The secret to a highly profitable Ebay business is to have many high profit items.
To do this, we occasionally need to tweak some existing ad copy or quickly get rid of any slow selling items.
A slow item is a lost profit opportunity. That is, the money and storage space for a slow item needs to converted to a fast selling high profit item,
Everybody gets a slow item at some stage and it is important to recognize a slow item quickly and take action to move it. I will show you some of the strategies we use.
What is a slow seller? Any item which sells on average with a sell frequency of less than 1 time per week.
First of all check the basics:
Compare your ad to the others sellers ads. If you are using the lab data the URL for the top seller is in the lab data.
1. Price i.e Auction (what is there start price) (do they / you have a reserve), Buy it Now? How does your price compare?

2. The title, are you using similar keywords in the 80 character title? Keywords are critical. Every good keyword brings more traffic to your listing. Ebay are only allowes us 80 characters, be very careful of wasting these characters.
The title is the only place in which the Ebay search engine looks for the basic search. If you are using the lab data, this is simple. Just use the same keywords as in the top sellers for the item
3. Bullet points, do you have lots of bullet points with features and benefits.
The idea here is to create a “high perceived value” of your item by pointing out every single feature and benefit you can find and then write them in multiple bullet points.

4. Make sure your pics are clear, detailed and on a white background. Like bullet points, show every feature and benefit in your pics to create a “high perceived value”.

5. What is different to your ad compared to the top sellers ad (from the lab data)

6. How is your price compared to the competition?

7. How many feedbacks do you have? If less than 50 then you should work to get it up by either selling items not used from around the house or second hand items from places like garage sales. This is what we did to learn when we got started and it got our feedback up to over 50 while learning a lot of lessons on the way.
8. Shipping. EBay wants every seller to offer Free Shipping and they will show your listing more if you have free shipping. And you Ebay even puts an orange circle with the words “Free Shipping” on your listing automatically.
We have done many tests of charged shipping versus free shipping and free shipping outsells almost every time. If you sell and item for $10 with $5 shipping and or the same item for $15 with free shipping, the one with the free shipping will be the winner.

9. EBay’s secret weapon “Markdown Manager”
If you have completed all the steps above and you item is still slow then it is time to bring out the big gun, EBay’s Markdown manager.

Markdown Manager allows you to easily consistently drop the price until you hit the sweet spot and displays the discount to your the customers as a percentage off. Always list the item with a high price so this discount seems bigger to the customer. Again, “perceived value”
We normally run 6 day sales with the 1st sale at 10% off. On the second week 15% etc.
Every item has a price which will make it competitive.
Note: Markdown manager can only be used on listings which are over 7 days old. It will not work on new listings.
To create sales in Markdown Manager:
1.Go to My eBay.

2.Move your cursor over the Account tab until you see the pull-down menu.

3.Select “Marketing Tools.”

4.Click the “Markdown Manager” link on the left side of the page.

5.Click the Create Sale button.

6.Once a sale is created, you’ll receive a success message. If you schedule more than 200 listings in your sale, you’ll receive an email to let you know when your sale is created.

http://neilwaterhouse.com/steps/steps

Every month traditional retail businesses lose more and more market share as more and more people all over the planet purchase their goods over the internet.

Here in Australia, I have the radio on quietly in the background of my office and continually hear all the excuses from traditional retailers as to why retail sales dropped again. Yesterday they were blaming the new carbon tax which Australia is “thinking about implementing”?

The reality is, it is just so much more convenient to order over the internet. As you almost always find what you want in stock, AND usually cheaper AND it gets delivered to your door!

The internet however is changing fast and luckily in a way that helps us run home businesses.

From the graph above, we can see people are no longer just buying direct from a companies website. They are purchasing from other market places like Ebay, Amazon, CSE (Comparison Shopping Engines) etc .

One of the most fundamental forces changing how people purchase is the smartphone. Ebay launched their iPhone application in 2009. In its first year it did more than $600 million in volume. In 2010 it did $1.75 billion with Ebay predicting 2011 sales just on the iphone app (buzz word for application) to be a staggering 4 Billion. From our research other major market places like BidorBuy etc either have mobile apps available today or are very close to releasing them.

