Business, economic development - the unofficial Chamber of Commerce

Stealing, well not really: If healthy competition is considered stealing, then there goes capitalism out the door.

Obviously, there are thousands of Ebay sellers making good money selling good products at good margins, so why aren’t you?

Their secret – They Know Where To Get The Products. My secret - find the auction sellers and you’ve found the suppliers.

Most sellers are lazy - I know I was. I copied and pasted descriptions of the products straight from my wholesale suppliers website. Took their pictures too, with their website URL splashed at the bottom.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, within a couple weeks my competition went from 2 to about 8 auction sellers of the same product. The average selling price dropped from $50 to $30 and my margin dropped 50% to 20%.

Most Ebay sellers won’t be so dim as to include a picture with their suppliers website address on it, but many will use their suppliers descriptions. If you take a section of this description and Google it, you may just find your supplier. Remember to try various segments of the description and to use quotes.

Now once you have found your product, your next goal is to force that supplier out of the market. Take a good look at their descriptions; record their keywords, could their images be improved.

Improve the content: Use Overture https://signup.overture.com/signup/ss/ols/signup.do, to improve keywords, and be sure to include them in your title. Also remember to include any popular misspellings of your product.

Improve the picture: Use the Google image search to find alternate pictures of your products (remember to ask permission to use them). If you can’t find any take one yourself with a quality camera. Consider hiring a professional if it’s worth it. Sometimes a quality picture matters more then other times, for instance with jewelry a quality photo is imperative.

Remember not to let anyone steal your supplier from you, don’t use any content or pictures that would guarantee you a similar fate.

Jules Boven is a professional auction seller and CEO of www.thewholesale-hub.com, an online resource connecting retailers to wholesalers.

Probably just like you, I had an overwhelming desire to spend more time with my family and friends, doing the things that are important to me and living a comfortable lifestyle without financial worries … and yes, less time working to pay for it!!!

So with my quest to find financial freedom, I “googled” my way through searches
looking for ideas on how I could fulfil this desire with minimum effort and
expense. After all, I wanted to make money not spend it! I had aspirations of
making wad loads of cash so my family & I could truly enjoy the pleasures of
life - together.

Now I’ve been involved with eBay for a number of years and enjoyed the success
and extra incidental profits from selling our own surplus & bought items but
never really considered that we could substantially make money on eBay alone. So
when I stumbled across some websites claiming to be able to do just that, I was
intrigued.

This could very well be the best home business money making opportunity to have
evolved in the past 50 years … possibly ever! eBay is one of the fastest
growing companies in history. This in itself presents the opportunity for anyone
to step right into a massive marketplace of over 47 million enthusiastic buyers
and make money on eBay. With this kind of unlimited exposure for under a
dollar, I thought ANYONE can launch a profitable home based business starting
from scratch! So why not me?

Greatly excited by what I had discovered, I began to see my enjoyment for eBay
as no longer a hobby but an amazing opportunity to fulfil our dreams and
accomplish them with something I actually love to do … eBay!!!

Ok, so I settled by what means I wanted to achieve success but how would I go
from being an occasional seller to being a high profit powerseller making
serious money on eBay? I needed more information but I really did not want to
pay for it.

You see, I was a “freebie seeker”. I was prepared to scour the vastness of the
internet to find the “secrets of success” without monetary expense. Ironically
though, I ended up spending all that “precious time” I was trying to save,
searching and implementing instead. Hundreds of others had quit their jobs and
were making a killing with their own home based business and so I was driven to
find out how they did it – website after website after website, day after day
after day … before I knew it, I’d spent a couple of months day and night trying
desperately to piece it all together.

What was I thinking?! … Wasn’t the whole idea that I wanted to spend less time
working and more time with my loved ones enjoying life!!! .. SO what happened?

I lost the plot! Along the way I saw a number of quality informative websites
offering all the “secrets” for a reasonable cost that I could access instantly
but I fooled myself into thinking I could find out all this information easily
and without spending a dime. I continued to muffle my way through copious
amounts of information and found bits and pieces, tips and suggestions for
making money on eBay I thought I could use, but for the record, I made many
mistakes along the way which cost me even more precious time.

So what have I learned? Well, actually I’ve learnt a great deal about how to
make money on eBay but I’ve also gotten wiser! No longer am I prepared to
sacrifice my precious commodity of time for the sake of saving a small amount of
money (which incidentally, I would make back promptly by following the expert’s
examples). If I find a resource I truly believe will be of benefit, I will
happily purchase it to instantly get the information I need and make it work for
me pronto.

