eBay is running a one-day 50% off listing fees for Auction-Style listings today only. March 11, 2010. the fee sale ends at Midnight tonight. If you do this I would run a 5-day listing between 3PM – 6PM as your auctions will end on Sunday evenings which is a great time to end listings as lots of people are online on Sunday evenings.
My latest newsletter is out. I just returned from the ASD/AMD wholesale trade show in Las Vegas where I connected with over 200 new wholesale sources who will work with small eBay sellers. I listed 40 of them in the latest issue of The eBay & Online Sellers News.
The rest of them will be uploaded to the member’s area of the website where those who have purchased The Complete eBay Marketing System can get access.
The show was excellent this year. In past years a lot of wholesale vendors didn’t want to work with eBay sellers. This year they were all over me when I said I was an eBay seller. The show had fewer attendees this year which made it more pleasant –but it was busy nevertheless. And the vendors were selling. I spoke with several vendors who said business was brisk and they seemed to be upbeat about the economy improving.
I just returned from the ASD/AMD Wholesale Trade Show in Las Vegas. I found tons of new sources who will work with small online sellers and great products to sell on eBay and Amazon.
I am working on an expanded special issue of The eBay Sellers News to come out next week that will feature triple the number of wholesale sources we usually provide. So look for the new issue and if you don’t already subscribe you may want to. The eBay and Online Seller’s News is FREE. It comes out twice monthly and is the oldest and largest newsletter for professional eBay, Amazon and online sellers.
Everyone’s business is slow. Unemployment shows no signs of abating. Consumer confidence is down and everyone is being cautious. Everyone wants to sell the newest, latest hottest product –but that business is cratering. My eBay sales are off over 50% from the same time last year. We are still making money –just not as much of it.
But there is a bright spot. Used and Vintage Goods. When tough times hit, people pull back their spending overall, but they still need some things. I have been watching the markets and talking to other sellers, and the sellers of used goods are doing pretty well. I spoke with one woman who specializes in used children’s toys. Her business has doubled from this time last year. Another lady specializes in used blue jeans –same thing.
The simple truth is that people need and want to save money and they are willing to check their egos and buy used. And its not just online. When I went to the post office the other day, I drove by our local Rotary Club Thrift shop and it was crowded. Same thing when I drove to our local Costco. The Costco wasn’t that busy, but the parking lot at the nearby Value Village ( a used clothing store) was packed.
The advantage of selling used goods are many. Products are easy to find. You buy them at flea markets, thrift shops and garage and lawn sales. The markups are high. The lady who sells used baby toys routinely makes 75% margins on her sales. The lady who sell blue jeans gets most of them at local thrift shops for about a buck a pair and sells them for between $10 and $20 a pair.
The downside to this business is time. I can order a case of new kitchen knives to sell with a simple phone call and they are delivered in about a week. But when I want to find used merchandise, I have to go out and look for it, haul it home, clean and photograph everything and then ship it. And yes, time is money. But in this case I am making a lot more money. I found a 1975 vintage stereo system at a church rummage sale a few weeks ago. I bought it for $20 and sold it on eBay for $375. Now thats the kind of markups I like.
I have even started to work on a new product. It is a book called The Electronic Trader – how to buy, sell and trade on eBay, Amazon and Craigslist. I have about 3 more chapters to write and hope to have it ready for the next newsletter. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at Ten Little Known, Highly Profitable Niche Markets on eBay. All of them are about selling used products that are easy to find and even easier to sell. I have just finished updating the book for 2010.
An interesting thing happened when I opened my mailbox yesterday. There was a certified letter from a law firm in Houston Texas. I am always the optimist. After all it could be a notice that a distant Aunt had died and left me her cats and a $2 million dollar trust fund to take care of them. But certified letters from attorneys rarely contain good news.
I had to read the letter a couple of times to make sure I got it. It seems that I had written an article last year about the interesting and profitable niche of selling coupons on eBay. (Here is a link to the article).
In the article I showed a list of recent coupon sales on eBay as an example of the types of coupons that sell and what they sold for. One of them was a coupon for a large bottle of Bertolli Olive Oil that had sold on eBay for just over $12.
Well it turns out that the coupon was fake –a counterfeit. There are a lot of completely legitimate Bertolli coupons –but none of them were for a free bottle of oil. (Which is too bad as Bertolli is my favorite olive oil).
So Bertolli and the nice folks at Grupo SOS hired this law firm to get everyone who was promoting the sale to cease and desist. In my case they felt that mentioning the value of the coupons on eBay would incent others to try and reproduce and sell more of the counterfeit coupons.
I called the attorney in Houston as instructed in the letter to see what this was all about. Not knowing what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised that she was actually a very nice lady whom I enjoyed speaking with. She explained her client’s position and asked me to remove the offending line from the article. I explained my position, that I was reporting on a fact that had occurred –not promoting others to do that. In the end I made a counter offer. I said I would remove the offending passage, if Bertolli would send me a free bottle of olive oil to compensate me for the web costs. She said she would pass my request on to Bertolli.
