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One key for business success using eBay is sourcing products to sell. The first questions eBay sellers should ask themselves are: “What can I sell?” and “Where can I buy?”

There are two kinds of sellers on eBay, garage sellers and business sellers. Garage sellers are people who sell products they are not going to use any more and that are usually not new. Garage sellers are not profit driven, their main objective is usually to get rid of some stuff they don’t need. They will be happy to make some money by selling something that is no longer useful to them. On the other hand, business sellers are people who will buy and sell products for profit, they consider eBay a business and need to earn profit on the products they sell.

The first key to success for business sellers is an old marketing rule, RESEARCH. The products you need to sell are products that eBay buyers will want to buy. Apart from being a massive market place, eBay offers you a cheap source of research that you can conduct without moving from your computer.

If you are a business seller, it is fundamental that you spend some time researching before you decide which products you want to sell. Follow these research guidelines:

1. Search for the categories that are most popular. The first index is the number of listings that exist under each category. In addition, you need to look at how many bids the products have.

2. Look at the ratings of the sellers who are listing products in each category and study their profiles. See how many products they are selling and how many products they have sold in the past.

3. Analyze prices. You need to become an expert in your category and you need to know at which price a product is worth buying as well as the expected final winning price of your auction.

4. Select no more than one or two categories. “Specialization” is another basic rule of marketing. It is better to become an expert on something, as this will inspire confidence and trust in your potential customers. Online marketing is all about trust.

For conducting good research, you need time and organization. There are different software programs in the market that can help you save time as well as optimize your research.

Now that you are becoming an eBay expert and have conducted a proper search, you are almost ready to start your business. Before starting to sell, you need to buy! Here are some ideas from where you can source products:

1. Write your own e-book and sell it. If you have any passion or are an expert on a subject for which you can find a niche in eBay, do not hesitate to spend some time on writing your own book. The advantage of this is that after your initial time investment, you can sell and sell copies of the book without having any additional costs. Selling information products is one of the most profitable businesses. Even if you are not an expert writer, you can find other people who can write the book for you.

2. Use drop-shipping. There are wholesalers that will sell you products and send them to the address that you tell them. The advantage of this source is that you do not need to carry inventories, so your investments are minimized. After your auction is finished, you send them your customers address and they will do all the shipping. If you decide to use this kind of source, you need to make sure that your auctions winning price can be higher than the price you will pay for the articles. At minimum you should expect to double your costs.

3. Buy from eBay. Many eBayers success comes from knowing how to buy well on eBay and sell the same products at a higher price. If you know your category very well, you can easily find opportunities that will allow you to buy and resell making profit. Again, solid research is fundamental.

4. Buy Asiatic products. If you are willing to carry some inventories, you can invest on Asiatic products and buy them for a very cheap price. You can easily start importing Asiatic products from the Internet at www.alibaba.com.

5. Sell local products. If you live in an area that produces local products which can be bought at a cheap price and shipped to other areas where people would pay more, you should take advantage of the situation.

Best wishes for your success.  If this post sparked a chord in you and helped you please leave a $1.00 tip.

Popularity: 32% [?]

EBAY is a 70 billion dollar a year industry giant. The really interesting situation is that they are dependent on entrepreneurs, like you, to make that business figure grow. In 2005, the number of people making money from working on EBAY increased by 68%. Over 724,000 million people either make a full time or a supplemental income from working EBAY. And another 1.5 million say that EBAY gives them additional income throughout the year. EBAY, Inc. 2005 offers these figures.

What is interesting is that there are many ways to get started working EBAY for an extra income. The main thing is to get a plan and work the plan. Gather up some income products from around your home, your relatives, garage sales, thrift stores, salvation army, big lots, consignment shops, etc. Invest a set amount, say $200. Make sure that you get items that are useful or entertaining and that provide a quick turn over. The way to do that is to think about your own buying habits. Would you purchase this item if you saw it advertised, does it appeal to a mass market, is it a niche product people might be willing to purchase? What you want are items that you can pick up for very little money and that you can put up on EBAY for a small price and, thereby, create an immediate cash flow. At first, you will want to return almost all your profits back into purchasing some more items to sell. You will do this until you have a comfortable amount of money invested in your business and then you will have set up your own profit stream.

To get your items ready to market what you need to do is to take a quality digital photo of the item from different angles. For smaller items, you should use a whiteboard backdrop to get the maximum amount of light with few reflections. For larger items, outside shots work well, just have the sun behind your back when taking the picture. You also need to write up a very good description of your item and do not try to hide any imperfections. Point out the usefulness and benefits as well. A description that is fair and honest will result in much better comments received in EBAY feedback. I will explain this more in a later paragraph.