My recommendation to you is to forget the notion of relying solely on freebie
information and learn firsthand from the experts who have tweaked their
knowledge & wealth with years of experience and tried and tested practices who
are ready to reveal their eBay secrets to success.

With so many interested people, it’s no wonder many eBayers make their living
from home by buying & selling items on eBay. An instant home business is right
at your fingertips because eBay is the easiest way to start making money
immediately from your own home! This is a real business opportunity but the
level of success you achieve will be determined by learning the secrets &
sources of those making a killing on eBay … The eBay Experts!

Don’t make the same mistakes I made … There are many shady guides on making
money on eBay, most of them written by people who don’t make money on eBay
themselves. They’re basically book reports (knock-offs or just plain
plagiarisms) of the few legitimate “goldmine” guides out there. Now much wiser
and finally privy to these expert’s secrets, we’ve put together a list of
resources at our website that we consider are the *best* and are bestsellers -
separating the wheat from the chaff.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The key is to copy what is already
working. Find out what IS working for these experts and copy what
they do. It’s amazing that more people are not already doing this.

~ Are you ready? … You really could be the next “eBay Success Story”.

P.S. Want to harness the high volume traffic from eBay to increase your website
traffic? You can find the answer to this and many other secrets at our website … just another way you can make money on eBay Living Free Online

Do yourself a favour and learn how you can “Make Money on eBay” seriously with our eBay secrets, tips, tricks, tools & techniques from
the experts for getting maximum profits with minimum hassles. Everything you
could ever need to launch your own highly profitable Ebay business overnight.
It’s all here … from one convenient source at http://www.livingfreeonline.com

For sellers who constantly have to put up with bid snipers, non-paying bidders and other anti-social, timewasting buyers, eBay’s ‘pre-approved buyer’ feature is a godsend.

Pre-approving buyers lets you choose in advance who you’re going to allow to bid: not by banning people you don’t want, but by explicitly allowing people you do want. Anyone who is not on the pre-approved list will have to email you and ask you to let them bid.

While that might sound great, it’s only really a good idea to do it on very, very high value items. After all, half the point of eBay is that it’s such an open marketplace – if you’re going to restrict bidding to a few people, why not just email them to offer the item?

Most buyers will be very upset if they come across an item that they need to be pre-approved to bid in. They almost certainly won’t have heard of the rule before, and they’ll think this ‘new feature’ (it must be new if they’ve never heard of it, right?) is absolutely terrible. The one time I required pre-approval for an item, someone actually wrote to eBay to complain about the auction’s format – as if eBay had nothing to do with letting me list that way! The chances are that almost no-one will ever email you asking to be included in the auction – they’ll go somewhere else instead.

Of course, it’d be better if you could just require that bidders have a minimum feedback level, but then that might overly restrict the choices of new buyers, and make them less likely to buy anything to begin with. There’s a delicate balance at play between trust and openness, and pre-approval tends to violate it. If one of your regular buyers wants to bid on your item only to find out they weren’t pre-approved, the chances are they’ll be more than a little offended at your lack of trust.

The only situations in which you might find an advantage in pre-approving bidders are if your auctions get consistently disrupted. Jokers sometimes bid millions because they think it’s funny, or people bid high and then don’t pay as a protest against whatever you’re selling – this is a pain to deal with. Requiring approval makes sense on very high-ticket items simply because it shows the buyer is serious about wanting to buy.

Before you can restrict an item to pre-approved buyers, you have to list it and get an item number. You can then set up pre-approved bidding on this page: http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?PreApproveBidders. From there on, it’s a simple process – just type the usernames of the people whose bids you want to accept, and then keep checking your email.

Remember, though, that you don’t need to restrict your auction to pre-approved bidders to keep people you don’t like from bidding on your auctions. You can simply cancel these buyers’ bids when they appear, and then use eBay’s ‘block bidder’ function to ban them from bidding on any of your auctions again. Edit your block list here: http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin.

In the next email, we’ll take a look at whether your eBay design is as effective as it could be.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.

If your business is not using eBay and other Internet auctions, you could be missing out. Here are just a few ways of generating additional income, profits and cashflow from online auctions.

