eBay

Are eBay and Paypal Finally Getting the Message?

So Paypal has a new president, David Marcus has been in the top job for a little over 5 months and it seems he might just be getting the message that putting holds on accounts and freezing thousands of customers balances with no good reason really isn’t very cool.

He has pledged to win back our trust with “delightful products and amazing service.”

Sounds promising David.

Whats more reports are coming in that some users that have “above standard performance” have been written to by paypal stating that next time they get a dispute their account will not be put on hold and no balances frozen.

This sounds like a beta test to me and I’m sure there are not that many users that are included in this “above standard” group but it smells like progress to me and that has to be a good thing.

If its a sign of things to come from Paypal then the new president gets a big thumbs up from me.

Not keeping other peoples money is very cool,

By the way, can I have that £120 back you have had on hold for the last three months??

Thanks!

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eBay To Ban Wholesale & Dropshipping Lists

Breaking News!
eBay have just announced that from the 1st September they will be banning the sale of all Wholesale and Dropshipping lists for the auction site.

This news comes as part of a routine clean up that eBay carry out once in a while, the have not stated the reason for this ban but I would guess that this type of material gets more than its fair share of complaints to eBay and so from time to time they remove the worst offenders.
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The issue with Dropshipping and Wholesale lists on eBay is that they are generally sold by people looking for some easy money and they are nothing more than a word document with some website addresses on, quite often they are out dated and some of the links don’t work or the sites no longer exist. There is usually nothing of any value in them and a simple Google seach would generate the same if not better results.

So in my opinion this is a good move by eBay, Wholesale and Dropshipping contacts are a very important part of creating a business online and you need to ask yourself if someone is selling a whole list of contacts for 99p or $2.49 what is the value of the information? The answer is zero!

I have built relationships with wholesale suppliers over years, and finding the right ones that are reliable and profitable takes allot of time and effort, screening the not so good ones, picking out the un reliable ones and looking for suppliers that have quality products means that a good one comes along once in every hundred and can be anywhere in the world.

My own suppliers that I have used to build many eBay and eCommerce businesses were found in the US, Europe, China, the UK and are a result of years worth of work and if I offer access to them it will not be for 99p or $2.49. All things being equal they should cost thousands as they offer the opportunity to build your own lifestyle business where you can work when you want to, from any country you want to and for as long as you want to. How much is that worth? Well the truth is that you cant put a price on it so we have to be realistic and the main reason I started Wholesale Help 5 years ago was to help people like me to build their new future and get the chance to live how they want to and not how they have to.

So I don’t offer a wholesale list, I dont have 7 pages of web pages, I have contacts from all over the world that I have worked for over 7 years to build, that I have personally tested and made money from and still do today. If you would like access to this you have to pay more than 99p or $2.49 but maybe not as much as you might think.

If you would like my personal help and my personal contacts to build your online business and create your new lifestyle then take a look at the Gold Membership here.

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Starting Your Online Business From Scratch

Is it possible to start a profitable online business with no buying budget?

The short answer is that It’s not easy but it can be done.

If you have no money what so ever to spend on starting your new eBay or eCommerce business you can still make a start with these simple tips.

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1. Have a clear out – everyone has items around the house that they no longer use, an old compact camera in a drawer, a cell phone from a previous contract. That brand new tent and camping equipment that got bought in a sale with good intentions but never used. I know plenty of people that bought an exercise bike or a rowing machine that was used every day for the first few months but eventually relegated to a glorified clothes hanger, if you’re one of those, free up the space and some funds at the same time. Sell all these items on eBay and generate as much money as you can to start your business.

2. Offer Your Services – If you can’t find much to sell around the house why not offer some gardening or window cleaning services around the local neighbourhood? Most people have the basic equipment and you don’t need any real specialist knowledge. Knock on a few doors and earn some start-up cash!

3. Make Use of Cheap Funds – You have to be careful with this step as you don’t want to get into financial difficulties as a result but if you have a credit card quite often they have very cheap balance transfer or money transfer deals for 6 – 12 months. If you have this option you can borrow the money for a set period of time and pay the money back as soon as you sell your stock, do this a few times and you can use the profits as your new capital without having to rely on your dredit card any more. As I’ve already said only do this is you have a good credit situation and you have reseached your new business throuily and you’re sure you can make some profits in your new niche. Worst case scenario is that the credit timeframe finishes and you have to sell your wholesale stock to pay off the borrowed money. If you sell it for the wholesale price you paid you can always get your money back pretty quick but you will be left with no profits.

4. Get a Part Time Job – This one may not be possible for everyone nor a popular one but if you really want to make your new business a success and you have no investment capital you have to do whatever you can to make it work. Even if you already have a job you can find some evening work for just a few months to generate enough cash to get you going, you never know you might enjoy meeting new people! You could do a shift in a local bar a few nights a week, wait tables in a restaurant, with both of these jobs you can often get quite good money when you add the tips into your wage. Deliver pizzas or other take away foods, this type of business are always looking for drivers and you can usually say how many shifts you want to work. OK it’s not glamorous but its about getting a start and its not forever so deal with it already!

