Swimming In eBay's Ecosystem


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Friday Feb 17, 2006

An online place for dealing Beanie Babies and Happy Meal toys now spans a far-flung ecosystem of PowerSellers, Affiliates, and brick-and-mortar storefronts.

Editor's Note: Which eBay opportunities have worked best for you? Do you profit as a PowerSeller? Amass assets as an Affiliate? Drop off items for dollars? WebProWorld. Post your opinions now.

The eBay success stories abound online. People have turned attics and garages full of knick-knacks into cash. Some of the more enterprising ones, hundreds of thousands of them, found they could leave the daily rat race behind in favor of the greener money pastures that a career selling items on eBay could provide.

Once long-term success began to manifest for many sellers, eBay crafted a new title for them: PowerSellers. They have come from a variety of backgrounds and careers. Recently, eBay highlighted The Pampered Store, run by actress Amanda Drake.

A chronic nerve disease forced her to leave Hollywood while she battled the ailment. While looking for work she could do during treatment and therapy, Drake chanced upon a discontinued fragrance she liked on eBay. That serendipitous moment led her to form her successful eBay business.

Businesses can stagnate without growth. For eBay, the challenge to expand its userbase became the focus of its Affiliate program, which we discussed in 2005.

Their Affiliate program functions in a familiar way. The site provides various branded items like banners and links to site publishers. Users who enter eBay through those affiliate links and become eBay buyers, or better, sellers, within a certain time frame generate revenue for both eBay and the affiliate.

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affiliates.ebay.co.uk - Join Now!

Developers have been an object of attention for the Affiliate program as well. Through APIs eBay made available for third-party affiliate developers, those affiliates can build applications that draw upon eBay's massive repository of product information to enhance their sites.

With a growing userbase and a robust developer community, eBay still had a need to demonstrate it could continue to grow its business. Reaching the people selling items at yard sales or through classified ads required eBay to find a way to extend its online services to the offline community.

When eBay went offline, it did so in a business sense. By making Pasadena-based iSold It Stores an official eBay Trading Assistant, eBay enabled people who wanted to sell items online without being involved in the technical side of setting up an auction to do so at a brick-and-mortar store.

Sellers who use the drop-off method at an iSold It store exchange the convenience of the store doing the work for a commission on the sale of an item, plus eBay and payment processing fees. The business model has paid off for the company, as iSold It Stores has expanded across the US and announced in January it would enter the U.K. and Ireland markets, where they plan to open 200 stores by 2010.

We would like to look at those three methods of making money with eBay, becoming PowerSellers, Affiliates, or using drop-off stores, in future articles. Let us know by email about your experiences with any of those three ways of profiting with eBay.

About the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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Advertisers Continue To Adopt Online Marketing Strategies

By Jim Hedger

An annual survey conducted by IT Analytics firm Outsell Inc. concludes that just over 80% of advertisers are using some form of Internet Marketing with a definite emphasis on search marketing.

With an increase in ad-spending of about 19% seen in the online advertising sector, the 80% figure is projected to grow to about 90% over the next two years. According to the survey, " Annual Ad Spending Study: Where and Why Advertisers are Moving Online ", spending on Internet advertising is growing at a rate of eight times that of TV and Radio spending which is growing at only 2.4% and six times faster than print budgets which are growing by about 3.3%.

Separating the 1200 respondents in to groups preferring Google, Yahoo, or MSN, the survey found that Google is viewed as the most effective though it has costs that can run 20% lower than those of Yahoo and MSN.

This finding was addressed by Outsell VP Chuck Richard in an interview with ClickZ magazine on Monday. "I think smaller firms have less bandwidth to try out multiple search engines, Google has a lower minimum bid price for keywords than Yahoo! and MSN."

Richard sees this time as a period of rapid growth in emerging areas for Internet advertising. Ad-spending on blogs, for instance, sits at about 2% of average advertising budgets but is expected to grow by over 43% in the coming two years.

"Advertisers indicate they will increase their spending," said Richard in the ClickZ interview, "They're not taking a wait-and-see approach."

About the Author:
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198

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Affiliate Questions Need Some Answers

One of the great and probably most endearing aspects of Internet forums is the sense of community strong boards build. A reliable board is a great place to go when you need help with a subject you may not be familiar with. Take for instance, the subject below. One of our moderators, who happens to be nearing the ballpark for search engine guru-ness, needs some help with affiliate programs.

10 years ago, his best bet would have been going to a library and conducting miles and miles of research in an effort to garner one or two kernels of information that may be beneficial. This is where the beauty of good forum with a strong community comes through. If you have any experience with these types of programs, drop on by and give him a hand. I know he’d do the same if the tables were reversed and a search engine dilemma was brought up.

|| Chris||

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I Need some Advice from Affiliate Pros

I have been working pretty hard to develop different revenue streams, and decided that with over 100 unique, over 200 visitors and 400-800 page views per day that it was past time for me to monetize my site.

There are several games being played out, right now, including:

1) Obvious non-relevant paid links being depreciated (paid and relevant is OK)
2) Gray areas between what is “Competitive” with “AdSense” and what is not.

I have quadrupled my AdSense revenue in the last week or so, with changes I have been making. At the beginning of 2006 I completely redesigned my Site’s architecture so that it was more “Monitization” friendly. In the last few days I maxed out AdSense, in what I hope is a non-intrusive manner. Now, I would like to go on and place some CJ and LC “RELEVANT ONLY” links to the pages.

What if, I placed one of the new PRWeb $.07/click towers on my PR and Article Pages with Adsense? Is the GOOG going to hammer me? The “gray matter” (in my head) there, revolves around the “relevancy” vs “competitive” issue there. Can anyone one help me resolve this?

...Click to read more

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