How To Sell Products on Facebook with Yardsellr

The Online Seller's News, Dec. 2010, Volume 10, No. 20

Tips, Tools, News and Resources for eBay, Amazon and independent Online Sellers ~ Published Twice Monthly since 1999
by: Skip McGrath

In This Issue:

Musings from eBay and beyond

1. How To Sell Products on Facebook with Yardsellr
2. Making The Holiday Selling Last Through February
3. eBay Arbitrage is Alive and Well
4. The eBay Consignment Business is Rocking and Rolling Again
5. Vendor Review – Sellathon
6. New Wholesale Sources for eBay, Amazon & Online Sellers

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." ~ Mark Twain

Musings from eBay and beyond

I usually publish this newsletter twice a month except for December. But between issues you can stay up to date on news about eBay, Amazon and website selling via my blog at blog.skipmcgrath.com. The best way to get my blog is to subscribe so new blog headlines appear on your home page and all you have to do is click on the article link to read the post. Subscribing to my blog is easy. When you are on my blog, look in the upper left hand corner of the page for this link:

Just click on the link to subscribe and follow the simple instructions. It takes less than a minute to do.

Online sales’ using mobile devices are really growing fast. eBay released their new iPhone buying application this week. Here is some of what it does:

• Quick and easy listing with integrated selling tools (US, DE and UK sites only)

• Save and share your favorite searches

• Get alerts when new items matching your saved searches are listed

• Find and compare products to buy and sell with integrated Red Laser barcode scanning

• Stay on top of your eBay activity with Reminders feature

• Improved search results and new refinement options

When I wrote this it occurred to me that this could be useful if you are doing eBay Arbitrage (see article # 3 below).

Ben Mannino, the fellow who brought your Scanlister, has come out with a pretty interesting product. It’s a pretty niche idea –not right for everyone, but interesting never the less. The product is called Simple Software.

Software is one of the most profitable products ever invented. Simple Software is a program that shows anyone how to invent a piece of software, have it written and sell it for very attractive profits. Basically Ben shows you how he invented, created and sold his successful Scanlister program. All you really need is an idea –something that a software program could do and Simple Software shows you how to get it done.

As I said, this is a product with pretty narrow appeal, but if this interests you, I did review the product and this will really work.

Site Build It (SBI) is offering a Two for One Holiday Special on their popular website builder and hosting program. SBI is the only all-in-one package of process, software, guidance, and help that enables anyone to create Web sites that build profitable businesses at unmatched rates of success. Step-by-step video and written guides help you every step of the way, guiding you through the most effective web business building process available anywhere. You can get two sites for yourself or give one as a gift.

Last month I told you about TradePub, The site where you can subscribe to free trade magazines. They offer trade magazines in dozens of product categories. Trade magazines are publications by and for buyers and sellers who work in a specific industry. For example there is Hardware and DIY. If you sell tools or outdoor products, this magazine contains articles about your industry and marketing as well as wholesale suppliers who want to sell to you. Another example is Home Products –all about sourcing products for the home and kitchen and Electronics –covers sourcing in the consumer electronics industry.

They also offer dozens of free eBooks and reports. Here is one example: Seven Reasons Customers Do Business, Online and Offline Learn how you can create a trustworthy website for your customers. Admittedly they also have a lot of arcane publications that have nothing to do with selling online, but it’s really worth your time to browse the site or use their search engine to type in keywords of products that interest you.

In my book, The Virtual Peddler, one of the topics I cover is Storage Locker Auctions. I was TV channel surfing one day last week and came across a new TV show on A&E called Storage Wars. It’s a TV show about people who do Storage Locker auctions -hilarious. One guy bought a locker for $3000 and turned it into a $19,000 profit. I have been to lots of storage locker auctions and have never seen the stuff that goes on in this show, but hey –maybe I am in the wrong part of the country.

If you want to make money with storage locker auctions, there is a pretty good chapter in The Virtual Peddler, or you can buy Steve Lindhorst’s book, Storage Unit Auctions. This 75-page eBook explains all you need to know to get started, and succeed in the ever-expanding world of storage-unit auctions.

You'll learn what you need to know before, during, and after an auction, so you can make the biggest profit, with the least amount of effort.

Steve’s books are not pie-in-the-sky books that only talk about the success stories. He writes an honest, balanced look at all aspects of the business, including the work involved.