5. Make Use of Your Talents – Have you ever used Fiver.com? It’s a great website where you can get anything done for $5, you can also offer your own services for $5. So take a look at the sort of things that others ore offering and think about what you’re good at and what you would be able to do for that much, it not allot of money be uf you get a few orders per day it will add up in a few months. Help people set up a blog, give a review of their website, sing happy birthday to their Grandma whatever you think you can offer just use your imagination!

So there you have it, a few ideas to get your business moving with no capital investment, obviously if you spare a few dollars it will make the process allot easier and quicker but the key is to do something, whatever it may be just do it, sitting around making excuses why you can’t is not good enough. Assess you r situation and then do something about it, the sooner you get going the sooner you can be in profit and on your way to online success.

If you have any other ideas for your own lets here them in the comments..

(Photo: Laverrue)

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eBay Traffic Techniques

In this post I want to explore some ideas about using eBay to not just drive sales but to also drive traffic to your own external website where you can then build an ongoing relationship and encourage repeat purchases.

This has to be done carefully as eBay does not permit external linking in 99% of it’s site, but it can be done quite lawfully and below is how to do just that..
Everyone is looking for a way to generate targeted website traffic at the lowest possible cost, but it seems that a whole lot of people are overlooking an awesome website marketing tool that is probably already book-marked inside their browser – eBay.

The key to accomplishing this is the eBay ‘Me’ page. The eBay Me page is sort of a profile-like page that you setup for your eBay ID. When potential customers look at your auctions, and your ID, they will see a little ‘Me’ icon graphic that links to your Me page. And it’s very important to note: your Me page can link to
your website.

Let’s see how this could work with an example. Let’s say you have a website that sells a course on how to make money using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines and you want to get traffic from
eBay to this website.

A good way to go about doing this is to create a small report on PPC Advertising that you can market on eBay. This report should contain useful information, but it should also pre-sell your main product – your PPC course on your website. Your PPC report should be something that you’re willing to give away or sell for very little, in the following example, you’ll be selling it for 99 cents.

You then need two more things: an enticing auction advertisement, and an enticing Me page that drives visitors back to your website.

You’re now ready to open your auction. The particular auction you’re going to create should be a Featured Plus auction, which means it is displayed at the top of the auction listings before the non-Featured auctions (regular auctions). You will also want the auction to be a Dutch auction, which means you can sell multiple items from the same auction. A Featured Plus auction will cost around $20.00 to post, along with about $5 – $6 of miscellaneous posting fees including the Dutch auction fee. So your cost for selling a low-cost report in this manner will typically be about $26.00.

Now, I hate to go over figures because there’s just so much that contributes to the outcome of those figures, but let me throw out some typical scenarios as I experienced them.

If your auction has an enticing title, you could very possibly get 100-300 visitors to your auction. I’ve personally seen auctions that sell home business informational products get up to 1500 visitors! Let’s say you get 150. Of that 150, about 20% will visit your website through your Me page, which works out to about 30
visits, again my experience.

Of the 150 visits to your auction, you will generate some sales for your report. If the auction copy is good, it isn’t uncommon to get 10% – 20% sales, especially at the 99 cents range, which works out to 15-30 purchases. Let’s say you generate 15% sales, which works out to 22 sales (rounding down).

Now let’s tally everything up. At the end of the auction, you’ve spent $26.00 on the auction itself. You made $22.00 on the report sales. And you generated 30 website visits. If we do the math, you came out paying about 13 cents for each website visitor ($26.00-$22.00/30 visits). Plus, you have a copy of your report in the hands of 22 hot prospects (remember your report pre-sells your website PPC course). Can it get better than that? The answer is
yes! I’ve been conservative with these figures. The fact is, you can actually make money and drive traffic to your website with some practice/tweaking.

Interesting to note, at the time of this writing, Overture was charging anywhere from $0.51 for the tenth place position and $2.55 for the number 1 place position for the “PPC” keyword. In our example, we generated 30 visits for 13 cents per visit from 1 auction. What if you had 10 or 30 of these types of auctions running?

Granted, I realize that this example may not fit everyone’s situation, but you should be able to apply it to some extent. The formula is really quite simple:

1. Sell something that pertains to your website that you can
give away or sell for very little. Information is the perfect
product.

2. Then make sure your auction (and auction title) is extremely
enticing – try to drive as much traffic to your auction as possible.

3. Then make sure your About Me page drives the visitor to your
website (maybe offer something free, like another report).

Give it a try, you may have to tweak it here or there but the formula does work, then let me know how you get on.