E-Bay Revisited

[Master Mind]

I used to make serious money off of eBay.

They recently revised their affiliate program and I am giving it a test.

They are getting 60,000 banners spun on
my big traffic deal and I am setting 5,000 plus cookies to see what the returns are over the next 30 days.

With a bunch of people making $25,000 to $1 plus million per month, it needs to be revisited.

With the new set up, it just might pay to do some email for the BUY IT NOW stuff.

We'll see.

[Master Mind]

Banners a spinning...the usual 1/2% CTR...no registrations...no nickels earned

7,000 cookies set...25 nickels earned...no registrations so far.

If you believe that 7,000 people go to the ebay website and not one registers to either buy or sell a product...you wanna buy a virtual bridge across the Atacama desert?

Here's the deal folks...and it applies to EVERY merchant...unless the networks like CJ et al force merchants to pay a per click against commissions earned, affiliates are going to get screwed into eternity.

No I have NO problem with doing CPA at all.
I just hate to spend time and effort and real money and get ZERO for the effort, when I know from 30 years of doing marketing that ...no matter what you have for sale, you have to sell at least 1 of it to even stay in business and make a profit.

But when you send 1,000 people from PPC search engines and get zero sales to ANY merchant, it's 100% fraud on the merchants or network side of the deal.

1,000 do not waste their time and not one of them buy something.

So if I send 1,000 to XYZ merchant and do not make $10.00 they should have to pay me that amount, if I make $100 we are all happy campers. It's the merchants job to make the sale. It's the affiliates job to bring the potential customers to the place to make the sale.

I am and never have complained about getting any number of sales...only about getting ZERO sales for reasonable numbers of targetted traffic.

eBays new program may make $1 million for someone, but it's not on the up and up of just setting cookies and getting registrations - $1 million is 200,000 registrations or 20,000,000 nickels.

I bet they got a list of alread registered eBay people and are sending those people to
bid on stuff - you know hey dude check these auction on eBay it's cool and they spam the list 100,000,000 times in the month.

[digitalpoint]

eBay's affiliate program really is a money maker only if you send a TON of traffic and you start hitting the higher tiers (up $0.15 per bid).

The real money is in the user registrations... starting at $5 each up to $16 each. I thought I was doing okay as an eBay affiliate (I got like $800 last month from them). But $1.3M/month to the top affiliate, $100,000/month to the top 10 and $25,000/month to the top 100 is insane. :)

Although in truth the top affiliates also have huge expenses in advertising... So it's not all profit...

- Shawn

[DrTandem1]

Banners=Ignore

[mason]

Seams like today everyone is looking to make the fast money without putting some effort into the business they are working with be it their or not. I see and hear this from a lot of ebay users. I use ebay also but if you are not a well know seller, chances of selling you product are getting slimmer unless you have some out of the ordinary.

So I decide to try this new auction site that is 35% cheaper then ebay and you can make money 3 different ways. It's call www.zimzy.com and is the world's first prepaid online auction site and you don't even need a credit card or checking account to list your products.

By the way you can list all of your items free until April 1st. Anything listed by then can stay on the site free even after they start charging the listing fees.


Take a look or if you know some ebay people that are getting feed up with the hight costs of listing on ebay this is the new auction site that a lot of people are going to switch to.


use agent number 1461 if you decide to join and remember it's free to join. www.zimzy.com

Have a nice day.

[ptory]

I am now receiving several "Get rich with eBay" emails every day, and it p****s me off. How do you get these people off your backs?

[DrTandem1]

ptory-

Only several per day? Consider yourself lucky.

[aim2004]

Greetings!
I've been considering using EBay to market my products, because I haven't been successful in actually selling any of my merchandise with my own website. I launched it in January and it has gotten over 11,000 hits (due mostly to linking with hip hop websites and directories). It's a graffiti t-shirt site I've developed with a partner who is the one who does the shirt designs. I'm the site designer and webmaster.
I've been wondering if putting the shirts into a Buy Now category page would help drive people to our site (or at least sell a few shirts!)?
Any suggestions? This forum is really interesting, and you are obviously experts in this area.
The url is http://www.aimclothing.com.
Thanks for any suggestions!

[mason]

aim2004
Mason here, I see that you are having much luck selling on your own site. This is a very hard thing to do with out the right traffic. eBay is going to charge you to list the clothing, but you can put it on our free. The details are on my website. www.lwbs.com. This site is only a 1 1/2 old but we are going each day. It's well worth taking a look at. Go to the zimzybro link on my site and it will explain what we are about.