You can open a starting seller’s EBAY store for just $15.95 a month and have about five pages to sell your items. You also receive a free month when you start your store, so you can get a feel for how it all works. You will have to pay EBAY for their sale fees which amount to an insertion fee and a selling fee. I will attempt to explain each in an example format.

The insertion fees differ based on the listing price, but for example, you will pay a fee of $.60 for an item listed from $10.00 to $24.99 and when that item sells, you will also pay 5.25% of the selling price. If that price is $24.99, then you would pay $1.32, so it has a cost of $1.92 to sell this item. Since you have several items to sell, you will want to know the following qualifications. The insertion fee for multiple items, dutch auctions, and fixed price items is based on the opening value of your listed items. The opening value is the starting price or fixed item price multiplied by the number of items you list. The maximum insertion price from EBAY is $4.80.

The final value fee charged by EBAY is determined by taking the multiple items or dutch auctions final value fee of the lowest successful bid item and multiplying it by the number of items sold. The final value fee charged by EBAY for a multiple value fixed price listing is calculated on per item sold, based on the final sale price of the item.

A EBAY Store is a very effective way to display your items, drive traffic to a website, or to display a couple of your best items in EBAY auctions and get people to visit your other items through your store listing on your auction websites.

After you sell an item, you will be eligible for “feedback.” This is where the buyer makes comments about your service, your responsiveness to email questions, and general comments about how it was interact with you as a seller of EBAY items. You want this to be 100% or as close as possible to it. If there is a dispute on any item, you will try to work it out and make sure that the buyer is satisfied within your own selling descriptions. You have a right to have your terms met, but you also have to satisfy the buyer as much as possible. You want return customers and you want others that will check your feedback section to be sure to find good comments about your service. This enables those who have not conducted business with you to know your track record and feel more confident that they will have a good buying experience with your company or store. Another thing that happens is that you should return the feedback to the buyers account so that they also have the good notations on their membership listing as a buyer. For instance, “buyer pays promptly, buyer is easy to deal with, buyer is welcome back to your store,” etc.

If you have any qualms about listing or do not know how to list, there are actually places you can take your EBAY items and have them do the marketing, listing, and selling for you. However, if you really want to make this a good source of income, I suggest learning to do the listings yourself and capitalize on more profits. But the key thing is to GET STARTED.

EBAY will only continue to grow as more and more people make money with them, so why not capitalize on this easy to do program. Go where the people are looking to buy…that is EBAY right now!

Popularity: 43% [?]

Many people do make good money with their eBay businesses. You can be one of those people if you take the right steps at the beginning to set up your business. You should approach an eBay business like any other. Do the necessary research first. Don’t rush into it with dreams of making a quick fortune.

Take your time and familiarize yourself with the eBay website. Take notes of the type of products you are thinking of selling - check out the competition, pricing and most of all take particular note of actual selling prices and whether the bidding was slow or fast and furious.

There are literally millions (somewhere in the region of 100 million) of eBay members, but this does not mean you are going to reach anywhere near that number. They won’t even know you exist unless you prepare your strategy first.

You’ll find that a large number of successful eBay sellers have started off as buyers. This is a good idea as you can get a feel for how the whole system works, plus you will know what buyers are looking for and what problems you are likely to encounter. Being a buyer will certainly help you become a proficient seller as you will understand the system from both sides of the fence.

Learn to be a eBay powerseller

A few things to take note of while you are learning from the buyer’s point of view:

* the customer service you received

* the accuracy of the description of the selling item

* the ease and speed of finalizing the transaction

* whether communication was good or not

* was the sales page well set out

* were delivery costs fair and reasonable

If you approach an eBay business like any other online business you will have a much better chance of making a good income. The following points should give you an idea of what you should be thinking about.

1. Decide whether you will set up an eBay Store

Whilst checking out the eBay website, you would have noticed a number of sellers have their own eBay Store. The advantages of this are many and you would be wise to check out the details of setting up your own eBay Store. Information is readily available on the eBay site.

2. Setting up your own Website

For many reasons, it is advisable to have your own independent website. Look at it as your “Head Office” with your eBay store as a subsidiary. If at some time in the future you decide to discontinue your eBay store, you will still have your business website.

Another good reason for setting up a website is that it gives you the ability to diversify your business. This can mean the difference between success and failure. It will also give you the ability to build a subscriber list that will be beneficial for both your eBay business and your own website business.

