With The New Year Will There be a New eBay?

The Online Seller's News, January 2010, Volume 10, No. 1

Tips, Tools, News and Resources for eBay, Amazon and independent Online Sellers
by: Skip McGrath

In This Issue:

Musings from eBay and beyond

1. With The New Year Will There be a New eBay?
2. eBay Plugin For WordPress Blogs
3. eBay Announces Regional Get-togethers
4. Niche of The Month –eBay Artists Rep
5. Upillar.com, Free Classified Ad Site to Compete with Craigslist and eBay
6. eBay Wholesale Sources for January 2010

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." ~ David Brinkley

Musings for January 2010

There will be new eBay policies announced this month. Our first article takes a look at what may be in store for sellers in the New Year.

FREE Training Webinar – Thursday Jan 14th at 8pm EST, 7PM CST, 6PM MST, 5PM PST.

Please join me on Thursday, January 14^th at 5 PM Pacific Time for a free training webinar with one of our senior coaches, Suzanne Wells.  The topic will be an auction listing review. This will be an identical session that we give our coaching students.  Suzanne and I will go through the listings and point out the good and bad parts and make suggestions to improve them.

If you would like to be considered to have your auction reviewed, please email me at skipmcg at gmail.com (use the @ sign instead of the word at). I will look at your listings and we will be picking three readers to participate.

The webinar will last about one hour. The purpose is to give our readers a taste of our eBay and Internet coaching program.  The Webinar is limited to 100 attendees and spaces will go fast. Please click here to sign up.

If you are interested in personal coaching and would like a free evaluation, Call 1-800-578-3449 or fill out this contact form to see if you qualify. We only take a small number of students at any one time. All of our eBay coaches are active eBay PowerSellers and our Internet coaches all currently run successful online businesses.

This great little book makes a great companion to my book, How To Make Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and the Internet. In this book Steve lays out his recipe that shows step by step how he went from $0 to $2000 per month selling used books part-time on Amazon.  Some of the things he includes are:

• Where you can find LOTS of profitable books, CDs, and DVDs consistently
• How to find thrift stores wherever you go
• How to choose what to buy and what to leave on the shelf
• How to use Amazon's Sales Rank to determine the likelihood of a sale
• What to do if you find products with no barcodes or ISBNs
• How to improve your chances of a sale
• Why you should charge a little more than your competition – and still beat them to the sale
• How to clean and repair books, CDs, and DVDs to pull higher prices

There's a lot more. Steve calls it "quick and dirty" because he didn't spend a bunch of time on a website or fancy graphics. It's pretty much just "meaty" stuff that can help you make money in a short time. This is all new stuff. There is little if any overlap between Steve's book, Selling on The River or my book, How To Make Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and the Internet.

Here is the link to read about Amazon – The Quick and Dirty Guide

If you wonder if Steve's methods work, I was speaking with him on the phone today and he told me about a book he found in the trash pile outside of a thrift shop that sold on Amazon within 2 days for $120 and another old Golf book, he bought for $4.00 and sold for right around $100 within 2 or 3 days.

If you would like to attend, here is the link to register. The ASD/AMD is one of the largest wholesale trade shows in the world with over 2000 exhibitors.

• List in Fixed Price for a 5¢ Insertion Fee (Video Game Systems not included)
• Get a free Subtitle upgrade with Fixed Price and Auction-style listings

This offer expires March 30, however eBay has extended it several times and I expect them to either extend it again or perhaps make it permanent when they come out with their new fee announcement.

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1. With The New Year Will There be a New eBay?

eBay will celebrate 15 years in business this August and after all those years eBay is still a company in search of an identity.  This once stunning and powerful brand is still in search of a clear marketplace position.  There is no doubt that eBay is still the dominant online auction market. Dozens of startups have tried to take a large chunk out of eBay –but when you combine the volume of all of them they amount to less than 10% of eBay's daily volume.  So will all its problems eBay is still the best place for the small online entrepreneur to start and grow a business.

eBay's competition has not come from other auction companies but from successful online fixed price merchants with Amazon leading the pack.  A few years ago it became obvious that eBay could not continue rapid growth with an auction-only format and eBay moved into fixed price sales. It started with Buy-it-now for auctions and eBay Stores –and last year they made fixed price listings a mainstream part of eBay.  But this dichotomy between fixed price and auction-style listings is what has blurred eBay's marketplace positioning and eventually its brand.

Ever since Meg Whitman left, eBay has been struggling to find its new identity. Management claims to have a clear vision of where eBay is headed and what it will look like in 1, 2 or 5 years –but they don't seem to be able to communicate that vision to the rest of us.

