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Do I need to bring traffic from outside of eBay?
 

How is it even possible. Power Seller sells 100 items of the same model everyday yet when I try to sell the same model I can barely sell one a day. So that got me thinking. Could it be that Power Seller Top Rated Sellers who sell 900 items day bring traffic from outside of eBay? I cannot come up with any other explanation. Yes I understand, they do get extra exposure (traffic) for being top rated power seller with thousands of feedbacks but this can only be accounted for a fraction of their total items sold per day. I am not expecting anyone to admit here that my findings are correct but maybe some of you wont mind to share your opinion. I have read on some forums where people claiming that you don't need to bring traffic from outside of eBay since ebay already does it for you. But if that was the case how can these power sellers sell so much more while selling the same exact product?

Hello Stan!

Many power sellers including myself use other social networks to bring potential customers who are looking for particular items.

Also, like me, selling lots of antique items I post on antique type forums with my ebay user name etc.

Networking is the key along with GOOGLE keywords as many people type right into google what they are looking for. If yours matches theirs then yours will be on page one of google.

None of us have a fighting chance only relying on ebay customers once the best match etc came into play so you have to even the playing field anyway you can.

From my personal experience & or point of view. Once you sell about 100+ or more on a good till canceled listing. It gets popular on eBay in which shows "see what other people are watching" towards the end of the listing. I believe if your a top rated seller & or powerseller they boost you in the search result because your item is " popular on eBay" The more people purchase & leave positive feedback it gives buyers a more safer way to purchase from that seller. Hope this helps. I use to run 100+ a day. Hope this takes care of your concerns.

Ha! I don't Ebay, haven't been to the site in years. But I will bet anything you are 100% incorrect.

I Guarantee there is something about your competitors that makes them Stand out from YOU.

You many not see if but Buyers do.

I doubt Sellers are bring spending money on Paid Traffic.

Maybe they have repeat buyers.

Maybe the seller has an Autoresponder or Newsletter and stays in touch.

I guarantee if I saw their Site vs Yours I'd see a big difference.

Most businesses don't know how to Market, problem #1. :smash:

Hello dear Sandy! Thank you for your advice. As always solid advice from a solid power seller. You are an inspiration to me and probably many of us here.

I was considering buying GOOGLE keywords I don't know how much money I should spend on each keyword or daily. Would you say spending 500-1000$ on keywords might not be enough ? I was also thinking about Google Shopping. Seems very promising.

This is another interesting and good advice. I will definitely take this into consideration. It makes sense to me.

There is no such thing as Buying Google Keywords. There is Google Adwords also known as PPC (Pay Per Click).

How much to spend always makes me laugh. :pound:

If you are getting a Return On Investment you (invest) as money much as you have. Millions if you can get it.

If you placed a $20 bill in an ATM and it kept spitting out $100 bills, then how many $20s would you put into the machine.

I'll give everyone here some Free great advice.

Learn how to Market. That's all that counts. McDonalds hamburgers are crap, but guess who sells the most burgers in the world?

Sorry I have to disagree with you. I have an excellent listing for my product. In fact I provide larger high resolution pictures. I believe there is something else that is driving their traffic from outside of eBay. I've noticed most of these sellers sell mostly for buy-it-now price and only small percentage of auctions to attract more potential buyers. I found one top seller who sells about 900 items a day and it's only about 7-8 different models. Something else obviously is involved here. I tried to put the same price and yet not a single sale.

Good advice Sandy. Using Free Social sites can pay off handsomely.

Relying on ONE source of Traffic for any busines is the Kiss Of Death.

Top keywords are free to see.

Then "Reverse Engineer" your competition.

Google their name, images, etc... and see what you find.

Yes, high resolution images does help, along with goog lighting.

I would never buy from a business that is not powerseller for the same price. Why should I?

What is unique about you?

Guarantee
Shipping
Quality
Pricing

What seperates you from them?

LOL! You are talking to me like I started selling on eBay a few days ago. I didn't ask you to criticize me. I have now 4 Power Seller Top Rated eBay accounts. There is more to just fast shipping, high quality and the amount of feedbacks you have. These top power sellers with 50,000 feedbacks are getting their traffic from somewhere else is what I am saying here. You can have the best looking listing and provide best service to your customers but if you cannot generate traffic you cannot sell as many products (not even close) as some of these sellers do.

Yes, I understand that. As Sandy clearly stated, she uses social sites to gain more traffic.

Traffic + Conversion (buyers) = Profits

It's that simple.

If you are only figuring this out now then you have a lot to learn about Ebay.

I don't know Ebay but I could figure it out in no time. I wouldn't waste my time selling there unless I knew Ebay betteer than Ebay knows Ebay.

