Using ebay.com as
a Marketing Tool
ebay.com is a great tool to
generate sales.
However, anyone that uses ebay
will tell you the same story.
It is a long slow process to
sell inventory and ebay does their best to keep you from direct
contact with customers. Making the process of harvesting
customers even more difficult.
One of the biggest complaints
is that customers that were derived from ebay sales often refuse
to pay the regular price for products and know they can buy from
another supplier cheaper back on ebay.
Although ebay has done
wonderful things for small businesses struggling to make sales,
it is not the entire answer to marketing your website.
But rather than gripe about
the downside of ebay, lets talk about what it can do for you.
ebay has millions of visitors
and is the number 1 source for unique or rare products. So there
is a market there that can be tapped.
The trick to
marketing is getting your product in front of the consumer
and ebay will do just that. If you are selling an inexpensive
product the cost of giving away samples is cheap in
comparison to most marketing campaigns.
Although we would not
recommend giving away items on ebay, it is a definite source of
users that will pay a discounted rate to try out your product.
On the down side, if you
continue to offer the product at the discount rate, the newly
attained customer will just continue to buy at that rate rather
than pay you more money directly. So it is important to rotate
available products or run limited time spans not letting
customers know the products are back on sale.
ebay is a great tool, but can
also be destructive to your business. If customers believe they
can get the product cheaper rather than seeing your side as being
an inexpensive marketing tool to gain new customers, you will
lose customers altogether.
We strongly recommend
outlining a good plan for using ebay and not just trying to sell
everything using the auction website. A good marketing campaign
should include all possible sources of sales, but no business can
offer a product for sale 365 days a year.
Like every tool, use with
caution and wear safety protection when operating. If you remain
aware of the pitfalls, the tool can be a productive one.
Compare ebay with
Walmart
Every single manufacture wants
to be in Walmart because of te extreme marking power they have.
They can put your product in from of millions of buyers and sell
more than any other single retailer.
But everyone knows that
getting in bed with walmart is like selling your sole to the
Devil.
They want it cheaper, faster
and they can put huge pressure on a business to cut corners on
quality.
The people running walmart are
not concerned whether you are in business or not, they only value
their bottom line and many companies that traveled that road are
now out of business.
Large companies learned that
it can cheapen or destroy their brand and some even sell cheaper
lines under their brand to meet walmarts pricing expectations.
ebay buyers are much like
walmart shoppers, they are cheap and expect the best deal.
So to compete on ebay, you
have to offer the best price and not necessarily the best quality.
Users will buy name brands on
ebay because they can depend on quality and ebay does a good job
policing for counterfeits and getting the products accurate.
More and more companies are
offing products on ebay as an alternate marketplace and knowing
that ebayers will shop on ebay almost exclusively.
ebay is so big that the
federal government has created legislation just targeted at ebay
sales, sellers and tax issues.
So ebay cannot be ignored
anymore.
But just like selling at
Walmart, you need to evaluate how it can help your business and
not just blindly list items thinking it will solve all of your
marketing problems.
My Spending and
Selling On Ebay
I have to say for myself I
have spent usually between $10,000 and $30,000 each year on ebay.
Now that might seem like a lot but it is really just a small
portion of what we spend running our business. But ebay offers
products we just can't find, and usually cheaper.
Just recently I purchased some
basic 30A Twist lock plugs for some of the power supplies in our
datacenter at Homedepot for $30 each. I found them on ebay for $5
each. Now when you need 30 of them, that is a big savings and I
can order more and keep some extras in case i need them.
So for us, ebay has been a
great tool when buying cables, plugs, cabinets and other hardware.
We can buy items like rackmout hardware for web servers that is
just not available anyplace else and even get bulk discounts.
In the past, companies that
make "Cage Nuts" would sell them to big companies like
Dell, HP and Fujitsu. For us to buy them, we had to deal dircetly
witth those companies and pay $2 each. But with ebay, I can buy
directly from the manufacturer and pay pennies each.
This helps me and he
manaufactures that can charge a little more than they charge HP
and Dell and I get to pay much less.
For companies like Home Depot,
it is not so good when I can shop cheaper online.
There is a definite
convenience factor being able to walk into a Grainger and walk
out with a product, but if I can wait 3 days for shipping, I will
get it cheaper on ebay.
Now, if you sell a premium
product at a high price then ebay may not be the right fit, but
if you can compete with the low prices, you need to be in that
market, because people like me, will always look their first
because I can search thousands of vendors at one time and compare
prices.
For us here at pageBuzz, ebay
is not a place we had any success with trying to offer website
hosting or website packages. So we remain buyers but not sellers.
But ebay has give us an outlet
to sell some of our used equipment to make back a few dollars. So
it does service us more than just being buyers 100% of the time.
Other Ebays
It should not come as a
surprise to anyone that the popularity of ebay has spawned so
many copycats you can't even count them all. But companies like
Amazon.com & Sears.com have taken the same ecommerce model
without the auction and create huge market places for sellers and
buyers.
So it looks like ebay is here
to stay and that is great for most people.
If you are not selling
your product on ebay, maybe you should consider it.
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