You’ve likely heard of people who have become multimillionaires overnight by merchandising stuff on eBay. Well, I am not alleging that it never happens but I am alleging that it’s only half true.

There actually are several people who have made and continue to make fortunes by marketing stuff on eBay, nevertheless, not many of them did it overnight, if any.

All, or at the least almost all, successful marketers on eBay share at the least one common trait - they all work hard. The successful eBay Marketers don’t play around in marketing on eBay.

They commit a lot of hours and lots of effort and energy into producing their success and it does not happen over night. It happens after Adequate effort has been exerted. They all put client attention on the top of their lists. They’re cognizant that eBay is much like a small town with a well-functioning grapevine.

All of the genuinely successful eBay Marketers make full use of the reports that eBay provides. Ebay does not make a big deal out of these reports but they’re right there under all of our proverbial noses.

Oh, and did I mention that these reports are free? They are except for those who have stores on eBay and then the cost is minimal.

The other matter that the successful eBay marketers all do is take full advantage of the free consultation service that eBay provides for all levels of sales.

These consultations are done person-to-person by phone with marketing and sales experts who work for eBay and who are well informed about the ins and outs of merchandising on eBay. They can answer questions or they can give advice and the service is free.

Ebay wants marketers to be successful. The more successful sellers are on eBay the more successful eBay itself becomes.

Did you realize that there’s a 93% failure rate amongst eBay sellers? Its true but its not surprising.

It’s just very much easier to fail that it is to succeed. Success requires hard work. It requires determination and it takes thought and preparation.

It requires discovering what went wrong and then working out a way to make it go correctly the next time. Success takes keeping on when everyone else gives up. Success takes tenaciousness.

Lead propagation is one of the secrets of the success of any online business. Ebay is not an exception to the rule.

Ebay can furnish you with leads easier than you can get them any other way. You’d do well if you only utilized eBay as a lead propagation tool but you can actually do more than that.

You can sell products at a gain on eBay (maybe not as big a profit as you make on your own site) as well as for lead generation. Leads are of as much or more value than one time sales.

By: Garland Choate

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Many people are probably not aware of EBay listing promotions and know nothing about it. In short, EBay listing promotions are promotions held by eBay during which eBay sellers can list their items at discounted price.

While it may sound like a good idea to list more items during this period of discount, there are more competitions during the same time since everyone want to take the advantage of cheap listing fees. Therefore, the question remains: how effectively is EBay listing promotion? Should ebay sellers seize the opportunity and blast the market with many similar items listed on eBay?

In order to answer this question, it is best to delve into the past eBay listing promotions and analyze their data.

In March this year, eBay held two major listing promotions - one on eBay.com and one on eBay Motors. EBay held a 50-cent listing promotion on eBay Motors section on 13th of March. In the most popular section - Wheels, data showed that a week prior to the promotion 2,852 items were sold at an average price of $416. During the promotion week, there were 3,427 items sold with an average sales price of $412.

Although sales went up during this time, total bids per listing actually dropped 11 percent when compared to the previous week and the total number of sold items only went up twenty percent. In other words, more items sold but conversion rates dropped quite a bit.

So, does that mean eBay listing promotion is not an effective way of getting more sales and save up on listing fees? Absolutely not. The answer lies in the analysis of two EBay listing promotions held at Ebay.com.

On 18th of January, eBay.com held a 20-cent listing day. By tracking a popular item, Sony digital cameras between 2.0 and 2.9 megapixels, there was an increase in sales and conversion during this week. Total items listed went up 12 percent while bids per listing went up by 4 percent.

On 14th of March, there was a similar success observed at eBay.com for a 20-cent listing day. By analyzing a popular item, Apple iPod, the total number of listings jumped by six percent, while total number of sold items went up seven percent. Again, there was an increase in sales and conversion when compared to the week prior to the promotion.

In summary, eBay listing promotion is an effective way of getting more sales at discounted listing fees while the conversion rate fluctuates depending on different commodities and category. It is recommended for people who want to boost their sales and cut down on their cost on ebay. Make sure you get in next time and find it out yourself.

By: Eble Chen

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Starting an ebay drop-off franchise is fast catching on ebay. There are millions of buyers everyday on ebay and let’s face it, not everyone knows how to sell an item on ebay. Some people just are not interested or not familiar with how ebay works, the terms and conditions and all that stuff. They just want to sell their item and get some cash. That is where an ebay drop-off franchise comes in.

What is an ebay drop-off franchise?

It’s actually quite simple in concept. An ebay drop-off franchise store acts like the middleman in the ebay world. You bring the items you want to sell to the ebay drop-off store. The store will auction it on ebay. If it is sold, the store will send a check to you minus a certain percentage of the sale price. The store will also pack and ship the item for you.

