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Why is the section so dead?
 

It seems like starting your own site is best solution. The cost of a domain and hosting is about the same as the cost of an Auctiva account. With your site, you can accept Paypal without running the risk on your site getting shut down. You can also accept any other form of payment you want without having to get it approved.

You can sell whatever you want without rouge sellers trying to take you down, VERO issues, or changing your IP address every time you log into your site.

The money you save in eBay fees can go into PPC advertising. Am I missing something? Because it seems like no one actually does it.

huh? Are you wondering why there are not more posts here about making websites? If so, I think it is something that users post about, make their sites and kind of move onwards....:ranger:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That is certainly part of the equation. Also, I might say that making a site can be a bit more involved than it would at first appear. It's definintely more complex that creating an ebay listing in HTML with some javascipt using notepad and a six pack. I think many feel intimidated by the task. On the other hand, it isn't horribly bad, either.

It's all about volume for me. I can make 50p profit on an ebay item and sell 1000's....

or I can make several times that on my own website (selling at the same price) and sell less than 100 in the same time frame - and that's with paying someone to do all the SEO etc.

I like to do volume - keeps me from getting bored :)

CaptainJack

You also have to get your site marketed right. Takes a while or it will cost you some money in advertising costs such as google adwords or microsoft ads.

I was playing with C97 cart and before it was entirely done, I had orders coming in. The part that wasn't done was the part that actually told me what the orders were for. After checking my eBay auctions, I realized I had more money in my Paypal account that I should have. After checking each payment in Paypal, I found out that orders were coming in off the site.

The stuff I was selling on my site wasn't the same stuff I was selling on eBay. I got rid of C97 because it was kinda lame, and made my own. While I am getting it ready, I put up a page that let people enter their email address to be notified when the site launches and on the first day, I got an email address. I have done no advertising prior to that. Since then, I have sent out messages on Myspace and posted ads on Craigslist. I still get email addresses coming in and the site should launch in the next couple weeks.

Was it a brand new site? Or was the domain previously used for something similar?

The one with sales on the first day was a brand new domain. The site that hasn't launched yet used to be a forum six years ago.

Well my guess is you got extremely lucky with that one sale if it was a brand new domain. Because sites don't get into search engines the first couple days unless you do some backlinking.

I've already purchased my domain and hosting. So far it's just a splash page with company description and a link to my eBay store. I'm still trying to find the right shopping cart and in the meantime I've been building links.

I'm on the first page of Google SERPS for My+Keywords+Chicago. I plan to expand on this and add more pages to the site with My+Keywords+Other+Cities so that my site will have more relevance to people searching locally for my products. Hopefully Google will pick up on it and deliver!!!

My second site launched. Two days after launching, I had two people abandon their carts at the checkout page. One of them emailed me and said they couldn't calculate shipping. I found out that the shipping module dropped the leading 0 from zip codes since it treated them as numbers and 01234 = 1234. Both people had a zip code that started with 0. If that problem didn't happen, I would have likely had 2 orders in 2 days after launching.

The next few days brought in 3 orders and a few emails. When I search Google for my indexed pages, I have 188, but 185 of them are from the old forum. The other 3 are the contact page, forgot your password page, and the home page. It seems like Google Base is where everyone is coming from, and all you have to do for that is submit your products and wait 24 hours for them to be searchable.