Common Sense eCommerce

I was under the impression that Google did not index eBay auction listings. I’m not sure where I got that idea (think it might have been one of those old school SEO books) but was I wrong! I listed something on Sunday 1/28 and on Tuesday 1/30 (approximately 48 hours later), I typed in the product name as it was in the listing title and… there it was! On the first page of Google. It was in the #9 position of the organics.

It really isn’t surprising considering that eBay is an important site and Google does lots of indexing on important sites. It also explains some things. Like why we have had a Store Credits showing up on our eBay account. eBay issues Store Credits when someone comes from outside eBay and buys something for your eBay store. I have absolutely no external promotions going into my eBay store (there are some going the other way - heh).

But it was one of those “aha!” moments for me and I started to wonder how I can possibly leverage that. Is that a case for coughing up the extra 40 cents for 10 day auctions? Hmm. It did get me thinking about writing my listing titles not only for eBay users but also for Google users.

Google has a free keyword tool (link here) that you can use to see what terms and related terms it recommends for a given keyword. It’s used for Adwords ad research, but it might be useful for other purposes too.

Obviously the keyword has to be a fairly niche keyword. I don’t think you could do this with Ipod Nano or something like that. I tried this experiment with all my listings and most of them actually came up fairly high on Google - many on the first page.

So, it’s back to the drawing board on title writing!

Tags: eBay Selling, eBay Auctions, eBay Auctions in Google, eBay Listings Indexed

If you sell items on eBay, maybe you’ve seen this:

Want to increase your listing’s chances of success? Use the Revise your item option to view personalized recommendations.

This message appears on your eBay items that don’t yet have bids. Ah…success. eBay’s version of “success” is simply whether the item sells or not. I don’t think this is necessarily success. If an item costs you ten dollars and it sold for 99 cents would that be success? It would be in eBay’s book (in fact, you would get a congratulatory email that said your item sold successfully), but hardly in anyone else’s book. Ok, you couldn’t look at just one item; you would have to look at all your listings overall. But if that 99 cent thing were repeated enough times, it certainly would not be ’success’.

My idea of success on eBay has to do with profitability. Profit is the amount left over from eBay sales after the costs and expenses are taken away. There are some costs that you can directly associate with eBay listings. These are things like listing fees and PayPal fees. I have a post on my other blog where I take a look at these in more detail (link here).

There are other costs of doing business on eBay that are not directly attributable to any specific listing. These costs would be things like shipping supplies, hosting charges for your eBay store, and storage fees (if you rent storage or warehouse space to keep your eBay goods).

All that stuff has to be paid for and there should still be money left over for you. This is my idea of sustainable ’success’ on eBay. Not to be confused with eBay’s versions of ’success’. How to keep track of the dizzying array of costs associated with eBay selling? Unless you enjoy doing lots of math, you might want to use an eBay calculator like ProfitCalc (link here).

Tags: eBay Success, Real eBay Success, eBay Profits, eBay Costs, eBay Profit Calculator

If you sell on eBay, do you offer Priority Mail or Parcel Post? How about both? Priority Mail is great for speed - it’s generally faster than UPS Ground and can usually get to the other coast in 2 or 3 business days. But it costs more. Parcel Post is noticeably slower, but costs less.

You can offer both choices to your buyers and let them decide. eBay will allow up to three different domestic shipping rates for a single listing.

Many buyers love you when you send Priority Mail because it gets their item to them faster then they’re used to on eBay. But they may not necessarily want to pay the ‘premium’ for it. So just give them the choice and explain the difference in your listing; perhaps by way of an example like this one.

A 5 pound package sent from Seattle zip code 98133 to Miami zip code 33178 (two continental extremes) will be 2 business days for $12.80 with Priority Mail. It’s 7 business days for $9.94 with Parcel Post.

Buyers on eBay appreciate choices! You could even add a third choice for UPS Ground or Express Mail. Little adjustments like this can help get you more activity on your auction and BIN listings.

Tags: eBay Shipping, eBay Postal Shipping, eBay Priority Mail, eBay Parcel Post

Most of the time Google Adsense makes sense. But sometimes, it’s just so exactly relevant that it’s .. ummm…maybe too relevant? After clearing out this morning’s spam from my spam folder, what did I see? A Gmail Adsense link to a recipe for “Spam Hashbrown Bake”! Google taking things too literally or just having fun?

And the recipe looks about as unhealthy as spam itself!

  Yech! The recipe page can be found here if you’re REALLY interested.

There’s a certain internet marketer, I’ll just call him ‘Jerry’ - not his real name of course, but since this is not exactly a favorable blog post and in the interest of not getting my self into libelous hot water, I’ll just change the name.

