Well, today’s the day - the last day for digitally delivered goods to be sold on eBay. I’ll be closing up shop for a bit while I get my head wrapped around a new way of doing business.

The past week has been interesting, to say the least. The big sellers continue to point out that this is really a great opportunity for information product vendors, because there’s a greater perceived value in physical products. The general consensus is that buyers will be willing to pay $10 or $20 for products on CD - the same products they could have downloaded for $1 or $2 before.  We’ll see.

The other great wisdom is that this change will drive a lot of ebook sellers out of the eBay market altogether. This is think is probably true, at least for awhile. If you’ve been selling penny ebooks, it’s probably going to be a bit of a stretch to revamp your business so that you’re producing and selling physical products. And, for technophobes, it’s going to be scary!

As usual, John Thornhill of PlanetSMS has been a great voice of reason through this all. Here’s a link to his blog post with some very good resources:

http://www.planetsmsblog.com/

Both the report and audio have some great information. I particularly appreciate his comments about the various schemes talked about in forums to get around eBay’s prohibitions on digital delivery, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. If you’re trying to build a business by using eBay’s resources, it just doesn’t make sense to try to cheat on their rules. It’s their ballpark, and they WILL pick up the ball and all the bases and take them away if you don’t play the way they say. It might not happen today, but it will happen, and you’ll be left without an account at the worst or without that hard-earned feedback at minimum. I just can’t see where it’s worth it to get a few more sales before they catch up with you. eBay has been reading these posts as well and have answered one of the questions about whether it’s okay to sell the cd and then offer the buyer a download link to the same material:

http://www.ebaychatter.com/the_chatter/2008/03/digital-downloa.html  (look midway down the page)

Another point John makes is that the guidelines for placing ads, eBay’s only option for staying with digital delivery, are completely up in the air. It would seem that this decision wasn’t well thought out by the powers that be over at eBay. I did see a notice that they’d be discussing the changes on April 11th - hello? Eleven days after the change??

Moving on, keeping a positive attitude. Yes I am!

Included with John’s newsletter is an offer for a digital media system, offering instruction and tools for creating the products, including cd covers. I did buy this; Planet Divinity offers great value and good products, in my experience. I haven’t used the product yet, but I’ve already seen a lot of packages (you knew there’d be a lot of marketers jumping on this!), and this seems to be the most complete - and at $27, it is reasonable.

John talks about putting together a whoop-ee-doo package, with the thought that if you dazzle your buyer with the packaging (and great content, of course), you’re more apt to get great feedback and return customers. This has merit when you’re dealing with a comprehensive package of information, but I think I’ll begin with putting my offers in a more reasonably priced package. He estimates that you can do the dazzle for only about 50 cents more than the plain offering, but in my investigation of all this, you’re talking at least a couple of dollars more for packaging and packing materials - and a greater postage/delivery cost. At least I’m hoping there’s a market for the information I have to offer, people who just want the information without bells and whistles. We’ll see.

This change is also pushing me to actually do something with my web site. I can offer all my ebooks for digital delivery, because that system is all set up (the same system used for eBay sales), but the site needs to reflect that.  And, of course, all those products that are specific to setting up an ebook business on eBay now have to go.

Geez, I just discovered that the comments link on this blog are messed up. When it rains… Actually, snow here. In Oregon. On the last day of March. What the???

Guess it’s time to get over to eBay and take down my listings. Stay tuned, though. My goal is to have at least a couple of physical products up by the beginning of next week.

Stay well.

Well, isn’t this just a fine kettle of fish. eBay, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that digital goods being sold on their site offer no value to anyone, digital items are only bought and sold to manipulate feedback, and therefore, they must not be sold - except through eBay ads ($9.95 or so), where there is no participation in the eBay feedback system.

 You can see their announcement here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200803241300132.html

As you can see, the announcement was made yesterday afternoon, and it’s effective March 31. Nice notice!

