How to Run a Successful Auction Website

Categories of Website Promotion

2009-01-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

The various categories of website promotion are:

Content
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Pay per click
Pay per target
Link exchange
Comments on Forums, other blogs etc.

The Customer is Always Right

2009-01-13T05:13:00.000-08:00

Now, reading some other blogs, mainly those about eBay, one point which really stands out is the fact that once you start imposing unbearable rules and regulations on your members, then you are heading for the slippery slope.

Especially if you are too punitive on half your members (e.g. your sellers) and not on the other half (for example, your buyers.

It is so clear that the fabric of an auction website is only its members, both the buyers and the sellers and if one or both sides are unhappy then it can only lead to the end. If you know anything about weaving (to side track a little) a material is made of threads going in two
directions. If the weft goes weak, or if the warp threads are weak and decide to get up and leave, then it is not material anymore, but just a series of unconnected threads!

One of our main concerns at e-DUDS.com is how to keep the members happy and involved.

We have a feedback policy, that is, if we are sent some useful and helpful feedback about how to improve the website, then that member receives £5 into their selling account.

Promotion, promotion, promotion

2009-01-09T14:22:00.001-08:00

It is one of the most well-established tenets of the internet that no matter how good your product or service, it is absolutely useless unless you can attract visitors. There must be some way in which people can easily find you and your product.

Over the next few blogs, I will mention the ways that I have found which, hopefully, should attract a small but steady stream of people.

eBay fees update

2009-01-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

I have written to eBay to question the overcharging - both the double-charged listing fee from one of my listings and the three listings which were charged at £1 each when they should have been 5p each. I was overcharged by £3.05, which is peanuts compared to how many people list items and the fees that most people actually do pay, but if you think about it, as a percentage, and in the grand scheme of things it is a phenomenal amount. I should have paid 20p and have been charged £3.10.

Be Positive, It's the only way!!

2009-01-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!!

As we enter 2009, it is clear that we are in the midst of a global recession. It is now more important than ever to maintain a positive attitude about aspects of our lives that we may not have any control over.

Pessimists and Optimists

There's a lot to be said about pessimists and optimists.

G. B. Stern said: "The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute".

While those trusty pessimists have both feet firmly planted in reality, they are so busy looking down at the mud that they fail to notice that it may be a beautiful sunny day. Optimists are thought to live at least 7 and a half years longer! Isn't that great all you pessimists? If only you were more positive, you could be miserable for a lot longer!

For a lot of us, being positive now is the hardest thing we have to do amidst job losses and price increases.

Tips on how to stay positive

Develop a routine: Even if you have nothing planned for that day, wake up at your usual time, brush your teeth, get dressed. Have you meals at the right time of day. Developing and sticking to a routine are key steps in maintaining a positive outlook.
Get out in the fresh air: Don't stay cooped up in doors. Even on a colder day we can all open a window for a few minutes and breathe in some fresh air.
Make sure you see daylight: It is a well-known fact that daylight not only sets our diurnal rhythms, that is, our sleeping and waking cycles, but it acts as a significant mood enhancer. If there is not much daylight to be had and the sun is nowhere to be seen, can you invest in a daylight lamp? Getting enough sunshine throughout the day will also help to get you to sleep on time.

Switch off the TV: Seriously, do you have to check the news every hour? It is the same doom and gloom as yesterday and you will probably benefit from not hearing it again. The same goes for those argument-shows - You know the ones I mean. You don't have to watch some grown-up people twitching and gurning their way through an assumed insult by their next-door neighbour. Switch off the TV for a while and do something absorbing which completely takes your mind off thing for half an hour. The world will still be there.

Get some exercise: Exercise is also a great mood enhancer as it actually releases endorphins which have a calming and stress-reducing effect on the brain. Exercise can also contribute to a daily routine.
Eat well: Eat a well balanced diet of three or more light meals a day. The process of preparing and eating a meal can be stress-reducing and there are psychological benefits. You can feel good about yourself in many ways if you are not cramming junk food.
Music: Put on your favourite tunes. Music has great powers to lift the spirits and make people feel better.

These steps may not end your problems or pay those bills, but a more positive frame of mind can help you cope better with all the little emergencies which crop up.

Stay positive. Its the only way.

