Titanium eBay

Thank you for purchasing Titanium eBay. This is the web resource page I mentioned to you in the book. Rather than just a list of links, I have tried to organize the material into useful topics every eBay seller can use. I hope you find this helpful to building your business.

Skip McGrath

Bonding, Fraud Insurance & Customer Confidence

The leading company to insure against fraud and provide surety bonding for eBay Sellers is buySAFE. The #1 Reason to become a Bonded Seller today: 95% of online buyers prefer to buy from Bonded Sellers. buySAFE also helps to promote your auctions by listing them in their online store for free.

SquareTrade has been providing buyer assurance seals and feedback removal service for eBay sellers for 5 years. Seeing the SquareTrade seal in your auctions tells eBay buyers your are a legitimate seller. If you sell electronic products, SquareTrade also offers a warranty program you can sell to your customers to earn extra income.

Contacting eBay

There are several ways to contact eBay. Of course most people try the online contact forms on the eBay.com web site, but unless you are a power seller, it can take days to get a reply and the replies are often just canned responses.

If you are a power seller, you can log into your power seller page and you will see a special contact form just for you. If you are at least a Silver-level power seller, you will also see a phone number displayed on the page that you can call.

Another way to get a phone number is if you have an eBay featured store. The number you see when you click on your Manage My Store page will take you directly to store support --but those folks can also answer most other questions and/or refer you to other people as well.

It also pays to get to know a few people who work at eBay. The best way to do this is to attend eBay Live and smooze the eBay folks. Come up with a reason to collect their business card. I have over a dozen eBay business cards including two from very top executives. I don't call them very often and when I do its for a good reason and I haven't been able to get help otherwise.

Lastly eBay does have a general phone number. It can take a while to get through all of the prompts and get someone on the line but it does work. The number is 800-322-9266. When you call them, be patient, it can take a while to get through to the correct department.

If you need to contact PayPal, their phone number is 888-215-5506 or 888-221-1161

FREE Newsletter for eBay, Amazon & Online Sellers PLUS 3 FREE eBooks instantly delivered with your Free Subscription

Please take a moment to subscribe to my newsletter. This is how I update the information in my books and keep you up to date with news about eBay.  Additionally, my newsletter, The Online Seller's News, is the largest opt-in, FREE monthly newsletter for professional eBay sellers... Our 35,000 + subscribers have relied on us for up-to-date news, tools, techniques and wholesale sources for over five years. You can subscribe in confidence --we do not sell or rent our names. 

Once you confirm your subscription, you will go immediately to a page where you can download these 3 FREE eBooks. 

• Successful Product Sourcing: How to find REAL Wholesale Products YOU can sell Online. This eBook will help you earn higher profit margins by better product sourcing.
   
• Forty-Four Wholesale Sources for Small eBay Sellers is my newest eBook.  Be sure to check out these great sources as well as the sample email to wholesalers on page four.
   
• Online Auction Photo Secrets.  This eBook will show how you can increase the number of bids your auctions get...and increase your final values ten-twenty or even thirty percent.  This book usually sells for $17, but we're giving it away as a gift to our new newsletter subscribers.

Subscribe Today - You'll get a free newsletter full of pertinent information for online sellers plus three free eBooks.  

Automation

Anything you can automate will save you time. eBay has an integrated shipping system with the USPS but frankly it is really clugey and doesn't save you that much time. I speak from experience, we used it for a couple of months. Then we switched to Endicia. This is the company I talked about in the book.

If you are truly going to be a large eBay seller, then you must automate your auction launching and management. Here are three companies who offer a short free trial to get you started:

Channel Advisor

Vendio.com

Auctiva

Channel advisor is the largest and offers the most sophisticated platform along with the largest menu of multi-channel selling venues. Vendio is used by many top power sellers and is good if you launch less than 500 auctions a month. If you are looking for Mpire --the company mentioned in the book, they have gone out of the auction management business since the book went to press.

Promoting Your Auctions

I have been a big fan of Sellers Voice for over a year now. Putting audio in your auctions is quick and easy --and it works. I have performed blind tests in my auctions both with and without audio, and audio wins every time. It easily pays for itself and anyone can learn to use it within 5 minutes. You can get a 3-week trial for just $1 by clicking here.

eBay Links

eBay makes some of their links very hard to find and their site map leaves a lot to be desired. Here are links to frequently used pages. Set up a folder called eBay Links in your Favorites List. Click on each of these links and just add them to this folder for quick access whenever you need them.

eBay Rules and Policies

Keeping up with all the rules and policies on eBay can be a challenge. You should get in the habit of checking the eBay Announcement Board at least once a week, twice is even better. If you don't the first time you will learn of a rule change is when one of your auctions is cancelled for violating it. The best way to find out about a rule or policy is to visit the eBay Help, Rules & Policies page. There you will find an overview of the rules and policies, popular FAQs and a search bar where you can enter a topic. For example if you wanted to learn about selling tobacco items, just type that into the Help Page Search Bar and it will take you to the policy on selling tobacco and tobacco-related items on eBay.

Branding and getting a professional look and feel

Templates only go so far. You will eventually will want to set up a professional-looking eBay store, and have the design match your auction templates, About Me Page and a web site if you have one. Simply the best designer (and the most cost-effective) I have found is Frooition.

Taking Great Photos

In the book I told you about the EZ Cube Photo System. It is simply the best system that allows anyone to take professional-looking photos for their eBay auctions.

