Some online auction ressources

Elib Directory:
Online Auctions in Canada:This category focuses on auctions online.

A better living for all

We at Mightybids are a Quality Online auction site supporting environmental protection by donating 5% of our profits to environmental causes that we judge are helping improve our environment. We think that any site that celebrates the environment and promotes ideas to recycle and reduce our consumption deserves to be mentioned here. Like Zlittle Frugal Living Like Zlittle Frugal Living a site celebrating of the beauty of Frugal Living. This site offers discussion on how to save money using your creativity and frugality. How to use principles of paying the lowest possible cost to get the highest possible results in your daily life. Other topics like changing trash into treasure, stylist low cost fashion, do it yourself home organizing, coupons and more.

Online auction Home Business Tips

How do I start an online auctions business?  

Start off by buying an item yourself to get the feel of how it is done. This will give you an overall insight into the process of registering with the auction site, bidding, paying for your goods and the delivery arrangements.  

Don’t Feel Forced to Buy  

As a buyer you should not feel pressured into buying something that you know is overpriced because you think it is the last item. There are many online auctions and there is a good chance that you will come across the same item at another site.  

Leave Your Bid Late  

Experienced online buyers will leave their bids until the last few minutes before an auction closes to prevent the price being driven up too high.  

Use Automated Bids  

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time waiting for an auction to close, you can use an automated bidding service such as eSnipe (http://www.esnipe.com). You can open a free account and type in the auction number and the amount you want to bid. ESnipe can then place a last-minute bid for you just before the close of the auction. If you win the bid, you pay eSnipe a small fee and if you lose you pay nothing.  

Search for Misspelt Items  

Savvy buyers know that many items listed for sale are misspelt. You can use this to your advantage by searching for wrongly spelt items. You will have far less competition as most people search for correctly spelt items.  

Once you have bought something and paid for it, you will know how the auction process works from the buyer’s point of view. This is vital as it will give added insight into how you can provide good customer service when you set up your own business.  

So now that you have bought and paid for an item on an online auction, you are ready to sell something yourself as a first step to setting up an online business.  

At this point, most people look around their own homes to rid themselves of some unwanted items for which they have no use. This is a good way to get started. When you list your item on auction sites, make sure you provide a photograph. This will grab the attention of the buyers.  

Description of Goods  

A good description of your ‘for sale’ items is essential. Give all relevant details including technical specifications and dimensions where necessary.  

Guaranteed Refund  

Give a guaranteed refund to potential buyers to reassure them of your integrity. Most buyers and sellers on the Internet are honest but there are a few rogues, and buyers like to be reassured.  

Positive Feedback  

Getting positive feedback from your previous customers is the best way to prove you are trustworthy. Always request feedback politely after a successful sale.  

Reserve Price  

Set a reserve price to ensure that your goods do not sell for less than you want. Make it reasonable. If you set it too high, you will not receive any bids.  

Payment Options  

The more payment options you offer your buyers, the more likely you will be to make a sale. Ebay auctions offer the online payment transfer system Pay Pal (www.paypal.com) which is free to set up. Credit cards also offer security and are popular.  

If you intend to set up an online auctions business, it is best to specialise in a niche which is a little out of the ordinary. Thereby facing less competition and guaranteeing your profitability.  

Setting up an online auctions business can become a reality for anyone who is prepared to do the necessary research and put in the effort. The enormous interest in auction sites created by the success of Ebay has provided huge numbers of targeted visitors ready to part with their cash for a great variety of goods.

Online Auction For Online Marketing

There is a new, untraditional way for reaching your target market. Online auctions have become so extremely popular that it’s now become a great extention to your marketing initiatives. There’s is a lot of talk about online auctions because people enjoy them, the variety of products and the buying and selling experience they offer, have made them some of the most visited sites on the web. For businesses, they offer all kinds of new possibilities, from the sales and inventory management perspective to marketing research and web site promotion.

Auctions get an estimated 70 million visitors a month. With all this traffic some promote their products in order to take advantage of this visibility to promote products a large group of targeted potential customers. Leveraging the auctions combined traffic to promote your product can give you more exposure than any single web site’s traffic could, or even offline advertising at a price point that isn’t available anywhere.

