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.