It is January again –the month when eBay starts announcing their latest round of changes to the platform, fee adjustments and new seller policies. The buzz this year is that the changes will revolve around fees, feedback and communications.

The feedback and DSR system may be in for major changes. One constant complaint from sellers is that eBay's fee schedule is too complicated –so it's possible eBay may move to streamline the fee schedule. A recent article in AuctionBytes also talked about dramatic changes to eBay stores and the possibility that eBay will offer either an option to allow store items to come up in search. The AuctionBytes' article also goes into greater detail on some of the coming changes and should be must reading for all sellers. In fact, if you sell online, you should subscribe to AuctionBytes free daily newsletter.

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2. eBay Plugin for WordPress Blogs

If you use WordPress and have an eye out for new monetization tools, you might be interested to learn of a new product that makes it easy to display eBay items on your blog.

WatchCount's new eBay WordPress plugin identifies and displays Most Watched eBay items (their specialty), based on your selected keywords and categories. At your discretion, you can have these highly voted items appear in your blog's sidebar or directly within your posts. The plugin is ePN (eBay's affiliate program) approved, so it easily accepts your eBay Partner Network ID to "affiliatize" outgoing eBay links, potentially generating commissions if visitors click through to eBay then make a purchase.

Affiliate links or not, eBay sellers who blog may have no use for showcasing Most Watched items, but instead may appreciate the plugin's ability to display their own items. This might be done tacitly off in the sidebar, or more overtly within a post, such as if you're blogging about a specific, newly listed product, and would like to have the live listing details (photo, title, etc.) easily appear by simply including a special tag as you type your post.

Like all of WatchCount.com's services, their plugin is free of charge. If you're ok with the small tagline/link that appears at the base of the plugin, then the recession-friendly price tag is a welcomed plus. (You can actually disable the tagline on the settings screen, but for ePN members this will effectively halve the placement of your embedded affiliate links, as "impression sharing" then kicks in.)

A bona fide WordPress plugin, it sports a few unique features that set it apart from common banners and similar creative's that are often dropped into a blog. Recently approved by WordPress, it appears in the official WordPress.org Plugin Directory, making it easy to locate, install, and upgrade right from within a blog's plugin admin pages.

Moreover, the plugin's default settings will select keywords based on the post tags that WordPress already solicits from you as you publish your post. If you're displaying Most Watched items — listings that registered eBay buyers and sellers have actively "voted on" with their Watch This Item clicks — this can help generate more relevant product displays. If your intent is to highlight products from your own seller stock, then this too makes it easy to draw more targeted items into the spotlight by employing native WordPress functionality.

There are a few other handy frills some bloggers may make use of:

• an inline eBay search box
• various text formatting options
• background/skin selection
• international eBay site support
• or even the option to display eBay's Daily Deals…

A comprehensive rundown of their free eBay WordPress plugin, with links to a demo blog and screenshots — and Quick Start Instructions for those ready to dive right in — can be found here. They've been actively collecting feedback on their new tool and even already released upgrades with improvements based on blogger requests, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts in their direction.

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3. eBay Announces Regional Get-togethers

As most of you know, eBay cancelled their annual convention for eBay buyers and sellers, eBay Live.  Last year they announced that eBay Live would be replaced by a series of regional events they are calling eBay On Location.  The eBay On Location program will kick off in Atlanta at the Omni Hotel on March 19-20, 2010, and will travel to additional cities across the U.S. over the following months, ending in San Jose, CA, in time to celebrate eBay's 15th anniversary in August 2010.

The eBay announcement stated:

"Aside from networking events, eBay: On Location will offer a full curriculum with practical information on building and growing an eBay business, as well as timely business topics – everything from managing your reputation to tapping into the power of social media and how to "green" your business."

I am not sure what "green your business" means –probably some silly environmental-babble. If eBay wants to green my business, they could cut some fees so I could keep more green in my wallet. But they will probably come out with some regulation that we can only sell on eBay if we use energy saving computers and ship our packages in recycled cereal boxes.

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4. Niche of The Month –eBay Artists' Rep

All types of art sell on eBay every day. And there are other sites such as etsy.com that specialize in art and handmade items.  But for every artist that sells on eBay or Etsy, there are 3 or 4 who don't.  Some artists just can't master eBay, some don't have a business head and many do not have the computer skills.  It is easy to contact these artists –you can advertise in publications they read, in local newspapers and you can attend various art shows where you can talk to them in person.

