Whether you think you can or think you can't --you're right!

Musings ////

Last month I opened the newsletter by telling you that the summer slump ended and the hot Fall selling season had started. My eBay sales are continuing to climb. I am up 5% over the previous month and 11% over the same month last year. eBay just announced their quarterly earnings were up 46% over the same quarter last year and the stock dropped 2.7% on the news. It seems that Wall Street was expecting more. After the dust settled, eBay climbed back up about 4%.

Our first article is about taking advantage of the Christmas Buying season. If you haven't started creating and launching auctions by now you are late --and I wouldn't waste any time. See the first article for tips to maximize your sales and profits during the next four months.

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eBay announced their long-rumored Safe Payments Policy last week. In further attempts to crack down on fraud eBay's new policy states:

"Not permitted on eBay.com: Sellers may not solicit buyers to mail cash. Sellers may not ask buyers to send cash through instant cash transfer services (non-bank, point-to-point cash transfers) such as Western Union or Moneygram. Finally, sellers may not request payment through online payment methods not specifically permitted in this policy."

The "online payment methods" referred to include systems such as e-gold and the new Google payment system. Apparently the only online systems that will be allowed are PayPal and Bid-Pay. The new rules will not take affect until January of 2006 which seems strange to me. Fraudester continue to sting eBay newbies every day --why not enact the policy now...??? For another take on this subject, read Ina Steiner's excellent editorial about this new policy.

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Just as I was wrapping up this issue of the newsletter I got a call from one of my customers who was considering buying a pre-made web site from a drop shipping company. He wanted to know if he should spend $199 and if it was a good deal. (For more on drop shipping see article number 4 below).

The problem with these type of shopping web sites are many. First of all, how will you drive traffic to it? Google penalizes sites if they have copy that is identical to other sites --exactly what you get when you buy a pre-made web package hosted on the same server with hundreds of other nearly-identical sites. So your only option unless you already have a customer list is email marketing or pay-per-click services such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing.

Search engines look for content. If you look at the web site where I sell the EZ Cube Photo Light Tents (www.ezauctiontools.com) you will see that I have a lot of free content on the site. The articles and photo tips pages get dozens of hits a day from people searching terms such as "digital photo tips." Again, most of the drop ship company's web sites don't allow you to add that sort of content.

Another problem is the scope and type of merchandise you can list. If you buy a web site from one of the drop ship companies, most of them only let you list their merchandise. This can make it very hard to build a niche. Finally you really have no control over the ordering, shipping and other customer service issues you need to control to build a real online business.

I host my web site at www.citymax.com. They will sell you a fully functional e-commerce web site for as low as $16.95 a month. Or see the next item about dot.ws domains where you can get a domain, web hosting and a web site builder for as low as $10 a month. With both of these options, you can create a web site in a few hours using templates and images the host provides, just use the free PayPal shopping cart for your e-commerce solution to take credit cards and you are up and running. You will have a unique domain name and web site where the search engines can find you. You can simply upload your products and photos and you are in business.

If you go with CityMax, they have a deal with WholesaleMarketer where you can simply add products from the drop shipper to your web site with a few clicks. If you use a dot.ws domain you can still simply open two windows and copy/paste the products and photos into your web site. The biggest advantage,however, is that you can also put other products up --those that you buy outright and products from any manufacturer or drop shipper.

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For the past three months I have been doing a series of free tele-seminars sponsored by Sellers Voice. We have been averaging about 200 listeners on each call. The next seminar is on Thursday, November 10th at 6-PM Pacific Time, 9-PM East Coast Time. You can enroll and get the phone number and code by clicking here. The subject of this seminar is: Automating For Profits.

In This Issue

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1. Taking advantage of the Holiday Buying Season on eBay

I recently attended a seminar where the speaker presented an interesting calendar chart that showed the best date ranges for holiday promotions based on real internet sales data from over 500 internet retail stores. I have always known that you want to start your holiday promotions early, but I had no idea how early.

I am always amazed when we go into Costco or Wal-Mart in October and see Christmas items on display. It used to be you didn't see Christmas merchandise until around Thanksgiving. This chart showed Christmas buying on the internet starting as early as October 15th and --get this: continuing through the end of January. I am not kidding. Smart online retailers keep their Christmas promotions online through the end of January and realize excellent sales.

So how do I take advantage of the Christmas season to maximize my sales? The first thing you want to do is start NOW. Don't wait until we get closer to christmas because a lot of people are using the internet to shop early.

Next is to offer Gift Services. eBay gives you the option to add a gift logo to your auction. Inside the auction description you can offer additional services (for a fee) such as including a gift card, mailing directly to the giftee or even gift wrapping.