Sellers need to treat this as a business, it requires all your effort.

Social sites
Youtube
SEO
Adwords
Autoresponders
Banner Ads
etc...

If you know a lot about Ebay then why ask questions that are blatantly obvious to me.

Outside traffic will bring more traffic which equals more sales, so why ask now after already being a PowerSeller?

I'll let you know when my Ebay Guide is ready for purchase!

"How to make Money on Ebay, and Lot's of it"

I'll be blunt, my friend.

$500 to $1000 on GOOGLE keywords is roughly $495 too much.

Where else is the Stanislav empire?

And if it is nowhere else why not?

You have to expose yourself without wasting money.

:ranger:

So, are you saying to spend $5.00 or $505.00? :pound:

ZERO


It can be done for no money.

I was just kidding. ;)

However, if, and that's a big "if." Paying for Adwords would provide a ROI then I would absolutely do it.

The key to growing a business is to use all traffic sources that provide a ROI.

I'm sure for products with a High Net Profit using Adwords would be profitable.

Otherwise, it would be on my list to avoid.

There are many ways to drive traffic. Although I would rather drive traffic to my own site that I control. Long term that is where the money is at.

Think I'm going to visit Ebay now, haven't been to that site in YEARS. :faint:

Shut your face I am saying. ( as you know).

Spending money can be avoided.

I was trying to make sure the OP was to be given encouragement in a constructive way.
:ranger:

I think it all boils down to powersellers showing up first (or bigger guys). When I buy something, I rarely go beyond page 2-3 and usually go back to the first couple sellers I looked at first.

I try to get an idea of a good price and go with someone I feel is a big seller, which usually has a good price, or slightly better than rest. As a buyer I'm looking at overall feel but maybe that's just me.

When you go to somewhere, do you go into the big lit up store in front, or go browse the dark back alleys for something better?

I'm not 100% sure they bring their own traffic. I'm not one of them, but I'm pretty sure if I had control over hundreds of sales per day, I wouldn't send them to my ebay store so I can pay a ton of fees and deal with ebay/pp drama on a weekly basis lol

Just my opinion but it would pain me to send traffic to ebay.
All traffic i generate is swayed towards my website where i can sell without dictators.

Stan,

I very slightly agree with you on this but there is some agreement. One of my items is very unique and I have a heavy hitter competitor that blows me away on this item on ebay. They were selling 20-30 a day more then me(this is a large number gap for this item). So when I first discovered this I started looking into every aspect of my competition, as I always do. After quick research I found my competitors real website and immediately noticed "VISIT OUR EBAY STORE" and "CHECKOUT WITH PAYPAL" this quickly answered my question that my competition might be the biggest idiot I know. So he has a website that is receiving good traffic without ebay and paypal but yet they turn around and tell there customers hey go there so I can let them take control of my business.

I doubt it's necessary to go into details on why this is a perfect example of a great product but non-educated ownership, probably inherited the company haha.

So Stan I agree this can happen but the chances are very slim and mainly root to the above stated reasons from other users. One more thing Stan, Do a quick search of this item on ebay/amazon and let me know the numbered results. I think if you give us the number of other people selling your exact product, then we can really count out "other reasons". Let us know

Yes and No is the correct answer to your statement.

They may be redirecting to Ebay to gain more credibility. People believe in "testimonials otherwise known as social proof."

Testimonials on your own site don't mean squat compared to Ebay where they have more credibility.

The ONLY way to know is to TEST. Without an A/B test, I can not say for sure which produces better sales.

If after testing it was determined that selling via Ebay was costing them a ton of money, then you may want to buy thier website and traffic. ;)

At minimum you could see where they get their traffic from and swipe it.

Well I did research and surprise surprise apparently these 3 top rated sellers with thousands of feedbacks are all one and the same company (I looked at their source code). They have .com website too. They also sell on Amazon. The amount of products they sell every day is staggering (used TeraPeak to find out). The most aggravating thing is the fact that every single product they sell I am able to import from China. Exactly the same product! And like I said I did try to sell the same product as any of these top rated sellers do but I am only able to sell one a day while they sell 100s everyday. I also noticed that they have myspace website, facebook website. I also found a few random blog articles promoting their products under their company name. Once again it leads me to believe that in fact what really sets these top sellers apart from the rest is SEO. Someone is definitely bringing them traffic from outside of eBay directly to their eBay store.

Now you're talking my language Stan. ;)

Mirror what they do. If it works for them then swipe what they are doing.

If you know how to market "online" using Press Releases, Blogs, Youtube, SEO, social sites, etc... then driving more traffic to your Ebay products is a piece of cake.

I definitely need to look into this Ebay stuff. I would prefer to do Drop-shipping, high net profits, and not much competition.

