• Welcome from Brian McGregor 
• Inspirational Quote of the Day
• News and Views
• Is PayPal The Best Way to Make and Take Payments on eBay?
• Don't Let Negative Feedback on eBay Get You Down
• Can eBay Help Your Business?
• 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 auction newsletter.

Today is quite a big one for me.

As hopefully you've seen, my main website www.workwinners.com has just had a makeover.

I like the design, and I hope you find it easy to read and navigate.

The second major issue is that I've launched a new product. This time it's a new diversion for me as it's not strictly to do with eBay.

What I'm finding is that many of the readers of this newsletter who are eBay sellers are not only involved with eBay, but are also trying various other ways to make extra cash on the internet .

If this is you, then you may well find this new product to be of interest.

You can see it at www.first-page-on-google.com.

However, I won't be deserting the eBay purists. You can rest assured that this newsletter will continue to be published for as long as I have breath in my body.

Mind you, I "celebrate" my 60th next month, so that breath may be running out some time soon!

Look forward to speaking with you again.

Brian
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1. eBay and the Future?

In the last newsletter, I talked about eBay's figures for the last quarter of business in 2005.

Everything was more or less fantastic. All the important numbers were up.

This week, something has appeared on the horizon which could inflict serious damage to eBay. It's related to an issue I've spoken about many times before in the newsletter - fraud on eBay.

You probably know my views on this. I believe eBay are not being responsible in the way in which they "bury their head in the sand". They claim they are merely a platform, and have no obligations regarding the validity of the item, the buyer, or the seller.

This position may be in for a severe test soon!

You can read about it in this newspaper article.


2. Am I sad or what?

I'm a big fan of the Gipsy Kings. Well, somebody has to be.....

Although I can't guarantee it, if you like latin style music, you'll probably like them.

One of the problems with the Gispy Kings is that they sing in Spanish. This makes Karaoke rather problematic!

However, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can now present a special Gipsy King Karaoke for one of their biggest hits, "Volare".

But don't bother to cough to clear your throat.....

Just turn up your speakers, click on this link, sit back and enjoy!


3. Slide over to eBay

Here's a lovely little facility you can add to your eBay auctions - and it's free to use.

Called Slide, this service automatically creates a very sexy slide show of the images on your auctions. You can include the slide show in your own auction listings and in web pages.

The results looks great.

You can see what these Slide shows look like here.

And here is where you can find out how to create a slide show of your eBay auction images.

You have to subscribe to use Slide's service but, as I said, it's totally free.


4. Another free resource

I've just finished reading an excellent report.

It's called "12 Little Known Niche eBay Markets you can Profit from Now".

The report is quite an eye-opener if you're looking for great ideas about what to sell on eBay.

At present, this report is offered at no cost, but I would anticipate the author might introduce a charge for it soon.

I thoroughly recommend you download the report today, you can get it from here.

5. eBay Features - Reduced Fee Day

If you sell on UK eBay, you may like to know that there is a reduced fee day on Thursday, 9th February, 2006. Sorry this doesn't give you too much notice!

On Thursday, you can try Gallery and Subtitle features for 1 penny each.

If you've never used these features before, this is a superb opportunity to test them out at minimal cost.

As usual there are some conditions that apply, and you can check it all out here.

The auction information site, AuctionBytes, recently conducted a survey of readers about payment methods on eBay.

The results show that sellers have some concerns with PayPal.

In no particular order, their concerns included:

• Level of PayPal fees


• Levels of customer service at PayPal


• Lack of competition


• Number of security and spoof emails


• Dissatisfaction with PayPal's dispute resolution


• PayPal accessibility issues


• A need for easy way to facilitate international payments

Despite the concerns, PayPal was still the number one form of payment accepted in eBay auctions. PayPal was followed by postal money orders and money orders, which were followed by checks.

The reason for PayPal's success may be because only a relatively small percentage, 26%, have a credit card merchant account. This may be due to the fact that PayPal now allows individuals and businesses to accept credit card payments without having to have a credit card merchant account.

With regard to the level of satisfaction with the current choice of payment services, 39% of respondents said they were satisfied with the number of payment services available, but almost 50% said that a greater choice of payment services was needed.

There was a diverse selection of secondary online payment methods. These included MoneyBookers, Ikobo, ProPay, Nochex and Ikobo.

I found the full survey results to be very interesting. They are neatly presented in bar chart form, and can be found here

Remember the student in school who complained (or even cried) because they only got a ninety-nine percent mark on an assignment or test. Meanwhile, some of us were relieved (if not ecstatic) to have merely passed.

