Note: I did not say that eBay is the BEST lead generator, just the most COST EFFECTIVE. You can place an ad on eBay for a product for as little as $0.30. You can get dozens or even hundreds of people to bid on the item listed in that ad. You not only make money off of them when they buy the product, you get to "capture" their email address (and their street address and phone number if you advertised a product that must be mailed). Just try to find another lead source that pays YOU for each email address you collect! There is not a single one outside the auction sites - and eBay is larger than all other auction sites combined and doubled and doubled again!
Let's do the math here. Business is slow in the summer so I place an ad an eZine that I have never heard of before. It has a subscriber base of 6000. I spend $45.00 to place the ad and I get twelve responses. Of the twelve responses, two join my mailing list and one buys a product for $4.50. Next I place a listing on eBay for thirty cents. Twenty eight people buy the product for $1.00 each. My shipping cost is $0.00 because they bought an ebook that is downloaded electronically. I captured 28 email addresses which all get added to a mailing list for future offers, I sold $28.00 worth of product, and I spent $0.30 doing it! Oh, by the way, the ebook has my web address and email address inside it. I will get future sales and web visits from that ebook.
It gets better. Let's even it up and say the eBay ad only received twelve bids, the same number of responses as the eZine article. How many of those 6000 ezine subscribers actually saw and read my ad? There is no way to tell. All I know is that 12 people responded. Were those twelve the only people that saw and read my ad? There is no way to tell. How about the eBay ad? Well, I have a hidden counter on the eBay page and it tells me that 72 people looked at that ad. My conversion ratio is 12 out of 72 or 1 in 6. Next I will relist the ad and change the headline to see if that new headline pulls better or worse than the first one. Don't forget, I'm getting paid (through my sales) while I am doing this market research. After I find the best headline (title) for the listing, I'll start playing with the ad wording. When I find the best wording, I'll start playing with the pricing and bonuses.
A computer programmer came to me once for some consulting. He had written three utilities that almost any computer owner could use, but did not have the money to market all three at once. He wanted some way to tell which would sell best so he could initially put all his marketing money and efforts on that one and let the cash from that first product pay for marketing the other two. I asked for resale rights and told him I would get some low cost but effective market research for him.
I listed all three products on eBay at the same price. There was no price incentive or advantage to buy one over the other. Whichever one of the three outsold the others was just more usefull and more desireable since they all cost the same amount. One product outsold the other two combined. I then relisted the three products with the popular one priced 15% higher than the other two. It still sold the most by a wide margin. I had hidden counters on all the ads so that I could judge popularity not just by sales but also by page views. Next I listed the two "loosers" at identical prices and did not list the third "popular" one. The results of this test were also cataloged.
When I went back to the client, I was able to tell him which product was most popular, second most popular and last. I also gave him the names and email addresses of the people who had already bought his product! Plus, after subtracting my costs for eBay Listing and Final Value fees, I applied half the remaining amount to his consulting bill! He actually got money back while having someone do his market research!
Here's another thing that is easier to do on eBay than with any web site, ezine, safelist, or any other marketing method. I have ebook products to sell. As a result of closing out my parent's estate, I also have my old science fiction paperbacks from the 40's, 50's and 60's. Then there are the old vinyl records, costume jewelry, carnival glass, magazines from the 40's, toys from the 40's, etc. How would you devise a way to use Pay Per Click advertising or eZines or any other method to determine which ones are hot right now (August 2003 as I write this) and which ones could not even be given away? How about eBay?
Best of all, I'm going to do this market research without running a single listing! Which means I am also not going to spend a single red cent! Not one! This time our research to find out which types of items are selling "Right Now" and which ones are just sitting on the shelves will not cost anything. It is so easy. Ebay has provided dozens and dozens or tools for its sellers and my observations lead me to believe that 99% of the sellers on eBay use NONE of those tools.
To do this research we are going to use a tool, provided free by eBay, called "Hot Items". On the eBay toolbar at the top of any eBay page click on "Community". From there select the sub-category "Talk". Scroll down to the bottom of the page and in the bottom right hand corner is a hypertext link called "Hot Items". Click that link. Oh, WOW! Look at all that market research information from the largest single marketing website in the entire world. I know, I know, there are larger sites with more traffic (only a FEW!) but this is the largest site in the world handling everything from stuffed Ardvarks to Zebra dolls and everything in between! If you are selling bicycles and bowling balls, you could go to a few bicycle sites and a few bowling sites, but would that tell you whether bicycles are outselling bowling balls (or vice versa)? It would most certainly NOT! Ebay WILL!
The "What's Hot" information on this page is updated every Thursday or Friday. There are also hyperlinks here for specific classes of items such as Antiques, Art Items, Books, Clothing, Coins, Collectibles, etc. A few minutes spent here looking over the categories will let me know which of my items I could probably sell right now, even though the economy is down, versus which ones would probably not sell enough to cover the listing fees. WOW! How much would you have to pay somebody to research that iformation for you with market surveys? Don't bother, the information is posted weekly on eBay!
There are so many tools on eBay, I could go on all day. So far we've seen that we can get paid to gather email subscribers and we can get free market research from the largest general store in the entire world. What else is there? Lots and lots, but there is one more you must know about before you list anything on eBay. Ebay can gather leads for you and can provide you with some very valuable market information, but only if your listing is in the proper category. Some eBay listings do not sell because the ad is poorly written, others because the price is too high, and many more reasons. The sad part is when an item has a great title, excellent ad copy, and killer price, but is selling poorly because it is simply in the wrong listing category!
