• Welcome from Brian McGregor 
• Inspirational Quote of the Day
• News and Views
• How to Sell an Affiliate Product on eBay
• How Being up a Gumtree can Help
• The Perils of Bid Cancelling on eBay
• A Gift from Me to You
• Someone's auctioning what? Unusual items currently available
• Finally
• My Products Catalogue
• Back to Newsletter Archive

Hello and welcome.

A particularly warm welcome to you if you're a new subscriber. It's good to have you as part of the family taking my eBay newsletter.

One of the great things about eBay is the thriving Community section on the site. Community is one the main menu items on eBay, and it is probably never clicked by 99% of members.

I know Community doesn't sound too exciting. However, one of the items in Community is the Announcements sections. And it was in eBay Announcements that I discovered an excellent intitiative which I sincerely hope will make eBay safer for all of us. I cover more about this in the News and Views section of the newsletter.

This is all very timely......

I don't know about you, but I've received an email "from" eBay in the last few days. This tells me that I can win a prize in eBay's Grand Draw. It sounds fantastic. I can win a $40,000 GMC vehicle, one of 10 iMac G5s or one of 100 IBM ThinkPad X Series. Wow! Aren't I lucky, being given this chance?

The only slight downside is that this is a spoof email. Another example of how creative these fraudsters can be in trying to extract account information from unsuspecting eBay members.

Don't fall for it!

And look in Community to keep abreast of what eBay is implementing to prevent the fraudsters and spoofers.

Speak to you again soon.

Brian
-----

1. Important Message from eBay

My Messages initiative from eBay is launching in late June. This may be the biggest breakthrough yet in the fight against spoofing and phishing of eBay members.

If you've never heard of My Messages, you'd be advised to find out about it today. You can think of My Messages as being a private (and therefore secure) email service which operates only within eBay. You need to be signed into eBay in order to access My Messages.

eBay will use My Messages to communicate important information to members. So, your eBay invoice and any other account information will be sent to you via My Messages. In addition, eBay will also send you an email as per normal. Do you see the benefit here?

If you get an email in your inbox that looks like it is from eBay, but you're not sure, just take a look in My Messages. If the email you're concerned about isn't there, you've just received a spoof email. And you know what to do with that!

Here's the My Messages announcement - it's definitely worth reading:

My Messages Announcement on UK eBay

My Messages Announcement on USA eBay

You can read all about My Messages here


2. eBay Shows Other eCommerce Websites How to do it

According to Nielsen/NetRating, 5 of the top 10 shopping and travel destinations saw a drop in traffic in April.

The Shopping.com network had an 8% drop to 14.6 million site visits from 15.8 million a year earlier. Amazon saw the second highest loss, with a 7% decline to 31.4 million site visits from 33.9 million in April 2004. Expedia experienced a 5% decline to 16.2 million from 17 million, followed by Travelocity, down 4% to 11.7 million from 12.2 million, and Orbitz, down 3% to 11.6 million from 11.9 million.

In terms of site visits, eBay led with 49 million site visits, followed in descending order by Amazon, Expedia, Dell, the Shopping.com Network, Target, Wal-Mart Stores, Travelocity, Orbitz and Overstock.com.

And, the shopping site with the longest time per visit was eBay, with 1 hour, 59 minutes, 59 seconds. The rest were as follows:

Amazon: 19 minutes, 22 seconds
Dell: 18 minutes, 23 seconds
Travelocity: 15 minutes, 31 seconds
Expedia: 13 minutes, 41 seconds
Orbitz: 12 minutes, 13 seconds
Overstock.com: 10 minutes, 52 seconds
Wal-Mart Stores: 10 minutes, 14 seconds
Target: 9 minutes, 29 seconds
Shopping.com Network: 3 minutes, 16 seconds.

So what does this mean for you and I? Well, this confirms eBay as the biggest and most "sticky" market in which to offer our goods. In other words, eBayers will invest the time to read your auction descriptions.

So make your auctions attractive and effective, and you will get the bidders.


3. A Reader's Warning

I received an email recently from Chris, one of the newsletter readers. It is self-explanatory....