Asimo

2008-12-17T11:17:00.001-08:00

http://video.honda.co.uk/campaign/asimo/video/Asimo_Commercial.wmv

www.e-DUDS.com Christmas competition

2008-12-15T13:57:00.001-08:00

If I build it, they will come...

2008-12-15T13:53:00.001-08:00

www.e-DUDS.com

Well, I didn't actually build it, I bought it, and then paid for the hosting and the company set it all up for me and I went 'live'.

www.e-DUDS.com was born!

The thing is, that I have become so disillusioned with eBay and their ridiculous rules and enforced regulations that I was convinced that the only thing to do was to open up an auction website with all the original freedoms that eBay used to provide.

Didn't it used to be a place where people came to trade? The whole world was not divided into sellers and buyers - the sellers all evil and intent on overcharging for postage and evilly scheming about ways to con the innocent, guileless buyers, and the lovely, hapless buyers wandering through cyberspace with their hands full of wodges of money, with 'please dupe me into buing something silly' written on a sign around their necks.

Then, also there is 'paypal'. Paypal have their own fees scale, all of which also go to eBay. You have to pay paypal for receiving money into your account. I'm sure there are some bank managers out there wringing their hands and thinking 'now why didn't I think of that!' You pay paypal 3.4% + 20p of all your income into paypal.

eBay fees
So, at the time of deciding to start my own auction website, eBay's fees are as follows. For a normal auction with no special categories or features, if you sell something for £1, you will pay 15p to list the item, then 8.75% of something called a final value fee (FVF). A final value fee is the commision you pay to eBay (and many other auction websites) for using their website. If you don't sell the item, you still pay the listing fee, but not the FVF.

Incidentally, I looked up Final value fees on Google and there are a million or so hits. Of the first 57 pages, all the hits refer to eBay FVFs - What they are, how much they are, how to avoid paying them, etc etc. Then on page 58, there start to be hits about other auction website FVFs. So, someone correct me if I'm wrong, the FVF was brought into existence by eBay?

Back to our £1 auction, you now have to pay 15% VAT and then paypal take their cut, which in the UK is 3.4% +20p.

So, altogether, eBay takes 52p of your £1.

Now I know, if you extend it to larger amounts it isn't quite so dramatic. But roughly take off 10-12% of what you have earned to pay eBay.

There are some very good eBay fee calculators out there. I have been using this one.

But be careful when using a fee calculator. It needs to be relevant to the country you are in, and also some of them don't automatically work add in the hidden extras like VAT.

Incidentally, although all these fees are laid out very clearly, what you actually get charged is another matter altogether. I recently listed 4 items on eBay because of their 5p to list anything weekend, and because I've been writing this article about eBay fees, and for the first time, checked what I had actually been charged. Well, for 4 similar items in the same category, I was charged for one listing twice, at 5p a go and for the other three items, I was charged £1 each. Yes, that's right, £1 each. Now, if someone is only listing 2 or 3 items, then they probably wouldn't bother to question the charges: it is too much hassle, you don't get a reply from a real person anyway, they might look into your account, they might not bother... etc etc etc, but multiply this overcharging by a few million people who list and see how much of your money they are actually taking!! They should be paying us!!

This article is now far too long. I'll try to write much shorter ones next time!! :)

OK, just one more thing, don't forget that paypal keeps your money for twice as long as a bank before they pass it on to you (5-7 days compared to 3-4 days). Think of all that interest!

What's in a name?

2008-12-13T17:23:00.000-08:00

"What's in a name?
That which we call
'rose',
by any other name would
smell as sweet"

In order to run a successful auction website, you need to have a good name.
Some important 'good name' criteria might include:

Short, snappy title
One that people will remember, maybe even comment on
One that describes the contents of the website

How to choose a good name? I did a few searches around the net and there are a lot of sites which directly rip off eBay. Then there are the ones which have something really obvious in the name about selling or buying or bidding online, isell, yousell, webid. It would be easy to get lost in the list of least traffic.

When searching, you do get a little bit focussed - a small amount of tunnel vision creeps in...

So, then I did a search in online dictionaries and thesauruses(thesauri, thesauriums?) and started looking for words to do with selling, auctions, bidding etc etc.

The objective was to have the shortest word possible but still be on topic. And that is how, 'Duds' came into view. Cool articles of clothing for a snappy dresser - an ideal name for an auction website.