Lets get started with this month’s articles:

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1. How To Sell Products on Facebook with Yardsellr

Yardsellr is the invention of an ex-eBay executive, Danny Leffel. Yardsellr was started to be an alternative to eBay. Their philosophy is somewhat like eBay’s was in the early days. Here is there mission statement:

Yardsellr believes that people are natural born buyers and sellers. In the tradition of neighborhood garage- and yard-sales, we make it easy for you to list and sell, or find and buy whatever you want; Best of all, the buying and selling is done by regular people like you. That means you get great prices from folks you can trust within your network or within a friend's network.

When you put something up for sale, Yardsellr will spread the word about your item within your online "neighborhood" - social and messaging networks like Facebook, Twitter. Yardsellr makes it easy to show your stuff for sale to potential buyers no matter where they are online.

For the buyer, it's just as easy. Yardsellr knows that destination sites like Craigslist and eBay have become pretty crowded and hard to use. It's tough to know who you can trust and even harder to find great deals from everyday people. Our "For Sale" page is available anywhere online where a buyer is hanging out. And checkout is a breeze for buyers and sellers. Great deals are only a click or two away when you discover and buy with Yardsellr.

The big difference between Yardsellr and eBay is that eBay is a destination site –people come there looking for products to buy. Yardsellr, on the other hand, is not a place people go to buy. Instead when you list items on Yardsellr, they are posted on your Facebook page and Yardsellr distributes the items to blocks of interested potential buyers.

For example, I currently have a champagne opener and a garlic slicer listed on Yardsellr. The champagne opener is distributed to the wine block –folks on FB who are interested in wine and the garlic slicer is distributed to the cooking block –FB users who follow and are interested in cooking. The other way listings get distributed is when people share them. If you list something really interesting it could potentially go viral on Facebook as it is shared and re-shared to thousands of people

When you list items on Yardsellr, you are selling to a social-interest community. On eBay your listings can be seen by the whole world. When you post an item on Yardsellr, it is only seen by your fans and friends and those who are in the social interest blocks that Yardsellr distributes to. When someone comes to eBay they are usually looking to buy something. Whereas on Yardsellr it seems to me that you are looking for an impulse buy.

I started by listing 5 items on Yardsellr –all were fairly low cost (Under $25) kitchen gadgets. No sales yet but it’s still early.

So can you make a living on Yardsellr? Not yet –however this is a good additional channel to your eBay business. But, since Yardsellr is connected to Facebook, the most successful social networking site, I think Yardsellr may have some potential.

Listing is free. Yardsellr changes the buyer a small fee. I would love to tell you more about Yardsellr, but it will have to wait as I am just running out of room here. However, I will be posting more on my blog over the next week or so.

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2. Making The Holiday Selling Last Through February

Most people think the holiday selling season starts after Halloween and runs through Christmas. But in my experience the selling season runs all the way to Valentines Day. I have always known this was true based on my experience, but I couldn’t really prove it. When I looked over my sales reports for the past 5 years, it wasn’t obvious because my sales reports on QuickBooks are quarterly. Of course the 4th quarter that contains Christmas was always high, but I didn’t see anything abnormal in the 1^st quarter of the New Year. So I decided to pull a monthly report and here is what it showed:

As you can see the months of our sales start heading up in November and continue strong through February before going back to average normal in March. I don’t honestly know why this occurs. I have read theories that some people wait until after Christmas thinking they will get a bargain, and others just don’t get their Christmas shopping done. Personally I think it’s people shopping for themselves and of course for Valentine’s Day. So how do you take advantage of this?

Mostly it comes down to inventory. Before I knew this was happening, right after Christmas I would lower my prices and blow out my inventory so I wouldn’t get stuck with it. But now, I always order more inventory than I will need to get me through Christmas and keep listing and selling right through February. Then if I have any excess left, I will lower my prices.

The other thing I do is to keep offering Free Shipping. Yes, you make a little less on each sale because you can never recover your entire shipping price, but you make up for it in volume –and this is really true during the holiday season. I occasionally offer free shipping other times of the year –but have always found it works best from November to February.

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3. eBay Arbitrage is Alive and Well

In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two different markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. On eBay, arbitrage is when you buy an item on eBay at a low price and turn around and sell it for a higher price.

I often get email from readers asking how to do arbitrage. It’s always been one of those topics that I kept meaning to write an eBook about but never got around to it. While I was dithering, eBay seller, Pete Bruckshaw wrote what is probably the master textbook on eBay arbitrage, The Auction Arbitrage Secret. What I really like about Pete’s book is that he is like me. He not only writes about it, he actually does it.

