EBay can not only use to sell physical items, but also to effectively promote affiliate products. This is made possible by creating short reports on eBay that describes basically anything and should be about 7 – 15 pages long, informative and useful to the consumer.

Affiliate products can be promoted using these reports having ‘branded’ links to products. And if a person buys the product using this link through eBay, the person who placed the link earns a commission on the sale.

This means that if you find that laptops are fast selling in the market, instead of competing with other sellers on eBay, you create reports by perhaps describing ways to choose a laptop, how to maintain it and how to improve the efficiency of the laptop. With this report, you place affiliate links for laptops, laptop chargers, laptop memory chips, etc.

If you find out that you have become a victim of eBay fraud, the first thing you have to do is not to get excited, but to calm down, and work out at a plan of action. You have to first contact PayPal and not Ebay as this is where you will be able to open a dispute against the seller using your PayPal account.

On opening a dispute, all the funds in the seller’s account is automatically frozen where they will not be able to withdraw any money. With this action, you are sure of getting some money. So the sooner you can open a dispute with PayPal, the better it is for you as you want to freeze his accounts before he gets to withdraw the money.

If you are a bit late in opening a dispute, you could wait till the seller places something else for sale, and till someone buys the product as this way, you are sure there will be money in his account for you to freeze.

Affiliate products can be promoted using eBay’s classified Ad format where a short ad with a link to the sales page of your affiliate product is created. A typical ad costs about $9.95 and lasts for 30 days.

However if you opt for the expensive ‘Pro’ package, the cost of the package is $39 per month or $1.33 a day. With this package, you can get a lot of exposure as long as you use it to promote the more popular products, and if you promote the products with the right choice of keywords.

This is an effective method of promoting affiliate programs. And if you merge classified ads and your report using a link, you find that you will be able to rake in more sales for your affiliate product.

To many people, eBay auction site is considered to be just a heap and ordinary online garage sale site. However the power eBay auctions have in generating traffic to your website should never be underestimated.

With an eBay auction, you can expect hundreds of hits on your product. And if you have more than 10 products for sale on eBay on any given week, you can drive more than 2,000 visitors to your main sales website every week.

However you have to remember that in such a position, you have to make a quick ‘about me’ page where you have your website address and information about the product to be bid and other products for sale on the website.

So by selling some products on eBay, you actually work at generating quick traffic, without having to spend much money on advertising.

To many people, eBay just seems to be another online garage sale. However, on the contrary, if eBay is used properly, it can effectively help to generate traffic to your internet business, and in the process, drive more sales for your business.

It is by offering a small percentage of the money generated from your products that you can use eBay to help increase your product sales. This is most effective in sales on your discontinued or limited quantity products through eBay.

With this step, you may not receive the full retail value of these products. However you still gain interest from auction visitors who visit eBay and your site to find out what other products you have for sale.

eBay takes write-down on Skype and changes team
Back in 2005, it was pretty clear that eBay had ‘jumped the shark’ with the big Skype acquisition that was going to bring internet calling to eBay and reduce friction in transactions.

Well, today eBay announced that they are going to pay $530m of the $1.7b earn-out and take a $900m one-time charge on the decreased value of the Skype asset they paid a whopping $2.6b for back in 05….

eBay Fraud - 15 ways to avoid
As eBay’s user growth has slowed, I’ve been getting lots of questions from sellers, wall st. and other folks in the eBay ecosystem asking why I think buyers are not activating or de-activating. Like anyone in the eBay ecosystem, I travel a good bit and meet lots of online shoppers in my travels. I always like to ask if they buy/sell on eBay and then dig in based on their answers. In the last 2-3 years, the overwhelming number of people I’ve talked to fall into two camps:

1. eBay is too time consuming, I’d rather shop from amazon or somewhere vs. bidding.
2. I used to buy on eBay until…

And then the … after until turns into a sad story that runs the spectrum from a bad seller/item experience all the way to out-right fraud…..

Neutrals are now negatives in TnS policies…
Many great sellers are getting suspended/managed out of the marketplace because without notice, eBay is considering NEUTRALS to be essentially NEGATIVES In early June, in an obscure message board (not the announcement board). eBay via a TnS employee called “Policy Steve” (post 17) revealed that:

* eBay has found that the bottom 1% of sellers are responsible for 35% of buyer complaints (makes sense, but note that this kind of abstraction will tend to catch larger sellers vs. smaller sellers just by the nature of absolute numbers. If I sell 5k items/month, I’m bound to have 50 negatives that would take a smaller seller a lifetime to hit).
* eBay is actively suspending/limiting the sellers that fall into this category.
* When making the “Bad Boys” determination eBay is using this calculation:

“If more than 5% of a seller’s buyers are dissatisfied, as measured by negative and neutral Feedback left or Item Not Received complaints during a 90 day period, the seller is in violation of the Seller Non-Performance policy.” …

When carrying out transactions on eBay, it is better to be aware of the fact that PayPal bars buyers and sellers from some countries from collecting payments.

However this does not imply that all buyers and sellers from the country are scammers. Remember, there are still some honest people out there.

While carrying out your transaction on eBay, there are some scams you have to look out for, like the advance fee scam.

This is a scam where the buyer contacts you saying he is the third party broker who is dealing the transaction of his ‘client’.

In such cases, you may be offered double your product price. The catch here is that our have to send the ‘broker’ his commission fees before you receive any money.

And if you do send him money, it is more than likely that you will not hear from him again and thus, be scammed by him.