Selling on eBay with a little more care for presentation can go a long way…

If you want to be able to succeed at selling on eBay then there are many, many things that you need to be doing on a regular basis besides even getting the right products to sell.

I think that this is one of the biggest obstacles to people finding real success selling on eBay. Marketing and sales is half the battle. There is a lot of competition on eBay, but 95% or more of people selling on eBay ignore this completely. The thing is that you really don’t need to be selling iPhones to be making money selling on eBay and chances are that if you are selling iPhones on eBay then you are not going to have a lot of success because someone bigger than you is getting them at better prices or in a more regular supply.

What if I was to tell you that what you sell isn’t nearly as important as how you sell it?

This isn’t always easy to understand, but I’ve been selling on eBay for years and in that time I’ve looked at a lot of my competitor’s listings and have been shocked and appalled in so many instances at how pathetic their presentation of their item has been that I have almost laughed at even considering them ‘competition’.

Here’s an example that I think explains it all.

When was the last time that you went to McDonalds? I’m not one of those people that has anything at all against their food. I don’t eat it often and wouldn’t feed it to my kids often, but I love the fact that you can go to McDonalds, anywhere in the world, and you know what you are going to be able to get, how quickly you can expect service and what the price is going to be. Also, I know that I can take my kids and they will have a good time playing on the play equipment while I relax for a few minutes and fill up. I don’t go expecting anything other than fast food (but to be fair McDonalds have expanded their menu quite significantly over the past few years).

See, McDonald’s has never been in the food business! Their food is not what brings people there. If you wanted good food you’d go somewhere else. McDonald’s is a marketing business pure and simple. They know their market better than any other franchise anywhere and they get people in the door by giving their market what they want again and again and again.

How can this apply to your eBay selling business?

While I’ve been selling on eBay I’ve been appalled at the presentation (or lack thereof) that many eBay sellers use for their listings. The photos that they use are more often than not out of focus and too generic to show any details. Or, the photos show the product that they are trying to sell in it’s worst light.

Do you think McDonalds would ever be guilty of that? They’d be out of business. See, here’s a Big Mac as you have seen it 100 times on McDonalds’ marketing material:
 

The Perfect Big Mac

I know it doesn’t appeal to everyone, but to me and millions like me it really looks good enough to eat.

In this famous picture, the bun is firm and fresh, the beef is brown and the lettuce is green. It all sits so nicely together and looks large and filling. There’s melting cheese and onion and the special sauce just slightly oozing out the side…
 
You might even be forgiven for thinking that you have eaten this Big Mac. You see this image has been presented to you so many times that it’s lodged in your subconcious (this is McDonalds marketing magic in action!)
 
But here’s what you know that you really get:

Your Real Big Mac

 
!!!!!!!!!  

Personally it makes me pretty sick looking at that picture. But I know I’m going to eat one again one day when I’m hungry and the kids are screaming in the car on the way home from school and I’m tired and just can’t be bothered going home and cooking…
 
And I’ll have forgotten what it really looks like and be thinking about the perfect marketing picture that has been burned into my head!
 
I’m not advocating an kind of deception and bringing all this back to selling on eBay, you obviously wouldn’t misrepresent the condition of any item that you are selling on eBay. I just wish that people selling on eBay would take a little more thought to the way that they present their listings and their photographs to make them more enticing to me.
 
For most things that I buy on eBay I’ve got a lot of choices of who I’m going to buy from. I don’t buy antiques or collectibles so the rarity factor doesn’t come into play with me. I probably buy the sort of things that you are selling – clothing, electronics, stationery, Cd’s, DVDs, toys…
 
Don’t just snap off a shot of your product sitting on the kitchen bench (with more of the dirty bench in the shot than the item) if you want me to buy it from you. I won’t. I don’t care what you’re selling or what your price is because you’ve turned me off.
 
Take some care with your listings and you will be selling on eBay successfully for a long time to come and make very good money.
 
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Go to www.eBaySuperSelling.com to find out more…

How to Sell eBooks on eBay

I recently started a fantastic course about how to sell ebooks on eBay written by Ray Johnson.

I dabbled in trying to sell ebooks on eBay a few years ago and had some success. I had about 10 ebooks listed and was able to sell about 2-3 ebooks each week. It wasn’t a great success, but that is all about to change.

Ray Johnson is the undisputed king of being able to sell ebooks on eBay. Seeing his success has really motivated me and in the next month when I complete the training and have learnt how to sell ebooks on eBay then I am going to jump right into it feet first.

Learning how to sell ebooks on eBay is actually quite easy, but the recent changes that eBay have made to their rules on selling digitally downloadable products (you can’t do it anymore) has confused me. I am hesitant to start doing it because I don’t want to be spending hours burning CDs with my ebooks on them and arranging postage. What really appealed to me before about selling ebooks on eBay was the way that the whole process could be automated. Apparently this is still possible and this is what I have been really eager to find out about how to sell ebooks on eBay in the wake of the changes.

