Why eBay Is Not Dead!

Recently I have had several discussions with other eBay traders and none of the comments were terribly complimentary either on my part or on the part of the other traders. The biggest complaints were that they are not making much money in their traditional markets and eBay’s constant policy changes.

You see they (and myself) started trading on eBay when eBay was an auction site that also sold things, as opposed to its current incarnation which is a shopping site that allows auctions. That is the crux of the problem, most people have failed to take into account this fundamental shift in eBay’s business model.

eBay decided several years ago to charm the high street stores and big sellers to their platform, essentially they wanted to be the new Amazon and to be bigger and better. The flaw in the plan is that the two business models are very different.

eBay introduced a raft of changes that effectively finished off a lot of eBayer’s by ensuring that their products were all but invisible in the search results. It’s incomprehensible best match policy killed off a range of good selling products of my own and they also banned some of my products that were being sold by other sellers and remain so to this day. I cannot relist them because I risk being banned.

They also banned my account for 3 weeks a few years ago because I was selling a product widely available not only on eBay, but in street markets and well known high street stores it is still on sale at all 3 outlets even today. They did explain to me why I could not sell it, but the document they sent me was in Korean and my Korean is rather rusty. I just wish that I had paid more attention at school!

Now, I still make a great income from eBay but due to eBays constant fiddling I have had to shift my markets several times. Five years ago I published Plugin Auction Profits (PIAP) my complete guide to profiting from eBay.

My intention was to update this on a regular basis to reflect the changes eBay would introduce for sellers (but a revision every 15 minutes proved to be a bit much!), revision of PIAP always seemed to be the next task, one that I never got around to.

One of the most often asked questions is how to find products for resale at a profit on eBay. Well on Friday 6th March I found 6 products in less than 15 minutes that are being sold by local wholesalers and doing a large volume of sales on eBay. I even shot a video of me doing it.

I have spent the past 6 months trialing new niches and refining my old eBay niches with some success and now seemed the appropriate time to completely update and revise PIAP.

So I have done this with a complete revision of the written materials, shot over 20 new videos showing the complete setup process, sourcing products and listing them for sale. I have nearly finished the product creation phase then the website will be rebuilt as a membership site.

PIAP is dead! I have removed it from the Clickbank market place. Plug In Auction Profits 2 is on its way!