Well good luck in what ever direction you choose.

[DrTandem1]

aim2004,

You have 11,000 hits in a month or two. Have you sold any shirts tecause of this traffic? If not, or not many, then I would suggest that this "traffic" is pointless.

People go to eBay usually to find things that are unusual (collector's items), hard to find things(old Apple computer parts) and deals. If your shirts do not fit one or more of those general categories, I really don't see much point in marketing via eBay.

Are any of the shirts selling on eBay itself?

[aim2004]

DrTandem
People go to eBay usually to find things that are unusual (collector's items), hard to find things(old Apple computer parts) and deals. If your shirts do not fit one or more of those general categories, I really don't see much point in marketing via eBay.

Are any of the shirts selling on eBay itself?


Hi again,
No, I haven't tried on Ebay yet. I have done searches on there, though, for graffiti t-shirts and come up with several matches, so the category is represented. These are custom-designed shirts on my site, but we probably can't sell them that way on Ebay. I would just choose a few of the designs and sell them with only one color choice for the shirt.

I've thought of maybe trying those ads that list to the right of search engine results on Google. I really believe in our product, and do feel that we just need to find the right marketing approach.

Thanks,
Aim2004

[Master Mind]

Ralph Wilson's new newsletter points out that eBay garnered 28% of the total net traffic in December.

That's a big deal when you consider what it means in terms of market share.

Second place was a non-event 4.2 by Amazon.

eBay has a huge problem...like massive plus. With so much traffic any cookie set by affiliates is likely to get squashed by new cookies and so on.

The guy with the last cookie wins the nickel but the registration may be another story. You may have a registration reported but the bid to activate it never happens for you, because the activation bid comes from another cookie.

I would be willing to bet that the way guys are making the big bucks at eBay affiliate wise, is they send a email collection bot and capture any email addy that they can off the eBay site.

You have to be registered to have an email address on the eBay site.

Once they get the email addie, they spam it with a go check the new auction on XYZ stuff at whatever eBay page it's on using their affiliate id.

Since these people have an interest as a buyer or seller already, it's not hard to get a good CTR to such an email.

You scrape 100,000 email addies, send them an email and get 10,000 or more nickels. Do it once a week and make it look like an newsletter and you make some pretty good bucks as you start moving up the per nickel
bonus. When you get to the higest rate, you blast it again and have a great few days of making big bucks.

There is no other way to do it to get those types of affiliate dollars.

You really can't do more than 150 registrations a day from your own site since they take about 10 minutes to do and you have the problem of confirming email and the bids.

That's 7,500 per month and the million dollars takes 200,000 registrations.

Interesting eh.

[Investor4life]

Aim: Look up t-shirts or graffiti t-shirts on ebay and literally calculate your odds. If there is 150 t-shirts for sale and only 2 have sold this week and no one's bidding then I don't think it will be worth it. Of course if the numbers are switched up and graffiti t-shirts are selling like hot cakes.....then go for it :) Just be sure to do your homework and test your market before you jump out there and waste money. Good Luck!

~Kristin

[Cedric]

aim2004,

The entry cost into selling on ebay is PENNIES. Stop worrying over whether it will work and TEST whether it will work. Until you perform TESTS, you won't know.

And now for some unasked for advice: DITCH THE FLASH. It took over three minutes for your site to load, no way I'm waiting around three minutes for a t-shirt site to load. I would hazard an extremely educated guess that you are losing 15-30% of your traffic at the front page.

Get a friend (or better a friend's mom) who has never seen your site and tell them to order a t-shirt -- I'm betting they won't be able to do it.

Your site LOOKS FABULOUS. But it's a usability nightmare -- it's slow loading, fonts are too small, and it's extremely difficult to navigate. And the t-shirt designs (unless I missed something) are too small to really see what you're getting (as a customer).

I would bet a considerable sum that the person who designed your web site started in graphic design for print, not the web

[Nargule]

Greetings!
I've been considering using EBay to market my products, because I haven't been successful in actually selling any of my merchandise with my own website. I launched it in January and it has gotten over 11,000 hits (due mostly to linking with hip hop websites and directories). It's a graffiti t-shirt site I've developed with a partner who is the one who does the shirt designs. I'm the site designer and webmaster.

The url is http://www.aimclothing.com.
Thanks for any suggestions!

On your site, you are promoting a contest that is over. Stale content is a big thing that turns me away from a website. It gives me the impression that the site was thrown up and the Administors of it are just sitting back and not doing any proactive marketing.