eBay, Recessions and Why the Experts Are Very Often Wrong

During good and bad times, the experts will tell you exactly how to make your business more profitable. But the experts are not always right, in fact very often the experts are totally wrong. You must judge their advice and get second opinions, especially when talk turns to cutting back on advertising when the economy slows down.

Let me tell you why I don’t always believe the experts, based on personal experience. Consider the well known fact that when economies go into freefall the majority of businesses call in their debts, cut back on advertising, stop investing, and other counter-productive practices.

That advice bears great similarity to mail order and direct mail, where experts tell you never to mail or advertise in June and July, people don’t buy during June and July they’ll tell you, everyone’s on holiday during June and July!

Years ago, when I sold business manuals by mail order and direct mail, my best selling months were, you guessed it, June and July. That’s because with the competition snoozing, I was one of very few people targeting the huge business opportunities market and capturing the Lion’s share of a huge and ever-hungry marketplace. Hungry, even in June and July!

This means when others stop advertising, you should continue. When others promote less when their profits drop, you should promote more. Do it like this:

* Start Selling, Don’t Just Take Orders. Just because you have auction listings running seven days a week, just because you have an eBay Shop packed with products, that doesn’t mean you are actually selling anything. If you’re continuously relisting the same items, even if they are proven best sellers, you are not really selling in the real sense of the word, all you are really doing is taking orders.

Selling is a pro-active experience, it means continuously seeking new items to sell, testing those products, and promoting whatever of those items generate reliable profits, while abandoning any that don’t. Selling means looking for new markets, listing in eBay categories you haven’t tried before, checking out untested eBay country sites, making special offers to test profit potential, and so on. That is selling!

* Remember There Are Always People with Money to Spend and Focus Your Efforts on Them. Perhaps the most important aspect of selling is looking for people with money to spend and finding products those people might want to buy. An old marketing maxim says it’s far easier and takes much less time and effort, also less money, to sell to people who do have money as to sell to people who don’t. You just have to find those people with money to spend.

You do it by researching the eBay marketplace, preferably completed auctions, and you look for products that rarely go unsold on eBay. It helps to start with a specific product theme, preferably one you are familiar with, and once you have a list of, say, 100 high profit items, you focus your business around obtaining and selling those items. I do it with vintage postcards (a truly recession-proof product), some do it with craftwork materials (in recessionary times people begin making more of whatever goods they need in order to save money on buying those items ready made), some sellers focus on tight niche markets (especially eager buyers with money to spend).

Collectibles tend to weather economic turmoil, especially globally as on eBay. Also from personal experience from several years ago, when I sold at a few local flea markets, most traders in collectibles made more money when the recession hit hardest. The reason was, while less affluent collectors sold their goods way below value to make fast cash to pay the bills, sellers bought those items much less expensively than before, so their profit margins were higher. Because they were selling to people with money and secure employment, many antiques and collectibles dealers found no need to lower their prices, in fact many increased their prices and often doubled their previous profit margins. Bear in mind, sellers were trading locally, long before eBay appeared, which can only mean potentially far higher profits for post-eBay slowdowns.

Avril Harper is a business writer and eBay PowerSeller who has produced several guides to making money online including MAKE YOUR EBAY BUSINESS RECESSION-PROOF which you can download right away at: http://www.avrilharper.com/freestuff.html

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