"Dear Brian

I thought I would mention how I got grossly caught out on overseas shipping charges although I expect you may have heard this before.
I mostly sell old radio components on Ebay and have been doing this World Wide for quite a while.I frequently get questions before the auction end about how much it costs to ship to various overseas countries and I have used the Royal Mail price calculator on their website without any problems to give a qoute,up to now that is.

I recently put some heavier equipment on Ebay which weighed 5Kg and qot a price to ship to Japan as surface mail at £23.00 so I quoted £25.00 and a bidder from Japan won the item and paid by Paypal.

I was somewhat taken aback when I went to the Post Office and was told it would cost £50.00 minimum.I supposed I must have made a mistake and checked in the price calculator again but it still came up with £23.00 surface mail small packet to Japan, but it appears the maximum weight for small packets is 2Kg so it is all highly and expensively misleading.

I really have no option but to pay the extra £25.00 and ship the item as I don'twant the hassle and possibly bad feedback arguing over the shipping charge with the bidder.

Anyway I thought it might be a good topic for warning others about this pitfall.

Regards
Chris"

This is a useful lesson. It seems that Royal Mail's online Postal Rate calculator isn't infallible. So, if you use it, please be careful.


4. Did you Hear About....

Two old ladies were outside their nursing home, having a drink and a  smoke, when it started to rain.

One of the ladies pulled out a condom, cut off the end, put it over her cigarette, and continued smoking.

Lady 1: "What's that?"

Lady 2: "A condom. This way my cigarette doesn't get wet."

Lady 1: "Where do you get condoms?"

Lady 2: "You can get them at any pharmacy."

The next day, Lady 1 goes to her local pharmacy and  announces to the pharmacist that she wants some condoms.

The pharmacist, somewhat embarrassed, looks at her kind of strangely (she  is, after all, over 80 years of age), and delicately asks what brand she prefers.
 
"Doesn't matter son, as long as it fits a Camel."
 
The pharmacist fainted.


5. My Mistake - Your Gain

I made a small mistake a week ago.

I received a short email in my inbox, it was only 3 to 4 lines. At the end of the email was a link which I was asked to click on. I did that, and was taken to a small website. I didn't read it too hard, and I left the website without doing anything.

I completely ignored the free software which I could have downloaded.

Something must have registered however, because I took another look at that site yesterday. And I downloaded the free software.

Am I glad I did!

When I opened the software, I realised there's nothing else like it. I'm looking forward to an extra income stream starting today.

Do you want to see the website, exactly as I saw it?

I'll show you where to go in a moment.....

But before I do, please promise me you won't make the same mistake I made.

Promise me you won't leave the website without downloading the free software!

OK?

You've nothing to lose.

This is definitely time well spent.

Here's the website which, to my shame, took me two visits to do the right thing.

Download the free software now, and prepare to be very happy with what this opens up for YOU!

If you're involved as an affiliate for any digital product, you've probably wrestled with how you can offer it for sale on eBay.

After all, eBay offers you a massive potential audience of 147 million members. And people who read about your product will likely have found it by searching, thus effectively saying they're interested in the market area in which your product resides.

The bad news, however, is that there is no easy way to market affiliate products on eBay!

Before we get into this, if you haven't heard of affiliate selling, here's a very quick description of how it works.

Fundamentally, selling an affiliate product requires that you get interested buyers to click on a special link. This link takes the person to the product owner's sales page. More importantly, the link also contains your unique affiliate code. It is this code which ensures that sales made from your introductions are recorded in your affiliate account. Finally, if your prospect purchases the product, it is the owner who handles product delivery and who also arranges to pay you your sales commission payment.

On eBay, you could easily set up an auction saying how marvellous your affiliate product is. You will certainly attract a number of people who would be interested in buying. The problem is, it's against eBay's rules to have a link in your auction page which takes your readers away to another website to make a sale.

Also, if you think about it, you don't have the affiliate product to deliver. If you recall, this is handled automatically by the product owner.

However, all is not lost. Read on ......

Here are two ways in which you can tap into the eBay market with your affiliate products.

1. The Simple System

You create an auction which explains the benefits of the affiliate product you're promoting.

But what do you offer on your auction?

You simply sell information on where to get hold of your product. And you sell these details for just one penny.

