Winning The Ebay Pricing War

Posted by Nick Niesen on November 1st, 2010

Pricing your products on eBay can really cut into your revenue unless you are careful. Most anything will sell on eBay and this is what makes it an attractive place to sell your products. The problem with eBay though is that there are so many sellers selling a lot of the same products that the prices are well below retail value. This can really cut into your profit margin and to make it worse, some companies will use eBay to try and sell a large quantity of products to try and make up for the profit loss.

eBay Reality

eBay should really only be used to auction off any products that have set in your inventory for a long time. The supply curve on eBay is extremely high even for those products with a high demand. The best result for using eBay is to use it as a product search directory. This is a very cheap way to get new potential customers in your front door. Post your products that do not cost much or those that don?t bring you a good return on investment. This will give you a sales template to get your potential customers to click a link to your website. Use your eBay sales page as a pitch page for your company?s products and website.

Making Backend Sales

Once you get customers in your front door of your website, you can gain the trust of your customers through your branding strategies and product information pages. This will allow you to make backend sales with eBay shoppers not seeing competing prices and listing your better products for a better profit margin. This same concept will also work if you do not have a website and only have your products for sale in an eBay store.

Customers will always pay a little bit more to buy a product from a credible source or company. To learn more about business branding and customer compliance then check out the marketing strategies section of my website.

Case History

A client of mine I recently spoke with decided to sell video games on eBay only making him one dollar per game sold because of the price inflation on eBay. He explained that he wanted to try and sell at least fifty games a day to bring him an extra fifteen hundred dollars a month. He had a huge inventory of about thirty different games. By the end of the month he had only made five hundred dollars profit, which is reasonable for the constant sales he was making.

He had a really good supplier and he was about to give it up and try selling a different product when I made him a website, used eBay as a marketing tool to get customers in the door and his backend sales produced him an extra twenty five hundred dollars a few months later.