How being a Trading Assistant Can help Your eBay Store Sales..

A Trading Assistant is the term eBay uses to describe people that sell for others on a commission basis. How could this make sense for you? Well first it is a source of income for which you do not have to come up with money for inventory. Next , the items you list to auction for you clients you are selling for will promote your own store items for free! The clients pay the costs of auctioning their items, but any items out on auction promote your store items! So you get some free promotion. Also some slower moving client items can be put in your eBay store where you can charge more than eBay charges you! (rent). Lots of good ways to make money in the trading assistant program. We will be writing more about this in coming posts.

I am a Trading Assistant - I can sell items for you!

Grow your eBay Store Squidoo Lens hits #1 In Business #2 overall!!!!

Big news to report tonight! Our Squidoo lens located here

http://www.squidoo.com/growyourebaystoresales

Has soared to the #1 position in the Business category! It is also an astounding #2 overall out of over 90,000 lenses! Squidoo is like a socially rated website content area. I could not have moved up without the help of many great eBay store sellers. Plus who doesnt want to make money on eBay these days?

In any case I am really excited about it and hope that if there are any Squidooers out there they can stop by and say hello on my lens and vote for me! I will keep providing the very best eBay information !

Marty

Train & Railroad Collectibles/ Items are always good to sell on eBay!

One theme that seems to never go out of style is peoples love of Trains! There are so many train and railway collectors out there! . People collect everything! From model trains to the real trains themselves! They collect bells from train stations, read books on trains, kids read books on trains, and almost everything with a train them is usually better than something without it! After selling out of nearly every train related item we had in our first year of selling we finally have a few more listed. Just to give you an idea of the variety of items . We have train belt buckles and books listed now so Ill post a few pictures -Marty

Huge Star Trek LOT /Outer Limits - What to do about titles for Cool Auctions

Well we have a cool auction running. Its for a huge lot of Star Trek Spaceships and a few other items.

Recently we had some Outer Limit cards with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner episodes so we decided to toss in a few cards into the lot. Thus we were able to use the following keywords in the title

Star Trek

Huge Lot

Outer Limits

Klingon

Borg

Having multiple reasons a searcher can find your item always helps. This should be an interesting auction! Star Trek items were very popular in the early days of eBay, and the best items will always get some good prices. However , in years since those days Star Wars has been more popular at times and represents one of the biggest markets on eBay. Some support for Star Trek items can be found in Japan where great collectors just cannot get enough items!

-Marty

Using your Squidoo Lens to Earn Ebay Affiliate Dollars & Increase Your Sales

On Ebay, I post often to a discussion board where other store owner (Sellers) gather. I just posted this information which I felt was important enough to add to the blog here.. I invite all comments and or ideas on this.

A week or so ago (its hard to remember as during tax time I lose track of time) I mentioned that eBay had opened up the affiliate end to eBay sellers. What this means if you can make money driving business to your own listings AND if someone signs up for an account to buy one of your items. Have you noticed the big announcement? Of course not! It came out but not everyone got the "memo". In any case there are many affiliates out there making lots of money bringing people to eBay listings to bid, buy and sign up for accounts but now its your turn.Ok so basically people set up these websites (you have seen them) where your listings are all over the web and look like big collections of eBay listings, some even look like their own search engines or stores. This is how people make money doing this.They have some web space and do the coded endings to the listings using tools eBay gives you that do it automatically. Some people make 1 million bucks a month (no lie).In any case, this program was not open to sellers bringing traffic to their own listings before. You could bring traffic to others listings and make money but now things are way more interesting because you double benefit! (sales and $$ for bringing them in ).In any case it all sounds good, but like anything else who has endless time right? Well being the rocket scientist I am (actually stumbled into it LOL) , I figured Id check on something.As most of you know from tinkering with the Squidoo lenses they have a nice system for adding an RSS feed module easily (basically if you can cut and paste a URL and type your done!). Moreover its FREE (their webspace and their dime no hosting costs no cost whatsoever to you).PLUS they pay you if someone clicks on an ad etc from your Squid pages (nice but no real money yet).In any case the affiliate program eBay has will create an affiliate coded feed of your items to post in RSS modules on Squidoo and you can post away and post your friends items (especially if related they might help your sales too) and do it all for free. Any business coming in with these codes earns you money under the affiliate program . Here is a link to the payout page (you can click around to get more on the program)http://affiliates.ebay.com/odcs/custom.htm?template=Payout

