EBay’s Deadline For Digital Delivery Sites
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:
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.
