Nextebizguy » eBay

Selling An Ebook on eBay

Nextebizguy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 03:18:27 +0000

Always one for adventure in ebiz ideas, I recently have tried selling an ebook on eBay. Admittedly, ebooks are a dime a dozen on eBay, but this ebook is a quality product and I think has great value to aspiring webmasters.

I first tried the suggested category: Everything Else > Information Products > Other

The listing had sales copy but no pictures. All listings in this area failed to sell. Ebook priced at $9.99.

I then tried listing it in: Business & Industrial > Other Industries > Websites & Businesses for Sale > Internet Businesses, Websites > Other Internet Businesses

The first listing had text only sales copy and again no sales. I had someone make me an ebook cover and relisted the ad. This time the ebook cover version sold (same ad copy and still priced at $9.99). The amount of interest judged by page views is quite low (< 20 views).

I am still going to try experiments with sales copy to see if I can boost page views. Overall, I think that eBay is saturated with ebooks. I can also try pricing changes but I don’t have much interest in selling ebooks for 99 cents.

As a side note, when I do research on completed auctions, the only ebooks that are selling well and for lots of money are the ebooks for police auctions that say things like “Xbox 360 90% Off Police Auction Ebook”. It appears people aren’t paying attention and somehow think they are buying an Xbox 360 at 90% off. Some of those ebooks are selling upwards of 100 dollars! Scratching my head on that one.

How To Use CSS With An HTML Ebay Listing

Nextebizguy — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 03:55:39 +0000

Let’s face it, eBay is not that user-friendly when it comes to creative listings. I labored over a nice CSS layout and when I tried to upload the listing, the CSS mods would not take. So after much trial and error, I found a way to make it work.

If you want to get CSS working with your HTML eBay listing, you need to make it an externally linked style sheet.

Nothing is simple with the html on eBay. When you paste your HTML code, be sure and just cut/paste what’s inside your body tags and nothing else. Then make sure that the first line of the HTML code is the linked style sheet. When you preview the listing you’ll see your CSS mods.

I’ve also heard that inline styles work, but I haven’t tested that. For me, it was much easier to keep the CSS separate.

What’s Popular?

Nextebizguy — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 16:53:00 +0000

There are many places on the net the help you find the most popular items being purchased. One such place I recently discovered was on eBay. It’s called eBay Pulse.

On pulse you can find popular searches, stores, and products (to name a few). You can select categories as well and find the top ten popular searches for each category. What’s great too is that as you select down the category tree, you can further narrow down your search by the various subcategories listed.

As an example, say you want to know what are the most popular cell phones being searched for on eBay. The pulse lets you drill down to All Categories->Cell Phones->Phones Only. You can also see the most watched items as well.

This is just one more tool available to help you find popular items you can target with websites or an Adwords campaign.