I haven’t finished my ‘how to sell ebooks on eBay’ Jedi training yet, but I am starting to see a whole other level to the process that I was previously unable to see.

For starters I am realising that being able to sell ebooks on eBay is not just about the sales that are made on eBay itself, but rather, the power of being able to sell ebooks on eBay is in the back end follow up.

Here’s the strategy (in a nutshell).

When you sell ebooks on eBay now, you have to ship a physical product (usually a CD). But this doesn’t stop you from emailing the buyer and offering to allow them to digitally download the product while the CD is on it’s way. Most people will want that and so you make it available to them AFTER they sign up for your newsletter on something related to the ebooks you are selling. If they don’t opt-in there is no harm done because they will soon get their CD and get their ebook anyway. So you’ll get positive feedback presumably. If they do opt-in then you are able to follow up with other offers and you can offer affiliate products or upsell them on the download page. Brilliant.

There is a lot of potential here for a long term relationship with this one customer, much more than any other customer that you are likely to generate on eBay.

Just think what this means. If you sell 100 ebooks a month then you will get about that many new subscribers to your list. You will usually cover your fees on eBay so there’s no cost then to getting their traffic. Plus they are highly targeted customers, having already proven that they are willing to spend money on your niche. If they stay on your list for 12 months and you send them an email every day with information, training and an affiliate offer and they buy anything during that time, then you have just made yourself a passive income stream!

I can’t recommend highly enough this strategy and I look forward to writing more about how it is working for me when I get it up and running. I am very confident of success!!

If you would like to learn more about Ray Johnson or his training, just click on this link.

Alternatively sign up to the free www.eBaySuperSelling.com newsletter for more training tips and secrets like these.

The eBay Affiliate Program

The eBay affiliate program is one of the most generous, popular and successful affiliate programs in the business! After all eBay is the largest marketplace in the world and does about $60 billion in revenue in a year. Through the eBay affiliate program you can share in that revenue. Let me show you how.

 

When you sign up for the eBay affiliate program at http://affiliates.ebay.com you are immediately bombarded with the fantastic opportunity that the eBay affiliate program represents. There are video tutorials and tonnes of text training information. In a nutshell you get between 50-75% of eBay’s revenue from a sale when you are able to refer relevant and active users to the site – more if you refer new registrations. This makes the eBay affiliate program highly lucrative if you have any form of traffic.

 

This means that when someone that you refer purchases anything on the site the listing fees are shared between eBay and its members of the eBay affiliate program.

 

Say you referred your Grannie for example. She goes onto the site and bought a new sewing machine. The sewing machine might have cost her $200 and eBay takes about 5% of that cost in fees. So that’s $10 in fees.

 

Immediately you get 55% ($5.50) for being in the eBay affiliate program. Now that’s not big dollars, but multiply it by 100 and now you’re starting to get an idea of what the eBay affiliate program is worth. And that can be achieved easily in a month by someone who has a popular blog or Myspace page. Seriously.

 

There are also an extensive range of tools available for members of the eBay affiliate program and many of them are geo-targeted, which means that you can specifically refer people to their own country’s eBay site. You also get a link generator so that you can send people directly to any page on the site, Creatives (eBay affiliate program logos to put on your site), an editor kit so that you can add eBay listings to your site, an RSS feed generator and API customisation.

 

Now you might not know what all that is – I wonder if I do actually – but it means usability in any language.

 

Joining the eBay affiliate program is free. You just need to have a website or a blog and fill out a short registration form.

 

Or…

 

I came across a fantastic site the other day, called Build A Niche Store (BANS). This is really good stuff designed to supercharge your success in the eBay affiliate program.

 

BANS has apparently been around for a while and is really making a splash in the eBay affiliate program with its users.

 

Check it out here:

http://www.eBaySuperSelling.com/recommends/Build_A_Niche_Store.html

 

What it does is takes you step by step through the process of setting up your own content website that uses the eBay affiliate program editor kit to show eBay listings on its pages and drives traffic there, earning you commissions.

 

Say you wanted to set up a site for your Grannie so that she could write everything that she knows about sewing machines. She writes 20 articles about different brands and types and you put that content up on your BANS site. Then you hit a few buttons and the software integrates eBay listings of those types of sewing machines on her site and as people read it they go onto eBay, bid and make you eBay affiliate program commissions.

 

This is a massive passive income generating machine!

 

You just set it up and it runs forever, making you money from the eBay affiliate program after only a short period of commitment to development and marketing

 

You’ve got to check it out at: http://www.eBaySuperSelling.com/recommends/Build_A_Niche_Store.html

 

Let me know what you think.

 

James

www.eBaySuperSelling.com