If you are selling something that would make a great Christmas Gift say so in the auction title (if you have room after the important key words) or put something in the Subtitle. For example I am selling a highly sought after Starbucks card from the first Starbucks store. I have a sub-title that says: The Perfect Christmas Gift for the Starbucks Fan.

I was talking to a large merchant at the seminar about the subject of keeping his Christmas promotions up after Christmas. He says it is amazing but a lot of people buy belated Christmas gifts and others are shopping for "after-Christmas" sales looking for bargains.

One of my favorite pages on eBay is Seller Central. They have a lot of tips, best practices and lists of hot items and most popular keywords. Be sure and check the section for your particular category as there is some great advice and information there on selling in or near the holiday season.

2. eBay now displays listings by other sellers on your closed-item pages

Many sellers have been surprised to view a closed item listing and seen listings of their competitive auctions. Closed listings only come up when someone searches for completed listings --but the cross promotions can come up on other pages as well. Rather than interpret it, here is what eBay says about the program:

"To increase the exposure of current listings and improve the finding experience for buyers, we will soon display similar active listings from other sellers on closed item pages. As they do today, buyers will first see other items from the seller who listed the original closed item in the “See More Great Items From This Seller” section. In addition, buyers will be shown a list of similar items from other sellers. This should be especially helpful for buyers who get to one of these closed item pages via a search engine.

Once launched, sellers who have not already opted out of having other sellers’ items displayed on Watch Reminder and Non-Winning Bidder emails will be defaulted into this program. This will ensure your items receive maximum exposure on other sellers’ closed item pages and that buyers who land on closed listings see relevant active listings."

Sellers will also have the ability to opt out of this program entirely, which means your closed item pages will not display similar items from other sellers, nor will your active listings appear on other sellers’ closed items. Sellers can also choose to only allow the display of other sellers’ items to any of the following types of buyers:

You will be able to control these settings from the “Promoting Similar Items on eBay Pages and Emails” section of your Preferences in My eBay."

So should you op-in or opt-out? I decided to opt-in. If you opt-out of having listings on your pages, eBay also will not put your listings on other seller's pages. I think the value of having my active listings shown on hundreds of other auctions outweighs having competitive listings on my pages.

3. Accelerate your sales with 1-day Listings

eBay created 1-day auctions for those with time-sensitive products to sell such as Football or concert tickets. But a lot of savvy sellers are using 1-day auctions to accelerate their sales.

It is no secret that items with less than 4-hours left to run, get the most bids, with the last few minutes getting the most activity. Recently I decided to try a few 1-day auctions as an experiment.

As my regular readers know, one of the product categories I sell are Starbucks Collectibles --Bearista Bears, City Mugs and Starbucks Cards. I usually run 7-day auctions. Last week I tried running different 1-day auctions on several days. I scheduled auctions ending on Sunday, Monday and Thursday. All three auctions for a Seattle Pike Place Starbucks mug ended in a sale with these results:

Sunday $23.27 - Margin $13.32
Monday $19.25 - Margin $9.30
Thursday $27.97 - Margin $18.02 (BIN sale)

So lets look at the results. I normally sell one Seattle mug a week because if I list several auctions all ending on different days, someone searching for a Seattle Starbucks Mug will see all of the auctions giving them the impression there is plenty of supply so they will not bid a very high price. However by running a series of 1-day auctions I sold three mugs, two of which performed very well and one that was so-so. I made a total of $40.64 profit instead of my normal margin which averages around $19 for one listing per week.

Now this won't work for every product. If you are selling something very specialized that needs large exposure you are better off listing it for 7 or even 10 days. But if you are selling an item that usually sells fairly well, you might want to try this strategy. Be sure and experiment with different ending days and times.

4. Can you really make money with drop shipping companies?

Drop shipping companies and the whole concept of drop shipping continues to be one of the most controversial subjects on eBay. There are two way to drop ship. Both of them can work and both have their plusses and minuses. The two ways are: Work with an aggregator and find manufacturers who will drop ship. Let's look at both methods:

• Work with an aggregator. An aggregator is a drop shipping company such as Wholesale Marketer probably the largest and most respected firm now servicing eBay sellers. The problem with aggregators is two-fold: They have to charge a fee to keep out the people who just want to buy something cheap for their own account. I am OK with that as long as:
  
  a) the fee is reasonable,
  b) they have either a free trial or a refund and
  c) you can cancel at any time.
  
  Wholesale Marketer meets all of these criteria which is one of the reasons I recommend them. The other issue is margin. You can't make huge margins with most products from drop shipping aggregators because of the competition. So is this still worth doing?
  