As much hands off as possible. My job would be to drive traffic and make my Ebay products look pretty.

Now go after them and hit them with everything you got. :fight:

You're wrong there. I am selling the same item on different accounts. One is a "Top-Rated" PowerSeller, the other one is an "Above Standard". The Top-Rated sells about 50-60 items per day, while the Above Standard sells about 7-8 items per day. The same products, the same photos, the same prices.

The difference in exposure that Top Rated accounts get is huge.

On my Top Rated accounts, I'm on page 1 in the last 16 hours of the auction, without even receiving a bid, while on the Above Standard account I only make it onto page 1 in the last 10 minutes if there's a bid. If there's no bid, it ends somewhere on page 8 or 9.

@stan, what kind of product or category listing you having this problem with?

Ssounds similar to Google rankings. Page one gets all the views, while page two has zero hits.

He is 100% right! Marketing is key on ebay, amazon is who ever offers lowest price..... I have a few items that I sell about 20% more expensive then the competition.... Guess who sells more?

I dont think Stan would want share this info because it would be a dead giveaway of a type of item/product he is asking about and create him possibly even more competition.

No offense to you RSOT but I have noticed that you repeatedly ask others similar questions. If you are not willing to help please don't pretend like you do. Why would anyone here would want to disclose in which category or what products they sell? That's a dead give away and you know it.

Type in the product you are selling as if you were looking to buying it, I bet you find that the power seller is on the first page and you wont be, his/her listing will be there permanently and will feature on the first page.

Remember ebays default search criteria is "best match" these are usually put in order depending on seller status, feedback score, traffics, listing end time, amount sold just to mention a few. Most people wont even go past the first page or 2 and most buyers don't even realise how ebays search engine works.

It is hard to get onto that front page, you might need to try reducing your price slightly at first the people who will search past the first page will see you are cheaper, as you get more visits and sell more and get closer to the front of the search screen slowly put your price back up and aim to stay near the front of the search screen for what you are selling.

Of course this is only my opinion, thats what the forum is all about, but I have had similar problems as yours in the past and if you can afford to drop the price at first (presuming it is buy it now) just so you break even then gradually put it up I think it would be worth it in the long run.

Good luck with it.

No I am not wrong. I wish I was though. In order to sell a lot you cannot rely on TOP SELLER ACCOUNT alone, good graphics, description etc... You need to advertise your store outside of eBay to bring more traffic. This is what sets apart Top Rated Power Sellers who make millions of dollars every year versus another Top Rated seller who makes under 50 grand.

You have a good point keithy72 and I am not disagreeing with you but once again, being on the first page will not make as big of a difference as advertising your eBay store outside of eBay. 3 Top Rated Power Sellers, each selling only a a few models/varsities of the same product. They sell around 900 items a day while I struggle to sell a few a day. Same product, same quality! You can't tell me that just because their product shows up on the first page it makes such a big difference. I have seen a few other Top Rated sellers and they don't sell anywhere close to what these 3 are, even though their products are on the first page. If you know how to advertise and good with SEO you can literally become a millionaire within 12 month.

Everything comes back to Marketing. ;)

I would not call it Advertising or SEO. Rather a continous Campaign to drive traffic to your Ebay product.

YouTube

Facebook

Twitter

Press Releases

Your own website with SEO

Paid Traffic (PPC, PPV, etc...)

Social Sites

Blogs

Banner Ads

Media Buys

Email marketing

Newsletters

etc...

It appears to me that making money on Ebay is easier than people make it out to be.

You need to put in the WORK to Market YOU.

I thought about doing Google Shopping and Facebook campaign but it's expensive. You wont get much from inventing 500$ in your campaign .

I'm not sure what you mean by "expensive."

You can set-up a Facebook page for Free. (you can then start an Ad campaign for a few dollars per day targeting prospects)

Create a Blog for free.

Twitter for free.

Youtube videos free.

Electronic Press Releases are free (you need to write the copy)

Email marketing can get started for free.

Other social sites, free.

Electronic Newsletters, free.

You can be a "Guest Blogger" on a site related to your product, free.

Start small, when you start making more sales which hopefully means more profits, then roll those profits into Paid campaigns that produce a ROI.

I like your style Roscoe

FREE
=
frugal
=
profits

Heck of a combo!

I thought you might like it Sandy. ;)

It's about leveraging 3rd party sites and driving eyeballs (traffic) to your product or service.

Pinterest is great also.

I'm a Marketing Guru and teach this to my students. I better know what I'm doing.

This company became an overnight sensation by blending crazy objects such as iPads. They've made Milllions and Millons of dollars off FREE YT videos. This video alone has over 15 Million views.

I heard Facebook campaigns sometimes are even better than Google. Is it true ?