With the Squidoo network we have , combined with the blogs and myspace pages etc , we have a web of content in place that will make these affiliate feeds more valuable.People can make money doing affiliate deals without content but we just created a huge web of content and can add lenses or modules to add RSS affiliate feeds.Lets take an example. I am not a home craft person but always like stuff that others do here.Many of these people have Squidoos and blogs now. They set up lenses with RSS affiliate coded feeds and earn money off any business coming to them AND off any new active user that signs up because of their feeds.Say Home craft person #1 is more motivated then person 2 and 3, she can put everyones stuff she likes up and earn money on all of it while her friend benefit from the sales in their store with no work.To the best of my knowledge there are few great content areas with affiliate set ups and for the most part while web space is cheap its not free. So this is my idea.Basically there are a few downsides. First I think like anything else new , eBay can always change it or take it out, and second, I worked with Commission Junction before and didnt like how they operated but it could have been just my experience. Commission Junction is running this for eBay.Also , while this isnt important to everyone when you have a business DSL or Cable package it often comes with this huge amount of space on their servers. I have some crazy amount at my office. Many of you have the same. I assume that can also be used to set up RSS feeds for no cost but Im not an expert in doing that.Anyone with any ideas? read through that section and let me know.Downsides are limited plus no costs. Upside could be some extra money.

Here are some thoughts from an affiliate blogger on the ebay change..http://www.geekbooks.com/ebay_changes_affiliate_terms_for_the_better_530.html

Selling and Old Favorite Educational/Science Kits

I am not sure if its because I would like to play with these or because people really want them but I buy a lot of educational/science kits to re-sell on ebay. As it turns out they sell really well. While many kids are plugged into their video games there are still people that enjoy these kits much like I did when I was a young teen 30 years ago. This weeks find? Prehistoric Animals locked in sand that you can escavate and paint yourself! I sold one within hours of posting them for sale! Always a great item! :)

Our Squidoo Lens hits #1 in Business #17 Overall! - Social Media Marketing

Within the short span of less than a week our Squidoo project jumped up to the #1 slot in the Business category and #17 overall out of 97,000 plus Squidoo lenses on the internet! For those of you that do not know what a Squidoo lens is, and for those that are hoping its just another way of looking at (or eating Calamari) LOL then let me give you a brief description of it. Its basically "Your take on a subject" . You post information , gather articles and or products and produce a lens or "your read" on a subject. Its a very cool site. You can see our lens here at

http://squidoo.com/growyourebaystoresales/

We did our lens on Growing your eBay Store! This is what our goal will be. We are there to grow our eBay store and will post ideas and strategies that we have to do just that. By creating a lens we also invite others to comment and add content and we grow a source of knowledge that helps everyone! We also have increased our sales as onlookers see our items in a soft sell environment of who were are and what we are about.

We plan on many more social media marketing strategies but the Squidoo lens is very well set up and the eBay store discussion board jumped right on the project propelling many eBay stores to the top ranks of the Squidoo especially in the Shopping and Crafts areas!

Definately check out Squidoo! Ill be back with more info! -Marty

Fairies, Mermaids, Fairykins and Mystical Creatures

One important thing we learned when selling is that the mystical and magical sells well online. People love fairies, they love mermaids they love dragons, unicorns, you name it! A while back we came across some nice items that were no longer manufactured in a closeout called Fairykins. Like many of our items we have small lots of these not an endless supply but they have been really popular. There were even Fairy Mermaid Kins but we sold out of them! Always keep the magical in mind when buying or seeking new products to sell. The fairkin pictured flaps her wings when you push her belly! I just love these things! -Marty

Using Squidoo To Tie Together your Ebay Content

Hey Everyone! Its still tax time for us CPAs but I did manage to get some work done ! I started our Squidoo lens here http://www.squidoo.com/growyourebaystoresales/ . It is just a start but it will tie together all our related eBay content. We have this blog, our store and myspace sites linked there. We have book recommendations, and hope to have our ebay listing feeds up and running to show our items for sale but I do not see it coming up as of yet. The goal here is to have a place to tie together all the content sites we are working on now. Squidoo is very highly ranked. One of my friends Sallie , worked hard on her lens and had a top 100 Squidoo lens for a while, she is my encouragement to do this project as well as my good friend Maggie the artisan who just stated I had to do it! LOL. So no challenge left undone! Its up and I hope you enjoy it. Please vote for me there if you like! I have lots of great content coming to all my sites so stay tuned! Sales are cranking for us and will be for you soon! Keep in mind always that we offer training, consulting and even tax help over the phone or even in person if you live close by where we are here in Connecticut!

