Howdy ya'll. I signed up here 'cause I kept hearing that I can find a lot of info on this site. Been selling on eBay since 1999, had an eBay store from which I was selling craft supplies. Shut my store down the last day of April because eBay decided to set minimum prices for my goods, which just was NOT going to work for me. Apparently, they don't think you can make money selling anything for less than a buck. The concept of VOLUME seems to escape them. I suppose the $400 in fees I was paying them every month wasn't a good indicator.

I hired some free-lancer to build me a website and moved all my stuff there. After I got it done, we had to go out of state for a month due to a family illness which took up all the money I had left from my eBay sales. So when I got back, I didn't have anything to advertise with. I opened an account on OLA and put some items on there. Not much comes from that, if anything. No sales, but I have no way of knowing if people are getting to my website from the listings there. So I leave it because I figure it's cheap advertising at least.

I listed about 60 items on eBay a couple of weeks ago. Didn't sell that much, and by the time they ate up a good chunk out of my profits with all the fees from the few items I did sell, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I've still got about 30 listings going on eBay that end on Monday and they're getting no action, so now I'm thinking about quitting eBay for good and opening an account at eCrater. Don't know if that will do anything for me, but what the heck. I still want to keep my website though, so I have to figure out how I'm going to work this.

I wanted to make a link exchange on my website, but now my free-lancer has disappeared on me. He doesn't answer my e-mails, so I'm going to have to try and figure out how to do it myself. {Oh joy.} I guess I mostly just need ideas on cheap advertising. Since I shut my eBay store, sales have tanked, so I don't have much to work with. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry to hear about your situation skizzer. Been there, done that so to speak. Depending on what you sell, you might find a good alternative. Some seem to be doing very well at eCrater, I have not done well yet, but I need to put more items in my store there.

I used Newsgator for my RSS feed and button. I put it on my website myself with little problems, it is free and easy. There are many others that are similar you can check out.

As far as other AUCTION sites go, there is none at this time to Rival your addiction to feebay. I believe they thought they were the ultimate drug and many of us were feebayholics. I quit smoking and feebay the same way-COLD TURKEY. I still get an unsatiable urge for both at times, but the withdraws are getting less frequent and easier to control with each passing day.

Good Luck to you and your future!

What type of shopping cart do you have on your website. Also put a link to your website in your post so we can look at it. Also the link in your signature on the forum will be a link to your website. Which may bring you traffic.

Terry

Do you have your site in all the search engines? If not here's a good site to list them in several searches in one place http://www.submitexpress.com/list.html The big ones are google, msn, dmoz, yahoo JMO

Good luck

Glad to hear from you folks.

I'm afraid I don't know what an RSS feed is or what it's for. The store has an OSCommerce shopping cart. I can't figure out what code to put in the signature for a clickable banner, so I just put a web address in my public info. This is my website.

I submitted my site to Google. How often are you supposed to do that?

Anita,

I submit my product feed to google base ever 2 weeks. This is a forum that has a lot of help for different types of shopping carts. They may be able to help you with questions about it.

Terry

RSS Feeds are basically News Articles, Blog reports etc, that pertain to your niche. When Google Spiderbots are searching the web, they pick up on activity on the websites. The feeds (articles, etc) change daily, giving the spiders some signs of activity, thus raising your placement on search engines.

There are alot of sites that were built and just sit idle, so their placement in searches is lowered daily. When you first submit your site to Google for instance, it will place higher at first. Then as time goes by with inactivity you get lower and lower until you are finally lost in cyberspace.

Be sure to pick Blogs and Sites that update everyday at least, so your RSS Feeds will automatically update as well. If you choose a blog that the owner hasn't even looked at in a year because you like an article, is worthless to you, because the feed does not change daily. I hope that all made sense to you. Good Luck

dlrane wrote (View Post): › RSS There are alot of sites that were built and just sit idle, so their placement in searches is lowered daily. When you first submit your site to Google for instance, it will place higher at first. Then as time goes by with inactivity you get lower and lower until you are finally lost in cyberspace.

There are also product feeds that can be submitted also.

The above quote is a perfect example of why you need to keep new content on a website. I have heard a lot of people state that after a while their website drops in page rank. I keep a lot of new content on my site and my page rank 3 has remained the same for all most 2 years and has not dropped.

Skizzer wrote (View Post): › I listed about 60 items on eBay a couple of weeks ago. Didn't sell that much, and by the time they ate up a good chunk out of my profits with all the fees from the few items I did sell, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I've still got about 30 listings going on eBay that end on Monday and they're getting no action, so now I'm thinking about quitting eBay for good and opening an account at eCrater.

Hi Skizzer,

Quick FYI: Since you already have listings at Ebay, why not open an account with a site that allows you to import your auction listings directly into your storefront, so you don't have to duplicate a lot of effort by listing them twice?

At our site, our AtomicTransporter will bring all your eBay auctions over with just a few mouseclicks, and setting up your storefront is free too. I don't *think* ecrater has auction imports, but I could be wrong. Ours will even let you import your expired auctions.

Something to consider, yes?

Later,
Mike

Hi Anita! Thanks for sharing.


I've found that I am able to sell right from my blog, although I did open a store at GoDaddy.com which I am learning the ropes on. It's pretty good, but I sell information products there, such as my online appraisals and eBooks.

I think I know of a site you may be interested in, I've just found it myself, and it seems to really have something going on.

It's free to list, and you can import your eBay listings. It's called Bonanzle.com
They take their money after you make a sale. I've just started, and believe me, I know that most of the eBay wannabes, are junk. But this site really seems to have something different about it.

I've been selling on eBay about 10 years, and I don't recommend other sites lightly as I hate to see people waste their time, but it looks like Bonanzle may be a good alt. The guy that runs it is no schmo. He wrote and owns web platform Ruby on Rails. He worked on the Bonanzle site for a year and a 1/2 before he launched it.

Good Luck,
AW