1. Convert Excess Assets to Cash

Sell personal or business items that you no longer use. For example, are there slow moving inventory
items in your store? A major camera store chain sells their slow movers, quite successfully, through eBay.

2. Buy and Sell Anything

Sometimes people put things out in the garbage because they don`t need them anymore and don`t know anyone who could use them. You can successfully sell some of these items by Internet auction.

As well, if you pick up bargains from garage sales, flea markets, importers, wholesalers, closeout dealers or other sources, these items can also be sold through online auctions.

3. Drop Shipping

There are suppliers who will ship one item at a time for you. You don`t have to stock any inventory. You simply pay your dropship supplier out of the money you receive from your auction sale. They will ship the product directly to your customer.

4. Self-Publishing

Do you have expertise in a specialized area of interest to people? Then, you could publish your own information product.

A very popular format for self-publishing information products is the electronic book (or e-book). E-book compilers, some of which are free, are readily available on the Internet. When people buy your e-book, they can download it from your website or receive it by e-mail.

You could sell such self-published information products on eBay and other Internet auction sites.
Incidentally, online auctions are an inexpensive method of testing the market for your information (or other) products.

5. Reprint and Resale Rights

You may not want to produce your own information products presently. Or, perhaps, you may already
have an information product, but would like to supplement your income with additional, related product offerings. This is where reprint and resale rights come in.

You can buy the rights to reprint or resell excellent information products created by other people. Some of these rights are inexpensive.

In addition to selling these products from your own website, you can use Internet auctions to create extra sales. Another advantage of online auctions is that they can create additional traffic for your website.

6. Sell Your Services

Do you design logos or websites? Do you sell consulting or other services? These, also, can be successfully sold through eBay and other auction sites.

7. Run an eBay Consignment Shop

There are still people who don`t have a computer or who don`t use eBay. You could sell on a consignment basis for them, taking a commission on the successful sale. You would need to charge for advertising expenses incurred, such as eBay listing and selling fees.

8. Promote Affiliate Programs through Auctions

Some affiliate programs have brandable e-books that contain your affiliate link. When people order from the e-book that they bought from your online auction, you get credit for the sale. As well, some of those purchasers may sign up as affiliates, earning you additional commissions.

Some of these e-books have valuable information that is worth the nominal value you would sell it for on eBay. In other cases, such an e-book is readily available for free. In this latter case, you might consider selling another related product and offer the e-book as a free bonus.

9. Supply Fellow Online Auctioneers

During the gold rush days, it is said that those who sold picks and shovels were more likely to make money than those panning for gold. Similarly, since there is such a big market for online auctions, you can make money supplying eBayers with information and auction tools to help them start and grow their own online auction business.

10. Internet Auction Consulting

As you gain experience and expertise in online auctions, you might consider charging for your knowledge.

Consulting services, seminars, information products and other ways of packaging your knowledge can earn you additional income streams.

These are just a few of the ways you can profit from Internet auctions.

J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc., has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twenty-five years. To learn more about Internet auctions and other profitable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit www.yenommarketinginc.com/auctions.html

Can you believe that ? I just did a search on Google for ‘ebay secrets’ and I got 3,090,000 (!) results back. Amazing isn’t it ? The search term ‘ebay tips’ resulted in 11,700,000 (!) sites and ‘ebay help’ even in 53,000,000 (!) web pages and so on and so on. I just cannot believe how many web pages exist in the internet offering these eBay ‘tips’ or ‘help’. Certainly, there are damn good eBay tutorials out there, but I think it’s incredibly important for an eBay beginner not to get lost in the jungle.

How can an eBay beginner select the best possible information to become a successful seller and not to get lost ? Well, it took me virtually more than 12 month to get through a lot of information ‘how to survive as a seller on eBay’. I am going to talk about some of the most important factors for a beginner to focus on.

Factor 1
First, get a good “How-to” instruction. There are a lot of guides out there but believe me - the ‘No-frills’ versions deliver the best, since they do not overwhelm people with information. I have studied a number of ‘eBay helping’ ebooks, but many of them basically have a flood on information, an eBay beginner can’t put into practice.

Factor 2
Learn some HTML ! Well, I don’t mean to study endless tutorials on programming HTML source codes. No, just get familiar with some HTML basics: How to modify text and links, add colour and how to add pictures to your site and so on. You auction listings will be like your business cards! If they look impressive – you’ll certainly get some good reputation, feedback and many bids.