Start your own Squidoo lens about your eBay Store or any topic you like by accepting this invitation http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/OnceUponaBid !!!!

-Marty

Dream Pets - From being Stuffed in Train sets in the 50s to now...

One thing about eBay, is that you learn something new pretty much every day. A while back , trusting my 16 year old daughters instinct we purchased some "Dream Pets" to sell . You can see one in this post . The interesting story behind these little animals is that in the 1950s the Japanese use to stuff to them in between toy electric train sets to protect them during shipment. The cute little stuffed things became a hit. Many years later they re-issued them in limited quantities. Due to an absolute freaky streak of luck once they were done sending small quantities to distributors the rest showed up somewhere where we found them. We had some of each of the many pets but just last night a buyer from the UK purchased 13 of the Pink Poodles you see on the left , cleaning us out! While these will never make the Beanie Baby hysteria level , they are extremely cute and retro looking , and that is a look which is definately in now! Unfortunately I have not gotten around to listing all the animals we have but we did get some of them up! - Marty

Ebay Express Heating Up? Time to Opt in?

Most people familiar with eBay know that eBay Express has not been quite the hit they thought it would be. It seemed to literally die in terms of traffic to the site and people pretty much gave up on it . Sellers, given an option to OPT OUT of eBay Express (have their items not appear there) were doing so (myself included) because of the strong evidence that sales were lower for store sellers when remaining opted in due to indexing and or other issues which were never really clearly determined. However.... Every dog has his day! Ebay Express seems to be pickign up lately. When I saw a sale from Express I did not think too much until we had 4 in one week. More than we had in months ! I then went to Alexa.com and noticed traffic perked up and was triple what it was just a few months earlier. The spike was somewhat short-lived but given that its make or break time for Express now I would consider opting in to Express. You can see our items here http://search.express.ebay.com/merchant/clact . Take a look to see how clean Express looks. The items we have been selling on Express seem to represent a different type of buyer. If you have any comments please post them! Thanks for reading this blog by the way soon we will have some cool new stuff here to show you! -Marty

Update on Traffic Program -Driving Business to Your Ebay Store

I am currently in the 3rd month of our traffic program trials. So far I have been happy, but want to update you a little on how things are going.

December and January were both great months for us. In February things started slow, but have been picking up some. I noticed my hits having been coming in slower from the traffic program. I am also not working as much with the store as I usually do. I have found that in order to good sales I need to target traffic of 1200 visitors a day for about 600 items in the store. I am going by the Omniture Traffic reports given to store owners free of charge in the store description. It seems to me when traffic spikes to those level things start happening.
What I mean is that small increases in traffic do not seem to show results I need to get to that level which I did in February, and in December and also in March 2006 when stores were in eBa's core search. So bringing in traffic more slowly is not helping proportionately it has to hit critical levels. I am working on that now. Below is a banner for the traffic program.



Lots of people are emailing me or messaging me for help with accounting for their eBay business. I want to mention that if you scroll down a bit you will see a banner that will take you to my friend Rogers software for eBay sellers . It is inexpensive and handles your eBay business, we use it! There is also a program for selling on ebay for consignment. IF you are lazy and dont want to see his banner his site is located at http://auctionsellersolutions.com

So far on the hit program we have had solid store sales every month. February ended with our lowest fee bill in two years and we sold over 100 store items!

I still need to do more testing (seems like a never ending job), and also sample out some international traffic from other sources!

Marty

Using GivingWorks at Ebay to Increase your Sales & Help Charities

Here are few links concerning using eBay's GivingWorks to do good, and increase your sales!

