Posted by Amanda Brooke on Mon, Feb 08, 2010 @ 04:46 PM
eBay announced the new and improved fee structure recently, with the changes set to go into effect on March 30th.
Once again, eBay is presenting this fresh disaster as something good for sellers.
Good?
Hmmmm…well, not many eBay sellers consider an enormous increase in Final Value Fees as good.
These latest changes might not be all that bad for sellers who are amenable to giving their items away. For instance, if a seller lists an item for $.99 or less, there is no listing fee.
Of course, there will still be a hefty Final Value Fee of 9%, plus since eBay stopped allowing paper payments so as to ramrod everyone through Paypal, another fee to be paid there. So, theoretically, if you listed and sold an item for $.99, you would pay no listing fee as long as you didn’t set a reserve price or use any special features.
But by the time you paid Final Value Fees and of course “Paypay” fees, you would be out a nice sized chunk of the $.99 you made. Less what you paid for the item when you bought it to resell, and any packaging supplies you have to purchase in order to ship the widget.
All this will do is cause another rash of sellers who attempt to make their money on shipping and handling charges.
What is so upsetting about this latest fee hike is that as usual, eBay adds insult to injury by assuming that the average eBay seller has a brain the size of a BB and lacks even the basic skills of using a calculator to do the math and see that sellers will be paying more for less.
The announcement itself was priceless and so typical of FeeBay:
"Starting March 30, 2010 selling on eBay will be a better deal than ever!"
That’s true.
It will be a better deal…..for eBay.
Here is a copy of a chart posted on the eBay Announcements Discussion Forum showing how the fee increases will affect sellers who do not have an eBay store. Read it and weep:
A better deal for sellers? If you sell an item for $50, you'll pay 47% more in fees. A sale price of $100 equals an astounding 87% fee increase. $150 sale price means a fee increase of 106%!
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is NOT a better deal for eBay sellers. If you have an eBay store, your fee hikes aren't quite as bad, but still bad enough. The Catch-22 here is that to save a few pennies on Final Value Fees, you will have to subscribe to an eBay store. More money, more money.
eBay has its hand in your pocket either way.
Sorry, John Donahoe, you haven't fooled anybody except apparently the Board of Directors, who must truly be as dumb as you think eBay sellers are.
Posted by Amanda Brooke on Sat, Feb 06, 2010 @ 04:27 PM
Even if you have a small internet business, you can use the online services of LogoYes to create and develop a professional looking, distinctive brand just like one of the Fortune 500 companies!
Branding is increasingly important for the ecommerce entrepreneur! Having a great and easily recognizable brand for you business can go a long way toward ensuring its success.
One way to help establish and build your brand is to have a fantastic brand logo!
What is LogoYes?
LogoYes was developed by none other than the award winning graphics designer John Williams. The logos and symbols found on LogoYes were all created by professional designers, so you are assured of getting a high quality, cutting edge design!
Many internet business people realize that the business logo is the cornerstone of building brand recognition.
LogoYes is committed to helping small businesses develop design logos of the same quality as a giant company, at affordable prices. The design process is extremely user friendly, too.
What are the Benefits of Using LogoYes?LogoYes pioneered the DIY logo design process. This is an easy to use, very quick and simple process that allows users to get online and develop a professional logo that will reflect what their brand is all about.
Re-sizing is also offered, which is an important part of a well designed logo. You will probably want to use your logo in various ways---business cards, stationary, brochures and more.
Therefore, your logo needs to be a design that will adapt well to sizing up or down.
One suggestion that LogoYes makes to customers which seems like excellent advice is to choose a logo that will look good in black and white as well as color.
There will be times when you will probably need to print or display your brand logo in black and white, so having a design that lends itself well to classic black and white is essential.
LogoYes offers you the latest in design trends, and can help you develop a logo for your brand that is easy to remember. This will help tremendously in building brand recognition, so important in the competitive world of the World Wide Web!
Check out
LogoYes and see what a great looking logo you can get for a surprisingly low price!
Posted by Greg Scott on Sat, Feb 06, 2010 @ 02:22 PM
Regardless of what type of business you are running, traditional brick and mortar or an ecommerce business, you want to be sure that all of the important legal stuff is as it should be.
Rather than going out and hiring a corporate attorney at several hundred dollars an hour, take a peek at Legal Zoom---your online legal experts!
What is Legal Zoom?Legal Zoom is a web based legal document service.
The company was founded by attorneys who have worked at some of the most notable and prestigious law firms in the United States.
The partners have used their combined expertise to simplify the law and make it easily accessible to everyone.
Legal Zoom can help you quickly and affordably start a business, or handle all sorts of personal legal business such as estate planning.
