Ask The Auction Guys

Here is a great new site that will send messages to many Social Sites at once. Email me if you’d like the beta code.

Here is a link to a Hard Rock Fender guitar autographed by Chris Isaak. He was really awesome at eBay Live 2008. It’s for charity and it’s only $810 so far. One day to go!

The price to enroll and become an Education Specialist trained by eBay is increasing to $169 on August 1, 2008. Renewals will increase to $69. You can still enroll at the $149 fee till the end of July. It’s a great course and is well worth taking even if you’re not going to teach classes. You can enroll at the PowerU website.

Here is a great blog post called “What Are Pings, Trackbacks, and Pingbacks?” by Michael Martine at Remarkablogger.  It really helps explain these terms and what they mean. Well worth looking at!

 

Technorati Tags: remarkablogger, michael martine, pings, trackbacks, pingbacks

Here is a video from the eBay Live Gala, where Chris Isaak performs a few songs including, I Want You To Want Me. Enjoy

June 23, 2008

eBay Stores

eBay stores are eBay’s version of an independent online webstore. An eBay store is a series of customizable pages, hosted on eBay, where you can post a special type of extended-duration, fixed price auction. In essence, you populate your store with a variety of Buy it Now products.

In some ways, an eBay store is sort of like a really elaborate MyWorld page. You have a certain level of control over its appearance and content, and you can add modules and features to it to give visitors access to your products. Listings on an eBay store have lower insertion fees and longer durations, but the Final Value Fees are quite a bit higher than the ones for a typical auction.

The Types of eBay Store

There are three different levels of eBay store, each with progressively higher monthly fees but also additional features and greater customizability. Even the basic store is not intended for amateur eBay users however; we don’t suggest signing up for an eBay store until you are making a strong number of regular sales per month. But, for users who are making a consistently high number of sales, eBay stores can significantly increase revenue.

Basic

Basic stores are the simplest to set up and use, but offer limited reporting and marketing tools. They are also relatively inexpensive, making them a good choice for hobbyists and part-timers.

Premium

A Premium store adds features for tracking your sales and gives you more advanced tools for marketing. Owners of Premium stores also have access to 24-hour-a-day technical support. These are a good choice for someone who is an established presence on eBay and is selling on eBay as a career.

Anchor

Anchor stores are meant for the most advanced, high-volume sellers. The subscription fees for having this store (before Insertion and Final Value fees) are over $3,600 a year, and many of the features are too advanced to be helpful for casual users.

More information about the three types of eBay store subscription is available here.

Store Inventory Format

Probably the single biggest reason to open an eBay store is access to the Store Inventory Format for your listings. Store Inventory Format behaves very much like Fixed Price Format; the buyer does not bid against other buyers for the item being listed, but simply agrees to purchase a certain quantity at a “Buy it Now” price. Store Inventory Format listings can also have significantly longer duration than normal listings. In fact, they can have a duration of as much as 30 days.

The Insertion Fee for Store Inventory Format doesn’t change with the quantity of items listed. That means the fee will be the same for listing a thousand of a particular item as it would be for listing one. Incidentally, Store Inventory Format cannot be used for items that have a price of less than $1.00.

Additionally, Store Inventory Format has a unique option available called GTC. GTC stands for “Good ‘Till Canceled,” meaning that GTC listings will automatically renew until the seller either cancels them. This allows you to have a particular item continuously available for sale, while paying the lowest possible Insertion Fee every month for doing so. GTC listings won’t stop auto-renewing until the quantity of items in the listing drops to zero or you cancel the listing.

Store Inventory Format does have its disadvantages, however. First and foremost, items listed for sale in an eBay store do not have the same visibility that standard auctions do. Listings that use Store Inventory Format don’t come up in an eBay search unless one of two things happen:

• The potential customer specifically searches for results in eBay Stores (most don’t)
• The search returns fewer than 30 results (very uncommon)

That means the vast majority of potential customers won’t even see listings in your store when they do a normal search, even if they are searching for exactly the product you carry. How does anyone ever sell things from their eBay store?

Getting Customers into your eBay Store

The thing to remember about Store Inventory Format is that, for the most part, it relies on getting potential customers into your store so that they can browse your products. Most of the time, successful eBay store owners do this by running a few standard auctions of their hottest items while keeping other items up for sale in their store. When potential customers are already considering bidding on those listings, they often tend to visit the seller’s eBay store to see if they can find other interesting deals.

This is where Niche Marketing fits into the equation. Successful eBay stores sell items that are related in some way, so that customers who visit the store through another listing find themselves in a place full of other things they might want to buy. This is where your potential customers will find related products that they never would have searched for on their own, because they didn’t even know about them!

Conclusion

eBay stores aren’t a benefit for every eBay seller, but they can be a powerful tool for those who are in a position to take advantage of them. Furthermore, managing an eBay store is excellent practice for managing an online business outside of eBay—many of the same procedures and techniques apply.

