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5 Ways to Free Yourself from Ebay

Chances are that if you are reading this article you could be a seasoned seller who has made his living selling on Ebay. When you started out a few years ago Ebay was the best place for small business to buy and sell goods. Since then you've been hit with ever-increasing listing fees and policy updates that are abusive to sellers. Now you are looking for another ways to make your money instead of using Ebay. Your ultimate dream would be to fire Ebay altogether and sell in a new place where you can make more money that before. That dream might be more attainable than you think. Here are 6 ways to free yourself from Ebay:

• Take some time to look at all the other sales venues that are available to you. Try some of them. You might be surprised with the results. As a large ecommerce company we've found that the sum of all the other sales venues produces more revenue than ebay themselves:


• List on Amazon - You've probably heard this already, but Amazon is actually growing while Ebay is not.



• List on Google Base - This is free so why aren't you doing this already? Did you know that Ebay actually uses mediaplex.com to put your items on Google Base to drive traffic to your listings? How about put your own listings on Google Base for yourself and cut them out of the sale? You can sign up for a free Google Checkout account, and buyers buy your items from you with Google Checkout. Checkout works much like Paypal, except that it's low cost and much more secure than Paypal. It's also worth mentioning that Google Checkout isn't sluggish like Paypal.



• Post your items on Craiglist - Just like Google Base, Craiglist is also free. Put links to your Google Base listings so people on Craiglist can click on them and be sent to your Google Checkout account. Unlike Ebay, Craigslist is also growing in heaps and bounds. You'll be shocked by the amount of volume you can send from Craigslist.



• Open an MSN shopping account - You can go to productupload.live.com and upload all of your listings, FOR FREE just like Google Base!



• Checkout other online auctions and online stores. Quite frankly most of them are designed better than Ebay. They just don't have the brand recognition and preexisting traffic. They need YOU to succeed!



• Get yourself a Website and hire a good search engine optimizer. Some of the search engine optimization plans aren't too expensive. There's no better way to slice Ebay's throat than to generate your own traffic and sales.



• Look at your overall operation. Examine your shipping costs, packaging costs, and logistics. We recently fired UPS and switched to DHL. To our surprise we found that DHL was cheaper, faster, and they don't break near as much stuff as UPS does. Way to go DHL!



• Clean up and reorganize. A messy shop can slow down your operation and thus cost you money in efficiency loss.



• Evaluate Ebay - This is a biggie. You need to decide whether Ebay is really for you, or would your energy be better spent building your empire on another foundation? Many people complain that Ebay is high maintenance. Would you be better off spending your energy toward something that has a higher reward?



• Trim the fat - If you're like us and have thousands of listings, it would be worth your time to identify poor performing items and yank them from ebay. If you decide to stay with ebay you have half the items listed and therefore give ebay half as much of your money as before.

Thanks for reading this article.