EBay Conference Call Class 5 More advanced EBay and EBay Stores

Setting up an eBay Store- Setting up a eBay store is one of the best things you can do if you plan on using eBay as a full time business. The eBay store is relatively easy to set up and has some great features to help you take you eBay business to the next level. The first thing you will need to do is go to www.ebay.com and click on the “stores” link in the upper left hand corner. Once you have clicked on that link you can then click on the link on the right that says, “Open a store”. Once you have selected on that it will give you some info on what options they have. EBay has 3 types of stores you can choose from. For most of you, you will want to select on the “basic” store. It is $15.95 per month. The others are more advance and therefore more expensive, so most of you will start with the basic store. It will allow you to list several items in a centralized location on eBay. You listing fees are substantial smaller using a store. Also when you have an eBay store it allows you to create an “about me” page. The about me page gives you several additional options from a marketing standpoint.

Store Referral Credit EBay’s store referral credit program is a new program eBay has put in place. The program basically will allow people to receive eBay store credit to there account every time a sell is made on his or her eBay store from a location outside of eBay. EBay will give you a 75% credit on your final Value Fees when your marketing efforts generate sales of your Stores Inventory format listings. This is a GREAT program you can take advantage of when you have an eBay store, especially for those of you that have a separate website. EBay does however have some requirements that have to be met.
• One of the requirements is the buyer must go to your store because of your promotion outside of eBay.

• Purchaser must buy off of the link to the promotion. Meaning, if someone clicks on your link and goes to your eBay store, but then closes the window, if they come back to buy something it bust be again off the link or eBay will not recognize that is came from a site out side of eBay.

• Item also must be sold in the Store inventory format. Sales of auction-style and regular Fixed Price format items will not earn Store Referral Credits, even though these items appear in your Store.
This can be a great program to further your online business using eBay’s promotion to eliminate some of the listing fee’s especially for those who have a separate website.

EBay Conference Call Class 4 Making your auction standout.
Auction management services.

This course will review what eBay and PayPal are, and then teach how to create an eBay store, which is an eCommerce website that can be optimized for search engines. An eBay store can be created in just days, whereas a regular website may take weeks or months to build. Many students have made several hundred dollars a week within a month of starting their eBay store.

Professional looking pictures: Now that you have some experience listing items for sell on eBay. Let’s talk about ways you can improve those auction so they can stand out in the crowd. There are several things that you can do to help this and one of those is taking professional looking pictures. Spend some time taking a picture especially for a higher priced item. Remember when you buy online you are basically buying the picture and description of the item. So if you have to take 3 or 4 pictures to get a good, then go ahead and do that. Also when you sell and item that is slightly used or new you may try to find a manufactures picture to use instead of your own. You can also use programs such as www.photobucket.com to help you post pictures and make sure they look good. Also for more helpful tips use the community board on eBay. Go to www.ebay.com and click on community in the upper left hand corner. Then click on workshops/discussion forums There is always updated tutorial on different things you can do to help you auctions.

Using HTML to help your page stand out: For those of you that have HTML experience, this can really help you. There are many different things you can do to a page if you are familiar with HTML. If you aren’t familiar with HTML, there are several sites out there that have HTML cheat sheets that will help you get some of the basics down. One particular site you can use is http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/HTML_Cheatsheet this is a great resource to use to start learning some basic HTML. Also you can use the book titled HTML for dummies that is a great book that will help you start learning HTML. Another one you can use is www.htmlprimer.com this site is full of tutorials on how to use and implement HTML. You can also use predesigned templates to help your site as well. A good resource to find templates is www.desacs.com some templates are free and some have a small fee but you can use those for templates if you are interested in that. Templates still give you some customization to your eBay auction and store, without you having to know HTML.

Setting up your About Me page: Setting up an about me page on eBay can be very beneficial for you. The about me page on eBay gives you the seller an opportunity to introduce yourself to potential customers. It also gives you some other marketing opportunities. The about me page on eBay is the only place eBay will allow you to have a direct link to another website. So for those of you that have another website, outside of eBay, this gives you an opportunity to link to that site, without eBay stopping it. EBay gets a ton of traffic on a daily basis and this is one way you can use that eBay traffic to help promote your website. For those that have a website when you design your eBay stores try to use similar colors and layouts that coordinate with your website.

Ebay Services and Auction management programs: EBay has a great tool you can use that is called EBay’s Turbo Lister. You can download it at http://pages.ebay.com/TURBO_LISTER/ there are several advantages to using the turbo Lister but one of the major ones is the fact that you can list and item while you are offline. You can go to that link for a complete list of features.

EBay Conference Call Class 5 More advanced EBay and EBay Stores

Setting up an eBay Store- Setting up a eBay store is one of the best things you can do if you plan on using eBay as a full time business. The eBay store is relatively easy to set up and has some great features to help you take you eBay business to the next level. The first thing you will need to do is go to www.ebay.com and click on the “stores” link in the upper left hand corner. Once you have clicked on that link you can then click on the link on the right that says, “Open a store”. Once you have selected on that it will give you some info on what options they have. EBay has 3 types of stores you can choose from. For most of you, you will want to select on the “basic” store. It is $15.95 per month. The others are more advance and therefore more expensive, so most of you will start with the basic store. It will allow you to list several items in a centralized location on eBay. You listing fees are substantial smaller using a store. Also when you have an eBay store it allows you to create an “about me” page. The about me page gives you several additional options from a marketing standpoint.

Notes for Website Design Conf call(s)

When starting a website there are several things that you need to make sure you do and do right if the site has any chance of success. Some of these things are new to most people or they don’t understand the importance of them.  So below are the several key ingredients that were discussed in our call(s)

•    Keywords.   Keywords are the very cornerstone of a website.  Before you start actually building the site you need to decide on what keyword phrases you want to use. You should focus on your top 5 phrases with each phrase being 2-4 words in length. Make sure the phrases you choose are phrase that your potential customers would actually put into a search engine to find your site.

