The eBay Slap
57Have You Been Slapped By eBay?
You have, if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of sellers who were bringing in new leads by selling digital products on the world's largest auction site.
eBay quietly announced that effective March 31st, 2008, sellers would no longer be allowed to sell digital downloads via the auction format. The official announcement stated that only classified advertisements would be allowed to advertise digital downloads.
This is a great thing for people who are selling digital product delivery services and ecommerce solutions, since people will need to have a website set up for their customers to go when they want to buy.
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Currently services are also allowed on ebay, but who knows how long that will last.
In my opinion, eBay should have just created a separate segment for Digital Downloads and another for Services, similar to the way they did auto and real estate. They could have also separated the Feedback into what type of product the feedback came from.
But I am not the head of a multibillion dollar corporation yet... so I can say that I wouldn't do what they did, either!
I apologize for the hub disappearing for a little while... I had misread the Terms and Conditions. It appears that I thought that since the site has a link list tool, that I could put the same links that I included in the content in that link list, to make it like a bibliography... But that made my link count excessive and the hub was shut down.
I have duly noted that 2 links to any one domain is the maximum, and will make sure I avoid doing that again in future hubs...
Very good advice Michael. Keep it up.
We were selling quite good on ebay, but with all the trouble with the change over to digital sellers, and the little sellers being forgotten about we decided to look around for other places to sell, we did come across a few sites, but the one we stuck with is Wight Auction @ http://www.wightauction.co.uk/ and its free, so that was a bonus, we imported our ebay profile to the site, contacted the admin who then gave us a years free premium listings which was a nice bonus.
Thanks for the Hub
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Making Lemonade Out Of eBay's Lemons...
Here are two strategies to turn these lemons into a pitcher of ice cold lemonade!
- Use eBay's classified ads for roughly $10 per month and get unlimited traffic from the worlds biggest online supermarket. You will need to keyword target each of your classified ads, however, so that you will show up in the results for the auctions you are targeting. You then set up an ecommerce site using Wordpress or Rapid Action Profits so that when people are directed to your site from the auction they can buy immediately.
- You can create a CD or DVD with your software, ebook or collection of mp3's and use a drop shipping company to do the fulfillment for literally a couple dollars per CD (which you can make back on the shipping). This strategy is awesome because you also get the customer's physical address, so that you can easily drop them a post card just in time for a new product promotion or just to get them back to your website.
With these 2 methods, you can have your profits back up in no time at all and you can slap eBay back!
eBay related links
- Sign up for your eBay store!
eBay Stores are a great place to keep your inventory of products right in front of your customers. You can even get up to 75% of your final value fees credited back to you when you drive traffic to your store!
Promoting Your Products Without eBay
A New Hope
With the advent of Jeff Dedrick's Viral Ebook Explosion, you now have a source of viral ebooks that you can load up onto a CD and sell for pennies plus shipping on eBay and use the Kunaki Cart above for delivery!
With the tools at work in Viral Ebook Explosion, you have the ability to create some real revenue quickly!
Want to take a virual tour of Viral Ebook Explosion? Click Here to download it!
dafla says:
2 years ago
Guess they're just trying to get back to what they were originally intended to be, a marketplace for actual physical products. I see a lot of changes going on with eBay that seem to me to be an attempt to make it into something better, although many people are not happy with it. Some changes will hurt, but this one, I think will really help.
They need not to let people sell services either, but not being an eBayer, I don't know if they do now.