There’s plenty of buzzing in forums about this, with suggestions that digital products be burned to CDs and offered as physical products being, so far, one of primary ways out of this fix for venders of ebooks. This is a viable option for higher priced books, and it may be that someone looking for information would be willing to spend the extra time and money it takes to get their product. It just seems to me, at least from my limited experience selling ebooks, that eBay is doing a disservice to their customers, both sellers and buyers.

The latest forum I visited also had plenty of “make lemonade from the lemons” comments on it. Well, bite me! Sure I’m working on backend and viral products, but the way of building that, of building a list so that I can diversify was all tied up in the ebook on eBay concept - a concept that has made a number of people quite financially comfortable, I might add.

On the upside, I can dump a whole bunch of ebooks from my hard drive that have to with this ebook eBay business.

I know that one of the reasons for this decision is that there are many venders selling their books for a penny, and they are primarily looking to build feedback. Apparently there are venders who will do this, build some good feedback, then move on to expensive product listings, which they don’t fulfill. Couldn’t eBay deal directly with that problem? They already shut down sites with penny books; they have to have the capability of ferreting out all the vendors selling penny books. Make it direct policy that digital products have to be sold for a minimum amount. They can’t honestly believe, in looking at their own site and the statistics of sellers who charge even $.99 that there can be any significant rapid accumulation of feedback. It takes a lot of time and energy to even list the damn books, much less get anyone to buy them. How is that feedback manipulation?

So, just as things are starting to take off in my eBay ebook sales business, it’s being shut down. Back to the drawing board in finding that one marketing method to focus on. Guess I’d better change the name of this blog, as well. But I know I’d better wait until I’m feeling a little less hostile towards eBay.

For now, I have to clean up the recommendations and resources pages to remove all the stuff about selling ebooks on Ebay. Also have to start doing some real work on SmilingPartners, where the entire first page has listings of those kinds of products. Check the site out in a few days to see the changes. Also, you only have a few days to find digital information products on eBay.

I’ve mentioned here a time or ten that I’ve been working on an old (circa 2000) laptop and my frustrations with it. Although it was top of the line when I bought it, the memory compared to today’s machines was abysmal. It was taking forever to do the tasks necessary to get an ebook business going, and I have to admit it cleary affected my enthusiasm for getting things done.

It finally completely overwhelmed me last week. I had entered a bunch of stuff onto Turbo Lister, taking several hours to complete the tedious tasks involved. All done, I hit the upload button, only to have the machine jam up, grind away for a looongg time, and then dump my work. After taking several deep breaths (away from the machine and the temptation to throw it out the window), I consulted with my husband who agreed it was way past time to make the investment in a new computer. Off to the local geek outlet - and home with a beautiful new HP Pavillion (I’m sticking with a laptop because I still have my dreams of traveling off to some exotic place and doing business from the beach!).

There are features on it that are going to take awhile to figure out, but I’m optimistic that I’ll be fully integrated into the new computer age soon!

The tasks are still tedious, but it takes less than half the time to get them done. It’s amazing to me to find myself full of enthusiasm again!

A help with that enthusiasm is that I’m making more sales of my ebooks on eBay. I’ve even started selling items from the store. I’ve sold 6 books this month so far, all at the $1.99 buy it now listing. Doesn’t sound like much, this being the 16th and all, but 4 of those were in the last 4 days, one each day. Again, big hoooo, but I do believe it’s the numbers that are starting to work. Get a bunch of books listed and somebody out of all those millions of folks who check eBay every day will find something they want or need.

I’ve been trying to find the books I have that allow rebranding and links to other books (Clickbank) and memberships, so that I can start working on the viral/backend/residual income part of this business. The dollar or so I make from a $1.99 sale through eBay is not going to pay the rent, obviously. Nor am I building any sort of significant list at this time (my sign up rate is not good, but I don’t have enough sales yet to have any sort of statistical base). And, of course, all the eBay information marketers that are making real money are doing so with their own products and through the back end sales from them or from others. I’m looking forward to the day I start having checks from Clickbank in the mailbox!

Well, I have bunches to do, both with getting more books listed and with learning about this great new computer.

 Stay well.