Updated My Squidoo Page Promoting Ebid

[kaazoom]

One good thiing about feebay's price increases is my Squidoo page promoting Ebid is getting more traffic and more signups At one time I was getting up to 100 people a month signing up to Ebid from my page, during July and August the traffic dried up, but now its building up again.

it was very out of date and still had a section about happy hour auctions. Today I have completely revamped it and include links to a couple of Ebid user's websites that help people to get started. If anyone else has a Ebid how to website, let me know and I may include a link to it.

This the link to my Squidoo page http://www.squidoo.com/auction_site_like_ebay . I used to have a section for people to add their shops but Squidoo changed their policy about the number of links you could have to a domain, so I had to remove it The good thing is feebay's price increase is leading more people to search for alternatives.

Paul

[deltadelta48]

Very interesting, thank you Paul.

I think you hit on every item but two important ones: traffic is different (necessitating different tactics to get sales) and the buyers have changed over the years. If feebay sellers don't understand these two very important concepts, they will not have sales here.

Basically feebay is a closed pool of members, who advertises for itself. ebid is a open pool of buyers who come from google/thefind, members, old feebay buyers, and seller's marketing (linking website to ebid). And people miss this, as one of the first commenters did when she said, she tried to sell here, could not, ebid is at fault. All traffic should work the same, the same as feebay.

(Note too, that even ebid forum chats go to google!! That is why we all put our links on them, it generates curious buyers too. Nothing like that on google, feebay did not operate like this).

So new sellers have to understand its a different system and make changes. i.e. more listings = more sales. Ten items won't sell, but 500 listings generate daily sales. And 2000 result in dozens of daily sales. Buyers also like the selection and buy more, thus a discount for multiple buys in essential here.

As far as buyers changing, industry has noticed and talked about it for a few years. Shoppers now buy all over the web (using google to shop). NOT just buy on feebay. One of feebay's many problems is that they never saw this trend coming. New sellers on ebid must understand that all the terms, warnings, methods of selling on feebay do not translate to these new buyers. ebid lets them transfer listings over, but it would behoove them to make changes to those listings. i.e. These new buyers are smart, they know seller is responsible for getting items to them, its every site's policy. Yet some new sellers state they are not responsible for loss, etc. Google buyers pass them by, again its ebid's fault.

If new sellers are not prepared to do business with savy buyers like this, they run into trouble. These people want information, not a two word description. They want a discount for buying more than one (so INCLUDING shipping in the price does not work here). They can't be pushed around, and some feebay sellers don't always have the skills that translate into selling to other groups of people. i.e. before demanding instant payment check site rules, ebid does not require it, and it will lose new sellers sales and negs they issue buyers will be reversed. Not a good way to start to sell here.

if a seller wants to learn how to really operate an independent business, ebid is the place to come. There is administrative support for sellers of all sizes, genuine member help on forums to get started (mentoring, what a concept), frequent owner imput via forums, support for problems including reversal of negatives when/if necessary, suggestions for site changes by members routinely accepted, tight control of multiple accounts (lots less shill bidding, or knocking out competitors by posing as buyers and negging them), fair placement in categories (not by feedback), open feedback rules, no sliding scale for seller's payments (all pay the same), no policies favoring larger sellers over small, no surprise suspensions with no cause (all spelled out with warnings), no working w/ PayPal to hold payments for months based on fake "concerns", the list goes on and on.