•    Domain name.  Once you have your keywords the next step is to think about what name you want to give your site. When choosing a name, you need to make sure the name reflects what you are selling. Keep it as short as and easy to spell and easy to remember as possible. Once you have a name in mind you can register it at www.godaddy.com and or click on the link to go daddy on the prosper blog.

•    Home/Welcome Page.  This will be the first page in the site that you will put together. It is one of if not the most important page on the site.  There are two objectives with the homepage. You need to build it with customers in mind and also search engines in mind. They are the same thing and for the most part focus on different aspects of the page.
•    For customers the site needs to look good. It needs to be grammatically correct and easy to navigate
•    For Search Engines the site needs to have at least 250 words of text, with keywords repeated at least 5% of the time.
Most of the content should appear out of the way at the bottom of the page. Remember most of this text is for SEO so it should be out of the way to the customer.

•    Contact Us.     This is a credibility page, you need three components to the contact us page.
•    Email address:  Start by using an email address you have already then you can modify it from there.

•    Phone number:  I would use a number that you already have, once the site gets going and if you start getting a lot of calls you can look into getting a different number. Most people start with there cell phone

•    Physical address:  Use whatever address you currently have, either your home address, or a PO Box

•    About Us.    This is also a credibility page. Most about us pages put together by new business owners are usually done with Mission Statements. When you are new and don’t have much to say about yourself, it is best to look at other about us pages to get some ideas.

•    Policies page.  This is an important page in your site. You need to make sure you not only have a policies page, but make sure it is almost identical to your suppliers policies. These policies should include shipping policies, return polices, and any other policies your suppliers might have.

•    Categories.   The next thing that you will need to add to your site is your category page. Sometimes referred to as product pages. You need to break your products down into categories.  This will help your site be easy to navigate.

•    Products. The next step in your site is going to be loading the products. This might be one of the more time consuming things to do in the site, you can import products if you know how or can have someone help you, but for the most part you will be loading products one at a time. You will get all your product information from your supplier. You should be able to use there pictures and descriptions that can be copied right to your site. You wont be able to copy the pictures, for those of you that are new to that, you may need someone at the resource line to help you with that.

eBay Conference Call Class 2 Research and Product Selection

Product Research
One key to selling any product online or offline, one eBay or anywhere else is doing the proper research on your product ideas. When you sell on eBay there are fees associate with selling, so the better prepared you are to sell a product the better you will be. There are two good ways to research products for eBay.

www.terapeak.com This site has a free tool that you will find in the navigation bar at the top of the page. When you click on it, the program will allow you to type your product idea in the search box and it will give you some results on the item.

Completed listings. Use the completed listing sections on eBay to research product ideas. This can be done by searching for your product. Once results come up on the screen you will see an option on the lower left hand corner of the screen. The option there will be titled completed listings. From there you can search the completed listings section to get an idea on well your product idea might be selling.

Product sourcing   One of the biggest challenges when selling on eBay is finding what to sell and where to get it. There are several ways you can go about finding products. Here are a few.
•    Garage sells and Estate sells: By attending local garage sells you can find merchandise to sell. Most of the time you can get items from garage sells at a good price. Spend some time at local garage sells and keep your eyes open for quality products that you can get for a good price. Also attend estate sells for products.
•    Storage unit auctions: Storage unit auctions are another great product sourcing idea. Ads are placed in newspapers of these auctions that are typically held once a month. When someone rents a storage unit but doesn’t pay the rent, the company has the option to auction off the contents in the storage unit in order to collect the funds to pay the rent. You can attend these auctions and buy whole storage units full of products to sell on eBay.
•    Consignment: I am sure a lot of you are familiar with pawn shops. Another excellent way to product source is through consignment.  Consignment is the process of selling items for other people. When another store has the products that they are trying to sell, approach them about selling there products on eBay for a percentage of the sale. A lot of pawn shops get items in the store they may not be able to sell. Often times you can take pictures of those items and list on eBay and take percentage of the price they sell for. Research is a must before you sell anything on consignment.
•    Bulk wholesale: If you have some capital and some space, bulk wholesaling would be another great way to get products to sell. Typically when you buy items in bulk you will get a better wholesale price, therefore increasing your profit margins. Below you will find some site you can use to find bulk wholesalers.

•    Drop shipping: Finally there is drop shipping. This is probably the most preferred way to find products to sell on eBay. Drop shipping is where the supplier ships the product to your customer for you. It prevents you from having to buy any product up front and having to warehouse and ship the item. The supplier will do all that for you. It is the easiest way to sell but research is a must with this also.  It can be very challenging to find a product that has a profit margin that is being drop shipped so make sure to do research before you go to the trouble of finding a drop shipper and selling the items on eBay.

Product Referral: There are several website out there you can use to help you product source. Here are some of the best ones we know of.
Thomas Register:  www.thomasnet.com is a site you can use to find manufactures of certain products. When you get to this site you can use the search box at the top to find companies that in one way or another associated with the product you searched for. Most of these companies you will find are manufactures and require some contacting and negotiating to set up drop shipping accounts.

Wholesale match:  www.wholesalematch.com/prosper is a website that will provide suppliers for hundreds of different product for you. For a fee they will give you a list of drop shippers. They also have other services oriented benefits to there program. There fee is $49.99 per month.  Make sure you consult your coach before you sign up for this program

World wide brands:  www.worldwidebrands.com is similar to wholesale match. The biggest difference is there fee. The only option they have is to buy a lifetime member ship to them for $299.99. Other than that they are very similar to Wholesale Match. Again make sure to consult your coach before you buy this program.