Category — Misc

Somebody’s got money in the recession and believe it or not, it’s eBay. eBay is offering a 25K prize money for the eBay seller with the best business plan. Check it out at:

http://ebay.promotionexpert.com/sellerschallenge/index.html

Deadline is August 2009, so hurry up and figure out how you will grow your business on eBay. For more info on growing your eBay business, have a look at us at aGenius Marketing. We help sellers grow everyday!

Traveling around doing a little research and looking at “make money online” -I  find a site in the news. I think, Wow, this could be good- it’s got to be the gospel, it’s in the news. Follow the link “thru” http://community2.myfoxaustin.com only to be redirected to spam affiliate income spammer site. Now I’m convinced he is good, because after all he spammed google out of a top position looking like a great news story.

So I do a little research. I see that Fox Austin has about 1700 blogs. and almost all of them are affiliate spammers. I stop and think for a few minutes, hmmm, could put my own spam( I mean link) and have it rank news too. Then .. I think again. Ok Fox Austin, you need to clean up your site! Spam Alert.

And of course Google, take a look: Those blogs  are definitely not news.

Well let’s see, Eddie over at Auctionchex tweeted this out today and it reminded me. I had forgotten.

eBay Picture Hosting will go away beginning in August, which means that if you are hosting using eBay for your images, you have to change.

Here is a breakdown for the image hosting services that we compiled.

Comparison of Image Hosting Solutions for eBay Sellers

Some of the above services come along with auction management services- some don’t. With all the fiasco of the Auctiva switch over to a paid system, and the change in eBay picture hosting, well, there is a lot going on around here.

Check out our latest creation: San Diego DUI Attorney Website. This site is sitting on a great backend that allows easy updates, changes and editing by the site owner. We are currently working with the site owner to do some good SEO (search optimization) in a very, very competitive market. Lawyers are paying as much as $35.00 per click in local markets. With the local market search volume for ONE keyword being about 4000 per month, the cost of advertising in top spots for that one keyword can range an exorbitant $4,000 per month. Couple up a few keywords in the lawyer field and a new lawyer needs a big investment in adwords to make a go of it. New Lawyers are therefore better off investing in SEO and even expensive SEO to get their sites ranked without paying the high cost of just plain advertising.

For those using WordPress blogs, a plugin called “Tweet Suite”  should post from one to the other. Here’s for trying. If you found this post on my twitter account, then you got there from a tweet suite plugin. You can find the plugin here:

http://danzarrella.com/beyond-tweetbacks-introducing-tweetsuite.html

The only small issues I have with tweetsuite is that it uses tinyurl instead of my blog url to post to twitter, and I’m not finding a way to keep this or that post from being posted to twitter. Other than that, it’s sweet!

A few people have posed the question of twitter profit. What good is twitter anyway. You go online, put up a few lines and then what? What exactly is twitter good for in the ecommerce field.

E-commerce, it’s marketing. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times. It’s about having someone know you exist so they can buy from you. With twitter the object is to get your message out with links. Let’s try a real life example.

Here are some tweets that do next to nothing:

1. I’m wondering how to promote my business.
2. I’m selling great stuff at my website so visit me.

Here are the alternatives:

1. I’m learning to promote my business, read about it on my blog at http://www.agenius-marketing.com/wp/
2. $59.99 : Thermor BIOS Wireless Weather Station For PC http://www.woot.com

The difference between these tweets are inherent in SEO (search optimization) work. First of all you need a keyword in your tweet, and a link where those who were attracted by the keyword can go to find out more. In addition, you should include daily updates on “what are you doing”  with things that are of interest to others. While some of your best friends will appreciate the warm fuzzies of saying “I’m drinking coffee” it isn’t much for those who aren’t your real friends. Perhaps a mention of a good book, or a little known idea in your field of expertise would be better. Most people do drink coffee, fruit juice, put on shoes, wear jeans, etc. So if you are doing twitter for business you’ll be better off saying things more like “The Supreme Court made a decision  to reverse the unconstitutional authority of police to search vehicles at will.” which is so much more informative for your readers giving insight and knowledge to them. The object is to give informative content and drive traffic to your website.

Not that a little birdie or two didn’t mention it, but as I travel the net today I noticed that one of the founding fathers of the Internet Merchants Association has gone wild with a new post, and a domain redirect to cancunbeachresort.com… what a shame. The post details some kind of a treasury money grubbing thing, and a disclaimer, of course.

I thought I made it abundantly clear some months ago when as Chair of the Moderation committee, that Steve was a wildcard, ah, but alas, it’s true!

I’m still waiting for the apology I’m owed by the rest of the supposedly sane folks over there but pray tell if it ever happens.

Meanwhile a visit to the Internet Sellers Group is sure to provide those without a home, a place to shout out with no strings attached. We were planning to take those down but refugees are welcome to visit and discuss the current drama.

I hate to say “I told ya so” but I told you so. Ahhhh, see you around.