In the old days arbitrage was a lot of work. There were basically two ways to find products that were selling on eBay at prices low enough to buy and resell. You could get up in the middle of the night and find items ending when no one else was online and you could often buy very expensive items that no one was bidding on and you could snap them up cheap. The other way was searching for items that were misspelled. Because 70% of buyers find items by searching, the theory goes that an item with a misspelled keyword would not come up in a search. This was so common that people were selling lists of common misspellings. With the advent of spell checkers, although this method doesn’t work as well as it used to, but you can still find items this way.

Pete had developed a few more techniques that he reveals in his book, and he also shares a couple of niches that he used to flip items. And he goes beyond eBay and shows you how and where to buy goods on other platforms and turn around and sell them on eBay. One of his niches is so large that even if a bunch of his readers do it there will still be room. But what I would do, is take his techniques and use them on other niches –his strategies will work in almost any category on eBay.

Besides using Pete’s system to make money –this is also a good way to save money on purchases you make for yourself or for Christmas shopping.

What I really like about The Auction Arbitrage Secret is that Pete gives you the choice of how you want to learn. You get an eBook that you can either read on your computer or print out. You also get the whole program on four MP4 videos, or you can download an MP3 audio file and listen to the program. And Pete offers a 60-day, no-hassle, money back guarantee.

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4. The eBay Consignment Business is Rocking and Rolling Again

My book sales have been pretty steady since the summer slowdown ended, but lately there has been a lot of interest in the eBay consignment business. Over the past two months, sales of my book, Making Money with an Online Consignment Business have been far outselling all of my other books. Part of this was due to my friend Jim Cockrum who promoted it to the members of his Silent Team program, but when I took Jim’s sales out of the mix, the numbers were still outstanding. I called a friend of mine who works at eBay and she told me they were seeing the same thing –there has been a strong uptick in the number of people registering as a Trading Assistant, which is eBay’s program for consignment sellers.

Next I did some Google surfing and sure enough, I saw more articles, blog posts and ads for eBay consignment sellers.

Consignment selling on eBay peaked in 2006 when all of the eBay consignment franchise operators crashed and burned and eBay franchise consignment stores were failing by the dozens. The franchise model just didn’t work. But in the meantime, plenty of people were running eBay drop off stores they started themselves and hundreds of others were flying under the radar –operating consignment businesses out of their homes or even from rented storage lockers.

The business has been alive and well for years, but the sudden upturn must be do to the continuing recession. With 9.8% official unemployment and real unemployment near 16% there are plenty of people getting rid of their stuff to raise cash and others willing to buy used goods instead of new to save money. I am a registered eBay Trading Assistant and used to spend a lot of my efforts on consignment sales, but have backed off as we found better sources for new goods. I still do the occasional consignment sale, but I focus on higher priced goods as it takes just as much time and work to sell something for $500 as it does for $50.

I called a few Trading Assistants I know and the other thing that is happening is a surge in business-to-business (B2B) activity. As companies downsize they need to get rid of their computers, furnishings, phone systems and so on. The other hot B2B activity is restaurant equipment from restaurants going out of business. The B2B area is a great place for a consignment seller to work as the price point of the merchandise is high and the buyers are usually very familiar with what they are buying.

So if you are having trouble finding merchandise to sell, take a look at the eBay consignment business. Sellers typically charge between 30% and 40% commission. One successful eBay consignment store in Los Angeles, SHOPitLA charges 55% and has no trouble getting it. You do need to be skilled at selling on eBay before getting into the consignment business, but if this interests you, take a look at my book, Making Money with an Online Consignment Business.

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5. Vendor Review – Sellathon

Sellathon is one of the oldest and most respected eBay third party services. When I first wrote about Sellathon a few years ago I called it the The Killer eBay App –and it still is today.

When you sign up to use the ViewTracker™ counter, you'll receive a "snippet" of HTML code to "copy and paste" into your auction descriptions (or auction template).

This code causes two things to happen:

1. It creates a counter that appears at the bottom of your auction. (The counter can be hidden if you prefer).

2. Every time someone visits your auction, it sends data about that visit to your ViewTracker™ account.

The information you receive includes:

• Visit date/time
• Visit duration
• Current price
• Number of bids
• High bidder ID
• If on Watch List
• If a return visit
• ...and more!

ViewTracker saves this visitor data for each of your auctions (and/or store items) and when you log into your ViewTracker account, the data is presented to you in a user-friendly format.

ViewTracker lets you see your auction data from several perspectives:

1. Account Overview - See at a glance how many listings you're tracking, how many unique visitors each listing has attracted, how many listings have bids, the accumulated value of those bids, the total number and percentage of listings being "watched," and more.

