Saturday, February 16, 2013

A Really Amazing Story About ebay


Woody Allen once said about the correct way to write a story: "Start with the ending and write backwards."  This is also true in marketing.  Rather than building something and then looking for people to buy it, first find a group you can reach, then make your product to fit that group.

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who told me a pretty amazing story. My friend's neighbor is a dentist who developed a dental tool that sold for about $200.  He put the tool on e-bay and only sold a few every month. Then he got in touch with his brother-in-law who is an e-bay SEO guy. After his brother-in-law finished juicing the product on e-bay, he sold 5,000 units in 90 days which grossed him over $100,000 in sales.

This puts e-bay in a totally new light. It demonstrates that SEO strategies actually work and do make a difference.  What I've learned about Ebay SEO from the above anecdote is included below.

I'm going to take a risk and develop a product to test on e-bay. I won't disclose what it is, but let me just say that  there are more people who would want to buy my product than there are dentists looking for a new tool. If you want to risk losing some of your hard earned cash on a crazy e-bay scheme, drop me a line and we'll figure out a prudent way to spend it in exchange for equity. If I stop blogging altogether, you'll know that it worked and I have retired to the tropics.

E-bay SEO:


Ebay no longer offers sponsored ads to place your listing at top of search category,  but now promotes listings higher and higher to the top based on the number of good product reviews from buyers. This changes the color of your star rating to silver, gold, platinum, etc.

The people in my story were very aggressive in getting ratings.  They emailed each buyer immediately and thanked them for buying and asked them for a positive review.  They made offers such as 50% off a second unit if they posted positive buyer feedback on Ebay and offered even sweeter incentives like 2-for-one coupon for a Youtube review, Facebook Like and Ebay review.  All listings had a 1 minute video demo of product (this might be perfect for Al's nail product you did the 3D model for).

The other important ingredients of the secret sauce recipe were:

  1. Search for narrow niche products on Ebay with $100+ unit cost and few competitors 910 or less is ideal. (See Niche Market Finder below)
  2. Among those, identify the top 2 or three.  In keywording the listing, include the competition's names and keywords so your listing comes up with the competition.
  3. Place 4 simultaneous listings at all times with different headlines and views of the product.  Track which sells best.
  4. Constantly monitor competitor's listings and undercut their price by $10-$20.
It only took about 8 weeks to starting getting $8,000-$10,000 a month in sales consistently. 

Niche Market Finder


Niche Finder identifies those little known items that sell extremely well but may be in short supply on the site. The identified niche items suggest opportunities to sellers or can be used by buyers to promote or discover interesting products. 

Visit Niche Market Finder to uncover little known and most wanted items on eBay
  • Identify new products you could sell
  • Find out about hidden treasures in your garage
  • Discover interesting products and good deals
A niche is a group of items with the following characteristics, estimated over a time period. 
  • A set of representative keywords- you can use them as a query to see niche items in the corresponding category
  • The maximum, average, or median selling prices for the period
  • An estimate of the number of distinct users who issued queries on the niche items
  • The number of available listings for the period
  • The number and percent items sold (conversion ratio)
Be sure to visit Niche Market Finder   for more detailed information.

Cheers

Jamie

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