AuctionCut

Has anyone had experience in offering downloadable products on ebay?
What are the do's and don't of offering downloadable products (in order not to get booted off by ebay)?

Downloadable products can be a very profitable route.

- Make sure your allowed to sell/resell the item
- Make sure your description does not infringe any trademarks or it will be pulled when the trademark owner complains
- Setup your product to be delivered automaticly, you can use a service such as payloadz or ebay.com has it's own option for digital delivery
- eBay rules auctual specify that you can only offer digitial products via Fixed Price or Shop Inventory format. You can not use an auction style format.
- State clearly in your description that you are not selling a regular physical item that will be shipped. This will help prevent confusion among buyers who are less familiar with digital items.

Talk,

Mark's advice is top notch. Just one advanced tip I'd like to add. I ALWAYS use the sale of the digital item to build a list. Put a subscription to your newsletter as a bonus for whatever item you are selling. eBay allows you to enter in your "destination URL" for product delivery. Once your customer pays, they will then be sent to this page.

Instead of making this the download page, I make it an opt in page that says "Please Enter Your Name and Email Address to Confirm Your Order". Once they do this, they are then redirected to the download page. I now not only made a sale, but gained a subscriber as well. I recommend using a double opt in when using this strategy to make sure they know about the newsletter ( just in case they didn't read the full description)

Chris Hubbard

Instead of making this the download page, I make it an opt in page that says "Please Enter Your Name and Email Address to Confirm Your Order"

Excellent suggestion by Chris, Just make sure you stay in contact with your list regularly & build up a relationship with your subscribers. Many times I've built up lists and left them to go stale - always, remember people buy things off people they know or think they know, so it's always worth the effort to stay in touch. [/quote]

Yes, of course it's allowed. I sold lots and lots of ebooks before. I earned some but I already switched to more expensive items.

Make sure you follow Mark's advice. His tips are good. you don't want eBay to remove your listing or worse ban you.

If you are listing on the UK site, make sure that your downloadable items are in the Everything Else.>Information category. eBay do not allow them anywhere else. Some people do try to get away with selling, say, a digital camera eBook in the Digital Cameras section but eventually you will be reported for this and the item will be removed for being in the wrong category

Is there a list of whats allowed and whats restricted on ebay regarding digital goods?

ALC wrote:Is there a list of whats allowed and whats restricted on ebay regarding digital goods?

There is a guide here on how it works - http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/selli ... items.html - and their policy on what can and can not be sold here - http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/downloadable.html

The risky part of selling eBooks is that it is quite a cut-throat market and many listing are pulled for Vero infringement. Be 100% sure of your product before isting, as eBay shoot first and ask questions later!

Hi. You could always try writing your own product. That way, you are 100% sure of intellectual copyright, as it's YOUR product! (Of course, make sure all the content is in your words, not just cut 'n pasted from another source!!)

There are many articles and tutorials regarding authoring your own material on the Internet, and the other benefit is that you will be the first person to sell it!

Good luck.

eBooks are great to sell, especially when you do write your own. We have been doing this with eBay since 2000 and there were only 3 eBooks listed at the beginning.

A few tips:

1) A RESELL eBook sells better than an eBook without it!

2) Do not do penny auctions, they are a circumvention of ebay fees and we tried this at one point in time, but all auctions were pulled. It used to be a good trendy thing to do to help you introduce new products on the market, but even with that reason, it was not good enough for eBay as they saw it as those who did this to be avoiding eBay fees. Some people just used it for feedback, and there are many to this day still attempting to do penny sales, but trust me it is not worth the hassle with eBay.

3) Watch out for those who buy your eBook and then turn around and write their own very similar eBook.

4) Watch out for those tricksters who buy your eBook(s) and then try to return it, after they have it on their harddrive and opened it. I really do not like people who try to cheat the eBook sellers this way, it really isn't fair, especially if you took the incredible amount of time to write the eBook and publish it. A lot of hard work goes into making an eBook the right way.

5) Take the time to build to your stock of eBooks and/or study other people's eBooks to get a feel of what you need in an eBook to make it sell and what they are doing to make it sell, it will teach you a lot about how to sell eBooks. Of course what one does doesn't always work for everyone, that is why I say study more than a few people!

6) Price your eBooks correctly, watch out for those sellers who keep lowering their price just to beat your price. It is a rough market, but worth it I think.

7) Learn to leave proper feedback. If it is an excellent and quick sale, I state so!

Good luck and if I can help in anyway, please let me know!

Kris Williams, Author and Designer for
DataWorkZ

Yes, many people do the eBooks thing, you can even find many sites offering free eBooks with resell rights.

yea i have utilized this alot as well but the main thing is to make sure that the product has resale rights. if not then you could be in some major trouble

People like to buy downloadable products because they don't have to wait for the delivery which can take days of waiting so that's a great idea

TalkHTTP wrote:Has anyone had experience in offering downloadable products on ebay?
What are the do's and don't of offering downloadable products (in order not to get booted off by ebay)?

for ebay they have changed the rules and downloadable products are NOT allowed any more!

there are some great tips above, particularly creating a database from your ebay listings. Compare that with advertising your product through an affiliate network where you will pay per sale, leads that come with profit for you are often worth more themselves than the cash made on the product.

Amanda