Factor 3
Study some books on sales language. You’ll be surprised how these little things can convert your sales copy dramatically. Learn from yourself! Study your buying/bidding behaviour. I am almost surprised every time when I realised what I have just purchased or where I have just put a bid into.

Factor 4
Learn to make high quality pictures. Buy a digital camera and start practicing. Without a picture in the eBay gallery, your eBay business won’t grow. But you have to be careful not to upload item pictures for your listing which are to big, because people are not patient to wait. So if it takes more than a couple of seconds to download the picture of your item your potential customers/bidders will leave immediately. You have to test and find out what works best.

Factor 5
Don’t be afraid to get started. Try to sell some old things you don’t need anymore. If you are still not confident selling – start to buy first. Study the sellers and make notes. You can learn a lot from other successful sellers. Get familiar with the eBay rules and policy and online payment system. Get yourself a paypal or stormpay account to pay for items and to receive money when you have sold your item.

Yes, that’s it. If you follow these simple factors, you can be sure not to get lost in the jungle called eBay.

About the Author: Thomas Haselhorst is webmaster of
http://www.auction-design-for-free.com
and has collected the best eBay resource ebooks at http://www.monster-ebook-sale.com/html/ebay.html

Answer: The introduction of the 13-digit ISBN is still a way off, but is already causing headaches for online book sellers and buyers. Some college bookstores have already converted existing books to the new system, which has prevented some students from shopping online for used books as an alternative to the college store.

The 10-digit ISBN has been used for three decades as a surefire way to uniquely identify books and their various editions. And after the launch of Amazon Marketplace and Half.com a few years ago, the ISBN has made online bookselling simple as pie — only the 10-digit number must be entered, instead of the book’s full title, author name, yada yada yada….

But the 10-digit numbering scheme is running out of space, forcing the mandatory change to the 13-digit system by 2007. An ever-higher number of books are being introduced each year, so the ISBN numbering system is nearly exhausted — much like the proliferation of cellphones has already forced the introduction of additional area codes in some urban areas of the United States.

Next year, ISBNs will resemble the current numbers, with an added prefix of 978 or 979. Existing books with 10-digit ISBNs must be converted to the 13-digit format by adding one of the 3-digit prefixes and changing the last existing digit. A book industry trade group has published a free “Dummies” guide to ISBN conversion here: http://www.bisg.org/isbn-13/

For bookstores that need to convert their barcodes to the new format, more resources are provided by the U.S. ISBN Agency. On Amazon.com, most products are uniquely identified by an “ASIN” (Amazon Standard Identification Number), and in the case of most books, it’s the same number as the ISBN.

It will be interesting to see how well the major online bookselling sites manage the transition to the 13-digit ISBN transition. Stay tuned.

See a real-time list of the most highly sought after used and collectible books.

Read more free articles on selling used books profitably online: http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/selling.htm

Steve Weber is author of “The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site” (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com

Once you have a buyer on eBay it’s vital that you keep that person’s name and address and look for additional items to offer them later. Research shows that around one in five buyers ultimately become regular buyers. This happens in mail order, on the Internet, by direct mail, and on eBay.

This means if you don’t follow up on past buyers you’re effectively losing out on 20 per cent more profits at every marketing opportunity.

Imagine you sell an eBook on eBay, about making money in the property business, for example, and you sell one hundred copies each month. Over the year that’s 1200 customers. Of that number 240 are potentially regular buyers of similar or even unrelated products.

Now let’s say you’ve been selling the book for three months, you have 300 customers, of whom you expect 60 to become regular buyers - IF you offer them something to purchase that is! If you don’t offer them something else later, you’ve just lost one of the greatest resources any business can have - back end selling potential. Repeat Back End Selling Potential.

So, let’s say you continue selling that initial book on eBay and let’s assume you make $10 profit per sale. That’s $1000 a month, $12,000 a year.

Let’s see how the figures stack up if you locate a second book about the property business which this time makes you $50 pure profit per sale.

This means from those 60 second time buyers gained over three months you’ll make $3000 extra, $12,000 over the year, making cumulative annual profits now of $24,000.

Imagine now that you double sales of your eBay lead book (called ‘lead’ because it leads to additional sales later - back end selling). Or you could add another lead product to eBay, for the property book or for something different. Either way, all things being equal, that is first time customer numbers stay much the same, profit potential remains constant for each front end and back end book combo, then each new book, with back end seller, adds another $24,000 to your bank account.

