AuctionCut

Anyone else feel like ebay is "double-dipping" on us sellers with the Paypal fees? Personally, i think they should offer discounted Paypal fees to ebay sellers since they are already making good coin off of us!

Cluviou4u wrote:The fees are getting bigger, feedback policies are getting worse and whats good in it? Well, you have to be smart these days to keep selling online. There is many ways to do it. The main reason why people are still using eBay is a high quality traffic, but its gona change soon as there is strong rivals growing more powerful each and every day.
Personally I like the idea, to grabb your buyer, take him into your own professional webpage and make him constantly buy from you.
eBay allows to put links which provides more information on product. Its a loophole and you can abuse it in many ways.

Fantastic piece of advice. eBay should really be the way to grab new customers. impress them with your professionalism and customer service and stellar products, and then have them purchase from your web site where you have no listing fees.

In regards to the fees, you have think of eBay as providing a premium service, and as such you will end up paying a premium price. I personally think that if some people spent as much time researching creative ways to improve their business model (like Cluviou4u's idea)as they do on bitching and moaning about eBay fees, then their bottom line would probably be doing a lot better.

Cluviou4u wrote:The fees are getting bigger, feedback policies are getting worse and whats good in it? Well, you have to be smart these days to keep selling online. There is many ways to do it. The main reason why people are still using eBay is a high quality traffic, but its gona change soon as there is strong rivals growing more powerful each and every day.
Personally I like the idea, to grabb your buyer, take him into your own professional webpage and make him constantly buy from you.
eBay allows to put links which provides more information on product. Its a loophole and you can abuse it in many ways.

The theory itself is good, but many buyers use Ebay over other auctions for the single reason it is trusted and appears to have a good reputation.

If like Us you believe that it is getting way to expensive to trade on place's like E-Bay etc and that they impose to many restrictions against Trading and swapping online, then you would probably like to do something to stop them.
Given the size and wealth of these companies it is unlikely we can stop them all together! But we can give them a run for their money and make them think about reducing their charges.

I have started savef1.co.uk and swappa-shoppa.co.uk

They both lead to save f1 as do many other sites lol, and I hope to have you join us there.
At the moment we don’t have that many members but it is growing every day and every single person that joins helps to make it that much better.
I am asking to not only to join but also to add it as your home page for a while as it will help us with Google to get higher up the rankings.
Also if you believe as we do that this FREE site is worth promoting then please email the people you do business with and your friends and colleagues and tell them all about us.
We look forward to seeing you there soon.

Cross selling, up selling, recurring sales. Don't look at it from the perspective of one sale. You need to look at the lifetime value of the customer. If you sell something people will buy more of or similar products after the initial sale, the fees turn into peanuts.

For example, lets say I'm selling digital cameras and I have a low profit margin and the fees are starting to kill me, what are my options?

1. Raise the price, lose customers.
2. Find the same thing somewhere else cheaper
3. Add additional products to my product line, when someone buys a camera they also get an email followup with links to your other products, camera accessories, upgrades, batteries, bags.

The best, in my opinion, if you have a product you can create a how to manual for it (ex: you sell digital cameras, you have an info product that's downloadable that shows them how to take amazing pictures). Then it's 100% profit. Heck you can even find one of the millions of products out there that pay commission and push that.

You have the name and mailing address, you can do a lot of followup.

eBay let down its guard an let every kid on the block start selling. To make up for lost profits they are raising fees and trying to reshape their image.

You have to make Ebay work for you. The fees are unjustifiable and ebay is no longer a cheap place to sell. You can still make it work though. I use ebay to get people to my website. I have a shop on ebay. I list my items ensuring I achieve my desired margin after including ebay and paypal fees and when someone buys from me I send them thank you letters and my website address with a new customer offer, usually 10% off the first purchase.

I look at ebay as advertising. It's much better than throwing your money away on adverts that may or may not work. Ebay work and you make a profit every time someone buys from your shop. It's then up to you to market to the customer.

You can also direct market to the customer through the post with a flyer or special offer. The first thing you need to do though is get the customer and ebay is a great place to throw your net out. Forget about the fees they're a part of the game. I never, ever sell below my desired profit margin. If this takes the price of my products high then so what, they're high, you don't have to buy them.
There's no point complaining about ebay fees. At this moment it's the only online auction site with the kind of traffic that sellers want. Ebay know this and they're wringing every penny from this monopoly. I can't wait for an alternative to come along. But get serious, at the moment there isn't one.

Amazon’s growth is better but margin is not stable. 2% net is not good business. So, I myself like Ebay more.