I actually witnessed one case where the math student insisted that he was not wrong. On rechecking the test, the teacher realized the answer sheet was wrong and not the student. The student got one hundred percent correct.

Realistically, however, most of us lesser mortals can't expect to get a perfect mark or score every time.

First of all, none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes.

Secondly, unlike math, some subjects are more subjective in nature. In certain subjects, the answer to a question may not be simply right or wrong. The teacher may have more latitude in how your grades are calculated. The teacher may even (consciously or subconsciously) increase or decrease your grade based on whether they like you (or your attitude) or not.

Similarly, in business, you can't please everybody all of the time.

In eBay or other Internet auctions, you will not be able to satisfy everyone. Even if you have one hundred percent positive feedback on eBay now, eventually it must fall.

Not all of your customers will be happy with you all of the time. You might make a mistake resulting in an unhappy customer. Sometimes factors beyond your control (such as a lost shipment) may result in a negative feedback.

Occasionally, you might even get a customer who is unreasonable. If he leaves you negative feedback, sometimes all you can do is leave a negative feedback in return. This is not so much as an act of retaliation; it is more a matter of presenting your side of the story.

Sometimes, a customer has a legitimate complaint. Other times the customer has jumped the gun and hasn't given you a fair chance to resolve matters. It is even possible that your customer is a sadist who takes delight in tormenting others.

Regardless, you can make the offer to mutually agree to withdraw negative feedback from each other.

If you both agree and follow eBay's procedure, the negative feedback will be removed from both of your total scores (thus improving both feedback ratings). The negative comments themselves won't be removed by eBay but neither will your response to defend yourself.

Even if this tactic to remove negative feedback is not successful, at least you tried. Don't let your pride stand in the way of trying to make peace with the customer and reversing any negative feedback.

If the customer won't agree, at least you've told your side of the story. Let your prospective customers decide if they want to do business with you or not.

I personally like it when I see an eBay seller with a perfect feedback rating. Realistically, however, I realize that you simply can't please everyone. Even if you did everything perfectly, there are still people who are just not reasonable.

Thus, even if a seller has some negative feedback, if the overwhelming majority are pleased with him, I tend to discount the few dissidents. I suggest you do the same in evaluating others as well as yourself.

About the Author
J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc., has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twenty-five years.

To learn more about Internet auctions, visit www.yenommarketinginc.com/auctions.html

For more profitable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit www.yenommarketinginc.com

As you will know, eBay gets serious traffic. In fact, something like 2 million buyers visit eBay each day ready to make bids and purchases online.

And eBay is more than just oddities and collectibles - it is huge, huge business. In the first quarter of 2006, eBay members sold around $12.5 billion dollars worth of goods and services to over 193 million registered users.

What I find difficult to understand is why businesses of all sizes don't use eBay more as an additional channel to sell their wares.

If you own a business which doesn't use eBay, maybe you can put your eBay skills to god use. Or if you work for a company, why not offer an eBay service to your employer in return for a commission or other payment?

This doesn't mean that anyone should neglect their current marketing and sales methods and transfer everything to eBay, but it does mean that with a receptive market which is that large, there are many ways to make it work for your business or your employer's company.

If you're involved in a bricks-and-mortar business, eBay can be a great source of extra sales.

Since you're already buying wholesale for your local market, it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to offer your goods online as well. This is especially effective for locally made, unique, or specialty items.

If you can ship your items for a reasonable price to customers who can't find it anywhere else, it would be quite easy to make additional profits.

And whether you have an online OR offline business, eBay is a great place to clear out old stock, and overstocks.

The same goes for returns or damaged stock. As long as you're honest about the condition and pay attention to your customer service, you can start building a reputation in the community that will lead to more sales down the road.

No matter what kind of business you have (even if you don't have your own business yet!), with a market of 180 million eager buyers just waiting for your offer, eBay is one of the easiest ways to develop an extra revenue stream and boost your sales and profits in 2006!

For more information about how you can use eBay to start a new business or explode your sales from your existing business, go to: www.AuctionTips.com

One of the problems we all have in selling via the internet is that nobody knows who you are!

You set up a website, and expect people to flock to it to buy from you.

You create an eBay auction and expect it to be inundated with interested bidders and buyers.

If only life was like that!

Whether you create a website, an auction, or both, you have to promote!

The gift in this newsletter gives you 105 ways to promote your internet business. It's not all about promoting via the internet either. There are plenty of offline promotion ideas too!

You can download your free copy here.

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

That's what I call initiative. Probably.

Ve haf vays of making you talk!

Worth reading, including all the questions to seller!

Can you think of anyone you might put in this?

Aah! That's very sweet!

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