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If buyers can find your goods easily - outside of eBay.. through search engines, for example - you don't need the eBay platform to sell (or Amazon, for that matter). Google AdWords make this possible, and a new Google service called Pay-Per-Action for AdWords makes the AdWords expense model even cheaper for ecommerce sellers.
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On another discussion board, somebody asked: What basic marketing fundamentals do I need to master to start an eBay business?
I provided a quick, compact answer, which follows....
Niche...
One of the best pieces of advice I can offer has to do with developing a niche. This means you should develop a business that has a small, specific market that you know something about or have some expertise in. If you can be both an information *and* product resource for your customers, you're way ahead of the game. Sellers that accomplish this do quite well with eBay auctions and eBay Stores. Make
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Once you start selling on eBay with any consequence, you need to come to grips with the fact that you´re in the marketing business. You´re a buyer, a seller, an office manager, and a strategist, but you´re also in the business of persuasion. With that realization comes a simple responsibility to connect with customers on their terms. That´s where your profits are going to come from. That´s how auctions get bid up and why some eBay Stores are more popular than others.
The sooner you can think of yourself as a persuader, the better. We live in a world of mind-boggling
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Once you start selling on eBay with any consequence, you need to come to grips with the fact that you´re in the marketing business. You´re a buyer, a seller, an office manager, and a strategist, but you´re also in the business of persuasion. With that realization comes a simple responsibility to connect with customers on their terms. That´s where your profits are going to come from. That´s how auctions get bid up and why some eBay Stores are more popular than others.
The sooner you can think of yourself as a persuader, the better. We live in a world of mind-boggling
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Dr. Robert Cialdini's site, Inside Influence Report, has an interesting article on eBay, auctions and general bidding processes that occur in the regular world. It talks about how bids with low starting prices tend to generate higher final sale prices than bids utilizing high starting prices. The research is based on a study by a couple of social psychology researchers.
The article offers three general insights that you may already have observed in your eBay dealings, namely:
1)Lower starting prices encourage participation by as many bidders as possible
2)Increased traffic and bidding generated by low starting prices acts as "social