In my opinion, this is a huge untapped market as there are lots of people who have heard of ebay but do not know or want to get involved in the whole auction process as it can be rather tedious. They are looking for people to help them sell.

So why get an ebay franchise?

Getting an ebay franchise is not cheap. It usually cost anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars plus some ebay franchises charges a annual or monthly royalty fee ranging from 3 to 6 percent of your gross revenue.

However, there are some great advantages to getting one.

1) Brand Recognition

The single biggest advantage of getting an ebay franchise is that you get to be affiliated with a recognizable brand. Some ebay franchise such as “isold it ebay store” spent huge amount of money in TV advertising and marketing plus they have a huge network of stores across the country. In that sense, your franchise store gets to leverage some brand awareness without you spending any money on advertising and marketing.

2) Franchise Store Support

Another important advantage is that you can get immediate support and training needed to maintain and operate your ebay franchise store. This is especially important if you do not have sufficient experience doing business. Plus most franchises have ebay drop-off experts who can be stationed in your store when you just opened for business to guide you on the details of running the business.

3) Franchise Buying Power

Because most franchises have a network of stores, they are able to negotiate better pricing on overstock items or with suppliers.

There are a lot more advantages in getting an ebay drop-off franchise. You can visit my website where I discuss more in depth on the different ebay franchises that are available.

By: Kb Lim

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Ebay ® unfortunately scams sellers, fraud stock deserves to drop

First off, a few months ago I had over 90 positive feedback with 100% satisfaction on ebay. This was earned over years of transactions.  Unfortunately ebay ® recently made some changes that really hurt my business in several ways. Including my business reputation, pocket book and lots of wasted time.

I have been selling on ebay ® for years, however I began selling web site hosting services on ebay quickly within one month racked up over $400 promoting my products and business. I was offering a discounted auction to give ebay ® users a great start up rate on web site hosting. I was offering them an introductory rate of $.01 or $1 for a few 1 - 3 free months of services.

I soon found out that other ebay ® users were buying my auctions and not signing up for hosting services, therefore costing me a large amount of money. I later complaned about this (see below).

After some research I found out why I was getting a lot of people buying my auctions and not signing up for my services. Turns out that ebay ® created a search function that gives ebay ® users better rankings if they have higher feedback rankings. Additionally ebay ® implemented a feature that requires a certain amount of feedback for users to be able to sell on ebay ®.  So in essence what was happening was people were bidding on my auctions that I paid ebay ® for, sending me (often times) one penny and then requesting positive feedback. This had me outraged because it was costing me large amounts of money to list these auctions and costing a lot of money on marketing. Then a lot of my auctions were being taken down by fake bidders. 

Another thing that ebay ® did was remove ANY SELLERS ability to leave negative feedback about  buyers that treat sellers poorly, which makes absolutely no sense because sellers are the only people that pay ebay ®. These people that help make ebay ® succeed in the stock market are the ones getting treated terrible and not being able to protect themselves from buyers abusing their system.

Fake bidders kept requesting I leave them positive feedback after sending them a penny. I wanted to leave them negative feedback, however since ebay ® removed this function, I was being held hostage by all bidders to leave them positive feedback because they are the only ones that can hurt my credibility by leaving me negative feedback. If I didn’t leave them feedback and they sent me money, they had the right to leave me negative feedback.

On 9/4 I sent an email telling ebay ® the following: (exact message below)

I have several hundred listings for hosting online. The reason I listed

all of these online was because I thought since people were bidding they

were going to sign up for the service I was offering. So a few hundred

dollars later, it turns out 3 out of 4 people are bidding on my items

just to hold me hostage for positive feedback. This is terrible and

expensive. How can this be resolved?

I never received a response until 9/10 when ebay ® shut down my account and hundreds of my auctions I spent around 50 hours working on. I was astonished!  I attempted to contact ebay ® regarding this on the phone, however their phone number hangs up on you and does not offer any sort of support. This company is very scarey, because I believe that companies that treat customers like this are destined for failure. I personally decided to get rid of any mutual funds or financial obligations that invested in ebay ® stock because I felt that negative things could potentially happen. Only my personal opinion obviously.

After requesting help and spending hundreds of dollars with ebay ®, my account was shut down. Not to mention, many legitimate accounts I obtained ended up cancelling services from me because ebay ® sent them a letter saying that I was abusing their services and that any feedback I left for them was not legitimate.

After everything I have paid around a thousand dollars paying and improving my ebay ® auctions, put in tons of hours and feel abused by ebay ®. I also am shutting down several companies that I run that use paypal ® as a payment provider.

Obviously this is all my personal opinion and ebay ® and paypal ® are all Designated trademarks and brands that are the property of their respective owners.