Whenever someone "buys" your information, you send them an email saying thank you for your purchase. You then explain they don't really need to send you a penny, and here is the link to the fantastic product in which they've expressed an interest.

Of course, the link is YOUR affiliate link.

By the way, in your auction description page please think of a new angle for the product. You'll find almost everybody who is an affiliate for any popular product will be using the standard sales material supplied by the product owner.

This means that you just appear to be one of many, and the standard sales pitch will be littering the internet. Your interested purchaser has probably seen some of these already, and you need to give them reasons for why they should take action on your one penny auction for the same product.

You do this by lacing your auction description with personal and credible information about the product, and you will undoubtedly get some of those prospective buyers to go with you.

Incidentally, you could find that your one penny auctions may be occasionally removed by eBay. After all, a one penny auction doesn't bring eBay very much by way of listing or final value fee.

If this happens to you, you could try system 2 below. Plus, you can also place your one penny auction on other auction sites such as Yahoo, Amazon, QXL etc

2. The Not as Simple System

With this system, you need to do a little research before you launch your eBay auction for your affiliate product.

The objective here is to create a package of items which are related to your affiliate product, and which you auction at 0.99 cents or pence.

First off, you need to create a 2 or 3 page report about your affiliate product. Ideally this should be based on your personal experience with the product. Failing that, it should be written in your own personal style. The key point is that it must include your affiliate link to the product. You can create this report in Microsoft Word - that would be fine.

The next step is to find other items for your "package", and you do this by using Google search to locate related free products.

Let's suppose you're an affiliate for an ebook which teaches how to paint and draw figures. On Google you would search for something like ["figure drawing" free].

It took me under 10 minutes to locate the following freebies:

Photographing Your Artwork (free ebook)
3D Figure Drawing Studio software (free trial)
How to Sell Your Art (free newsletter)

And there are many more you could unearth given a little more research time.

Be a little careful in your selections here - you don't want to give away something which will compete with your affiliate ebook!

Having found your items, what you now do is create an auction which offers the whole package for 99 cents or pence.

There's no way eBay can possibly object to this auction.

As you can see, all it really takes to get your affiliate product in front of eBay's massive market place is a little creativity.

I must admit, this one slipped by me.

Even though I know I must have read something about it, for some reason it didn't register with me.

In fact, it was very lucky that I even found it today.

I'm talking about gumtree.com - of course!

What?

You've never heard of it either!

Well, let's get up to date together.

In August, 2004, eBay bought a 25% stake in the popular online classified ad site, Craiglist.org. In March of this year, eBay launched their own network of classified sites around the world. Called Kijiji (which means village in Swahili),
the sites were lauched in 50 cities in 6 countries.

The idea of Kijiji is to give people a city based forum in which to meet, find information, trade ideas, offer and get employment etc.

At the same time as Craiglist was being developed, in London, gumtree.com was well underway. Having started in March 2000 as a community site, Gumtree was designed to connect people who were either planning to move, or had just arrived in London, and who needed help getting started with accommodation, employment and social opportunities. Gumtree now cover 11 cities in the UK, plus others in Europe and the Southern Hemisphere.

Gumtree looked like a great idea to me, and an ideal use for the internet.

It must have looked like a good idea to Kijiji too. They acquired gumtree.com last month.

And this brings me round full circle.

You can get to gumtree here.

If you're about to move to one of the cities which appear under the Gumtree banner, you'll find lots of useful information to help you along.

Even my own city is covered.

Although I'm not sure who in his right mind would want to move to Newcastle upon Tyne?

I came across this excellent article recently. It's by Mark O'Neill, and it covers an area of auctions which, although rarely used, can be a minefield for some unsuspecting eBayers. Here it is.....

"Being an eBay enthusiast, I try to buy many of my things on eBay. Not only am I a sucker for bargains, but I also see it as supporting fellow eBay sellers. I hate being outbid on something, but when I am outbid, I accept it, move on, and find an alternative item. But after a recent eBay experience, I have realized that finding an alternative item isn't always the best thing to do. Welcome to the murky ethical gray-area of last-minute bid cancellations.

