Well, that was a total waste of my (and most of the other participants’) time. The fellow who was supposed to be answering questions didn’t show up until 9 minutes past the hour, and then he must have been overwhelmed with the questions, because it took a good long time after that to start seeing his responses - or non-responses, I should say.

 The beginning statement was that the policy is a done deal, so there’d be no further discussion of that. Most of the rest of the replies were restatements of what they have listed as policy - not really clear, but I’ve pretty much decided that I’m staying away from ads, at least until I see there are clear guidelines and some rational use for them. I just don’t see much of a service in a potential customer needing to email me to get information on the product, especially when I’m paying a fee for an ad that should include the necessary information. Oh well…

There were many questions about the sellers who are still listing their items for digital delivery, although I am seeing fewer and fewer of those. I don’t really want to be a narc, but if I’m forced to charge more for my product because of the cost of putting it on a CD and into a mail container, it just isn’t fair. I don’t plan to spend a great deal of time at it, but since doing research on how stuff is listed and how much it’s selling for is a part of what I see as good business practice, I am going to attempt to let eBay know about improper listings. This, though, has its own challenge, as eBay hasn’t changed the categories in reporting abuse.

It still seems kind of odd to me that they’d implement these policies waaaay before they’re ready to deal themselves with the changes. But sellers are supposed to suck it up and adapt in minutes.

Must be in a cranky mood. Sorry about the rant. I think it’s best that I go back to getting products ready to list for the weekend.

 Best to you.

I’ve been working on getting set up to start selling my ebooks on CDs and deciding what kinds of packages I can put together so there’s some good value. I just can’t see that it makes sense for someone to pay $.93 in postage to get just one ebook, although I do see there are listings for that. Of course, for higher priced products, it’s okay. But most of my sales were books in the $.99 to $1.99 category. I’ll try all sorts of combinations, of course. Since I’m producing the CDs myself, I can see what sells. Can you tell this is lots of thinking out loud?

There’s a great blog post I want to share with you today. It’s from Mike Enos, a platinum power seller, and he’s written an open letter to eBay about their policy changes, reminding them that it was the mom and pop sellers who really got eBay established. The link is below. Also, if you’re interested in doing anything on eBay, you really should subscribe to his newsletter.

http://208.69.123.136/eBaySellingSuccessSecretsVideoBlogNewsletter/?p=815#respond

eBay is holding a workshop in just a little while that is supposed to be about clarifying their new policies, and I’ll report back on what they have to say. Their initial notice that digitally delivered products were going to be discontinued suggested that we could use eBay ads to replace our listings. Problem is, no one, including eBay, seems to have a clue about their policies on those ads. Some sellers were able to successfully get their ads up and running, but many others had their ads denied or were told they were doing something against policies that were undefined! What a mess!

If you’ve tried to post a comment and were unsuccessful, please forgive me. With all this eBay stuff, I can’t get my head areound trying to figure out where I mucked up the programming. If you’d like to contact me, please email me at admin @ judimehrens.com (sorry about the spaces there, but I don’t need the spammer messages!).

I’m back to figuring out my stuff. I’ll let you know if eBay makes things any clearer. Be sure to read the Enos post.

 Stay well.

I spent a while this morning looking at eBay listings to try to get a sense of how the new rules are being implemented and what sellers are doing. I checked listings for home business and how to make money on eBay and found several hundred in each category - not the thousands that used to come up.

It appears there are only a few sellers using ads for their products. A few are complying with the auction rules and offering CDs to be mailed, but there are a lot of listings that are still up offering digital delivery. (The nine year old in me wanted to report them - they’re not playing by the rules! - but I resisted that urge. EBay will, I’m sure get this all figured out and get rid of the listings.) Interestingly, there are some folks who offer their items for pickup only and offer a telephone number. Hmm, could that call then lead to a digital delivery? Again, not my business, but it is interesting to see the way some folks are trying to get around the new rules.

By the way, can someone tell me how an image of a near-naked woman has anything to do with making money on eBay? I’ve seen the listings before and assumed it was geeky teenage boys selling to other geeky teenage boys, but one seller has over 6000 feedback!

So it looks to be a very good time to jump right in and get those listings going. I’m going through the instructions I told you about last time on how to do the work of getting products on CD and hope to get a bunch listed next week. If you didn’t take a look at that offer through John Thornhill’s report site, you really should. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. (It isn’t an affiliate link for me, so I don’t tell you this to make money off of you.) There are other products out there, but I haven’t checked them out since I bought this one. Lucky for me, my new computer has the CD burning capability and includes LightScribe disc labeling (although I don’t know yet how to use it).

That’s really all today. I just wanted to share what I found at eBay. It could very well be that the gurus are right - this can be a tremendous opportunity if you’re willing to change direction and start offering your products in a physical form.

 Be well.