He used to write a wonderful, fairly regular email newsletter. It was fun to read, very inspiring, uplifting and informative - diffused with humor. I used to love to get them and always saved them off to read them again and again.

Then along came success for Jerry. As far as I can tell, BIG success. And the wonderful newsletters tapered off and eventually were replaced with sales letters, fewer and fewer. Now, the only time I hear from Jerry is when he is trying to affiliate sell something. Perhaps about 3 or 4 times a year now. Most recently it was that pipeline thing.

Jerry, if you’re only going to contact me when you have a big product launch, how do you think that makes me feel about giving serious thought to that product?

Funny thing is, he used to use such metaphors as “Jedi Marketing” and the “Dark Side” in talking about doing business on the internet. Now it seems he has succumbed to the ‘dark side’ himself.

As far as I can tell, ‘Jerry’ does not maintain a blog (that would have been the logical replacement for an email newsletter). The only place I can find him in the blogosphere is as a temporary blogger in various places in relation to product launches or marketing announcements.

I suppose ‘Jerry’ is probably just too busy now to write like he used to. Jerry, if you ever decide to get back to writing the wonderful material you used to, let me know. For now however, I’ve removed myself from your email list.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Internet Marketers, Internet Marketing Business, Internet Marketing Strategies, Affiliate Internet Marketing

When you find something that sells really well on eBay and isn’t overflowing with competition, you will probably consider purchasing a large quantity of that product. This is particularly true if you’ve tested it and know a bit about how it will perform.

But how many of the items can you have going at once? eBay has often been touted as a place where you can turn inventory over easily, but this can be challenging when you selling many of the same item. eBay places a limit of 15 (I think) on the number of identical auction listings you can run at once. If you have more than 15 of something, you can consider a Dutch Auction.

One thing I’ve found out about the products we sell on eBay is that we get better results by placing fewer of them up for auction at one time. It varies depending on the item, but some items do best when there is only one auction at a time for them. Sometimes we can get away with two or three if they are spaced well apart, but in our market it seems that any more than that drives the prices down on our own auctions.

We keep our excess in the eBay store and cycle them out to auctions according to a schedule. You may have to do some testing to figure out what the right balance is for the products you’re selling. But too many auction listings at once can flood your own market and you can end up becoming your own competition!

Tags: eBay Selling, eBay Selling Tip, eBay Auction Tip, eBay Listing Strategy

Skip McGrath has a great spin on eBay’s newly tweaked “Best Offer” features (link here). He says:

Now you can actually haggle which is what I think Best Offer should be about. Once you get an offer you can accept, reject or counter it. The best option is to counter. And now the bartering begins. The buyer can accept or counter your offer. Each offer is good for 24 hours. After that you have to start again. TO be successful using Best Offer you should list your Buy It Now price a bit higher than you want to get for the item. That allows for the haggling process and lets the buyer feel like they got a deal by “talking you down.”

I agree completely with that haggling point he makes. Since this change was implemented, I have been seeing a lot more success with Best Offer than with the one-shot deal it was before. And I sense the buyers are also enjoying the feeling of getting that ‘great deal’ they seek.

If you do set up a best offer, be sure to beware of the point below which you cannot go. This should be determined well ahead of time. It should be a point that is below the Buy it Now price but still high enough that there is enough profit left over. No sense giving the stuff away!

To do this, you have to consider ALL the costs associated with your item. At my other blog, I had a post which details all the costs you might consider when trying to figure out eBay profit (link here). There is also software that does this for you (link here).

But I’m glad that eBay is still able to build some fun into their marketplace!

Tags: eBay Selling, eBay Best Offer, eBay Buy It Now, eBay Profits

I get a lot of email from internet marketers in my Gmail box. I’ve noticed that two in particular have been getting dumped into the Spam folder of Gmail. Mike Filsaime and The Blog Squad to be exact. I’ve had to instruct Gmail that these folks are not spam - I believe Gmail ‘learns’ from what you tell it. I’ll wait to see what it does next time I get email from these people.

How long or exactly when they began getting moved into the spam folder I cannot say. They were going to my inbox at one time. They might be doing something that Gmail’s spam algorithm doesn’t like. There are plenty of other internet marketers who go right to my inbox. From the perspective of an internet marketer, having their email go off into the spam folder is practically a fate worse than death! It’s kind of like “go to directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $$$”.

I may send them each a little note letting them know about this or else they may pick up my tag. If Gmail is doing this to my inbox, it’s possible that other Gmail spam filters are getting their fill of these legitimate emails as well.