I see this every day on eBay. Identical items listed in different categories at the same or very close prices. Identical titles and ads because both listers are using an auction template provided by the merchandise wholesaler. One listing is selling lots of items and the other one (in the wrong category) does not have a single bid! The really sad part about this is that no one ever has to wonder which of eBays thousands of categories (with new ones almost every week) to list in. Ebay will tell you! For FREE!
If you want to use ebay to generate leads and do market research, you had better list in the correct category or your lead generation results are going to dissappointing and your market research is going to be invalid! Here's the trick. I want to know which category to use to sell my custom made "Glow In The Dark Bowling Balls". (Boy, I wonder how big the market would be for THAT item! Aren't all bowling lanes very well lit? Oh well, there have been crazier ideas tried!) First you click on "Sell" on the eBay toolbar at the top of any eBay page. The next screen will ask you to "Log In". Do so, using your eBay ID. Don't have one? Sign up for one. It is free, you know! Next you are asked to choose a selling format and are presented with some choices. I know, you aren't going to sell anything right now but you MUST get past this page to get to the page with the magic on it! Pick a selling format (or keep the default) and click "Continue".
You are now on selling page number one of five. That's as far as we need to go. Notice on the right side of the page that there is a yellow box labeled "Suggested Categories". There is a space there to type in a word or phrase. Let's start by just typing in "Bowling".
There is a pause while eBay searches (at no cost to you) every single listing (current and recently closed) on ALL of eBay looking for the word "Bowling". They search titles and listing text. They then present you with a list of every category that contained the word "Bowling". In about 3 seconds! Not only that, they list them in order by popularity. The category at the top of the list has the most "Bowling" entries (16% of them when I did this a moment ago) and the last one has the least number of "Bowling" entries. Note that in the case of "Bowling" there are categories for balls of different weights, bowling clothing, bowling shirts, bowling shoes, etc. I didn't know that "Bowling" was broken down into all those sub-categories. Now I do. This makes it much easier to know where to list a given item.
Try a "Suggested Category" search with "Ebook" and see what you get. Now try it again with "Ebooks". You will get some of the same categories, but "Ebook" and "Ebooks" will each have some categories that are not in the other list. See which one has the largest percentage of listings and use that category for your ebook listings. This will also let you know if you should include the word "Ebook" or the word "Ebooks" in the title to get the most hits. Do this with any word you research, try both singular and plural forms seperately. Isn't this fun? It sure is useful!
Just one last remark about category research and I'll wrap it up. When I am doing this type of research I add one more step. I click on "Search" on the eBay toolbar at the top of the page and type in the exact same word or phrase I used in the "Suggested Category" search. When we did the "Suggested Category" search, that told us how many bowling listings there were in each category, but not how many bowling sales were in each category! By doing a search for listings, using the same word or phrase, we find the actual listings. Now I scroll down through the listings for a page or so looking only at the column for "Number Of Bids". I click on those listings that have the most bids and see what that seller is doing that makes his listing outsell others. Is it price? Is it bonuses? Is it the quality of the listing and photographs? Is it the listing title? Is there more color in the most popular listing? Of course, I look at the very top of the ads with the most bids to see in which category it is listed. Once I have analyzed the "Winners" with the most bids, I am ready to place my own listing, in the correct category, with a "good" title and do some more lead generation. And of course, with each sale I get paid for doing all this lead generation and market research!
Can I get more leads somewhere else in the same amount of time? Absolutely! As cheaply? Probably not! Will those leads from somewhere else come with all that market research data? No way! That is why I use a combination of both methods. I am a member of two safelists and am looking for more that meet my criteria, I advertise in eZines, I use online classified ads, and I write articles like this one and publish them. I also run a newsletter (eZine) and I have a website. I also do market research every single day! And I do it on eBay!
I'm always amazed by people who say they got their start on eBay but they don't use it any more! Right, you are making a good living on the web, so why bother to use the largest, most accurate, lowest cost lead generator and market research tool in the entire world? You know, the FREE one that pays you to do your lead gathering and research, eBay! Gee, do you think maybe if you had been tracking the "Hot Items" listings for the type of items you were selling on your web pages you might have been able to see that type of item beginning to tank in the listings? Do you think maybe you could have switched your marketing efforts to some other class of item to sell and avoided the slump you are in now? Do you think maybe you could have discovered an alternate way to "package" your items and pick up additional sales? Maybe you could have found a way to "Cross Sell" or "Joint Venture" your items with a "Hot Item" to avoid the summer slump or at least minimize it?
We've barely touched the surface of eBay with their FREE selling tools, FREE market research tools, FREE lead generation tools and other tools. Next issue we will discuss some more of eBay's free selling tools and how to apply the principles behind them to any selling that you do. These tricks will even work at your local garage sale!
O. D. Williams - BidNow on eBay
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
O.D. Williams odwill@gobidnow.us
My eBay About Me page is HERE and my web page is HERE (http://www.gobidnow.us)
This article may be used in its entirety in newsletters, ezines, web pages and ebooks provided this sig file is left in place.
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