Here's the situation. I was looking for a hard-to-get DVD, found one on eBay and bid quite a high amount on it. I was subsequently outbid and so I found a cheaper copy of the DVD on Amazon. I was congratulating myself on finding a cheaper version elsewhere when I suddenly discovered that the person that outbid me had his bid cancelled at the last minute, and I was now the highest bidder again for the eBay DVD!

Now I was facing having to pay out over $100 total for two identical DVD sets because the seller had cancelled the highest bid without bothering to inform me first. After some hasty email dialogues, my bid was subsequently cancelled by the seller, but it made me realize for the first time about the pitfalls of bid cancellations. As eBay told me later, "when you are outbid on an item, you haven't necessarily lost the auction because the higher bidders can be cancelled or suspended for any reason at any time". So in other words, it isn't really over until the auction has ended. You shouldn't go looking for another item until the auction you were outbid on has ended.

Many eBayers I keep in contact with expressed surprise when told about this issue. One eBayer who buys and sells told me, "this is the first of me knowing a bid can be cancelled. It kind of puts the bidder in an awkward spot not really knowing if they have the item or not. If they bid at the start of a 10-day auction and get outbid, imagine waiting 9 days to find out if they can look elsewhere for the item!"

Up until the final 12 hours of an auction, both the buyer and seller can alter bids. During the final 12 hours, only the seller can cancel bids. A buyer can alter a bid if they have entered a wrong amount ($999 instead of $9.99), but they MUST immediately enter a new bid right after cancelling the old one. If you cancel a bid but fail to enter a new one, eBay considers that to be backing out of the auction and you can have your eBay ID suspended for it.

The few other exceptions where you can cancel a bid include fraudulent use of your eBay ID; if you're unable to reach the seller by email or telephone; or if the seller radically changes the auction description so you no longer get what you originally bid for. You can read the ins and outs of bid retractions and file a retraction at http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bid-retract.html.

Please be aware, however, that eBay investigates all bid retractions, and people that abuse the process run the risk of being suspended. A tally of retracted bids is also displayed on your feedback page. The more bid retractions, the less attractive you look to future sellers (and buyers if you also sell things).

In reality, sellers can cancel a bid at any time for any reason. In my situation, the highest bidder got his bid cancelled for having one negative feedback last year alleging non-payment (even though the bidder strongly contested the allegation in his feedback response). So as the seller on eBay, you seem to have wide latitude in cancelling bids if you feel so inclined.

Just go to http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/cancel_bids.html, click on the link and fill in the form. But I would suggest contacting the previous bidder first to make sure they still want the item!

In my situation, I no longer wanted the item, and if I hadn't checked my "My eBay" page in time, I would have ended up with an item I no longer wanted which could have led to a nasty negative feedback.

About the author:
Mark O'Neill is originally from Scotland and now lives in Germany testing the beer and promoting Scottish-German romantic relations. Mark is self-employed as an English teacher & freelance writer and a few other ventures including trying to understand the end of the second Matrix movie and eBay mentoring with the Disabled Online Users Association. He reads a lot of books, especially history subjects, Dilbert, and lots of novels. His website is at http://www.camelotonline.net

If you're into internet marketing, you cannot have failed to notice all the hype given to the areas of blog and RSS.

Depending how far you've researched the topic, you will know of the significance being placed on blogs and RSS by many highly respected internet marketers.

If you've never heard of these topics, then it may be useful to learn something about them. I can assure you they will be appearing with more frequency within internet based activities. Some see RSS as a replacement for email, which is increasingly unusable due to the mounting volumes of spam.

As an example, you may have noticed that eBay now offers us the facility to take their Company Announcements via RSS.

The free gift this time is a superb introduction to blogs and RSS by Brandon Hogg. Brandon is one of the most knowledgeable people I've come across on these new topics.

Even if you're unfamiliar with the terms, why not make a start and see what's up?

Download "Marketing with Blogs and RSS" for free today.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties.

I think we call this theft!

OK. OK..... Why??? Who???

See if you can get to the bottom of this!

Ever wondered what Noel Edwards is doing now? Here's his latest business venture.

Very Rare? Sure is - as there can only ever be one! Good to see our education system working well!!!

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.