You can see all of the EZ Cube models at EZauctionTools.com where they offer discount pricing on the complete line of EZ Cube light tents and complete sets. Be sure and look at the eBay Drop Off Store kit, which contains everything a consignment seller would need.

Insurance

Did you know you can save up to 60% on the cost of shipping insurance --and if fact you can even make money on insurance. For example, I personally made over $2,200 in 2005 by using the insurance services of Shipsuranc. Their rates are up to 60% lower than UPS or the Post Office. People gladly agree to pay the standard postal rates and you keep the difference. Also when you have a claim you don't have to wait as long to get paid.

Research Tools

We covered the importance of product and market research in the book. eBay has announced a new research tool, eBay Marketplace Research, listed in the table above. The other two popular services are Terapeak and HammerTap.

With either one you can find the best items to sell, find out what they are selling for, the best days and times to list them, a recommended starting price, and how much and who the competition is. If you click on this link to HammerTap you can get a special deal for my readers. It is a 2-week free trial and a $5.00 a month discount if you sign up for the service.

Other Ways To Make Money on eBay

As I pointed out in Titanium eBay, there are also ways to make money by using eBay to build a customer list that you can later market to from your web site. But you have to follow eBay's rules.

A couple of years ago a fellow named Jim Cockrum wrote a book called The Silent Sales Machine Hinding on eBay. It became a best seller --selling over 80,000 copies. Jim recently updated the book and the method of getting sales from both bidders and non-bidders still works today. I use these methods myself. Jim has also just released a new book, called Turning Auction Traffic into Cash. Both of these programs are very legitimate, used by thousands of sellers and comply with all of eBay's policies and regulations.

If you also want to learn how to sell effectively on eBay, read about The Complete eBay Marketing System. If you know how to sell on eBay and just want to learn how, what and where to buy products to sell on eBay, just click here to read about The Wholesale Buying System.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is another great way to make money on eBay without investing in inventory. Drop Shipping is a selling technique whereby you find a seller with goods they will agree to ship directly to your customer once they are paid for the goods. Here is how it works:

• You first list and sell the goods on eBay.
• When the item sells, you collect the final value plus the shipping cost from the buyer.
• Next you send the money for the lower wholesale cost (plus the shipping cost) and the buyer's shipping address To the wholesale drop shipper.
• The seller (wholesale drop shipper) then ships it direct to your customer.
• You keep the difference between your wholesale cost and what the buyer paid you.

This is a great way to sell. The only upfront investment is the few cents for eBay listing fees. This sounds easy --and it can be, but there are some caveats. The problem is finding reliable drop shipping companies. Most of the companies that advertise their services to eBay sellers are not reliable. They ship late or ship the wrong product and you get the bad feedback --or, even worse, their products are priced so high that you can't make any money. And many of the so-called Drop Shipping warehouse companies are just scams.

The best way to drop ship profitably is to deal directly with the manufacturer of a product...not a wholesale middleman. This way you are getting the lowest possible price ---and a unlike a distribution warehouse, a manufacturer a direct relationship and has fewer customers (you). This will usually assure you good service.

So how do you find these manufacturers ? The best service is a company called World Wide Brands. They are a certified eBay provider. They contact manufacturers first and ask them if they will agree to drop ship their products directly to eBay sellers. They have a group of employees who are constantly adding new products and sources. I have used them to find three different products that I can sell at very nice profits on eBay.

The final piece of advice for working with drop shippers is to look for products that will sell for over $50. You don't want to be listing dozens of low-value goods where you only make a few dollars on each auction.

WorldWide Brands offering includes access to drop shippers, light bulk wholesalers, large wholesalers and a built-in research tool that helps you determine the best products to buy before you make a commitment. My readers can get a special $20 coupon by clicking here. They also offer a complete suite of training videos and tools related to wholesale sourcing. Frankly speaking this package is a bit expensive, but I have been completely through it and it is excellent –really worth the investment.

Setting up a web site.

You can set up a pretty nice web site with some of the template companies such as CityMax or Bigstep, but if you want a really professional-looking ecommerce web site you really need some help. Hiring a web designer is expensive. If you want to do that, Anthony McMurray at Pro-Impulse Design can do it for you, but there is a middle way. I used a company called Bright Builders to build my new web site Firepit-Grills.com. Take a look at it.

I have just set up a joint-venture with BrightBuilders whereby you can get a $500 website package and 3 months of hosting for only $97.00. It's called Skip's Website Builder.

The Bright Builders platform at Skip's Website Builder is a template-based site you build yourself, but you get help. They assign a coach, a technical rep and a professional designer to take you beyond the templates. Best of all they have their own credit card processing company, or you can use PayPal's new Pro shopping cart and just have PayPal process all of your payments.

I have just set up a joint-venture with them so my readers will get special pricing. Either visit my Website Builder or give them a call at 1-888-782-2368. If you are really serious about building a large eBay and internet business, also ask them about my eBay coaching program where you can get a personal coach and mentor who used my proven methods and has been personally trained by me.

Personal Coaching

If you would like to learn about our personal coaching program, please click here. We offer a combination of online lessons, webinars, in-person workshops and telephone coaching.

Selling Information Products on eBay

Since Titanium eBay came out I have released a new product: How To Create & Sell Information Products on eBay (and the internet). I am not talking about creating crappy eBooks or money-making schemes. This is a complete course in how to make real products that people want. Take a look at the information about How To Create & Sell Information Products on eBay.

Thank you purchasing my book. I hope the book and the resources on this page and other areas of my web site help you grow a large successful eBay business.

Skip McGrath