eBay Selling Secrets by Andrew Lock, the ‘Renegade eBay Auction Seller’

Actually I cheated. It’s a tale of lots of taxis, but that didn’t look nearly as good as a headline so I took the liberty of artistic license, forgive me. But you’ll really like this story, I promise.

So here’s what happened. A few days ago I was at ‘eBay Live’, the annual event for eBay sellers, which was held this year in Boston.

On the first day of the event, a Thursday, apparently no one had notified the taxi companies that there would be 8,764 people exiting the conference center simultaneously at 9pm after the keynote speech, and that most of them would need a taxi back to their ridiculously overpriced hotels (that’s another story – I paid $350 a night and considered myself lucky to get that rate!).

So imagine the scene, literally thousands of people standing in line for taxis that were nowhere to be seen - just an occasional passing blip on the horizon, far away. Taxis were as rare as a Nintendo Wii in a retail store.

As you know, I think differently to most people, and I avoid the lemmings mentality at all costs. There was no way I was going to stand in line for hours waiting for a taxi that may or may not eventually appear.

What did I do? I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I went around the corner of the convention center to the Westin Hotel and discovered a line of taxis with drivers that apparently had been sitting there for several hours, desperately hoping that someone, anyone, would require their service.

Yes, I know - how ironic is that?

In I jumped, and immediately asked the driver to take us past the front of the convention center building to allow me to wave at the ever increasing line of people waiting for a taxi.

I’m not a mean person, I just couldn’t help myself.

Actually, I wanted to see if many others would think to do what I had done. Guess? Nope. I counted just three people who strayed from the ‘official’ taxi line. And that’s where the lesson lies in this story. The situation I encountered is a perfect analogy to describe how eBay is being used today.

You’ve probably heard me say before that some 95% of sellers follow the crowd and blindly stick together, all sharing the same antiquated, ineffective and costly methods for using eBay. They’re standing in line for a taxi that might never come, and somehow they’ve convinced themselves that that’s the best option. Come to think of it, they probably believe it’s the ONLY option.

By contrast, there’s a much easier way, a fast track to profits, and that’s the taxi round the corner, just waiting to whiz you to your destination if you’ll only seek it out. That’s the key, right there: to benefit from it, you have to step outside your comfort zone, be willing to reject the familiarity and apparent safety of being with the crowd, and be unconventional, a renegade.

A good friend of mine sold products on eBay without any competition from any other sellers for years. However, recently several competitors entered the market and started selling the same items as him.

This situation is one of the reasons why I don’t recommend selling products on eBay unless you can be sure of exclusivity. It’s very common for copycat sellers to appear on the scene and grab a slice of the market, because they’ve already seen you profit from it.

Fortunately, sometimes these copycat sellers are not the ‘sharpest knives in the drawer’ as it were, and they can be forced to move on by being more creative and utilizing ‘renegade’ techniques.

So we brainstormed the situation together, and one of the most successful strategies he implemented was to create bundles of products so that all of his listings were different from the other sellers.

In marketing this is referred to as the ‘apples to oranges’ comparison. In other words, prospective buyers can’t make a direct comparison between offerings because they know it’s not a like for like, ‘apples to apples’ comparison.

Using creative bundling, adding high perceived value bonuses that cost you little or nothing to offer, can transform a business that’s been the ‘victim’ of copycat selling.

This is a strategy that you don’t often see used in the retail world, even though it’s incredibly powerful. However, I looked around for you and I did find a couple of examples to show you. In the example below from Staples, you can see how they bundled products by adding free bonuses to an existing product.
As you probably know, all the Sunday paper advertising inserts from all the major electronics chains promote the latest DVD releases each week. ‘Apples to Apples’ again. Think about it. What would make someone buy the movie from one store compared with another if the price was the same, which it usually is? Well, someone in the WalMart marketing office got their act together by bundling the DVD movie ‘Dejavu’ with a bonus ‘behind the scenes’ DVD. They also did a smart thing by using stickers to prominently indicate that the pack was exclusive to WalMart. There’s no question this was a successful strategy, and the hard cost of manufacturing that extra DVD was probably less than 50 cents.

Exhibit 1 shows the special twin pack, with the ‘Exclusive’ sticker in the middle, and the ‘Exclusive DVD’ graphic on the top right.

Exhibit 2 shows an example from eBay of a seller who’s selling a commodity item with lots of competition - a camcorder. Notice how they’ve created a bundle with tapes, a tripod, lenses, carrying case, filters etc. Now it’s a ‘camcorder value pack’ that’s sold for a premium price. The seller removed the problematic ‘apples to apples’ comparison and added additional appealing items.

Exhibit 3 shows a seller who has bundled a group of associated cell phone accessories rather than selling them individually.

If you’re in a competitive niche where others sell the same products as you, I encourage you to implement this renegade strategy.

‘My World’ is eBay’s attempt to jump on the MySpace bandwagon. Notice any resemblance? MySpace. MyWorld. You can’t blame eBay for doing this, but they’re about 2 or 3 years late in Internet terms, which in the real business world probably equates to more like 5 years. Things happens very fast on the Internet.

This is one of the problems with companies that are so large. They get bogged down with their own bureaucracy. Compare eBay to a small, fast moving company like dig.com, fark.com, or friendster.com - when these companies make decisions that take a couple of days to implement, eBay goes through at least 3 months of planning to accomplish something similar.

It’s a disease that most large companies have. No one wants to put their butt on the line to accomplish something different, instead there’s a loooooong chain of command, protocols to be followed, and even once it gets approved the huge teams of programmers simply put the proposal in their ‘queue’, to be acted on at their convenience, when they’ve ironed out the latest set of bugs.

The Opportunity

Looking at the positive, ‘My World’ does offer an opportunity for the smart eBayer to promote their business (rather than themselves, which stupidly the majority of eBayers still do – ‘my dog’s called spot’ etc etc, you know the drill).

Each registered user has their own ‘my world’ which consists of 6 modules: Favorites, Blog, Listings, Bio, Store, and Reviews & Guides. ‘Favorites’ shows a list of your most recent searches, sellers and stores. Use this carefully because at any given time, your most recent searches will be available for all to see. Of course, you can turn the feature off if you like, but it makes sense to use it. My advice is to use an account for searching that’s separate from your selling account. That way, you can save

searches on your main account that will stay on there permanently, does that make sense? Obviously those searches will be for your own products, as an additional way of promoting them.

The blog module is fairly self explanatory. Set your blog entries to show ‘long excerpts’ to maximize your keyword opportunities for SEO.

The listings module is also self explanatory, it displays your choice of current listings. Again, use the widest number available, or you might also want to feature a specific item, but be sure to update it.

The advice about keywords applies equally to your Bio. Ignore the predefined sections and fill them with keyword rich content.

If you have a store, it makes sense to promote it, and it’s super easy to do that in this module.

Finally, the reviews and guides module allows you to display up to 5 of each type, so use them all, and uncheck the boxes marked ‘display the titles only’ for obvious reasons.

‘My World’ is free, so it makes sense to spend ten minutes to set it up and occasionally monitor it.

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