Why Should You Use Legal Zoom?You can handle your business legal needs in the privacy of your own home office, quickly and affordably. Legal Zoom has helped over 1 million satisfied customers attend to common legal matters.
All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, and then Legal Zoom’s proprietary LegalZip® software will automatically create your legal documents.
After your documents are created, an experienced team will proof read your document and check spelling, consistency and formatting, then print the document on high quality acid free paper, and finally; ship the document directly to you.
There is no need to print or download!
Your information is guaranteed to be private and secure. Legal Zoom takes extra precautions to ensure that its website servers and connections are secure with cutting edge encryption and security devices.
As a matter of fact, the Legal Zoom website passes the FBI's very stringent Internet Security Vulnerabilities Test!
In this lagging economy, with jobs being lost at a near record rate and millions of Americans out of work, more and more people are turning to online home businesses to generate an income. Having a low cost, highly skilled business available online to help with the legal aspects of an internet business start-up is a real plus!
Take a look at
Legal Zoom today to see how they can help with your ecommerce business!
Posted by Madison Claire on Sat, Feb 06, 2010 @ 01:24 PM
Terapeak is used by many eBay sellers to increase sales!
What is Terapeak?Terapeak is the industry leader for eBay Research, eBay Education and eBay Motors Parts.
An eBay Certified Provider, Terapeak was founded in 2002 by Anthony and Andrew Sukow while they were busily running their eBay Powerseller business.
In a very short time, Terapeak had established itself as the industry leader for eBay Research as well as eBay Education simply because it was the first of its kind to provide eBay seller, eBay category, eBay Motors Parts and Accessories and eBay international research.
In addition, Terapeak is the only business to focus solely on eBay Research.
Terapeak focuses on eBay Motors, Parts, education, innovation, plus the entire customer experience. As if that wasn’t enough, Terapeak also has the largest customer base for eBay research, and is certainly the fastest growing research and eBay education company.
How can You Use Terapeak?If you are an eBay seller, Terapeak will be an invaluable tool for you! In fact, Terapeak claims that it can increase your eBay sales by up to 80%! From October 1st, 2009 to November 13th 2009, a Terapeak subscriber’s average selling price was 83.28% higher than the average eBay selling price.
Wowza! That’s impressive!
Basically, eBay sellers use Terapeak’s statistics and analysis to know what and when to sell for the maximum sales price.
For instance, Terapeak can show you:
- How to Sell: You can analyze 90 days of eBay history and over 500 million closed listings to know everything you need to know about a product you are thinking of selling. It will help you know what to sell, when to sell, and to find great keywords for your niche.
- Seller Research: Terapeak gives you the inside track on your competition. You can see the products that your competitors are selling, track their total sales and see what prices their items are going for, and much more.
- Hot Products: Terapeak will help you find great products to sell. Terapeak analyzes every category on eBay, and tells you which products are in high demand with high prices and 100% sell through rates!
- Seasonality Trends: Terapeak will show you 2 years of seasonal category trends. Trend the average selling price, total sales, how many bids per listing, and long term success within a category.
Check out
Terapeak today and start boosting your eBay sales tomorrow!
Posted by Amanda Brooke on Sat, Feb 06, 2010 @ 11:17 AM
Twitter is an amazingly effective social media marketing tool that can boost your ecommerce sales if used correctly.
Why Should You Use Twitter?Twitter can help build your brand and promote your business to many, many people you would not ordinarily reach. Many huge mega corporations are using Twitter such as:
Now, chances are that if these industry giants have checked it out and decided that Twitter as worth their time, it will be worth your time, too.
What are Some of the Ways You can Use Twitter?You can use Twitter to:
- Generate buzz about your ecommerce business and products
- Build relationships that will lead to increased sales for you
- Spread the word about promotions, sales and contents
- Interact with your customers and improve customer service
- Keep up with what is being said about your business
- Generate great PR for your business
- Establish yourself as an authority within your niche
What can You do to Use Twitter Effectively?- Ask to be Retweeted. This is the best way to acquire followers and crank up the buzz about your business. It’s very simple to do: At the end of your message, simply type in “RT Please.” That’s it.
- Reply to your mentions. If your business I mentioned, reply to the mention as soon as possible. This will make you and your business more personal and real to fellow Twitter users, and make others feel as though they are more personally connected to your brand.
- Use Twitter to do a little informal market study. For example. If you have an online pet supply store and are considering selling a new line of kitty condos, you might ask folks on Twitter what they think of the product. This is an excellent way to find out how well a new product might perform for you. If 9 out of 10 people give it a thumbs down---don’t sell it!
- Only follow people who are relevant, and don’t try to build up a huge following of every Tom, Dick and Harriet on the internet. Having a big following on Twitter is all well and good IF they are followers who are genuinely interested in what you’re all about.