More than 35 million people have downloaded eBay’s iPhone application— it is by far the largest m-commerce application in the world (m-commerce or mcommerce, is the latest new internet buzz word meaning “customer purchasing an item from a mobile phone using using an app or website (not verbal)”. Mobile brings the internet to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, on our time, at our convenience, where you want to be.

Surveys are now finding out how people shop. People standing in a line at Starbucks can start browsing on eBay. They see something they want and they buy it right then and there. Surveys even show people buy while on the toilet!

Neil Waterhouse Apple Iphone App

Every business on the planet sells either a product or service.

If a business wishes to get an app made for a smart phone, the average cost is US $100,000 and takes on average 18 months to develop, test and get Apple’s approval.

Ebay has spent a lot more than 100k on their App and we all get to use it for free.

This is all good news, just keep adding more and more hot items to your business every month.

Thank you Ebay!

Let me know your thoughts?

Cheers,

Neil Waterhouse

USP Top Left Corner

Make something people want

Be engaging

1) Does your headline speak directly to your potential customer and give them a strong, specific benefit of your product or service?

2) Did you start with the strongest benefit of your product or service, then work your way down to include the least important benefits for your potential customer?

3) Do you explain how your product or service is better or different than your competitors?

4) Does your sales letter speak directly to your prospect? In other words, instead of saying, “people that like horses will love this book” you say, “If you love horses you’ll love this book.”

5) Do you use “you” twice as often as “I” in your sales letter?

6) Is your sales letter easy to read using short sentences and paragraphs?

7) Do you use power words and write with the goal of keeping your reader’s interest?

Do you show your potential customer their problem; agitate it by telling them how troublesome it is, then offer your product or service as the solution?

9) Is your copy clear, easy to understand, and follows a flow from one paragraph to the next?

10) Are your strong words and phrases highlighted or bolded to draw attention and keep the reader focused?

11) Is your sales letter written in a friendly, active, conversational,” me to you”, tone of voice?

12) Have you used specific numbers and facts in your copy to build instant credibility?

13) Have you included credibility creators, like why you’re an authority on the subject, testimonials, and case studies?

14) Does your sales letter have a nothing to risk guarantee that shows your confidence in your offer?

15) Do you include a reason why you’re making this offer? Are you doing it because you are tired of seeing people scammed on the Internet and what to provide them with solid information they can use for profit immediately? Or are you giving them a dirt-cheap price because you have an overstock on inventory and it’s costing you more to store the product in your warehouse?

16) Does your sales letter give details of what the customer needs to do? Call now. Or, simply fill out the form below, enclose your check or money order for $24, and mail to..

17) Do you make it easy for your potential customer to act on your offer?

18) Are you offering bonuses to increase response, or do you create high-perceived value for your product or service?

19) Did you create a sense of urgency in your letter, explaining that the price is for a short time or quantities are limited?

20) Have you answered all questions a prospective customer has about your product?

1- If you have hundreds of lenders, put their logos on your site. Borrow their credibility
2- Give me a screenshot of what I’ll get… the finished report… you have to make the invisible visible and give me an idea of what I’m buying.
3- Your first form is too long. Think lead gen. Two step.
4- http://www.loanexa.com/mortgage-quote.php doesn’t have the price
5- Break down the price to cups of coffee or some trivial amount (“For the price of two grande frapuccino’s…”)
6- For a PPC landing page… consider removing the header nav
7- Heart next to Bookmark seems out of place
8- Your logo seems fuzzy… have someone sharpen it up
9- If step one of your form is just name, email, and type of loan or size… you can offer a free gift such as “Whistleblower Report: 7 Dirty Secrets of the Mortgage Industry Uncovered”
10- Get most important info above the fold
11- Price needs to be on the page, above the fold
12- If they try to exit, offer them a report on the top recommended loan providers for $10
13- Testimonials… need em. Even if you can’t do performance ones for industry reasons… you can get testimonials on how easy it is… how many quotes they got… how fast it was… etc.
14- Everyone’s doing it… show me how many people are using or have used your system (if that number works in your favor)

Another way to do it is to make the process free to get the sample, but obscure the vital info. Give them a taste… maybe even 1 or the providers… the third best one… but the rest you have to pay for. If this is explained up front then I’d be more likely to give it a shot.

