Years ago you could use eBay to drive traffic to your webstore. Then eBay introduced policies that discouraged sellers from linking eBay listings to off-eBay sites, so customers couldn't leave eBay to purchase an item elsewhere. For eBay, it was a smart move—to make a profit, eBay needed customers to buy on eBay, so eBay could collect its final-value fees.

 Despite eBay's policy changes, you can employ several strategies to drive eBay traffic to your webstore. I like to call it mining for traffic. Why drive traffic from eBay to your webstore? Three good reasons:

 
• Higher profit margins: The average customer is willing to pay more for an item on your webstore than on eBay. By selling the items from your webstore, you can increase your markups—and your net profit.
• Reduced competition: When a person searches for an item you sell on eBay, eBay returns a list of items from hundreds or even thousands of your competitors. By driving traffic to your webstore, you virtually eliminate the clamor of the competition.
• Increased potential for repeat business: Developing long-term relationships with customers is the key to retail success. By steering customers to your webstore, you significantly improve your chances of building customer loyalty.

Driving eBay Traffic to Your Webstore with a Newsletter
By Stuart Lisonbee

 As I discuss in the article "Driving eBay Traffic to Your Webstore," eBay has several policies in place to discourage sellers from selling any of the products they're selling on eBay at off-eBay webstores. In that article, I offer two strategies for working around the policies to drive eBay traffic to your webstore. In this article, I reveal a third trick: encouraging eBay users to sign up for an email-distributed newsletter.

 eBay Stores owners have access to a newsletter tool provided by eBay, but the eBay newsletter tool will do you little good, because you're not allowed to advertise your webstore (other than your eBay Store) in the eBay newsletter. This means that you'll need to use some other newsletter management company such as Constant Contact. (Email List Manager - 60 Day Free Trial)

Writing an Effective Newsletter

When composing the content of your newsletter, lean toward the soft-sell approach. In addition to including a few subtle ads for featured products and services, strive to offer more to your customers than... Read More

Product Research Basic Principles

Introduction

 Of all the questions we receive here at Doba, the question of what to sell is far and away the most frequently asked. Many of our customers ask us to tell them exactly which products to sell. Though we may give an example here or there, we generally shy away from telling people exactly what products we think will sell well.

 Why? Because what sells well is whatever is in high demand and low supply, and in retail, the supply and demand changes as often as the tides.

Instead of telling you which products to sell, we would rather empower you to discover products on your own—products that you can most effectively market. To achieve that goal, this tutorial presents four articles that reveal basic research principles and techniques:

 
• This opening article, "Principles of Product Research," introduces the guiding principles of effective product research and selection.
• "Online Auction Research" reveals techniques for finding products that may sell well on eBay and other online auctions.
• "Website Research" presents techniques and tools for researching products to sell on your webstore.
• "Alternate Sales Venues" suggests other sales venues to consider during your research.

Online Auction Research: What's Hot? What's Not

 A key factor in your success as a retail merchant is your ability to pick a product that's in high demand and then set a price that customers are willing to pay for that item. By employing savvy online research strategies, you can quickly determine what's hot, what's not, and the prices that people have actually paid for the products or similar products you're planning to sell.

 In this article, you discover some cheap and easy research strategies that can help you select potentially profitable products and set prices that are inline with your market.

 Remember: Never compete on price alone. This often causes a price war that drives down prices for all retailers, including you. Combine a reasonable price with effective marketing.

Checking the going rate on eBay

An important part of doing proper research on eBay is finding out what's selling and for how much. The simplest way to do this is... Read More

Website research

 Conducting your business off eBay can mean higher profit margins per sale, but also presents the challenge of getting traffic to your site. eBay already gets millions of interested shoppers to their site every day, but to get consumers to visit your site it is important to choose the right products and employ a good marketing strategy. This section of the tutorial won't cover the marketing aspect, but will focus on finding the right products to sell on your website.

 The same basic principles apply and so we'll focus on finding products, determining supply and demand, and analyzing your competitors.

Choosing your niche

 The hardest part of opening an e-commerce site is knowing what to sell. It'd be great if we could jump right into opening a store selling everything under the sun. In fact, many of our members try to do just that. They want to open a store with every product available at Doba. However, effectively marketing a huge product line like that is nearly impossible.

 When asked, "Who is your target market?," "Everyone" is almost always the worst answer you could give. In trying to target "everyone," many new website owners end up failing to target anyone at all. Marketing dollars are spread too thin and website content isn't focused enough to be ranked well by search engines resulting in almost zero visitors to the website.

One of the nice things about selling for a specific market is... Read More

Tapping Into Alternate Sales Venues

 Internet retailing comprises more than eBay. Hard to believe, but true.

 While the majority of our members attempt to sell on eBay as their exclusive outlet, our most successful members have their own Internet stores, some of which sell nothing on eBay or on other online auctions. This article explores several of these alternate sales venues, so you can fully exploit them to maximize your revenue opportunities.

Turning on the taps for multiple streams of income

 You may have heard the term "multiple streams of income" thrown around by business gurus. The concept is simple: the more sources of income you are able to create, the better. Creating multiple income streams delivers two important benefits to your business:

 
• Multiple streams of income protect you from total disaster if one or two of your streams dry up
• Tapping into other markets often opens opportunities that are unavailable if you sell exclusively on eBay or some other online auction site

The Dirty Dozen - Avoiding the 12 Most Common Business Blunders / Busting Common Drop Shipping Myths / Driving eBay Traffic to Your Webstore
Email List Manager - 60 Day Free Trial / Domain Registration / Build a Web site yourself!

Publisher - www.itccommunications.net . Copyright - International Traveller´s Card Limited


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