  Sure --but you still have to be careful. If you want to work with an aggregator, your first step is to do is your research. You don't want to waste eBay listing and feature fees on something that won't sell at a profit. Here's the best way to do that:
  
  Open two windows in your browser--one is your drop ship supplier and the other in the eBay Advanced Search window.
  
  When you see a product that looks attractive, do a completed items search on eBay to see what it has actually sold for in the past 30 days. It does no good whatsoever to look at ongoing auctions. The bid prices usually don't get very high until minutes before an item ends.
  
  The second thing you want to do is look for higher-priced items --ideally things that will sell for over $50 or even $100 is better. Because the margins tend to be small you want to make a higher dollar amount on each sale. 25% on a $12 item is only $3.00. I wouldn't waste my time listing an auction if I was only going to make $3.00. But, 25% of $100 is $25. That is worth my time.
  
• Find a manufacturer who will drop ship. It is a fact: The closer you can get to the manufacturer or direct importer of a product, the lower your wholesale price and the higher your profit margin will be. It is a little-known fact that there are thousands of manufacturers who will drop ship their products.
  
  The downside to this strategy is that it is a lot more work. It takes a lot of work to find the manufacturers who will work with you. One way is to use the Thomas Register. This is a listing of almost every manufacturer in the US and Canada. Once you find the manufacturer of a product that interests you, you have to contact them individually to determine if, a) they will deal with you and, b) if they will agree to drop ship.
  
  There is a way to short-cut a lot of this effort. Chris Malta who is eBay Radio's product sourcing specialist operates a company called World Wide Brands, a certified eBay solutions provider.
  
  Chris sells an online directory called the Drop Ship Source Directory. The key word in that title is the word "source." Chris has a team of people who research manufacturers, attend trade shows and use other ways to find them. Then they actually call the manufacturer on the phone, explain their program and determine if the manufacturer will work with eBay sellers and if they will agree to drop ship.
  
  The advantage to you is that you get access to a list of manufacturers with good products at great prices that are already pre-screened and ready to go. But --you still have to do the research. Remember before you decide to sell something, make sure there is a market for it on eBay at a price where you can make a profit. Otherwise you are just wasting time and eBay listing fees.

5. Build your brand with an eBay Store Design

I did a teleseminar in October with Phil Dunn and Amy Balsbaugh who are co-authors of a great book, The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing. Our seminar was on the subject of Branding Your Business. One of the things all the experts agree on is building a brand through creating a similar look and feel with your auctions, eBay Store, About Me page and web site if you have one.

I have worked hard over the years to brand my name, my web site and my business concept, but I had neglected my eBay Store. So I contacted Anthony McMurry from ProImpulse Design. He is a designer who specializes in working with eBay store designs. After discussing logos and concepts, we really decided the best thing to do would be to carry my current web site design over to my eBay Store.

So, here is the link to my new eBay store: http://stores.ebay.com/The-Auction-Sellers-Resource. Notice that the store design also carries over to my About Me Page and my policy pages.

If you go to ProImpulse Design there is a form you can fill out to get a proposal. Prices can vary, but Anthony is pretty flexible and will work with you.

IF you want a simpler approach, you can design your own logo at a great web site called Logo-Yes. The neat thing about this site is that you don't have to pay a dime until you end up with a satisfactory design. You can just get a logo to upload to your store and About Me Page, or they also offer some complete business packages including letterhead and business cards.

6. Promoting your niche on eBay and the web

Before we get started, be sure to read my article on Niche Marketing Strategies on eBay and then this item will make more sense to you. (If you want to read it first, it will open in a new page and you can come right back here when you are finished.)

Sometimes finding a niche is all about how people search for products. This is true on eBay or the web. Did you know that almost 50% of people search for items with three-keyword phrases and 41% even use four or more words in a search. If you know what some of these words strings and phrases are, you can really target traffic to your eBay store, web site or in a Google adwords campaign.

The other interesting thing about using three and four word phrases is that you will rank higher in organic searches in search engines and you can buy Google adwords and Yahoo Overture ads very cheap, because almost no one else bothers to purchase keywords this way.

If you search the term "handmade jewelry" you will come up with over 4.1 million web pages that use that term. If you purchase that term on Google adwords, it will cost you over 30-cents per click to rank in the top 5 results.

But if you search the following terms:

custom handmade jewelry
designer handmade jewelry
Buy handmade jewelry online
handmade jewelry sites
handmade jewelry web sites

The competition for these terms is minimal and you can rank in the top 3 Google adwords results for just 10-cents a click.