Among the first to realize the potential of auction were the computer and hardware vendors who quickly realized how to move obsolete inventory thought them.Today many offline stores realize that their unsold inventory is doing them no good collecting dust on their shelves, so it’s an effective way to offer them to interested buyers, letting the buyer fix the selling price and generate the extra income from stale inventory that could, otherwise become a total loss.

From a marketing perspective some use auctions for new product price testing and testing sales copywriting efforts. It’s an effective and inexpensive way to test new product prices is to see what people are willing to pay for a product offering what your new product promises. Some sell their product at three or four different online auctions, then calculate the average selling in order to determine the suggested selling price before launch of a new product. Similarly some test the copywriting to determine the best description and conversion potential.

In order to get started all is needed is an online auction store, allowing you to advertise your store with links back to your site and your product information page. You’ll need well designed ads offering product details with all the proper images, effective copy writing and of course the proper use of keywords. This will allow you to position this auction post in front of the proper audience, leveraging the power of the auctions search own engine and driving more traffic to your site and generating interest for your product.

Online auctions were never intended to complement marketing and promotion efforts, they were created to move products and create value from the Internet.But over the years these sites have attracted so many buyers that they’ve become a great traffic generation tool for your web site, giving your products and your company more exposure and international visibility. In many cases, they won’t replace your offline initiatives, but for a lot of products they are an excellent alternative to the traditional ways of moving inventory, gathering marketing information and generating visibility. Check out online auctions like mightybids and others just to see the diversity of products being offered.

Online Auction For Endless Leads

Traditionally online auctions have been used for buying and selling rare and popular items. Now some entrepreneurs are using auction listing to generate leads to their web site and to sign up for their news letters. By using auctions to promote their products and services, some have created an automated prospecting system to generate leads for expensive products and services, for affiliate products and services, and even membership sites.

This system works for any online entrepreneur that;

-Are affiliate marketers looking to grow their lists?
-Are involved in direct sales and want a bigger down line?
-Would like to grow their business with an autopilot lead generating system?
-Are using PPC ads to get newsletter subscribers?

Many people spend small fortunes on PPC advertising, search engine optimization, and other methods to get traffic to their websites. Others use direct mail and direct response advertising to get leads for their products. These people understand the value of traffic leads, and qualified traffic and the cost associated to lead generation systems.

From an online auction you can easily create a completely automated system for capturing the names and email addresses of people who look at your auctions. Once you’ve set up your system, you’ll run auctions for some low priced, easy to ship items specifically selected to appeal to your best prospects. You can even sell digitally delivered items such as e-Books or software utilities on eBay and skip going to the post office for the delivery of your items.

Once you have him or her visiting your listing you could describe how your other items may be of interest offering links to your web site taking them to the specific pages of your site that would be relevant to them. Once the customer enters your site the auctions’s job has finished and now it’s your site job to compel the user for signing up to your news letter, buying an higher priced item. Look at your other offering and any other information you wish to share.

Now, every time you run an auction, you will generate two types of prospects:
People who looked at your auctions, and gave you an email address and people who bought the introductory product. Your cost for generating leads are your listing fees, for some auctions this is free and for eBay this can be as low as $0.20. If a product is sold the profits would offset your listing costs and could even generate a profit. There are no cheaper more effective lead generation methods allowing you to pre-qualify your leads more accurately offering you this level of exposure.

Auction Sales Copy That Rock!

Creating an effective online auction listing is a selling process like any other. In sales a successful sales person learns to read his customers, put himself in his shoes and get in his head to foresee how he should adapt his strategy to improve his chances of closing a deal with him. Advertising needs to do the same. By learning your target customer’s mindset, effectively, you’re able to position your product to succeed through an effective auction listing.

This may seem like it’s impossible to achieve, with all the segements and products that are available to sell. But time and time again power sellers have demonstrated that focusing on niche segments, and good product knowledge, improves your success with online auctions dramatically. Only by analyzing others and learning about your segments needs and wants, can you effectively communicate to your market with an effective sales copy.

So it’s important to learn about your audience and find out as much as you can about them as well as the details and features of your product. A great place to start is by looking at other similar listing. Look at the ones getting the bids versus the ones not getting them. Looking at sales histories to see what details seem to constantly be in place for successful auctions and which ones aren’t. Visiting blogs and forums to see what aspects seems to be a major concern with your type of item, with your target audience, and what features are their most valued. The time you take here to learn, will pay off by contributing in the creation of a listing sales copy offering greater convergence (an enthusiasm to take action) for your posted items.