The offending passage is now gone and I am waiting for my bottle of olive oil.
Yes, I could have objected and played hardball. Since I carry advertising liability insurance, a court proceeding wouldn’t have cost me any money. But heck –my time is more important. And the fact that Bertolli’s attorney took the time to be pleasant and reasonable, instead of belligerent, went a long way towards finding a solution. Also, the cost to remove the line from the article was not that great, so why get in a fight over something so minor?
If you blog or write newsletter articles, this points out some of the pitfalls. Even when you are working with the best of intentions, an innocent mistake can cause you problems. As things go this one was pretty minor, but that is not always the case. A couple of years ago, I inadvertently broke some arcane consumer law in a state where a company I was writing about was located and it cost my insurance company $5000 to settle the case. So you do want to be careful.
Carry Advertising Liability Insurance
Always check your facts and carry advertising liability insurance. If you blog for a hobby, you can get this protection as a rider on your homeowners insurance. If you blog for money, like those who read my book, How to Make Money Blogging From Home, then you should take out a basic business liability policy with an advertising rider. This type of policy pays attorney’s fees, court costs and even damage awards if you are sued or threatened with a lawsuit. Had this been a more serious case, I would have called my State Farm agent and he would have put me in touch with an attorney in Houston to deal with the matter.
So all’s well that ends well. But my current bottle of Bertolli Olive oil is about half-full. I hope the new one gets here before I have to buy a new one.
Our eBay Training webinar last month was a big hit. We had over 100 people register and about 90 who actually showed up. I know many of you wanted to attend but couldn’t, so we recorded it for you. The topic of this webinar was auction review. I got together with one of our coaches, Suzanne Wells, from our coaching program and we reviewed the auction listings that were sent in by readers. You can listen to the eBay coaching webinar here.
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.
Sellebrity has unveiled a mobile support application for all large-screen mobile devices. Now, all eBay Listings can be tracked across multiple eBay accounts, right from your iPhone or iPad, or any similar mobile device.
Sellebrity is a free auction analytics service for eBay sellers. It works by placing some code in your listings that tracks data such as hits, where they came from, what time of day you are getting hits, and much more. Their service also allows you to perform A/B testing. For example you could list an auction with two different titles or descriptions or starting prices and you would be able to analyze which one was working best.
The ability to analyze and understand auction data is one of the secrets of top power sellers.
Sellebrity has made a great offer to my readers. If you use this link to sign up for your free account, they will double your free data storage to six months instead of the normal three months.
Now back to the news:
“This launch is to prepare for the upcoming iPad craze,” says the Sellebrity development team. “As the global trend of access to information anywhere anytime continues, Sellebrity Mobile fits right in. Real-time analytics meets mobile flexibility. The utility simplifies the process of checking on orders by the eliminating annoying searches and multiple accounts. Sellebrity Mobile will separately track all visitors and revenue for up to 6 eBay UserId with one login. It will also track other sites you add, such as your store site or blog.”
Just like Sellebrity, the mobile interface is clean and simple. It is designed for that on-the-go seller. The iPhone version even includes a its own Spy mode, which streams pageviews and other actions LIVE as they are happening on your web site. If you get more than a few thousand visitors per day, you can sit for hours and watch people use your web site live. It’s a lot of fun and great to have that feature on the go.
Sellebrity Mobile is entirely FREE for ALL users. And, Free Usage Plan for the Sellebrity Analytics service itself has been changed to be free for anyone running fifty (50) listings or less concurrently. So, you can sell hundreds of listings per month and still use the service for free. Upgrades are available starting at 125 concurrent listings for $4.99 per month.
All future Sellebrity products will be integrated with our Mobile Apps. ”Getting started with Sellebrity today is a great way to take advantage of more best-in-class e-commerce products on the road map for 2010,” notes J. Ritenour, founder and CEO.
Want to see Sellebrity Mobile in action?
An online demonstration of Sellebrity Mobile is available on the website: Click here to visit Sellebrity and then click on the link at the top of the page that says Demonstration Site.
eBay announced a 2-day fee discount on auction-style listing fees. Any listings launched on February 9th or 10th will receive a 50% credit on listing fees.
I just finished a great new book: How To Sell Coupons on eBay and Really Make Money. I bought the book because selling coupons is one of the great niches I talk about in my book, Ten Little Known, Highly Profitable eBay Niche Markets. Basically I wanted to see if I had missed any techniques. It turns out that I hadn’t, but the author of this book, goes into quite a bit more detail.
How To Sell Coupons on eBay and Really Make Money
It is a short –but excellent read. This guide will teach you step by-step how to sell coupons and earn $500 or more a week in your spare time. With today’s rocky economy and unsteady job market, there’s never been a better time for you to earn extra cash on the world’s number one auction website!
The conventional wisdom is that you want to schedule listings to end at times and on days where the greatest number of people are on eBay. Since the Superbowl is the biggest TV event of the year, you would think that having an auction end during the Superbowl would be a dumb move. That’s what I always thought!
