28Sep
Strong competition from Chinese rivals have led eBay to consider selling it’s China arm.
“The 21st Century Business Herald reported that Hong Kong-listed Tom Group would announce its takeover of eBay’s China division and its PayPal service within a few days, citing a well-informed source. An agreement between the two companies had already been signed, it said.” Source
eBay China’s office (photo: crienglish.com)
It seems eBay is struggling to compete against Taobao, the leading Chinese auction site, which has no fees. Taobao’s market share in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou was 67.3% last year compared with eBays dwindling 29.1%.
eBay declined to comment, but if the rumors are true expect to see an announcement within a week.
27Sep
Young Jack Neal mananged to purchase the pink Nissan Figaro after his mother left the computer logged on to eBay.
“Luckily [the dealer] saw the funny side and said he would re-advertize” Neal’s mother said.
22Sep
Online selling isn’t what is used to be. To be successful nowadays, you either need a large budget or a small niche.
There are a few online research tools to help make your job of finding a niche easier.
The Market Research Wizard: This will cut your search time down significantly. You also get pretty stats like this:
Overture: You can use Yahoo’s data of monthly search terms to find out what people really want to buy online.
Above all, I recommend finding a product or industry you are familiar with. This will allow you to understand your customers better so you can tailor your auctions to their needs.
20Sep
A new survey conducted by AuctionBytes has shown only 33% of eBay sellers grossing over $100,000/year plan to be selling there in 6 months.
Fee’s ranked highest among respondents concerns, followed by fraud, non paying buyers, payment services, then inventory and product sourcing issues.
The survey polled 1225 respondents between September 3 and September 13. Check it out here, and have a look at Chart 1.
18Sep
Why is every idiot and his dog constantly posting all over the place trying to get wholesale iPOD’s at 1/2 or 2/3rds off retail with minimum order of 5!
Forget it. Big brand consumer electronics suppliers and wholesalers operate on very small margins (usually between 1 and 10%). Dell, the king of cost cutting has a profit margin of 6.3%.
If you can find brand name consumer electronics that will let you have them for a decent margin and a low order you can bet their doing something similar to the iPOD scam.
Your only hope is to find generic brand usually Chinese manufactured consumer electronics, which may allow you a decent margin.
18Sep
At the time of writing, this information is consistent with eBays policies.
You may:
* Provide a contact email on your listing page, this can only be used to discuss the listing and cannot be used as a way to circumvent the auction process. Smart buyers will realize that there’s probably a website of yours attached to that email so this can generate traffic.
* Link to a page which further describes the product. The primary purpose of this link must be further describe it, meaning you cannot give the user the option to buy it on that page, but eBay says
“That page may contain links to pages which do contain items not listed on eBay.”
Remember, the primary purpose of the further description page must be to further describe the product, so keep the links to other pages discreet.
* Use your further description page to highlight your other eBay auctions.
* If you own your images, watermark them with your website address.
18Sep
Navigating your way through the myriad of alleged wholesaler’s and dropshippers can be difficult. The first thing to watch out for is a scam which you can usually prevent by doing a search here.
The second trap is the middleman. Buying low and selling higher in lower quantities, he passes himself off as a legitimate wholesaler.
There are a couple of things you can look out for to unmask him:
1. How low is the MOQ (minimum order quantity). Generally, genuine wholesalers will require around a $500 minimum order or more. A typical middleman may have $100, $70 or even none.
2. What’s the going rate on Ebay. If the prices he’s offering are around the same or higher then on Ebay thats a dead giveaway.
Middlemen wholesalers and dropshippers will spend a lot of time SEO’ing (search engine optimizing) their site, which will mean a search will usually place them up the top. So you might have to dig a little deeper, use the advanced search feature so you can display 100 results at a time.
17Sep
The success of the iPOD has led many manufacturers to copy the design. Some have merely imitated the iPOD style, branding it under their own brand, but others have directly copied the packaging and the iPOD itself trying to pass it off as genuine.
Heres a post that will help you identify the fakes, Faketalk
You can also source legal, ‘iPOD style’ mp3 players from my site The Wholesale-Hub.
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