Create a simple sales page that is well documented and do not get carried away with distracting colors, animation, and any thing that takes away the focus on your sales copy. I see a lot of people trying to show off their HTML knowledge adding colors, graphics, and yes, sometimes some animation. This doesn’t provide any benefit to your listing and can in fact deter to promote your item because it fails to promote trust and goodwill. The actual page copy should breathe, so break complex sentences into shorter, clearer sentences that arouse the curiosity rather than satisfy it. Provide a text that reads well and provide readers a smooth transition that builds up their interest and demonstrates your expertise in the matter. Write compelling description by focusing on the desired benefits. Lay them out into heading and subheadings. Always support your claims with documented facts using real facts and numbers (like 6 instead of a half-dozen for example). So as you trigger the emotional response to buy now, supply them with the logical reason’s as well. Now that’s a mouthful, so lay out your objectives and put your imagination to hard work into creating an effective sales copy, focused on providing a compelling call to action.

Finish with a call to action. Unfortunately, many marketing letters don’t end with a call to action. You’ve build up all this desire and enthusiasm and you’re not caching in. What do you want your readers to do? Now you’ve motivated people to want to take that next step, you need to show them that final step. Like “Bid now!”, “Do this!”, “Do that!” there are so many good examples, check other listing you will find lots of them.

Always keep in mind that this is all about building relationships and trust as you compel them to read on, get enthusiastic, emotional and finally getting them take action. Even if you’re selling used garden tools, this will happen if your sales copy show’s your, trustworthy, knowledgeable and a nice person to deal with. Always maintain a good standing, be fast at responding to questions, be clear in your responses to questions and you could be making a nice online auction income and have some fun at it too.

Using Online Auction For Guerrilla Marketing

There is a guerrilla, or if you prefer, an untraditional way, of reaching and researching your target market using online auctions. Online auctions have become so popular that it’s now possible to use them to extend your offline marketing initiatives at a price point no traditional, offline marketing method can touch.

There is a lot of talk about online auctions, because people enjoy them, the variety of products and the buying and selling experience they offer, have made them some of the most popular sites on the web today. For businesses, they offer all kinds of new possibilities, from the sales and inventory management, to the marketing research and web site promotion medium they offer.

Auctions get an estimated 70 million visitors per month. With all this traffic some promote their products in order to take advantage of this visibility to targeted groups of potential customers. Leveraging the auction’s combined traffic to promote your products can give you more exposure than any single web site traffic could.

Among the first to realize the potential of auction were the computer and hardware vendors who quickly realized how to move obsolete inventory using them. Today many brick and mortar stores realize that their unsold inventory is doing them no good collecting dust on their shelves, so it’s an effective way to offer them to interested buyers, letting the buyer fix the selling price and generate the extra income from stale inventory that could, otherwise become a total loss.

From a marketing perspective some use auctions for new product price testing and testing sales copywriting efforts. It’s an effective and inexpensive way to test new product prices, to see what people are willing to pay for a product, offering features like your new product promises. Some sell their products at three or four different online auctions, and then calculate the average selling price in order to determine the suggested retail selling price before the launch of a new product. Similarly some test the copywriting to determine the best description and conversion potential of ads and brochures before getting them printed.

In order to get started all is needed is an online auction store. For 16$ per month and a bit of page editing this eBay site will allow you to advertise your store with links back to your main site and your products information pages. You’ll be able to design ads offering product details with all the proper images, effective copy writing and of course the proper use of keywords. This will allow you to position this auction post in front of the proper audience, leveraging the power of the auctions own, search engine and driving more traffic to your site, generating interest for your product.

Online auctions were never intended to complement offline marketing and promotion efforts, they were created to move products and create value by bringing buyers and sellers together. But over the years these sites have attracted so many buyers, they’ve become a great traffic generation tool for your products, giving your web site and your company more exposure and international visibility.

Although in many cases, they won’t replace your offline initiatives, but for a lot of products, online auctions are an excellent alternative to the traditional ways of moving inventory, gathering marketing information and generating visibility for your products, your site and your company.

Online Shopping With Auctions

Welcome to Online Shopping news and other related subjects. This blog is going to my collection of articles and experiences that I want to share with any body interested in sharing about ecommerce and online auctions.