Feedback Ranking

Live Person

Meta Tags – View Source

Macaphee Secure

Feedback Ranking

Build trust on the site using lemmings

Let me know your thoughts

Cheers.

Neil Waterhouse

The true deffinition of a scam is “A purchased item or service which does not do as much as advertised”.

The term is very loosly bantered around especially on the internet.

Most peoples perception of a scam is something they feel is not ethical or correct and I share the same thoughts.

The largest “scams” on the internet is the bait and switch technique which is  illegal in the many countries.  The bait and switch technique works by saying something like Neil Waterhouse Scam of John Smith Scam, read this first.

Because the human psyche loves drama, i.e the news and current affairs shows, people click on the the bait and switch site and fed a short story about xyz person and then of course reccomend their “reccomended” sites which of course they make money from. (Affiliate marketing).

Thankfully Google has shut down most of these sites from advertisning on Google (Paid Search – Adwords) however as most of these sites are registered in third world countries it is very difficuly to close them down completely (Organic search).

As I have said many times, never ever purchase anything on the net with Western Union or Bank transfer.  Only use credit card or Paypal then you can always get your money back if the product you purchased does not do what was advertised.

Every credit card company will refund any fraudulent credit card debit if the seller cannot provide a signature.  Of course when purchasing anything on the net there is no signature so all the risk is on the seller.

Let me know you thoughts.

Cheers,

Neil Waterhouse

The correct keywords are critical to get traffic to your EBay / Bidorbuy listing and critical get traffic to your website. 

With EBay for example you are allowed 55 characters on the title.  This is where you must put the best keywords if your item is to be
 found.
 
 Example, recently I was asked to help a friend purchase a used aluminium boat using EBay.

Using some in-house tools we found a boat up for auction with the “Quintrex Dory 420 for sale”. For the experts out there, Quintrex is a boat builder and the “Dory 420” is a model.  For everybody else this boat was invisible unless they trawled through every listing manually.  Most people type words like “Aluminium boat” “dinghy”, “trailer boat” etc.

If the ad had read “Quintrex Dory 420 Aluminium Trailer Dinghy Boat” then the ad would have been seen by over 50 times more viewers.

 To make matters worse for the seller, he listed it at 1:30 AM on a Saturday morning for 7 days.  Consequentially the auction finished
7 days later at 1:30am on Saturday morning while everybody was asleep!

Yep, he ended up buying the boat for a song.

Ebay today anounced they will stop pay per click advertisers advertising on the right hand side of the Ebay’s search results page.  Up till now advertisers have been able to sign up with www.adcommerce.com (owned by Ebay) and advertise their Ebay store next to the search results. From the end of September 2010 these ads will only appear at the bottom of the search results.

The very most important part of making money with  internet marketing is A/B split testing.

Before the internet when we used to post letters through the mail system, we would write 2 sales letters which were slightly different.

We would then post 100 of each different  sales letter.

One sales letter would convert more sales than the other.

The winner was then called the control letter i.e the one we have to try and beat.

We then just keep doing this process and continually try to beat the control letter. 

Internet marketing uses exactly the same strategy however we can get results much faster, sometimes in just hours instead of weeks.

All succesful internet marketers do split testing and the most succesful split  test more than the others.

Not only do we test sales letters (text which is the used on an ad to sell an item), we also continally split test new  products, i.e slightly different  model, colour etc. Continuos testing is the key to increasing profits of any online business.

These days there is a lot of specialised software which can test much faster including Taguchi testing and even Google’s brilliant Website optimiser.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Cheers,

Neil Waterhouse
http://www.neilwaterhouse.com