This first one is how to use the charity section to potentially get better pricing on your items by using the extra attention the charity section brings in . This has worked for me very well in the past. I highly recommend printing these out and reading through them a few times.http://www.tastefulgraphics.com/_CauseMarketingforSellerseBayLive2006_eBayLive2006_FINAL.pdf

The second one is if you were considering being a trading assistant to help nonprofits, also loaded with good info!

http://www.tastefulgraphics.com/eBayGivingWorks_TradingAssistants_final__eBayLive2006.pdf

The classes were dont by the Givingworks team at eBay were great! You can tell they loved what they did. When I mentioned the info was great they emailed it to me so I can share it with people (this was a while ago) .

The type of people that visit charity listings are the type of buyers you want. You have to trust me on that one! They are often people doing the charity listings themselves checking out others, and people more inclined to buy something if a portion goes to charity (makes them feel good).The Givingworks people fought hard to get a $5.00 minimum donation instead of the old $10.00 one so that makes things more affordable to do. Now, at the end of the year... they even send you a report of all the donations you made!When you read the report you will see that many times (but not always) finally prices are higher by MORE THAN THE AMOUNT YOU DONATED!!!!!. So you get a better price, the charity gets some money etc.Also, many charities monitor listings and send you thank you notes.

Overall, I think as part of the big plan running a charity listing or two per week if you have the right items will bring in more traffic and aid sales.I hope some of you find this info helpful. My thanks to the people at Givingworks that you never really hear from that behind the scenes set up eBay to raise millions of dollars for charities.Occasionally there will be a challenge to the eBay community and there remains and anonymous donor who sponsors a large charity. That donor sometimes comes forth and adds to your dollars you raise for the charity!I think its Warren Buffet, but it could be Gates... Maybe its you?? LOLMarty

Save on Ebay Purchases with Paypal Coupon!

Just a quickie update for now!

*** If you received a promotional email from Paypal dont ignore it, you could get some free money! You need to have received the email to use this coupon! *****

How these work is Paypal occasionally does stuff like that to encourage you to buy something and pay with Paypal! You must have a paypal account (or set one up then use the link I suppose if you dont have one), and then buy an item that meets the criteria which I think is $30 or more between Feb 8th and March 31st.

https://paypal.promotionexpert.com/greatshopping/signup/200702/misc_s.html?route=misc.s

They give you a $15 rebate! That is darn good hey?????

Now that you might have some FREE DOUGH I strongly suggest you check out my store, and perhaps me eBay ME page where I list some of my friends ebay stores!

You can get to some awesome eBay shopping here..


http://Onceuponabid.com



Marty

Using FilmLoop To Help sell items from your Ebay store!

A picture is worth a thousand words! I figured I should show you why you should check out filmloop.com . At filmloop you can create and eBay slideshow you can post all over the web! I have this slideshow running on our Myspace and now on the blog here! It only shows about 30 items or so but automatically updates over time! It is a great sales tool! Customers can click right from the picture to the item itself as listed on eBay! Let me know what you think! - Marty

Increasing Your sales for your eBay Store UPDATE

Hey! This is one of the first times I have been excited in a while. We are having an excellent sales month and in sharing a lot of details with other sellers I have learned even more things to pass along. So if you are strolling in for the first time or just checking please keep checking back over the next few days at least so I can feed you some useful info.

If you have been reading you will know by now I have been using a traffic program that I started trying out in December. This month so far I have had 106 store sales and 29 CORE sales on eBay off a base of less than 600 items. That is probably the best eBay store item sales number I have had and our fees are running very low this month (ebay fee bill). Now I am doing a bunch of things, so Ill go over them all here...

1- I am opting in / out of Ebay Express every 7 days
2- I am bringing in 25k in hits a month using a traffic program. Allocated cost to this month $61.00
3- I have been using search engine submission sites and manually submitting this blog, my ebay store, my ebay store domain and my myspace to all of them I can find.
4- I cut back core auctions to 10 or less items a week and have had a decent sell through on those as well

That is the basic plan I am following. During the course of my research, I had the idea to try out some foreign traffic programs for the next month . I have not done so yet and will not mention any providers until I can get some info as I have not decided on which one to use yet and they are different than the first one I am using for US traffic. I asked a few questions and found out we , as eBay store owners have stores on other eBay sites if we sell to those countries! I never knew this! Let me give you links to our UK store and our Australia store...


http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Once-Upon-A-Bid


http://stores.ebay.com.au/Once-Upon-A-Bid

This is something that I did not know, and which could be of value. I stumbled across this after asking some questions and figured we could list items on these other sites and point people to our stores in their country! As you know eBay policy makes it so you have to be clear on the location of your item as being in the US (if you are a US seller) and you should note any special concerns for those countries in terms of what you can ship there. Generally the UK and Australia are pretty easy , its other countries which are more difficult in this regard.