Since Sunday evenings are typically great times to end listings I usually do so –but not on holiday weekend or when something like the Superbowl is happening. However, last year I just spaced on it and launched my normal number of listings to end on Sunday. I was amazed when I checked my computer after the game and noticed that out of 17 listings than ended during the game, 12 of them were successful –and one of them was the subject of a bidding war and realized almost double what that product (a Starbucks Headquarters mug) usually sells for.
So this year I wondered what would happen if I did it on purpose. I have about 8 items ending today. So check back and I will update this post after the game. (BTW – I also have several items on Amazon. I will see how those do too.)
Superbowl Sunday – 9:45 PM Pacific Time
Well it didn’t work as well this year. Only 1 auction item sold on eBay during the game. However, I did sell 1 item from a fixed price listing for $289, 1 item on my website for $227 and a small sale on Amazon for $39.95. Plus there were some book buyers on the Skipmcgrath.com website. Two people bought eBooks during the game and within fifteen minutes of the game ending, another 3 eBooks were purchased.
One problem with the eBay listings is that I had only expensive items (over $200) listed that would end during the game. Maybe I will try this again next year, but put up some lower priced items.
Anyway it was an interesting experiment. Oh – and what a great game. I was rooting for New Orleans but didn’t really think they had a chance. By the end of the 1st quarter I thought the game would be in the bag for Indy by halftime. Glad I was wrong. N.O. really pulled on out. Just goes to show you that patientce and persistence pay off.
I was reading Auctionbytes today when I saw a story about the post office expanding its test of greeting card sales. This will be about as profitable as its sales of teddy bears, Christmas ornaments, mailers, scales and all of the other junk you see gathering dust and not selling in the Post Office lobby.
First of all, I don’t think the Post Office, a government agency, should be competing with local business. In our small town there is a small independent office supply store one block from the post office and a greeting card store about three blocks away. Secondly –the post office does not know anything about retail business.
How the post office loses money
Every year the post office loses money and this results in them raising rates for mail. But did you know there are two big areas where the post office loses money: Retail sales and Air Express –the overnight service that competes with FedEx and UPS. It seems that both FedEx and UPS make money, but the post office loses money operating the same service.
If you study business in college, one of the first things you learn about marketing and management is “stick to your knitting.” Losing focus and dabbling in lines of business that are outside your company’s area of specialty or expertise is one of the fastest ways to lose money –and the USPS is a prime example of this.
If the post office would stick to selling stamps and delivering mail –they may not become profitable –but they would dramatically cut their losses and postal rates would go up much more slowly. And private businesses that USPS competes with would do better –creating more private sector jobs –rather than public ones.
I have been working with a company to help me optimize my website marketing who have produced some very interesting information. One of the studies they did used Yahoo demographic information to see who is visiting my website. Take a look at the chart below:
The dotted line that runs through the bar chart represents the internet average. As you can see my readers are overwhelmingly over 35, make above average incomes and are 60/40 male. The first two don’t surprise me, but the last one does because I tend to get a lot of email from women and I know I have a high number of stay-at-home moms who buy my books. Nevertheless this is really interesting information that I can use to further target my material to my readers.
Skip McGrath
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The Complete eBay Marketing System is one of the oldest and most respected eBay training programs on the market. always updated, we are in our 8th year of publishing what has become the best-selling eBay training system.
I was recently introduced to the Internet Marketing Report Card (IM Report card). This is a wonderful free site where you can check out the reputation of any product, service or person related to making money on the internet.
I had no idea that I was reviewed there until one of my radio listeners (www.wsradio.com/skipmcgrath – 10 am every Wednesday) emailed me that I was ranked 5th in the country out of the top 25 internet marketers. You can read my review at the Skip McGrath Page on IM Report Card.
So take a look at Internet Marketing Report Card. Sign up for a free account (it only takes a minute) and post a comment. If you like any of my books you can write about them. I would love to hear your unbiased comments.
The other thing that is really neat about IM Report Card is that you can actually make money every time you rate someone or post a comment –or even when you recommend someone. You won’t get rich, but there are a few active folks who make an extra $50 to$100 a month or so for just a few minutes work each day. And you are also doing people a service when you warn them away from bad promoters or crappy internet products.
Cheers,
Skip McGrath
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Anyone who can point, click and type can set up a website with XsitePro.
Please join me on Thursday, January 14th at 5 pm Pacific Time (8 pm Eastern) 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.
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.
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The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath is the leading eBay training course on the market today. The 6 pound volume is shipped the same business day you order.
My good friend, Steve Lindhorst, author of Selling on The River has just come out with a great new eBook called Amazon – The Quick and Dirty Guide.
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.
Making money selling used books 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.
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.
The used book market on both eBay and Amazon is a great way to get started on the internet. It is low cost, low risk and has high profit potential. If you want go learn the basics, get my book: Make Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and The Internet.
Then get Steve’s book Amazon – The Quick and Dirty Guide and you will be fully armed to make money in this profitable and fun marketplace.
