Steve Lindhorst – Selling on The River (Alternative To eBay)

Selling on The River

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If you are a small to medium size eBay seller, you already have what it takes to double your online sales. And I’m not talking about selling on eBay – let me explain…

From: Steve Lindhorst, eBay Instructor
Date: Sunday, June 22, 2008

Dear eBay Seller:

I’ll bet you didn’t know much about selling things on the internet until you found eBay. You can probably even remember the first thing you sold. (Mine was a sales brochure for 1960 Ford trucks.)

eBay used to be a lot more fun. Seems like just about anything would get bids. I once listed a bent up Oneida soup spoon that I found in the road in front of eBay’s headquarters, where I worked at the time. I listed it to show one of my eBay University classes that virtually anything would sell.

It got 14 bids and sold for $4.95.

I wouldn’t be as confident today. I’ll bet things have changed for you too. Where did all the customers go? Take a look at this article from the New York Times:

Customers are still out there – but they’re shopping on Amazon!

In case you are wondering, this is by no means a “bash eBay” book. Rather than trade one marketplace for another, I’ll show you how to get the best of both worlds. By selling on multiple channels you can double your online income. This is a realistic, unemotional approach to the problems facing eBay sellers.

Let me ask you. If you were fishing, and you weren’t catching any fish, would you keep fishing the same spot? Of course not!

There are a LOT of fish in the Amazon.

Do you still think of Amazon as just a place to buy books? You really need to take another look. Some sellers are making a killing selling the same products they sell on eBay, to an entirely different customer base.

Ask yourself…

Are your eBay sales better than they were a year ago?
Have you wished there was another place to sell your stuff?

Have any of these recent changes affected
your business?

• eBay Store listings appear in search results – then disappear!
  – Jan./Mar. 2006

• “Rebalancing” the marketplace – eBay Stores fee hikes
  – August 22, 2006

• Detailed Seller Ratings instituted – April 30, 2007

• Neutral Feedback counts toward negative rating – July 2007

• Changes to eBay’s fee structure – a discount? or a fee increase?
  – February 2008

• “Best Match” becomes default way of sorting search results
  – March 2008

• Digitally delivered products banned
  – March 31, 2008

• Sellers no longer able to leave negative comments for buyers
  – May 2008

• MORE changes “to be announced”…how will they affect your sales?
  • On April 4th, General Manager of eBay North America, Stephanie Tilenius, said: “expect to see bold change and faster change in the future.” She also said, “by this time next year eBay.com will be unrecognizable in comparison to today.”

Sometimes it feels like eBay is the competition!

I could go on, but you get the point. eBay sellers are feeling jerked around as eBay tries to figure out who they are.

A while back, I bought some books at my local thrift store. I got home, looked them up on eBay, and I was pretty disappointed. No bids. Then for some reason I checked over at Amazon. They were listed there for twice as much! I was pretty skeptical, but I thought, “what the heck, it’s free to list.”

Yes, it’s free to list your products on Amazon. You pay nothing until you have a sale.

I figured out how to list books, and within 24 hours I had my first sale – $35 for a book I paid $.50 for! The first month I sold nearly $1000 worth of books on Amazon and they were all thrift store purchases. One was a book called “Zeckendorf” a biography of a real estate tycoon. I picked it up at Goodwill for $3. It sold a month later for $239 on Amazon.

Could I have made more on eBay? with an auction? Well, at the time, the last copy of Zeckendorf had sold on eBay for only $168. So Amazon was the better choice.

As an old eBayer, of course the next thing I thought was, “I’ll bet I could sell other stuff here.” Well, turns out you can sell all kinds of things on Amazon.

Anyway I wanted to sell other things, and that’s when I hit rough road…

Since I was a National eBay University instructor, I am quite familiar with eBay’s efforts to educate their sellers. I expected Amazon to have an education program too.

No such luck.

Amazon.com is like the real Amazon – a jungle. Different terminology, different layout, it was very confusing, and I’ve been selling online for years!

Google wasn’t much help either. Try doing a search for “learn Amazon” or “Amazon classes,” I’m not afraid you’ll find my competiton. There isn’t any!

Sure, I found some free articles, and Squidoo pages but most were terribly out of date, some were just plain wrong, and most of the authors have no idea how to actually teach.

Even Amazon’s own Seller Help is all over the place. When I asked for a simple tutorial, an Amazon rep told me there is no single place to go to learn to sell on Amazon.

There is now.

So many eBay sellers were asking how to sell on Amazon. What they needed was a straightforward, plain-English guide to the basics of Amazon. I started months of research, gathering information from Amazon and eBay forums, articles on the internet, and my own experience.

I even got a lot of help from Amazon Seller Support over the phone.

Oh did I mention that Amazon has phone support for their sellers. In the book I’ll show you how you can get them to call YOU at a time YOU specify!
And you’ll get to talk to a real, understandable, human being.

I took all this information, and drew on my experience teaching eBay classes to create a guide that helps eBay sellers expand (or completely move) to Amazon. It’s called:

“Selling on ‘the River’ – The eBay Seller’s Guide to Selling on Amazon.com”

The book is packed with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions to get you started. You’ll also get tips and advice, screenshots, explanations of terms, and a couple of video tutorials I’ve created to show you how to list your products on Amazon. Just follow along!

The title is a nod to the eBay Discussion boards. It seems many discussions that mention “Amazon” have mysteriously been deleted. Clever eBayers began referring instead to selling on “the River” so as not to offend “the censors.” (Some trivia for you: The Amazon is the largest river in the world, by volume.)

Here is some of what you’ll learn:

• Amazon Seller Fees
  • No upfront fees, and NEVER an Unpaid Bidder
• Types of Amazon Seller Accounts
  • Good, Better, But which is best?
• How to create a Product Detail Page Amazon will approve
  • This is way different than eBay.
• How to Optimize Your Listing and Stand Out
  • Your eBay skills will come in handy here.
• Pricing Strategies for Amazon
  • How having the lowest price by a penny can hurt you.
• Packing and Shipping
  • I’ll show you how to use PayPal to create pre-paid, trackable shipping labels for your Amazon orders.

Get download Steve Lindhorst – Selling on The River (Alternative To eBay) at IMC.sale right now!

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