So I am actually going to look to not only promote my US url but the foreign ones as well and build up some knowledge of my store on these sites.

I started using the traffic program mentioned a few posts below on December 18th. I ran one program from Dec 12-Jan 12 and then another started Jan 18 and will run til Feb 18th. Some other people have started trying it out as well and I will report how things worked out for them . So far out of 3 other people I am familiar with 2 others (besides me) were fairly happy with it so far. One person directed the traffic to an off eBay website and had a poor result. As a result of her analysis of this I would not recommend the program for this purpose. My reasoning on this is that it is redirected traffic. This means people come to you after they looked for something else similar to what you sell. The eBay name gives these strangers to you a slight amount of thought that they are somewhere familiar or that they can rely on. So while 95% of your traffic will just click away I believe it helps turn a little more of whats left into buyers.
Another issue is that the seller who had a poor result sellers primarily a single product line. As such I would not recommend this for a single product. Remember the odds. 25,000 visitors maybe only 1000 will take a peek maybe only 30-50 will become buyers maybe less. If you sell a variety of items I feel you are more likely to do well with it. Also if you have a small store and not much in it yet, I would hold off on much traffic and search engine stuff until you stock up some. A larger store provides some if its own traffic as it gets indexed. You need this traffic to work with other sources to make things work. I am only offering these cautions as the best info I can offer , it could be be that your experience would be different.

I will be giving a full report when the month ends which is later tonight, so probably by some time tomorrow.

I will be reporting more on promoting the foreign URLs for our stores and I am going to start recommending some other resources that I have used like books I have read etc, in case people like those things. Right now I have a few in my store, the cheapest and most ebay related is the Grilled Cheese Madonna book whic talks about all the crazy eBay auctions and might give you some marketing ideas. I have a few other market specific books listed on the Tween market and Creating Ever- Cool how companies create brands that live on. Those are more general.

The comment section is open for others recomendations as well.

Another project I will be working on is creating a Squidoo lens for all our content and some new ideas . A good friend of mine (Sallie) who is featured way way down the blog (She sells some nice jewelry) has been working with Squidoo and doing and excellent job. Its time for me to get moving on it!

More sooon...

Marty

Use FREE Search Engine Submissions to Help Sell your EBAY items!

It does seem like lately, it has been all business and no fun pictures huh? LOL In any case another good marketing strategy today. This one costs ZERO! Many years ago before Google was huge and everyone thought about how they showed up in Google in the rankings, people worked hard on submitting their sites to as many search engines as possible. I have found this strategy still works today. There are more search engines than ever and even though the top ones still throw around the bulk of the traffic there are many small niche search engines that people stumble upon and can find your business in! Basically this will take you some time. So stop wasting time and have some tea, a cold drink or whatever you need and get to work! You need to go to Google, then to Yahoo and type in "free search engine submission" . You will be happy when you get a ton of results hey? Well , its not that easy. Many of these are just covers for charging you money so you have to dig through a little bit. Over the course of a few nights I found I could get coverage in 100 or more search engines then paid 5 bucks to pick up another 300 or so then I kept submitting anywhere that would take me. I noticed my small hits from odd domains increasing in my traffic reports.

While everyone looks for the "home run". Its often a matter of building a "web" of your business all around the web. For example. Right now you are reading my blog, I submitted that as well to search engines. I also submitted my myspace page. Submit anything you have that talks about you, especially if its rich in content. Remember the more you can talk the better!

To get you started here is a site which on the right side of the page you can start by submitting to 40 search engines free! http://www.submitexpress.com/ !! Keep in mind that you will receive some emails from this process. So if you do not want to clutter your box create a hotmail email or another email addy just to click on the confirmation notes etc. With 40 search engines its really not too bad but if you blast out there then it will get to be a bunch of mail!

