Listing your goods on large online auctions sites can be an expensive way to sell your products. Also there is a lot of behind the scenes work for example: sourcing your products, emailing customers, packing, trips to the post office etc. You may find that a good percentage of your profits are being eaten up by the auction site fees alone.
So why bother to list your items only to pay the big auction sites a high percentage of your profits? To be honest, the only thing that you are paying for is targeted traffic. By targeted traffic we mean web surfers that are actively searching for your product to purchase.
So why not just create an online eCommerce store and pay for targeted traffic to reach it? Well, in my opinion most auction buyers believe that they are getting a fantastic bargain if they buy from an online auction site instead of buying from a regular eCommerce store.
I recommend setting up both, your very own online eCommerce store and an online auction site. It may sound like a daunting task but to be honest it’s not so hard and now most hosting companies can install the scripts for you at no extra cost.
I say setup both to filter customers from your auction site and/or other auctions sites to your eCommerce site rather than just relying on auctions to generate customers. If you have a large range of products then backing it up with an ecommerce store will create a much more professional looking business presence. Ideally you want to be in the situation where you have a good list of repeat buyers spreading the word about your eCommerce store.
To purchase a domain name can cost less than $5 and one year hosting can start from as little as $20 a year. If you are really serious about being successful with your online business, then I recommend hiring a professional website developer.
A professional web developer will create a great looking website that will increase buyer’s confidence in your products and thus increase sales. Also they may help with Search Engine Optimization to help you achieve higher rankings in the search engines.
Once you are set, you are in complete control of your online businesses. You can list your own products and even charge other users to list theirs.
Also join affiliate schemes such has Google’s adsense to create revenue. It should more that cover your yearly hosting costs.
The best part of owning your own auction site is there are no fees to list you items. You get to keep all your profits that you worked so hard to gain.
Tips on How To Create A Market Presence With Your Online Store
Setting up the website is the easy part, generating customers and sales is the hard part. You must look at your online store or auction site as a real store front in the market place.
Using Smaller Online Auction Sites to Make Profit on Larger Auction sites.
A lot of auction sellers seem to be missing out on untapped merchandise to sell for profit. They seem to be forgetting the smaller online auction sites out there. There are literally 100’s if not 1,000’s of smaller online auction sites out there.