Regards,

Joel McLaughlin

By: Joel Mclaughlin

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Unlike products that get shipped and lose the reference to your company, infoproducts are an excellent way to establish a constant self-promotion engine that primes your marketing sales. That’s because it’s very easy to link your infoproducts to other online website sales offers that can help you reap repeat customers. In Chapter 8, we will go through a sample online sales pipeline and how to use each step to sell your infoproducts quickly and effectively.

The beauty of self-promotion is that it is uniquely suited to the Internet where self-made experts can reap very big profits, even though they’ve never gone through conventional business channels. For instance, if you are trying to get published with a major publishing house, you will probably face the Catch-22 where they will only publish well-known authors or those people who have already made a name for themselves in their business.

Using the WWW you can make yourself the expert and start to build a marketing platform AND print your ebook to an audience of interested parties, without having to get the approval of a major publishing house. Then, after you’ve convinced everyone that you really are an expert on something, if you want to go through the official channels, it will be much easier to convince them to publish your books.

Great Exposure Worldwide

Another reason that selling infoproducts is so powerful has to do with the exposure of customers all over the world through portals like eBay. In a conventional retail store, you might be able to place your item on commission on their shelves for a period of time, but the exposure that gets you is not the same as if eBay allows you to put your product in front of their members.

There are literally hundreds of millions of registered users in eBay and every single one of them could potentially be your next customer. Obviously the level of exposure you get with eBay for your infoproducts will far exceed printing your book at an independent publisher and then trying to get it put on the shelves of local independent bookstores. Instead, you bypass that entire process and save money in time and effort.

With that number of potential customers out there, you can afford to start pricing your products competitively. Your aim should be to become an eBay Powerseller with your own eBay store to maximize the exposure and help you save costs on listing fees. To generate this amount of product choice and sell effectively on eBay, we will introduce you to different ways to generate infoproduct content that you might not have considered.

Modern Ways Of Doing Business

Now that you’ve made the choice to become a modern business, you shouldn’t have to do everything by hand. Learning how to either buy or generate new content using slick methods can be one way to increase your product line without significant investment. Even if you decide not to go that way, you can also hire third party ghostwriters and use them to generate infoproducts for your online business.

In addition, you will learn about various electronic tools that can make your job of listing and selling much easier. We will discuss eBay templates, CD cover templates, and website templates too. You will want to learn how to market online versus doing so face-to-face and how important email harvesting is to starting a pipeline for your business. From there, you can start to generate revenues not only with your products, but also through affiliate marketing, partner or sponsored offers, and even advertising revenues, if you are smart.

Once you have a good idea on how to use the Internet and eBay to your advantage, all you have to do is locate or create infoproducts that can help you start marketing online. To make it fun as well as potentially profitable, you should pick a niche that you love and that excites you. This will carry through in the subject of the infoproducts yourself, where your enthusiasm can spread like wild fire.

As of March 31, 2008, the rules for selling infoproducts on eBay have changed somewhat. You can no longer use auctions to sell infoproducts that aren’t in physical format unless you choose to advertise them using eBay’s classified ads area. You would do this by listing your virtual infoproducts in the Everything Else > Information Products category. Even doing this, there are additional rules that eBay has disclosed that people using infoproducts must follow to be allowed to work within eBay.

The New Rules

The new rules are:

” No cross categories

The infoproduct cannot contain cross category information.

” Not allowed as a bonus in listings

If you sell other products and want to promote your infoproduct for free as a bonus, you will be violating the terms of agreement with eBay.

” No brand names

Infoproducts should be somewhat generic and shouldn’t promote other brand names and keywords other than that particular product being advertised.

” No excessive keywords

To grab traffic, some promoters resort to flooding their infoproducts with keywords. This is not allowed when using eBay in a classified advertising format.

” Not point to outside URLs, vendors

eBay is really trying to knuckle down on people trying to steal their traffic, so they are not allowing references to outside URLs where they can buy the infoproduct or to other vendor’s products.

For a more comprehensive, up-to-date, listing of the restrictions on selling infoproducts on eBay, be sure to check out eBay.com. The penalties for not following the rules can be severe and can include the following:

” Cancellation of listing,

” Imposing account privilege limits,

” Suspension of your account,

” Forfeiting eBay fees,

” Losing Powerseller status.

This is covered in detail in the eCourse, “Ebay Info Profits”, where I will go over how to list infoproducts that you will be physically shipping to your clients as well as how to list virtual infoproducts. There are differences depending on what you are selling on eBay and you should choose to follow the rules meticulously if you want to become a power seller on eBay.

To find out about ” Ebay Info Profits” SELLING PRODUCTS ON EBAY WITH NO OUT-OF-POCKET MONEY click here to see our full report!

By: KHALED TALEB

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