Good luck and I promise some fun stuff is coming up! -

Just as a reminder. here are my sites

http://Onceuponabid.com <----Ebay store

http://Myspace.com/Onceuponabid <----Our Myspace with music and a slideshow that you can creat for your business as well!

http://www.worldofebay.blogspot.com <--- This blog that you are reading now. Save them all these are great places for great info

Also keep in mind the Accounting Software to get you ready for the Tax man by Roger in the banner below and also the hit program I am sampling out also shown a few posts below.

Coming up on the blog will be some information on something new I found ! International traffic! Time to grab some Europeans! Ill be back with more info! :)

Marty

Using Myspace as an eBay Tool

Just a short post here to direct you to take a look at our Myspace for our eBay business. We have developed a basic site and used a filmloop to show a slideshow of our items and hook up with other eBayers. I highly recommend giving this a try as you can connect with other ebayers there and get some hits and sales. We are just in the initial stages of this project but wanted to show you the possibilities. Also , on Myspace you have "friends" if you click on some of mine you will see some more advanced possibilities as many people have done a great job with their sites. Here is a link to our myspace .... http://myspace.com/onceuponabid
Let us know what you think! -Marty

Accounting, Record-keeping , Tax help for your eBay business!

Many eBayers have asked how the heck do we keep track of things we are selling on ebay? How do you know what you are making on your items and how to accumulate information for filing your taxes and figuring out if you are making money?

Well a good friend Roger has developed this program that you can get to from clicking the banner below. His solution which is always being updated takes you from soup to nuts through the process of accounting for your business. If you have been looking around for something that looks good, has the right feel and isnt overly expensive and does not charge a monthly fee this software might be right for you. He currently has two main programs one for accounting for your auctions business and one if you work selling items on consignment from others on eBay. We work with both programs and Roger will be stopping in her to the blog to talk more about them. You can take a peek at tons of screenshots to see how these work below! One great thing about these is if you do not have Microsoft Excel he has an open office version . OPen office is a free spreadsheet out there and Roger has a link to it on his site! So take a look at these programs , even if to just get a feel for what you might need to gather to get you info in order! They are also very inexpensive ! He is working on even more auctions solutions and will be posting here about them. Make sure to comment to let me know what you think! ... More soon!

Update on Driving Traffic to our eBay Store

As I mentioned in some prior posts we are using a traffic program to build some off ebay traffic flow to our ebay store. Our first program ran from December 12th until Jan 12th and delivered 25,000 targeted hits choosing the main category of "Gifts" to our store.

We felt sales benefited from the program, we saw the traffic saw some click through and visits, but its hard to tell in the holiday season and while running a lot of core auctions how everything interplayed. We decided to try another program in January and overall since Jan 1 we changed our style to run LESS Core auctions , a lot less since they cost a lot of money to gain exposure. For those who do not know what core means. This is running fixed price or auction style listings at fees ranging from 70 cents on up to a few dollars or so for a weeks exposure on eBay. Store listings cost 6-10 cents a month by comparison.

In any case by running less core auction in January ( and average of less than 10 per week) we had HUGE store sales with just the traffic program running to Jan 12th, then a pause before starting the new program which took a few days then more sales since. We lucked out this month as the traffic selection we made was on a 50% off special. You can check here as this sale is going on til the end of the month I believe..



Now some people have written and heard that these programs are "rip offs" . It seems to me that a good chunk of these targeted hits are click in click outs. These are people searching for gifts and getting redirected because someones domain expired. However, we are getting a small percentage of people poking around in our store and buying. Sometimes the orders are better. Most of the time something catches their eye in these cases. Our store carries something for everyone so if it was just say a hunting fishing store, there might be less success unless of course you had targeted hits for that area.

Another thing I wonder about is when you bring hits in, does that change how search engines look at you? It seems as though other things improve as well.

Overall I think in the price range of the current sale of 25k in hits for 49 bucks its worth a try. I will be reporting more on the second program as we go along here as well.

Coming up in future posts I have some great info for you!

1- Tons of places to submit your site free across the net

2- How to use Myspace to generate some eBay traffic

3- Some great software to keep track of eBay sales and even Consignement eBay sales when selling for others!

So stay tuned for more!

Marty