So why is this important to me selling on ebay? If you have a web site, this information is of obvious value. Using these keywords on your pages and in your pay-per-click campaigns will get you more traffic. If you are just selling with eBay auctions, this is of minimal help, except that some eBay buyers do use long keyword phrases in their searches. with only 55 characters it may be difficult to use long word phrases, but if you can fit them in without compromising your main keywords it will usually help your results.

If, however, you have an eBay store (every serious seller should), remember that eBay indexes your store listings to google and you can submit your listings to Froogle. This is very important for two reasons. First more people will be exposed to your store listings and secondly --eBay gives you a 75% discount on the final value fee if the buyer gets to your store from an "off-eBay" location such as a Google search, Froogle listing or a pay-per-click search. If you are selling something expensive where the final value fee is $5.00 or more and you can drive traffic to that listing with a pay-per-click ad that cost 10-cents each, the 75% final value credit of $3.75 will pay for 37.5 paid clicks. That is a pretty good return on investment.

How do you find those keyword phrases? Here is one free service and one paid service:

www.nichebot.com is free. Just enter one keyword or a keyword phrase and it will show you all of the related keywords and phrases and how they rank competitively.

www.wordtracker is easily the most powerful service available and the one used by most search engine optimizer experts. It is free to try, but then you can subscribe for a day, week, month or year.

7. New wholesale sources for November

Last month I told you about eBay's Reseller Marketplace, a wholesale source for eBay power sellers right on eBay. I just posted a new article on my Free Articles page by Hunter Goodson, an 18 year old eBay power seller who has been using the Reseller Marketplace to source goods.

Before I get into the new sources, when I was surfing the web this week, I came across three interesting paid information sites. Although you have to pay for this information (I did) I found the value surprisingly good. The first one is a company called Repo Jewelry --which links you to some really good sources of medium-priced and expensive jewelry that could easily be sold on eBay for a profit. The second offering is called Seized Electronics --basically the same thing, but they specialize in electronics. The last one is only of value if you are in the market for a home or a car, but I was amazed by some of the values. It's called Home and Car Auctions .

One of the information products I have been selling on eBay for the past year is My Top-Twenty Wholesale Sources. I sell it for $2.99. Obviously I don't make a lot of money at that price, but it has been a great way to introduce eBay sellers to my web site. Anyway I decided to also offer it here on the site. You can't go wrong --it's only $2.99 and comes with a money-back guarantee.

Perfumes are hot sellers on eBay --especially during the holiday season and right up through Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Fragrance X is a great source. The prices you will see on the site are retail. You have to click on the link to "wholesale info" in the upper right corner of the web site and register to see the wholesale prices.

Inventory Adjusters specializes in overstock quality brand name watches such as Tag, Gucci, Movado, Seiko and more. The prices are between 50% to 65% off of retail. You can't really get retail on eBay for these because of the competition, but you can make 15% to 25% markup depending on the watch. That doesn't sound like much but a lot of these watches sell for between $600 and $1,000, so that is a pretty nice dollar amount per sale. It's also a great place to get a good quality watch for yourself.

The Marshall Distributing Company sells a wide range of facial care, natural cosmetics and natural health products --and they have a drop shipping program (you have to email them to request the drop shipping info).

I have mentioned liquidation.com on several occasions but it bears mentioning again as this is really one of the best sites to get saleable and profitable merchandise for eBay. One thing to be careful of on this site is shipping. Before you bid on a pallet of merchandise, be sure and determine the shipping cost to your location.

Aircraft Models is a manufacturer and importer of fine hand-crafted ship and airplane models. The web site only shows retail prices, but if you email them they will send you wholesale information.

Hunting season is here and Green Supply is a large distributor of hunting and camping accessories (they don't sell guns). You have to contact them through the web site to set up an account before you can get the wholesale pricing --but their pricing is very good.

For some reason women's corsets have become hot sellers on eBay. Wholesale Corset sells a large line of medium to high-quality corsets, gqrter belts and gloves.

Royal Hanna sells a large line of cell phone and iPod cases, headsets and accessories. The web site has been a bit unreliable, but you can call them at 732-536-0215 or email royalhanna81@yahoo.com for a product catalog and pricing.

Don't forget to check our FREE Wholesale Search Engine. I find merchandise there every month.

Last month I told you about a friend of mine, Paula, who is retiring from eBay. She operates the eBay store that sell lady's sportwwear: http://stores.ebay.com/NY-baglady Paula is selling off her entire inventory at a below-wholesale lot price. This is a chance for someone to step into a viable eBay business with saleable, profitable merchandise, photos, descriptions you can copy --in short everything you need to start making money right away. Just go to her store and contact her through Ask Seller A Question in one of her auctions.

 

Thanks it for this month

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers and good luck on eBay

Skip McGrath