Tags: Mike Filsaime, Blog Squad, Internet Marketers, Spam Filters

What happens when you get your GPS stolen from your car and then you go to shop for a new one on eBay, but see your stolen GPS up for sale? That’s what happened when Danial Rangkar (eBay ID ‘nydannysjewelry‘) tried to resell the GPS he allegedly stole (I’m supposed to use that word ‘allegedly’ in good form). One of the ‘customers’ who shopped his auction also happened to be his victim!

Well not surprisingly, nydannysjewelry is now NARU. But it’s stories like this that probably keep many buyers suspicious of making purchases on eBay. While eBay plays “Whack a Mole” with bad sellers, its reputation of being a marketplace rife with fraud continues to persist.

A lot of effort on eBay goes toward preventing certain kinds of fraud (such as intellectual property infringement and shill bidding), but what are they doing to make buyers feel good about doing business with a previously unknown seller? The seller in this story had a decent feedback rating of 179 with 2 negatives so there were no real red flags there.

Should eBay start to qualify sellers with something more than a bank account? That would certainly favor people who are actually businesses trying to do business on eBay but they might need to make some allowance for the ‘basement cleaning’ seller as well. I’m not sure the Whack-A-Mole approach will ever work in a marketplace the size of eBay.

Link to story here.

Tags: eBay Business, eBay Selling, eBay Fraud, Stolen Goods on eBay

Remember when the Open Directory Project (ODP) was the end-all for valuable inbound links? Times have certainly changed. Nowadays, they are mostly a reflection of better days. Times when directories were the search engine of choice. If you try to submit your site you get this message:

Service Temporarily Unavailable - We apologize for the inconvenience while we resolve technical problems. Please check back in a day or two.

Day or two? A forum post from 11/26/06 (link here) - as well as other things I’ve read - suggests that the problem has persisted for longer than just a few days. In fact, I first tried this last week and have tried off and on over the past few days. I would say ODP (aka DMOZ) is simply a relic of times past and may never come back.

Furthermore, there is evidence of corruption in the ranks. Remember Ana Thema? The so-called corrupt DMOZ editor who started a blog call Corrupt DMOZ Editor (link here) - which has not been posted in for nearly 10 months.  And then there was the DMOZ editor who got exposed for taking money for putting up listings (link here). Whether those two are the same I have no idea.

But the question remains as to why search engines still give credence to ODP as an important resource. Google for example, still shows a ToolBar page rank of 8 associated with it and the ToolBar page rank was recently updated as I understand. I suspect ODP should be relegated to the internet archive and just be seen as a page from the book of internet history. At the very least, it is not living up to one of its main goals:

The ODP is an Open Source inspired initiative created and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The following is a social contract that we created to reflect Netscape’s commitment to the Web community to keep the ODP a free and open resource…

ODP … is anyone home?

Tags: Open Directory Project, ODP, ODP Problems, ODP Corruption, ODP Failure, DMOZ Problems, DMOZ Corruption

I prefer to sell physical products versus selling a Service or Information Products. Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong with selling a specialized service or information products.  They’re both viable and potentially profitable ways to build a business. 

In order to start a service based business or build a business around an information product you need to have specialized expertise in one or more marketable areas.  For example, you can’t just wake up one day and say “I’m going to start a bookkeeping business from my home” without having a solid foundation and preferably some experience in keeping books. Similarly, you can’t just say “I’m going to write an e-Book on Stock Investing” without having some very specific knowledge in that field.

This is great work if you can get it.  What happens if you don’t have a reasonable level of knowledge in a marketable area for service or information products? How about selling physical products?  Apart from eBay’s contemporary issues, it is still a great place to sell because you can turn product over quickly.  With strategic, well thought-out purchases, you can often turn the product before you have to pay for it! 

I am both an eBay evangelist and an eBay critic depending on the day, the lunar cycle, and other intangible factors.  I also see eBay as a springboard to bigger and better things rather than a permanent end-all solution for a business.  So if you want to just start a business, I still think eBay offers a good vehicle for that.
Tags: eBay Business, eBay Home Business, Selling on eBay, Selling Products on eBay

I had a few spare moments this morning (yes my spare time is counted in ‘moments’ nowadays), so I decided to play the shopper and test drive eBay Express. I browsed into the Kitchen category under ‘Home & Garden’ since that is one of my favorite selling categories. I wanted to see if any of my listings would come up.

A lot of people shop by brand name - this is no secret. eBay knows this and even provides a brand name browser within eBay Express. You can activate the brand name browser by checking “more choices” under ‘Brand’. I selected “Nordic Ware” a line that we sell. I was greeted by this message:

‘We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.’