ProStores has sent a note around a couple of days ago advising ProStore owners that the checkout redirect that they can now have with eBay will not be there after 2010… and the nice news is that ProStores has “chosen” not to support the requirements of checkout redirect until then so it will go away much sooner. “As of June 15, 2009, they will only allow Third-Party Checkout through vendors who have updated their checkout pages to meet specific design and functionality requirements. Among the required changes, eBay has eliminated the ability to cross-sell and up-sell items from your own Web store in the checkout flow. ”

Therefore folks, until June 15 when checkout redirect will no longer be used , unless you’re on another system (other than ProStores) who will abide by the difficult to maintain API piece that eBay is now requiring. ProStores will sign off of checkout redirect on July 15.
This tells me either eBay’s requirements are too difficult for anyone to consider, even eBay’s own ProStores platform, or that eBay doesn’t consider it an important item, (which of course they don’t since they are going to put it to bed).

This frankly means that eBay merchants who use any platform for an off-eBay store, I mean a website, will need to realize that eBay if a fantastic traffic generator and a couple of things will need to be in place to help you cross-sell from eBay.

1. a userid on eBay that matches a domain name

2. an “About me” page with links to your website

The first being of the utmost importance because we don’t know how long eBay will allow off-site linking to assist eBay sellers in saving money on fees.

If you’re an eBay seller, you might know that eBay has settled upon restricting payment methods.

Take a look at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html for the current information.

Choice words here include “Sellers aren’t allowed to:

• Ask buyers to contact them for additional payment methods
• Offer a payment method to some buyers and not to others
• Discourage buyers from using any payment method the seller specified in the listing
• Ask buyers to pay using a method not mentioned in the listing.”

The bottom line is that eBay is now restricting payment methods *in most categories* to exclude checks and money orders. Feeling a pinch of fees coming on? Yes we agree.

eBay Stores announced today that the custom designs may break under the “New” eBay look and feel for eBay Stores. Fear not! Our of hundreds of stores out there, we only have one store in the market that will likely fail under the new deal which won’t be enforced until March. Plenty of time for fixes.

Now we have some of those who have said that other companies are non-compliant, and that “thousands of stores” will break under the new system. Ouch. The reality is that even the top competitor in eBay store design  does not have more than a few hundred eBay stores out there.  So let’s all take a breath and relax. The sky is not falling. eBay is not punishing my competitors for their non-compliance, rather, they are taking the easy road to out-of-the-box thinking and watering down theirs store algorithms so that good creative design and extreme automation won’t mix. Too bad. The truth is that those non-compliant cookie-cutter designs were a brilliant idea of someone in the industry, albeit they may have technically broken the rules of eBay. Specifically the site interference rule of style sheets. * But in their defense, if only out of sheer envy, even throwing a gazillion dollars at it; won’t work. As eBay has now demonstrated those with a gazillion dollars can only seem to go so far. Ebay, who has a gazillion dollars can’t even seem to come up with a suitable backend that could handle both those who can’t figure out how to do great design, and those who do it well.

What is an eBay store anyway? Is it a cookie cutter store made for cookie cutter design or is it the property of the seller? After all, those sellers make money there and they PAY eBay for the privilege of having their stores, don’t they? Well, yes, and then it stands to reason that they should get the improved experience that THEY want out of their stores. But the truth is hard to swallow, eBay couldn’t figure out how to do it programmatically and that’s a shame. Good eBay store design will suffer.

Meanwhile, while we ARE experts at eBay and all of our stores (but one) are in compliance, and we DO play by the rules, still so much in eBay store design has outdone itself. We generally tout modified custom design for eBay stores because the truth is that the selling power is in the eBay template and not in the frilly store design. The truth is that our top clients, top 10 powersellers on eBay, don’t use full store design because it prohibits buyers from buying.

Conversion happens at the template level and not at the store level. Once they hit store they are already on the conversion trail. When companies tout their conversion rates, they have to know that this is based off of template conversion into the store and not the other way around. So what’s the reason for great eBay store design you ask? Well, for design companies it’s a no-brainer, profits.

Good eBay Store design means that it looks good, it feels good and buyers will buy unfettered by the extra barrage of ridiculous over-designing. If you are over designing your eBay store, you’re wasting your money. Go take a look at the work we’ve done for the number one seller on eBay, ACCStation, and you’ll see that it’s simple unfettered design. They clocked out their conversion rates and realized that sometimes good design is simple design. Now, I’m not saying that there is not room for improvement there after 3 years, but still, they are definitely converting or they would not be the #1 seller on eBay now would they!

Design is meant to compliment the offerings not to shout out all around it in complete design overload.

If you have aspirations to be a huge powerseller, you don’t want your eBay store to be the main source of your income anyways,  as the fees are pretty hefty. Most of the largest sellers out there opt for a standalone website.

I’ll do another post soon about eBay template design and the misnomers out there about conversions. Trust me, we know how to eBay!

* eBay rules on site interference:
http://pages.ebay.com/stores/newstore.html#o9 You might have used CSS extensively, which is against our Site Interference Policy.