Hello <$firstname$>
As we get towards the end of August the beginning of the autumn school term approaches and the evenings have begun to draw in. And what does all that mean for us? It means that before long people will start spending more of their time in front of their computer screens and less going out and about.

Sales on eBay and the other online auctions will start to climb and they will continue to do so until Christmas. I hope that you are prepared to take advantage of this busy marketing period. If not you had better start preparing, after all you do not want to be left behind.

If you are serious about building your eBay business you should now be setting yourself
targets for the next 12 months. I have always found that if you have a target to aim at
you get far better results than if you just aimlessly wander forth. And besides if you don’t have
some sort of target to aim at how ill you know when you have reached it. In this issues audio tutorial I talk about how to measure your success or otherwise with online auction selling.

If you remember sometime ago I told you I was developing a drop ship operation supplying
Information and self help CDs for sale on web sites and online auctions. Well I am pleased to say that we are just about ready and at present have 47 CDs in the product range. In the coming year I want to add 3 or 4 new products each month. These will be mostly aimed at niche markets rather than the very over crowded “Internet marketing” sector. As I write this the details are due to go up on our web site next Monday. So if you are interested make a note to visit www.eclipsepublishing.com from late Monday afternoon.

Good Luck with your online selling
Bets regards
Dave

A few issues ago I told you that I had been tempted to try eBay Stores again. Originally I had a store when I first joined eBay, mainly because it was free. When they introduced a monthly charge I decided, as I do not think I had sold anything from the Store there was no point in paying for the service.

However, after talking to some American contacts that were doing great business through their stores I thought I had better have another look. Like many things about eBay their stores have good points and bad ones and in this article I will discuss these.

First of all the cost, at present I have the basic site, which costs £6 a month. I use my current store to sell a wide variety of educational, information and self help CDs. Currently I have over 100 items listed mainly using the Good Till Cancelled (GTC) feature. This means that each item is listed for 30 days and then automatically relisted. The cost for this is just 5p per item per 30 days. Even allowing for the £6 monthly fee this represents a terrific saving if you regularly list a large number of repeatable items.

Setting up a basic store is very easy, just go to the site map and click on Sellers Guide and then the Selling with eBay Shops. The whole process is surprisingly simple. You are also given the opportunity to sub divide your items into categories. When I first launched my shop I did not pay to much attention to categories and ended up placing Many of my items in a category I loosely called “Other”. This was a mistake and I am currently going through my listing re categorising many of them. I will explain why I am doing this a little further on.

Because your eBay store is effectively a web site you can direct traffic to it from any other web sites you might have. Another simple way is to add a signature block to the bottom of your e-mails telling people about your store and providing a link. Most e-mail providers have a way that you can add a signature block. All you need is a simple four or five line message.
Something like this:

Dave Bromley
Ezeeweb Solutions
For a chance to buy some of the best Self Help and Self Hypnosis CDs available
today visit my eBay Store at http://www.stores.ebay.co.uk/compactdiscworld

If you do this each e-mail you send out will contain your message.

The big drawback with an eBay store is that any store items do not appear in the eBay search engine. As many buyers use the search engine to locate items this can be a problem. I was reading an article recently in which the writer was saying that in Germany stores have been slow to kick off for this very reason. Sellers prefer paying the higher listing fee because they know that they are likely to attract more bidders. I think the same is probably true on Ebay.co.uk.

There is a way for many of us to get the best of both world, that is low listing fees and the traffic we want. Most of the CDs that I sell can be broken down into about 7 or 8 Categories, Self Help, Hypnotism, Education, History and so on. What I am doing is making sure that I have at least one of my best selling CDs from each category listed in my main auction with good keywords. I then use another free tool from eBay called the “Custom Listing Header” This is a banner that appears at the top of your main listings and not only does it cerate a link to your store but also has a search engine just for your store and a link to all your specific categories.. Providing you keep a well stocked store this should help attract plenty of visitors. This is why I think I made a mistake lumping so many items in the “Other” category. It pays to be specific.

The Store differs from eBay auctions in the fact that in the main auctions providing your list well the bidders will find you. With the store you have to go out and tell the buyers you are there. Just relying on people clicking on the little label tag link to your store will not work you need to actively promote your site. I shall be coming back to this subject in the coming months but if you have not considered an eBay store yet now might be the time.

One easy and low cost way to build an eBay store is to stock it with items that you can get on drop ship terms. Listing 100 items will only cost you £11 per month. That is a pretty cheap way to start a business. I have discussed dropshipping in details in past issues and if you need to remind yourself these are available to read at our web site at
http://www.ukauctionline.co.uk/newsletter.html

The one continual complaint that I get from subscribers can be boiled down to the fact that eBay will not speak to them. Many of us know the frustration of sending a question to them only to either receive no reply or a message from an auto responder that seems to have no relevance.

And have you ever tried to find a telephone number or address for eBay? Of course there is a way to establish communications with eBay and that is to become a Power Seller. Once you reach this elevated status, (you have to sell at least £750 a month on eBay) then you are given a method to contact the company. This could be taken to mean that eBay is only interested in the very successful (i.e. the big spenders) and the rest do not matter.

Of course if you have a near monopoly as eBay does then possibly customer service will not come up high on your list of priorities. In the UK we should know this from the days of the nationalised industries, but to be honest even many private companies are not that great. I think it may be a reflection of the times that these days we are actually surprised when we do get good customer service from anyone.

To be fair to eBay they have grown at such a phenomenal rate it is not surprising that not all there departments can keep up with their pace of growth. But now they have their new European Head Quarters opening in Dublin this would have been a good opportunity to create some sort of call centre. I recently read that an eBay spokesman said that one reason that they do not provide telephone numbers is because given the number of their registered users they would be swamped with calls. The spokesman also went onto to say that the answers to nearly all of the questions posed could be found online. With such a profit based company as eBay I am personally surprised they have not established a premium rate call centre but perhaps I should not suggest that.

In answer to the question at the top of this article I think the answer is that eBay do not consider customer service one of its major issues at present. I believe that it rates security and company growth as more important. And I think that in some ways they may be right, which would you prefer, a safe trading environment or good customer service? But even so that still beggars the question why can’t you have both? As long as profits and registrations keep rising at their current rate I can’t see any change. But who can tell what the future holds, I always remember the old adage, be nice to people on the way up and then they might be nice to you on the way down.

But I would like to know your views about eBay’s customer service and any stories you would like to tell.

The Audio Tutorial - Arbitrage

Lastest Changes from eBay

Toolbid - New Auction Site Review

Eclipse Publishing - New Dropshipping Service

Offer of the Month: The Subliminal Black Book

I was pleased to hear about the launch of a new specialist online auction site at www. toolbid.co.uk. There are more details in the extra reading section of this issue of UK Auction Line and I recommend that if you sell or buy woodworking and other equipment you go and have a look.

Don’t forget if you have not downloaded Sidney Johnsons e-book Make Your Auction Network Sell, you can have a no cost download by going to www.sitesell.com/Bright.html and click the auction master class link at the bottom left side of the web page.

Regards,
Dave