• 17Sep

    Inflating Shipping Prices

    No Comments

    Postal Gouging, as it is known is done to keep the listing price of the good as low as possible while making the real money in the shipping.

    Ebay’s policy is pretty clear on this and basically states that sellers may charge the actual shipping price (inc insurance, tax, etc) and at the sellers discretion a nominal handling fee to compensate for packaging, tape etc.

    An example listed on the policy page:

    • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (2001, DVD) BIN: US $1

      Shipping: US $11 First Class USPS

      Explanation: The actual cost to ship this DVD would be less than $3 using First Class Mail stated in the listing. This seller is charging all costs for this item in the shipping price thus hiding the “true” cost for this item from buyers.

    Although this example is clearly against their terms, I can see grey areas that sellers could half-legitimately operate in. For instance listing a low priced item usually listed at $2 at $0.001 BIN, and then charging a $2 handling fee on top of the $2 shipping fee.

    As I see it, the difference between the handling fee and the listing price shouldn’t raise alarm bells, but shipping or handling charges more then about $2 over actual cost should be avoided.

  • 17Sep

    Get Your Site to the Top of Google

    , No Comments

    I’m an auction seller, but primarily a webmaster, so heres a few tips to help you get free search engine traffic.

    Decide on what keywords you want to target, using Overture, you want to target terms that have a high search volume, but not so much competition. Once you’ve found a few words that suite your niche, search for them in Google and have a look at the first few sites. You want be specifically looking at their title (the words in the blue bar up the top), and their page rank.

    Ignore the millions of other pages Google found, you can easily beat them, its the top ones you have to worry about.

    If their title is exactly the same as the keywords you want to target, they’ll be your direct competition. If their PR is any higher then 5 your going to struggle, the lower the better. PR is indirectly responsible for Google positioning. It is a measure of the quantity and quality (as measured by PR), of the links that point to that site.

    Use Yahoo and type  linkdomain:www.theirsite.com -site:www.theirsite.com to find all the sites linking to them. If you think you can beat this then you have a good chance of ranking above them.

    Link building is hard and time consuming, some strategies can be found here, but above all a quality site will naturally get incoming links.
    Onpage optimization: Create your homepage title to match your keywords, if your targeting more then one phrase use the | key (shift + key above enter), so it will look like this; keyword phrase1 | keyword phrase2 | keyword phrase3. I wouldn’t recommend going after any more then 3.

    Within your text on your page you want to make sure you’ve got your keywords - a ‘density’ of about 5% of the words of your page should be your keywords.

    You can repeat these step for every page on your site, though its easiest to get links to the homepage. The age of your site is also a factor so you may have to wait up to 9 months to see your site in Google, though MSN and Yahoo are more forgiving.

  • 17Sep

    Wal-Mart Sued For Selling Fakes

    No Comments

    Ok, this story is old news but in case you missed it:

    LVMH, owner of the Fendi brand sued Wal-Mart in June for selling fake Fendi handbags, wallets and key chains in Wal-Mart owned Sam’s Club stores.

    “The company cited one example of a Sam’s Club store in Las Vegas selling one of its handbags for $295.03 (£160) compared with the recommended retail price of $925.” read more.

    A fake Louis Vuitton handbag on sale in Beijing Silk Street market

    Although mums and dads selling fakes is a widespread problem on ebay, it also goes on relatively unnoticed in shops and now apparently, in corporations.

    One Tool I use to question if the supplier I’m working with is legitimite is Rip Off Report.

    If your supplier has been in business long enough to rack up some complaints, you can generally find them on there.

   Next Entries »