Um. So I closed my browser waited a few minutes and then tried to go back into the Home & Garden category on eBay Express. I was then greeted with that same message for the entire Home & Garden category:

‘We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.’

I then tried the Consumer Electronics category, same thing! What? No Consumer Electronics! Not sure what gives here. It’s not like eBay Express was just rolled out yesterday - it’s been online since at least mid 2006.

We don’t really get very many eBay Express orders and this gives me a clue as to why. I don’t know whether I just caught it on an off-day, but it’s not very acceptable to have a broken search and browse feature. Clearly eBay Express needs some work!

Tags: eBay Express, eBay Express Bugs, eBay Express Problems, Search eBay Express,Browse eBay Express

I read a lot of blogs and come across many that have comments disabled. Here at Common Sense eCommerce, there is comment moderation in force, which is a lot different. The comment spam is so bad that the comment moderation feature of WordPress lets me keep the blog uncluttered and makes it easy for me to let only the real comments through.

My Home Business blog over at AllBusiness does not have comments currently working because the site went through a large change and that feature is still being worked on (much to the dismay of some of the blog authors there). But that is hopefully temporary.

In my opinion, a blog without comments is not really a blog - it’s an online newsletter. Not a bad thing necessarily, an online newsletter, but unless you’re allowing commentary and open discussions, it’s so… um.. Web 1.0.

Comments are what make blogs what they are - kind of like an open discussion led by the blog author. I still read some blogs that don’t have comments because they can still have great content, but it does feel like something is missing.

And could that ’someone’ be eBay?  Some time ago, before all the cybersquatting laws came into play, I registered a domain that was a phrase with the word ‘eBay’ in it.  So far it’s just a parked domain and is not in use.

A few days ago, I got an email from someone appearing to be from eBay chastising me for registering this domain.  I won’t repost the email since it was lengthy, but it basically cited some trademark laws and told me that I should let the domain expire without using it.

The odd thing about it was that the email did not originate from eBay. In fact, I’m not sure why my anti-spam, anti-phish filter didn’t catch it.  The originating domain was another company, a legitimate company who does such trademark enforcement. But the email was signed with someone’s first name (no last name) and the title of ‘eBay Enforcement Team’.  The reply-to email address was enforcement@ebay.com.  I don’t think the email was a phish because it didn’t contain any links to sites that asked me for anything - only informational sites.

However, I am treating the email as a spam for a variety of reasons.  For one, legal notices such as that should never be conveyed via email.  For a various reasons, not the least of which are the existence of email filters, sometimes email does not get delivered and there is no real way to prove email delivery.  The method of choice for any kind of legal notice is still postal mail (certified) which will hold up in court.  I doubt if email notices like that can be considered any kind of official notice. 

Secondly, a first name signature is not very official.  It was a very common name and looked unprofessional.

Thirdly, why did this company not identify themselves as the actual company representing eBay, rather than try to pretend like they were eBay?

Is eBay just too lazy to send the notice via postal mail?  The domain in question is not private so whoever this was had access to the PO Box address associated with the domain.  It was available for them to mail me a notice.  Or is it just someone trying to strong-arm the domain away from me?

Whatever the case, I will most likely renew it when it comes due unless I get some sort of official notice coming from something that I can positively identify as eBay.  I will need to seek eBay’s approval before doing anything with the domain; this was my intention all along.

On January 3rd, eBay announced their annual fee increase. No surprise there - as mentioned in an October blog post (Link Here), eBay still has no apparent path to business growth other than raising seller fees. They can sugarcoat it all they want with talk of resetting the eBay marketplace balance and such, but that’s the way it is in 2007 just as it was in 1999. The only good news is that this time around, it’s minimal. Barring any nasty surprises as they pulled last year with the eBay store fee hike debacle, it’s an increase that we can live with.

Unless you sell in eBay motors, there are only two levels to be concerned with. The first is the insertion fee for items listed in the range of $1.00 - $9.99. They are raising that by 5 cents. Yet another reason to start your listings at 99 cents! See my earlier blog post on 99 cent listing strategies (Link Here).

The other affected level are final value fees for items in the range of $25.01 to $1,000. That is going up from 3% to 3.25%, a relatively small increase but an annoying one just the same. Hard to get around that unless you sell in extremely low end stuff or extremely high end stuff.

The complete glossed over announcement can be found on the eBay announcement page (Link Here).

Here is a challenge to you eBay: How about getting a bit creative with ways to grow your revenue? And by creative, I don’t mean thinking of different variations of raising seller fees! I can’t think of too many businesses of their size who rely on just one thing for their ‘bread and butter’. Even Google with its heavy dependence on Adwords revenue is coming up with different things to bring in more growth. Come on eBay - you can do it, I know you can!