Use Twitter to grow your ecommerce business and watch your sales skyrocket!
Posted by Greg Scott on Fri, Feb 05, 2010 @ 01:47 PM
If you are a home business entrepreneur, you might find yourself always on the lookout for new and improved self help books that will give you the magic formula for staying organized and efficient while working from home.
Coming from someone who has read and soaked up many hundreds of pages of this type of book from all of the great self help gurus, here are a few of the things that stand out as a compilation of what you absolutely MUST do every day:
1. Make sure you eat your recommended dietary amounts of veggies, which is a minimum of 5-7 servings a day. This will keep your brain fresh and functioning like a well oiled machine, thus improving your efficiency.
2. Make sure to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep every night. This will keep your brain fresh and alert, thus making you more efficient and productive.
3. Make sure that you get the recommended 30-60 minutes of aerobic exercise every day. This will keep you fresh and running like a lean, mean machine---full of efficiency!
4. Make sure that you get the recommended 15-20 minute Power Nap every afternoon. This will keep you fresh and efficient!
5. Make sure that you eat a healthy lunch, and get out of your home office to do it. You need a change of scenery to keep you fresh and efficient, running like a well oiled machine…..etc. etc.
6. Make sure that you dress for success as recommended by all of the work-at-home self help efficiency experts. This means don’t slouch around in your jammies and robe all day. Kit yourself out just as though you were going out to work---suit and tie for men, nice power suit or dress and pantyhose for women. It will take some time every morning, but will keep you fresh and functioning like a paragon of efficiency!
7. Make sure that you read the latest reports and happenings within your specific industry. This will be rather time-consuming, but maybe you can work it in somewhere between your Power Nap and 40-60 minutes of daily exercise. Staying up-to-date on things in your field will keep your brain fresh, and so on.
8. Make sure to drink the recommended 8-12 glasses of water every day. This will necessitate frequent trips to the powder room, but perhaps it could count as part of your recommended 30-60 minutes of daily exercise. Staying hydrated will keep your brain fresh and alert, and all of those other good things.
9. Make sure that you spend some time every day planning what you will do on the next day---short term plans---and for the next year---long range plans. This will eat up a fair amount of time, but you should be able to squeeze it in between your 5th glass of water and subsequent trip to the rest room, and lunch. Planning will keep you fresh and efficient, and so forth.
10. Make sure to spend a little time every day doing nothing. Just take some “me” time and chill. No work, no plans…..just kick back in your office chair and day dream for a little while. You might be able to work this “me” time in somewhere between coming back from lunch and your daily Power Nap.
Now, this doesn’t leave much time for actually making a living, but with your fresh, efficient brain and since you are running like a well oiled machine, you should be able to manage that with no problem and still have time left over to check Facebook and see if anybody has written on your wall; or some other equally important thing that must be done every day!
Posted by Amanda Brooke on Fri, Feb 05, 2010 @ 11:17 AM
Your
ecommerce dropship website says a lot about you as soon as visitors arrive at your home page, so it needs to make a good first impression!
There are various ways to spruce up your website and make it appear welcoming and appealing to potential customers, as well as mire user friendly and functional.
Here are 3 handy tips for improving your website:
1. Be aware that your front page of your website is around 90% of what influences winning a customer. If you can take an unbiased look at your front page, check it out and see how welcoming and professional it looks to a visitor. Ask yourself if your front page clearly tells a visitor what you are all about, and summarizes what you have to offer in such a way that visitors arte prompted to proceed further into your site. If you can’t do this objectively, solicit a friend, relative or professional acquaintance for a critique.
2. Keep your content fresh and up-to-the-minute! If you surf the web for a while, you might be shocked at how many ecommerce websites still have a Christmas theme going on, which is so over. Don’t do this. Always make sure that your ecommerce dropshipping website is timely and revitalized with new content. Remember that in viewers aged 25-55 years old, you only have approximately 10-12 seconds to snag their attention. For viewers under the age of 25, it’s even less. You will have about 8 seconds to grab their attention. So, keep your website optimized with fresh, relevant content!
3. Make sure that your website is functioning with optimal performance. This means speed of page loading, being error free, not full of typos and ungrammatical errors, easy to navigate, easy to search, well organized, has great product descriptions, and more. You can get free analytical tools on the internet to help you analyze the overall performance of your website. Use them at least once a week or so. Also, be sure to SEO your website to the max with good keyword practice. This means not over-using or under-using your keywords.
Making a good first impression can make or break sales in your ecommerce dropship business!
Posted by Greg Scott on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 05:43 PM
Let’s face it, almost everybody is in a big tearing hurry these days, and internet users are notoriously impatient; so the faster you can speed up your ecommerce website, the better off you will be!