Four new front end combinations makes just short of $100,000 a year; forty new lead book and back up package all but hits the ONE MILLION DOLLARS a year mark.

This is the simple step-by-step formula for turning virtually anything you sell on eBay into a fabulous back end earnings source.

This is how to make your first million:

Promote a book on eBay, it can be virtually any subject, any format of book, the most important thing is that it lends itself to back end selling, meaning the subject must be something people want to know more about and to learn more they’ll purchase similar subject books later. Niche market titles are especially good for back end selling. So people who buy books about fishing will buy more books about fishing, dog lovers similar, UFO enthusiasts, craftworkers, and so on.

This is what you do next:

1) Keep names of buyers and enquirers to sell to later.

2) Obtain another book that might interest buyers of the first product. Get it from the public domain, or create one from other people’s articles (ask permission from them, few will refuse), obtain it from out of print booksellers, etc.

3) Write a sales letter for the second book or send the first chapter free with a link in the back of the chapter for people to purchase the full version. Some email programs let you include your PayPal button for payment in the body of an email containing the sales letter or sample chapter.

That’s it, mission accomplished, more money going into your bank account.

More Back End Selling Tips

Here is another great way to adapt this lead generating for front and back end selling process through a string of books, of different genre, different types. This can be accomplished by selling books online, offline, as free sample chapter downloads, and so on.

This is what you do:

1) Ask first time buyers to join your mailing list for future sample chapters of books chosen to interest them.

2) Compartmentalise names and addresses in your email programme, according to type of books people previously bought or obtained as free downloads, etc.

3) Look for new books to interest niche book buyers or general interest books to suit most people. Send sample chapters as appropriate in emails to your past buyers: niche and special interest books to specific buyer categories, general interest titles to all past buyers.

3) Add a payment button inside the email to attract early impulse buys for your full length version. This saves losing potential buyers who delay visiting an alternative sales page for the full length book and change their minds or lose the location of your sales page. The next best way to accomplish a fairly certain sale is to send the sample chapter as a pdf attachment to your email, making sure links for sales page or payment button in the pdf file are active and working properly. Alternatively add a printable order form at the end of the sample chapter giving both online and offline ordering options.

4) Send the complete book to buyers as an email attachment or as a direct link between payment and download page.

There is a simple way to increase bids and hold gross when selling cars and trucks at ebay Motors. Add audio sales presentations to your listings. Use your own seller’s voice. You are selling a vehicle, are you not? Then tell your ebay shoppers about the vehicle and tell them how easy it is to buy a vehicle from you.

If you went onto a car lot to buy a vehicle and you were greeted by a sales person with tape over his/her mouth, wouldn’t you at least be taken aback? Let’s say you couldn’t overcome the urge to ask the sales person a question. “How many miles does this car have?” The sales person opens the door of the car and points to the odometer and you have to get in and read it yourself. After all, the sales person has tape on his/her mouth and can only point for you to read. I have just described an ebay motors auction that is devoid of a person doing a walk around on a vehicle. Without audio, you are listing your vehicle in ebay Motors with a SILENT auction.

Yes, you can certainly sell vehicles at ebay motors without using your seller’s voice. However, if you have 2000 unique visitors look at your ebay auction listing that is the same as 2000 people walking onto a car lot and looking at the vehicle. If you are not getting the price you want, then you have to ask yourself why. My personal opinion is that not one of those 2000 visitors to your ebay auction listing got excited.

Yes, you probably have great pictures. And you probably have listed every detail about the vehicle that a person would want and need to know. And I am sure you included everything about delivery, payment, warranty, etc. that you want to convey to any potential buyer. The problem probably is that they didn’t stay looking at your auction long enough to read it all.

According to Sellathon CEO Wayne Yeager, “About half of all auction visitors - 48% to be exact - spend 10 seconds or less looking at your auction.”

Don’t do a good enough job to get 2000 people to look at your auctions and then let them only spend 10 seconds there. Use your seller’s voice and talk to your ebay shoppers and tell them to take action and bid on your vehicle.

Jane B. Clark trains people in buying and selling on ebay. She also advises car dealers on ebay Motors listing and marketing techniques. You can visit Jane at http://www.addauctionaudio.com or email Jane at jane@addauctionaudio.com.