September 8, 2010
Businesses have a number of different channels through which to sell products. These include retail, wholesale, Internet, and direct sales. There is one classification of sales channels that businesses owners everywhere are overlooking. That is the category of major selling sites such as eBay.
Some may ask, “Isn’t selling products on eBay just the same as selling on a business website?” The answer is NO. There is a huge difference and I will show it to you in a moment.
Most people have the perception that an eBay business is finding items around the house, at garage sales, close outs, and estate sales and selling them on eBay. For some that is what eBay is all about. For other business owners, eBay is a powerful selling channel selling legitimate products. Many businesses sell their products on eBay and other Internet selling sites.
eBay is the largest auction site on the planet. Every week hundreds of millions of people visit eBay looking to buy various products. Why? Cheap…cheap…cheap. People are looking for items and products cheap enough to beat Wal-Mart prices. Now in reality people also go to eBay for other reasons. Brick and mortar stores are limited in the quantity of products they can carry because of the limited space available in the store. Selling products on line allows a business to off an unlimited number of different products that are not restricted by walls or shelf space.
Other reasons people go to eBay is to find hard-to-find items, unusual sizes, collector’s items
What can be sold on eBay? Anything and everything. Anything on the face of the earth that can be sold is being sold on eBay. You will find large appliances, automobiles, fresh water sharks and potato chips that look like the Virgin Mary can all be found for sale on eBay. For example, there is a toy cash register that my kids played with many years ago and I thought it was a fun toy.
Well today there is nowhere you can go to find that same cash register. So guess what? I went on eBay and sure enough, there it was. In fact there were two for sale.I bid on the first one and was beaten by another bidder. I bid on the second cash register and I won it. In a short time the toy arrived at my door in perfect condition. Thank goodness for eBay.
So how does a business person use eBay to increase sales? Two ways. You can list your products for on eBay for sale. If you sell radio controlled airplanes, rockets, or ant farms list them all on eBay for sale. You can list 10 of each if you want to. You can see what your competition is selling his same products by looking at the “completed listings” feature.
In addition, you should open an eBay store. An eBay store costs only $16 a month but you are allowed to list many products, and it lowers your over all listing fees to be reduced. An eBay store is like a website because you can populate it with many products easily seen by customers.
But here is a bonus strategy. There are several other large selling sites on the Internet, Craig’s List, Yahoo Shopping, Goggle Products, and Amazon. Each has a large amount of people going to the selling sites looking to buy products.
With a traditional website selling products you must spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to your website. With eBay and other selling sites millions of buyers go automatically to shop for your products. Think about it. Instead of having a local customer radius of five to ten miles, you can expand your market across the United States.
What would happen to a business’ sales if it could sell its products to the millions of visitors that go to Amazon dot com, Goggle Products, Yahoo Shopping, Craig’s List, and eBay? Increase sales by 50% that’s what. The cost of selling on these selling sites is very small and the potential gain is enormous. Get started selling on eBay and give it a try.
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