At this time, speed isn’t a factor with Google when it comes to a website’s search ranking. But that is subject to change without notice and in fact, Google has mentioned adding speed to the overall algorithm.
If Google makes the speed of a website a factor in search ranking, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other search engines will follow.
Visitors to your website will expect your pages to load quickly. If they don’t, you will lose a lot of potential customers as they hit the back button and skedaddle off to greener pastures with speedier websites.
There are various methods of speeding up a slow loading page. Here are a few suggestions from Page Speed, which is an Open Source Project:
- Optimize caching, which includes making sure your styles are in CSS files on the server, not in your page’s code.
- Minimize round-trip times, which means reducing the number of different style sheets and scripts you use, and avoiding redirects whenever possible.
- Minimize request size, which means keeping cookies small and serving static content from a cookie-less domain whenever possible.
- Minimize payload size by compressing scripts and images, and by serving all resources from the same URL every time you use them in your site.
- Optimize browser rendering by using efficient CSS and putting style sheet links in the head of the document.
What is Page Speed?
Page Speed is an Open Source Firefox/Firebug add-on. Both webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate performance on web pages and also to get suggestions on how to improve performance.
Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices as shown above that are known to enhance web page performance.
Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.
Check out the FREE service from Page Speed, then put the pedal to the metal and watch your ecommerce website take off!
Posted by Madison Claire on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 04:37 PM
Savvy ecommerce entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the many benefits of social media marketing, which includes Twitter.
Twitter is extremely popular and many huge corporations such as Dell Computers are using Twitter to grow their businesses and increase sales.
If it works for them it can work for you, too! Many people hesitate and hold back on social media marketing because they simply do not understand how to get started.
Here are some simple tips to help you get started on Twitter:
- You are limited to 140 characters with your Tweets, which is what a Twitter message is called. This means that you must use those characters wisely! So, use internet shorthand such as LOL for Laughing Out Loud and TTYL for Talk To You Later, etc. This is perfectly permissible on Twitter. Another character saver is to shorten your URLs. Use a free service such as tinyurl.com to shorten URLs for you.
- Be polite! Mind your manners on Twitter, as on any of the social sites. There are unwritten rules of etiquette for social media. It is recommended that you sort of sit back, listen, watch and learn for a while before jumping into the full swing of things. If you do that, you will be able to sort of get a general idea of what is socially acceptable on Twitter.
- Sometimes it is okay to be a copycat. Find and follow a successful Twitter member, read and keep up with their Tweets, and learn just what they are doing that is making them successful on Twitter. Then do the same thing yourself.
- It’s also okay to be a copycat with tweets. Just be sure to give credit where credit is due. Preface a copied tweet with “@their username” and all will be will.
- Don’t try to follow everybody, and don’t try to amass a huge following of people who follow any and everybody. Be selective! Follow those who have interests that are germane to yours, and in this way you will accrue relevant followers---people who are following you because they have a genuine interest.
- Make your tweets count by using Twitter during the peak hours, which are usually in the afternoon.
Twitter can help you grow your internet business to new heights! It does take a commitment in time and a bit of effort, but other than that; it’s completely free!
Posted by Amanda Brooke on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 03:24 PM
Every ecommerce entrepreneur is aware that SEO is vital to building a successful online business, so a few tips to help improve your search engine rankings with SEO will probably come in handy.
The plain and simple truth is that without SEO, you won’t be found in search engine rankings, which means that you may as well not even have your virtual doors open because there won’t be any business!
Here are some simple tips to help improve your search ranking with SEO:
1. Put your keywords to work for you. Use keywords in your title, in your description and somewhere in your URL. This tells the search engines such as Google what you are all about, and helps them to rank you.
2. Be shrewd about your keyword density. You want to be like Goldilocks and get it just right---not too much, not too little. If you over-use keywords, and stuff your content with too many, that is considered “Black Hat” SEO and the search engines will penalize or worse yet; even drop you for it. If you use too little, you won’t be found easily enough by the search engines. A good general rule of thumb is about 1-3% density in your content.
3. Use keywords in your header tags. Besides the text being larger, which highlights the importance of your keywords; just using them in headers tell the search engines that they are important.
4. If you are sure to incorporate your keywords into anchor text, it will help with SEO tremendously. Whether on site or off site, using your keywords in the anchor text of links is a smooth move SEO wise!
5. Try to link to an authority site within your niche. This lends credibility to your content and builds trust, which carries a lot of weight with the search engines. For instance, if you are selling canoes, try to establish a partnership link with someone like Coleman or Eddie Bauer.
Using SEO wisely will increase traffic to your ecommerce business, and help you build your home biz into a successful, thriving enterprise!