I had had the idea that there was a need for a website to help people sell the little things. Little knick-knacks, clothes, etc. i.e. those items on which there is a potential to lose money on eBay because, once you have paid the fees, you are totally out of pocket.

And so e-DUDS.com was born.

I liked it, a nice snappy, memorable name, which rolls off the tongue, with a totally cool meaning.

Do you remember I mentioned about the potential blinkers earlier? the tunnel vision?

Well, one of the first members asked why I had named my site after an unexploded bomb? i.e. a 'Dud'. Or a 'Squib' if you like things in Harry Potter terms.

I still didn't get it. I still thought the majority of people thought of duds as clothes rather than anything else. And I had already bought the domain name and paid for the software and they had already set up the name on all the pages. But it all still seemed to have negative connotations.

Rather lamely, I decided that a good thing would be to have a definition on the website. So I paid through the nose and got the software designer to insert a definition onto each page. And this is what it said:

"Duds: definition: Informal term for articles of clothing. (16th century)"

Yes, OK. I know. Very internet, very web 2.0.

Why do they say 'paying through the nose?' It probably has some sort of horrible medieval connotations. On various websites it says things about debtors having horrible things done to their noses if they couldn't pay their creditors. But wouldn't that be 'paying with your nose'?

Pay up or the nose gets it!

Terrible depths of gloom and depression...

... could have descended, but then hey, if websites such as 'Yahoo' can be famous and popular, and if 'Google' can become a household verb, then why not?

e-DUDS fulfills 2 out of the 3 criteria straight away - short, memorable and of the dictionary websites I visited today, 4 only mentioned that it is an informal term for clothes and 2 mentioned that it could be clothes, or - well, yes, an unexploded bomb.

And personally, I think that if Donald Trump can overcome the hurdles of that name and get to where he is, then so can e-DUDS.com

www.e-DUDS.com
http://www.illustrationsof.com/

Time's a ticking!

2008-12-09T15:23:00.000-08:00

London

Even changing one little colour on the forum takes me all morning. I'm not sure whether I'm ever going to get this just the way I want it.

The thing is, you go onto the internet, do a search via Google, check into the BBC, look at the news, find out what the weather is going to do, watch something on iplayer, without realising that the world - make that the cyberworld is moving forwards at a tremendously rapid rate.

You can't just put some HTML together any more, and proudly display your efforts. There's XML, JS, CGI, Perl, (I'm sure some of these are ancient in computer terms, but I've only just discovered that they exist). How do you handle forms? How do you design your CSS? Do you design CSS or do you implement it? I'm not sure! Then there's all the social stuff! Do we have to be constantly so social with each other? How annoying would it be if the person next to you constantly told you what they were feeling and thinking?

So it's all moved on, but the trouble is, I've just arrived. Suddenly I'm back on the school hockey pitch running after Monica Wharton. Luckily, at some point all the girls would stop running one way and turn back and start to run back towards me, at which point I'd realise they'd just gone by, stop in my tracks and go back the way I'd come.

I don't think that's going to happen here somehow. WWW is bigger than a hockey pitch!

www.e-DUDS.com

How to Run a Successful Auction Website

2008-12-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

Why?

The first question to occur when reading the title will probably be 'Why on earth would anyone put themselves through all that trouble when there are already auction websites out there?' ... or words to that effect.

Well, without being too specific, I wanted the challenge. It's a great opportunity to have a website which could potentially be populated by hundreds of people and it would be a great place to hang out.

OK, being slightly more specific, I have tried other auction websites and found some of them too draconian or demanding, and some of them too confusing! (How much do I pay exactly?) Without being too much of an auction junkie, I have tried to sell the odd thing in the past and with little items of low value, once you have worked out the listing fee, the final value fee, the hidden fee, the other hidden fee, the paypal fee and the Fee fee, you have either made pennies, or worse, you have ended up paying for the privilege. Then a few weeks later, there is nothing more demoralising than getting that dreaded 'Paypal has reversed your transaction'.

Now, the thing I didn't quite realise was exactly how much time it would take (has taken) because when you are a novice, you have no idea just how much there is that you don't know! (But more on that later).

So, I bought a template, bought a domain, paid for hosting and here I am, about to run a Successful Auction Website!

Wish me luck!

www.e-DUDS.com