This can be very profitable. Basically you become their online sales rep and sell for them on consignment.  Artists prefer to sell their work for cash, but many of them are used to selling on consignment. Art galleries typically charge between 40% – 50% consignment fees, so artists are used to paying these types of fees.  However when you charge this much for your services, you will have to eat the eBay and PayPal fees as it is unlikely that any artist who will work with you will agree to pay any upfront costs.

The key to succeeding in this business is first to only select art that will sell. If you pick poor artists and list work than no one wants, then you will go broke paying listing fees.  Next is that you must understand that art has to be "sold!" –You can't expect to just put up a photo and the size of the piece and expect it to sell.  You have to romance the piece, display excellent photos and talk about the artist.

Unlike some niches, Art doesn't have a high sell through rate. Therefore it is vitally important that you select art that will sell.  When I look at the art on eBay, it looks like topical art far outsells general art.  This would include art of animals, plants, cars, aircraft, nautical subjects, militaria, sports, horseback riding, western subjects and specialized landscapes. It is much easier to sell a painting of a beautiful racehorse than an abstract painting of a bathtub or an impressionist landscape of a swamp.  The lesson here is to select your art –and your artists carefully.

As someone who was once married to an artist in an earlier life I can tell you that most artists are really nice people but a lot of them are –or can be, real jerks, perhaps a better word to use would finicky.  It seems the better the artist the nicer they are. It's the ones who "think" they have talent and don't that are the hardest to deal with. There are so many good artists out there that could use your help, then when you run into one of the jerks –just thank them for their time and move on.  This is a business where learning how to say "no," is crucial to your success.

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5. Upillar.com, Free Classified Ad Site to Compete with Craigslist and eBay

I rarely mention new online startups, because they have a tendency to fail. But Upillar.com looks to be a very interesting exception.  Upillar is not an auction site –It is a free classified site that looks like an auction site in the sense that photos are featured rather than the ad headlines that you typically see in an online classified site such as Craigslist.

Like Craigslist, Upillar is free. You can sign up without a credit card and negotiating payment is between you and the buyer.  Upillar lists your ads both regionally and nationally.

There must be some money behind the company because they are advertising heavily on radio and they have a national billboard campaign. One of their coolest billboards says: Craigslist with a facelift.  That pretty much describes the site.

I played around with the site and I really like what I see.  It is quick and easy to create a listing.  Here is what their management says about the site:

"Upillar.com's free classified ads set us apart from the competition. Your ads are listed nationwide and categorized correctly. By categorizing your ads, we help buyers find your items faster than any other free online classified website! Local and non-local users will see your free online classifieds and be able to contact you directly from our site. Promote your business, post a free job, sell your home, or get your junk sold all completely free on upillar.com. Upillar also offers free car and automotive classifieds."

Take a look at Upillar and I think you will be impressed.

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6. eBay Wholesale Sources for January 2010

Be sure and check out our Wholesale Search Engine –but please read the disclosure first before using the search engine.

January and February tend to be the best months for closeout and overstock merchandise, so this month I am going to feature several well known closeout firms. Remember to make sure you know exactly what you are buying. Stay away from returns. Instead try to buy overstock and shelf pulls.

Closeout Store is a general trading and wholesale company located in California. were you'll find a great selection of merchandise. They sell department store returns, close-out items, liquidation items and their stock includes anything from electronics to clothing and everything in between. They sell pallet, lots, case lots, and truck load quantities.

GMS, Inc of Moorestown NJ is the authorized wholesale distributor for Sony remanufactured and overstock electronics. They don't have much of a website, but there is a link on that page where you can download an excel worksheet of their current inventory and prices.

Techliquidators sells Pallet and Truckload Wholesale Liquidation Lots. They are an liquidation source for Electronics and more. Powered by DealTree and Best Buy. http://www.TechLiquidators.com.

R. G. Riley sells off price clothing, T-shirts and sweatshirts sold in small prepack cases. Closeout and irregular apparel only. Save 40% to 80%. In business for over 80 years.

WholesaleDiscs.com sells wholesale CDs and DVDs in small and large quantities.

California Wholesale deals in closeout of health and beauty products, paper products and some electronics.

MjibSports Inc. is wholesaler of men's private label denim jeans in 5-pocket and carpenter styles for work and casual wear. Small orders welcome. Bulk discounts. 1000's available.

Closeout Central and Wholesale Central are two well known resource of closeout and wholesale sites. They tend to feature smaller wholesalers although some of the giant ones are there too.

That's is for this issue.  See you in a few weeks

Skip McGrath
The eBay Seller's News

P.S. If you missed the last issue, click here to read it.

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