Powerseller Status

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I’ve taken my eye off eBay over the last six weeks while I’ve been concentrating on website sales and direct marketing. This has resulted in reduced sales from my eBay shop; my two-week trip to France also took me away from eBay as I closed the shop down for the duration of my holiday. The reduction in sales has threatened my power selling standing. I’ve been told that I need to increase my sales or I will lose the status of power seller.

It’s not something that bothers me because my business has progressed to the point where I can make sales through my website and by direct marketing. I have a list of a few thousand names of customers who have purchased from me in the past, many are recurring customers, all I need to do is direct market to a number of them and sales on my website increase to make up for the falling eBay sales.

This is the situation you want to create. When you have been trading for a while, building your own website is an important step in your business development. You can’t do it overnight. It takes time to market a website. Once you have been trading for a year or more on EBay you will have accumulated a list of customers interested in the kind of products you sell. You can use this list to direct market to them.

I offer my products cheaper through direct marketing because I can knock off the eBay fees from the price. It’s always better to sell outside of eBay if you have the structure in place. Without those fees to pay, you get to keep more of the profit.

So losing power seller status is not a worry for me, I don’t live or die by eBay. I’ll regain the status in the autumn when I kick up my eBay sales again. When you first start out online selling, eBay is usually the only venue for new sellers, so all your energy is focused on it. Once you become established however, build your own website, and market it, you will then have a platform to sell outside of eBay. This is the target you should aim for.

EBay will still be important to your strategy. I use eBay to bring new customers to my site and will continue to do so. I’m not however too bothered about maintain a power seller status. Unlike a guy I was reading about on a business forum who sells items on eBay for a pound at a loss so he can call himself a power seller. If he thinks it’s worth paying and working for nothing to be called a power seller, good luck to him. Personally, I’ll stop trading on eBay when I can no longer make a decent profit. My philosophy is “turnover is vanity; profit is sanity”. I’d sooner make a decent profit selling one item a week than lose money selling forty.

Anyway, it’s a nice quiet Sunday. I’ve just been for a few pints and I’m off for my dinner.

Have a nice weekend (what’s left of it)