This information is from the weekly snippets distributed by Bright Builders. I would recommend a subscription.

The Hierarchy of Social Marketing

Use this guide to understand how to approach the new social media tools

I think one of the things that small business marketers struggle with around the entire topic of social marketing is trying to jump into the new new thing without enough analysis of what they should focus on. I happen to think this is an important, evolving and essential area of marketing for small businesses, but there’s a hierarchy to it. In other words, there is a logical progression of utilization that comes about much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Nature.

As Maslow theorized, the ultimate potential of your marketing or human self-actualization couldn’t be achieved until the most basic human psychological needs - breathing, eating, sleeping, sex were first met. (Yes, I’m about ready to compare blogging to sex.) In fact safety, love, and esteem all come before transcendence. Now, before I edge too close to the deep end here, I’m simply comparing what I think is a bit like progressing up the social marketing hierarchy.

Most small business owners should look at the following progression or hierarchy as they move deeper into social marketing tactics. So, jump in, but do it in this order and don’t move on until you have the basics of each stage down and working for you.

Blogging - the foundation of the pyramid - read blogs (Google Reader or Bloglines), comment on blogs and then blog. This is the doorway to all other social marketing - WordPress, TypePad, Blogger

RSS - aggregate and filter content around subjects and use RSS technology as a tool to help you repurpose, republish and create content - Some tools - Feedburner, Google News and mysyndicaat

Social Search - this is often ignored in this discussion but I think it’s become very important for small business owners. Directories that publish reviews from customers - good and bad. You can participate and should stimulate and manage your reputation here. Insider Pages, Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Local.com, Judy’s Book, Yelp

Social Bookmarking - tagging content to and participating in social bookmarking communities can be a great way to open up more channels to your business as well as generate extra search traffic, but it takes work - del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, Small Business Brief

Social Networking - branching out to take advantage of the numbers of potential prospects that you might find in sites like Facebook or MySpace will frustrate at least as a business tool if you don’t have many of the above needs met. These networks take time to understand and thrive on ideas and content. You’ve got to have much to share if you wish to build a business case. The good news is that industry and idea specific sites for everything from book lovers to green living are springing up every day. Here’s an enormous list of social networking sites from Mashable

Micro - I’ve lumped some of the more experimental social tools into the edge trend of micro, social, real-time communication that will likely only confuse most small business owners. The confusion is not because they can’t figure out how to make them work, it’s just not obvious why they would spend the time. I think Maslow suggested the self-actualization was a place that most might never reach and in social marketing terms Twitter, Thwirl, Plurk and FriendFeed might be some sort of sick transcendence.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Abraham Maslow

Related article - Search Engines Explained

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John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing. He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting www.ducttapemarketing.com

You may reprint this article in its entirety if you attribute the article to John Jantsch and include the information about the author above

Prior to leaving Chicago, I had the opportunity to speak with Certified Business Consultant and Education Specialist, Joyce Banbury. In lieu of eBay Live not being held in 2009 in favor of Regional events, discussion has been held on the regional events.

Joyce indicated that she had several discussions with eBay and Paypal who are supportive of the Regional Events and efforts to establish them. I have also pledged support to establish a Regional Event in PA.

Today I received an email from Joyce that stated the first Regional Event will take place in Kansas. Instead of paraphrasing the email, I have decided to include it here for broader appeal:

This is a  non profit, volunteer effort to support and celebrate the eBay Community of sellers and buyers across the USA. The sponsoring organization is YABIE Assn, a non profit grass roots group dedicated to Education, Community, Networking and Fun at regional and local areas in the USA.

Websites will go live August 1
yabie.com
kansasjubilee.com

Thanks to everyone who volunteered help and support the Kansas Jubilee eBay seller/buyer event. It is firm for October 3,4 and special fun day on the 5th. There will be two days of panels and seminars, dinner on Saturday evening with time for networking and chatting. Sunday will be an additional fun event for those who want to stick around. Four hours of bbq, history and hayrides on a 10,000 acre local working ranch set in the beautiful Saline Valley about 11 miles from Hays. Buses will be provided for those who go.

We have full support of eBay and PayPal, plus two Hall of Fame winners, expert Education Specialists and other eBay seller experts. In addition we have local assistance from our Convention and Visitors Bureau and University.

This truly shows the power of the eBay Community of sellers and buyers at its best. Combined with the power of the Education Specialist community of  instructors.

I discussed this with quite a few people at eBay Live and I don’t want anyone left out. Please email me and let me get you in the loop of participants. If you were not there but interested, email me and I will fill you in.

This is the first of what will be several regional events over the next two years.

Those of you who would like to talk about hosting events in your area, come on aboard. It’s a good sized job with a lot of rewards. This Jubilee will serve as a template and we will develop a planner for how it was accomplished.