3. What Products are in high demand?

Take particular note of products that sell well and what the competition is. Also check the availability of the products as well as the cost. Armed with this information you can determine whether or not a product is a viable proposition.

4. eBay Learning Center and University

Before you think of buying tutorials on eBay trading, check out the resources provided by eBay.

The Learning Center will provide you with tutorials and guides relative to the different areas of eBay. In addition, you will find many free resources on the internet in the form of reports, tutorials and e-books. So have a good look around before paying for this type of information. Of course if you do purchase training products they will more than likely be a taxable deduction.

The eBay University runs offline and online courses covering every aspect of an eBay business. This is where you can learn tried and true methods from the experts.

Running your own eBay business can be a rewarding experience. To ensure you succeed, research your market and your product before undertaking your first Auction.

Remember you will receive queries from prospective bidders, so you must be extremely knowledgeable about your product.

Learn to be a eBay powerseller

Popularity: 15% [?]

I once was told to test, test, test every new feature that I implement. So, for the past week I’ve been toying with a new feature on two of my site. Coach Outlet, and Designer Fashions. I’ve linked a RSS Feed from two blogs. One coach outlet site and a new blog that I added to my designer fashions site, Fashion Outlet. Why do this? Well, I was having a problem updating my websites with new articles as well as coupons and sales items. I found that it took too long creating a page, formatting it, adding the material and publishing it. With blogs I only had to set up the template once. Then working with a blog editor I only had to enter the information, the title and the link and I was finished. This cut down my time to publish, and when your updating a number of sites, time is of the essence. Time is a rarity that I don’t have.

But most important I wanted to create a another means of income. My hope is that the search engines will pick up on the blogs and start listing these two sites in other areas that I would have never been able to reach with my current site and setup. I’m hoping as the blogs get larger I can double my current income. Next week I will show you how i’m piping in the rss feed to my sites.

Like the information you just read.  Want more in depth information about internet marketing?  Then sign-up to my news letter, “The Market Associate Times“.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Once again Google is taking the lead at making their search engine results the most relevant in the industry. With Google sitemaps webmasters don’t have to wait for spiders to index their sites. Google sitemap empowers the Webmaster to submit page links pertaining to sites through one sitemap page. And what’s great about this process is that when you add other pages to your site, all you need to do is add those pages to the sitemap file produced by Google. Google. Will even help you debug problems with your pages.  Now you might ask: Does this program replace Google’s normal methods of crawling the web? Google has stated that this program does not replace their normal methods of crawling the web. Sitemaps just gives Google additional information about sites that they would or may not have discovered otherwise.

Will this process increase time to index? Google has also stated that since sitemaps is a Beta program they cannot guarantee when or if URLs will be crawled or added to their index.

So how would I participate in this program? I am glad you asked this question. First, access is free, yes free. Any site owner can participate in the Google sitemaps program. Site owners with single page sites to owners with millions of ever changing pages. Now lets get into the fun part, creating a sitemap. There are a number of ways to create sitemaps using the sitemap protocol.

1. If the majority of your site is a HTML static file or your URLs can be found in your access Logs or if you have a text file that contains a list of URLs in your site, you can use the Google sitemap generator.
2. If the majority of your site is dynamic URLs and may not show up in your access logs, you can generate a list of URLs as a text file and then use the Google sitemap generator.
3. You may not be able to use the Google sitemap generator. In this case you may be able to use a third party tool to create a sitemap.
4. Create the file manually or use a script based on the sitemap protocol that extracts dynamic content as URLs and includes information such as last modified date for those URLs.

Once you sitemap is complete its time to place the file on your site. You must place the completed sitemap in the highest directory that you would like Google to crawl. Why is this so? Because Google can only accept URLs contained in your sitemap that are the same directory level or lower. If you only have access to sub directories place the sitemap at the tip most directory you have access and ensure the URLs listed in the sitemap are at that level or lower.

Now add the sitemap to your sitemap account and your all done. Its as easy as that.
Things to keep in mind

1. A sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of sitemaps.
2. If your sitemap file contains a list of other sitemaps then you should save the sitemap file as a sitemap index file and use XML format provided for that file type.
3. A sitemap file can only contain no more than 50,000 URLs. If your site ahs more than 50,000 URLs then split up the URLs into smaller sitemap files and link them together.
4. Completely specify each URLThat’s it you’re done. Enjoy the new traffic.

 Like the information you just read.  Want more in depth information about internet marketing?  Then sign-up to my news letter, “The Market Associate Times“.

Popularity: 15% [?]