Ebay cost per click vs your own site

The_Cynic · #1 05-30-2008

1st, I want to say Cheers! to the people here at this forum. I have been lurking for a while, I must say there is real gold in these threads.

I am in the situation of relying almost 100% on ebay for my income. I know, that is precarious position to be in, if you don't have back up accts ready to go. I am in the process of setting up back ups for that day ebay cuts my throat. I have also set up a couple stand alone websites to sell my stuff.

I have come to the realization that the fees I pay to ebay and paypal are NOT for the right to be a part of the ebay "Community" and sell on ebay. The fees I pay them are essentially for traffic to webpages they host for me and a payment option. Nothing more.

-------There is no ebay community, ebay is just another ecommerce company with bad management trying to maximize their profits in a shortsighted way.-------

My ebay fees are essentially for traffic. Nothing more.

So the essential question for me, -How much traffic does my ebay fees buy? What is my cost per click from them?

-- I looked through my ebay traffic stats, for last month, I counted up all my pageviews. I then divided the pageviews into my ebay fees to get a rough number estimate of my cost per click. $1350 in fees dived by 12000 pageviews = 11.25 cents per click. --- On my standalone websites I have added both Google adsense and google adwords. For the keywords I need I pay on average about 7 cents a in adwords. -- On that front ebay is ripping me off for traffic i could just as well buy from google for 4 cents a click less.
--- That doesn't even mention the free traffic my site gets from the search engines, etc.. When I add that into the equation my cost per pageview is around 4 cents vs. 11.25 from ebay.

Just wanted to share that. Now that I see my ebay fee as paying for traffic, my whole outlook has changed.

Anybody have similar insights into this?

**aspkin** · #2 05-30-2008

What if you're in a very competitive market, in which a keyword from Google cost $1 or more per click? That's where being on eBay really helps out.

I never thought of eBay fees as just the price for traffic, to me it's much more then that.

EBay brings the sales, they have a huge audience of buyers at their finger tips, and I wouldn't dismiss them just yet unless you don't want those extra sales your website can't give you.

djmuggs · #3 05-30-2008

yeah bro, i hate to say it.. but if it wasnt for the brand name "eBay" you wouldnt have nearly as much traffic as you do now.

they advertise like crazy to drive traffic to your pages.. i saw a ebay commercial on fox 5 primetime... thats like $15k a second

ebayhateluv · #4 05-30-2008

HI Guys:
When I used to bid with the Ebay Keywords program, for a Word such as "Pens", or the word "Montblanc", cost per click was anywhere from $1.25--up to $3.25, depending on who was in position number 1, and if you wanted to be in the number 1 slot..
--Now if you want Rollerball Pen, that was cheaper, like ..30-45 cents, as it is a much broader search. And if you went to something like black pen, its down to like .11-.18,
--Once i competed fro the word "Cross Pens", got up to $2.77 per click, ran my entire $150 budget out in 2 days, so i cancelled it,., AND i got -0- sales
--They also gave you "IMpressions", as well as click stats

The_Cynic · #5 05-30-2008

Good response, I am looking at it from the perspective of my items and what makes sense in relation to that.

If you list some items with higher priced keywords, I am sure the math will change. I can say what works for me may work anyone else. I have also tried to siphon my ebay customers into my own website with a little success.

If you have throwaway accts, It might be worth looking into an arbitrage play. Set up the listings with links to drive the ebay traffic to an affiliate or MFA site. Depends on the
listing cost vs conversion ratio.

I blatantly violated their linking policy for well over a year on thousands of my listings and I was never caught. I had direct links to my off ebay site that was selling the same item. Was nebver caught and I removed the links voluntarilty when I realized that it was against ebay TOS, and wimped out. So something to consider.....

The_Cynic · #6 05-30-2008

Now that I think about it, Google base would be a much better arbitrage play. Free listings on Google Base just convert your excel to a csv and List away. -- Free Clicks--

The_Cynic · #7 06-03-2008

I went back and dug through my numbers a bit more. I left out a very important factor and that is ebay traffic converts at a much better rate than my site traffic, about 30% better.

So for now, I need to get my backup accts in place, as I am not leaving Ebay anytime soon.

ambercolour · #8 06-04-2008

There is much more on the internet than ebay and you can get dirt cheap ads on google/yahoo/clicksor and etc. It just depends on the "keyword" you are promoting, if you are promoting a keyword such "nokia n95 mobile" then you gonna waste your money and more people are going to bid like crazy on that keyword, however IF you had the keyword "brand new nokia n95 car charger" then these keywords are dirt cheap and less competitive and you are directing exactly what the customer wants. If you are using keyworddiscovery it will give you so many results for google keywords what people search for. I think to many people depend on ebay to much and they need to think out of the box, yep its a good tool but also consider other options.