Friday, January 18, 2013

New Online Markets

            New Online Markets

    Just because you spent months or even years working at Ebay this does not mean that they were ever the only place to work. I worked there because they were the most popular and were convinced for the longest time that Ebay was the only online marketplace.

    The experience of the last few years has taught me that this is not the case. There are many other online marketplaces to sell at. More and more come on line each week. Someday one of them will grow to rival the once great ebay. I say once great because there was a time when it was a wonderful place to conduct business. That was before they began to attack the small time sellers. The mom and pop home business owners. They did this with raised fees and new rules and endless restrictions and ebay suspensions for insane reasons. If you are reading this post you are here because Ebay went out of their way to make you feel unwelcome there.

    There are on the other hand many sites that make you feel very welcome. They not only want you to sell at their sites, they need you and the skills that you will bring.

    My advice is to sign up at a few of these sites and see how it goes. I am one of the former power sellers that has found a way to generate four figures a month is sells by selling at other online marketplaces.

    My second piece of advice is to review your sales history. You can do this by visiting paypal. Download a list of all of the emails that belong to those who purchased from you in the past and invite them to visit your new store fronts at the sites that you move to. You can do this mass emailing yourself or you can do it by using a clever little trick I have learned. You can sign up for a free trial with one of the email marketing services and use that trial as a way of marketing to all of your former buyers.  It works great and if you opt out before the trial is over you have reached all your past customers with a great marketing campaign and did it without spending any extra money only time.

    You can also visit sites like Ecrater and Ioffer and the only other auction site online that is seeing steady grown, Ebid. Below you will find a brief video about them and a banner link to their site. If you like the classic Ebay auction format rather than the fixed price format then Ebid is probably where you should set up shop.


eBid. Online Auctions with no listing fees.
    Okay that is it for today. I have added some social bookmarking buttons so please take a moment to bookmark this post or send it to someone else. Thank you and have a good day. Get the Email + Social Marketing Experience