vast majority of sellers encourage potential buyers to ask as many questions as necessary to help them make an educated buying decision.

Since you cannot examine the item in person, you have to rely on the information provided by the seller. After all, once you place a winning bid, you are obligated to complete the transaction.

eBay Do #2: Play by the Rules and Obey the Law

It is to your advantage to know which items are prohibited, questionable, infringing or potentially illegal. Whether you are buying or selling, you need to familiarize yourself with a number of regulations concerning the nature of the item up for bid. The item you could be bidding on might be perfectly legal in seller’s country but prohibited in yours.

Examples: crossbows, DHEA supplements, swords, animal products.

Other times, the item is legal to own anywhere but there might be some restrictions in ways of sending it across the border.

Examples: perfumes in pressurized containers, cigarette lighters.

Once in a while, you might come across an auction of an item prohibited by eBay authorities. Whether or not such item is legal, is irrelevant. The article should not be listed on eBay at all.

Examples: glow sticks, fireworks, human body parts.

For a comprehensive list of what can, or cannot, be listed on eBay click the eBay “Help” link and enter “prohibited items” in the search box.

To avoid having confiscation of the goods by customs, find out beforehand if they can be shipped without breaking the law. Remember, if the item is confiscated, you are not entitled to a refund.

eBay Do #3: Be Courteous and Polite at All Times

Have you been outbid by the same buyer 5 times in a row? Still waiting for the seller to reply to a question you sent 3 days ago? It happens. It can be irritating. It’s enough to make some people start sending angry messages, or post nasty comments on the eBay Forum. Don’t let this happen to you.

Remember, a little patience does go a long way. Maybe the seller’s email did not work. Re-send the question. As for the buyer who keeps winning “your” auctions, examine the bids. Are you always losing by a tiny amount just seconds before the auction end? Sounds like a “sniping” software in action. Yes, it’s completely legal, and it can be very effective. Give it a try, or set a higher maximum bid.

eBay Do #4: Tell the World When You Are Happy

The power of Feedback is enormous – it can make or break a seller, or a buyer. It is the single, most comprehensive, word of mouth “performance review” of every eBay member. If you feel your transaction went smoothly, be sure to say it with Feedback. Remember, eBay Feedback is forever!

It takes time and hard work to earn, and keep, a perfect Feedback. If you are not so happy with how things went, contact the seller first. Most sellers do care a whole lot about making sure their buyers are satisfied, and will do their best to rectify the problem.

eBay Don't #1: Don't Bid Without First Reading the Ad Carefully

Once in a while, we all come across something we just can’t pass up. Perhaps you just found that awesome mp3 player you’ve always wanted. The bid is only a dollar, and there is only one mp3 player available. What do you do?

The reflex reaction would be to bid immediately. Wrong!

Some sellers deliberately list an expensive, sought-after item for cheap to catch the novice buyer off guard. Grossly overpriced shipping and handling charge is where they get you, if you’re not careful! This underhanded trick operates just within the boundaries of eBay policy... and this trick punishes the lazy user who forgets to read the full ad. Correct action is to carefully read the listing, including all information on shipping and handling costs, method of payment, etc.

Some sellers deliberately list an expensive, sought-after item for cheap to catch the novice buyer off guard. Grossly overpriced shipping and handling charge is where they get you, if you’re not careful! This underhanded trick operates just within the boundaries of eBay policy... and this trick punishes the lazy user who forgets to read the full ad.

eBay Don't #2: Don't Engage in Bidding Wars

Bidding wars won't work for you, unless you are the seller. Often, the seller sets the starting price extremely low to entice as many buyers as possible. The buyers start bidding high and often, which starts the “bidding war”, a frenzy of over-excited buyers.

This behavior is common amongst eBay newbies who are yet to learn when to keep bidding, and when to let it go. Quite often, seconds before the auction closes, a patient veteran buyer will outbid the novices by mere pennies.

If you are bidding on a rare, hard to find article, it’s understandable you might be willing to bid high. Sometimes, it’s the only way you can win it. Other times, with a little patience and research, you could find another auction for a similar item, at considerably lower price. The feeling of victory is much stronger if you win the auction without breaking the bank.

So the tough lesson here is to show restraint and patience... and to learn how to bid in the last minutes of the auction.

eBay Don't #3: Don't Rush to Negative Feedback

The vast majority of eBay sellers want your buying experience to be a happy one, but sometimes, things go awry. Shipping delays are the most common issue, especially if your item is mailed to you from very far away. Cross-border inspections are also about everyone’s safety, and not just to inconvenience you.

The more borders to cross, the longer it may take before you receive your goodies. Many new eBayers fail to recognize this and rush in to leave a negative Feedback for the seller only to regret it the next day when their purchase arrives. Although the actual Feedback message can be mutually withdrawn, the statistics will show there was an unfavorable Feedback left before. These statistics can make any future sales, or purchases, very difficult.

Again, Feedback is forever, and a little patience goes a long way. If you believe there is an undue delay in receiving your goods, contact the seller. If your package is indeed lost, many sellers will offer to replace the item, or issue a refund.

eBay Don't #4: Don't Bid Over Your Head

Shopping online can be a lot of fun, providing it doesn’t get you in financial hot water. eBay, in particular, comes with all the convenience of finding just about anything you can think of without having to physically travel the world for it.

Bidding, like gambling, can become addictive. Whether it’s one large bid, or several small ones, the total can quickly add up. Remember, you are also expected to pay for any and all shipping, handling, and insurance costs associated with winning an auction. Unless “money is no object”, don’t spend your next month’s mortgage payment on that cute Prada just because it’s here now. “Buyer’s remorse” doesn’t work on eBay!

So the biggest Don't of all: be brutally truthful to yourself about how much money you can afford to spend on that eBay item!