2. Detailed Visitor Log - This visitor-by-visitor log of every hit to your listing(s) shows you which customers have been viewing your auctions, the length of their visit, how often they visited, and more.

3. Other Analytical Views - For any tracked listing (or group of listings), we give you the ability see visits charted by hour, visits grouped by day of the week, and hit counts for each unique visitor to determine who's really interested.

Not only is ViewTracker a great way to keep tabs on your current auctions, it also allows you to learn from your previous auctions by performing "what if?" tests on any group of auctions.

For example, if you sell jewelry, you can look only at the auctions within the past six months that had "diamond ring" in the title. Now, you can use ViewTracker to see which hour of the day those auctions received the most traffic! It's a good bet that this will be the best hour to schedule your diamond ring auctions to end!

With Sellathon’s ViewTracker, all you have to do is gather all your previous listings of similar items (using our powerful search tool) and then view the "Hi-Lites" for that group.

You can get a free 30-day trial subscription. If you continue it will cost you $4.95 for up to 50 simultaneous listings per month or $8.95 per month for up to 250 simultaneous listings. They also have an enterprise plan for really high volume sellers and annual payments to save you money.

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6. New Wholesale Sources for eBay, Amazon & Online Sellers

Via Trading is one of the oldest eBay Wholesale Suppliers. Most of their items are sold by the pallet. but many pallets can contain hundreds of items and cost as little as $300 to $400.

Luna Bath & Body sells Natural soap bars, soy candles, Dead Sea bath salts, reed diffusers, gift sets packaged in beautiful organza bags, high end labeling. All of their products are made in the USA and their minimum opening order is only $100.

Kendall's Custom Lamps LLC is a manufacturer of really unique rustic and western style lighting. They are located in Punxsutawney, PA which is famous for Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who predicts winter if it sees its shadow on February 2^nd.

My Little Diva Accessories sells a line of fashion accessories (hair clips, t-shirts, totes, headbands) for little girls. Their minimum opening order is only $150.

J&C Associates has a large selection of home textiles. they feature bedding and accessories, tabletop, kitchen textiles, accent pillows, Christmas and Halloween décor and licensed products from Williamsburg, Joe Spencer, Katie McCrostie, April Cornell and others. No website. Email Cathy Brusack at cbrusack@aol.com and ask for a catalog.

Jazame Shoes is an importer and wholesaler of Men's Italian Style Dress & Casual Shoes. Visit us today & start making money. They carry a large selection of Designer Inspired Sunglasses & Handbags that are hard to find.

Sweet Illusions carries the latest trends in Junior Apparel and Ladies Lingerie & Hosiery at unmatched prices.

The Military Man Wholesales Tru Spec Military clothing & Tru Spec military uniforms, BDU pants, Tru Spec camo pants, EMS supplies, flight jackets, camouflage clothing, police swat clothing and hunters uniforms. ACU Clothing and Thermal underwear. They also sell First aid and emergency preparedness kits.

Cousin Corporation of America is a full line bead supplier. They feature glass beads, semi-precious beads, Swarovski crystals, plastic beads, and a complete selection of bead kits and beading supplies.

If you are thinking about bottling that secret hot sauce recipe and selling it you will need bottles. Specialty Bottle sells Glass Bottles, Plastic Bottles, Glass Jars, Plastic Jars, Tins, Metal Containers, Glass Vials, Pet Bottle, Wholesale Containers and Candle Jars.

Warehouse Craft Supplies sells wholesale craft and floral supplies with volume discounts up to 62.5 % off on over 3,600 items.

Now that we are into a new month, Web Wholesale magazine once again has free subscriptions available to my readers (they only allow me 300 free subscriptions a month). Web Wholesaler is the magazine for online sellers that connect you to wholesale sources who want to work with eBay and online sellers.

That’s it for this month. We usually publish twice a month except for December. So we will see you in January. In the meantime, you can subscribe to my blog where I post news and articles of interest to online sellers every couple of days or so. If you would like my blog feed delivered direct to your home page you can Subscribe.

I pray that all of you will experience a joyous and wonderful holiday season. Happy Hanukkah and a very Merry and Blessed Christmas to all of my wonderful readers of Jewish and Christian faiths and happy holidays to everyone else.

During the season please take a moment to remember our boys and girls serving our country far from home this year (my eldest son just left a few days ago for 9-months).

Karen and I are truly blessed with your continued loyal readership.

Skip McGrath
The Online Seller's News

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

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