Is “Powerseller” really a “status” on eBay?

Powerseller eligibility is (in part) based on turnover, but not on profit. You could, technically, qualify as a Powerseller and be making a loss every month!

Here’s what eBay says makes you eligible to be a Powerseller:

• Uphold the eBay community values, including honesty, timeliness and mutual respect
• Average a minimum of $1000 in sales per month, for three consecutive months on eBay.com, Half.com, eBay Express or eBay Motors
• Achieve an overall Feedback rating of 100, of which 98% or more is positive
• Have been an active member for 90 days
• Have an account in good financial standing
• Maintain a minimum of 4 average monthly listings for the past 3 months
• Comply with all eBay listing and marketplace policies

Do you notice anything in that list about profit? No! It’s all about your contribution to eBay, both being a good member and maintaining a minimum number for sales and income.

eBay make their fees based on your listing price, final valuation and all sorts of listing options. eBay don’t care if you make a profit or loss: the more turnover/higher incoming revenue you have, the more they make. They do of course, hope you make a profit, so you keep selling and buyers keep buying — but profit isn’t a pre-requisite to becoming a Powerseller.

So, in summary, Powerseller status simply helps eBay make profits — which doesn’t necessarily mean in turn that sellers make profits!

Isn’t that why eBay looks after its Powersellers — they bring in the best profits for eBay!

Do you look after YOUR best customers like eBay does? Do you know WHO your best customers are?

… receive!

I feel particularly impressed today with the wonderful, open source nature of the internet (or at least its open source good bits).

For many reasons, Eudora is my preferred email software, and has been since… the mid-1990s. Having steered away from other offerings, and then avoiding Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express (to help safeguard my computer, especially in earlier days)… I’ve always kept with Eudora. Two of the main reasons are the ability to have quite smart ‘multiple personalities’ and also, the ability to edit the subject line displayed for incoming messages (without actually changing the message’s subject line!). That’s a great feature for storing/sorting messages, especially artwork approvals (good to add “OK TO PRINT” to a subject line, so I can easily track emailed approvals).

Anyway.. Qualcomm, Eudora’s maker, announced last year it was discontinuing development of Eudora. I guess in the end, sadly, the more popular programs like those from Microsoft make it hard for alternatives to compete. Not to say Microsoft makes better software (want to spend 20 minutes while I tell you how dumb some of their software really is??)… just more popular.

Thankfully, Mozilla has picked up future development, with Qualcomm’s support and blessing, to make the code open source, and create a new email program called Penelope. This will sit alongside Mozilla’s existing Thunderbird (which I nearly switched to last year, as Eudora has a couple of nagging things that annoy me, such as it’s inability to display good html formatted emails, or forward them to other people. However, that’s probably why it hasn’t been exploited by hackers like other popular programs!).

Well, with the development of Penelope, there was an online “wishlist” of features that users would like — and last year I contributed to that list. I’m most happy that not only could I make suggestions, but many of them have been picked up (some obviously not just suggested by me), including a couple of specific ones I made — I asked, and I will receive when Penelope is launched!

Open source… what a fantastic integration of human intelligence. That’s one reason we love Firefox, other than it’s so much smarter than IE!

As a marketer-cum-copywriter with a strong sense of “consumer advocacy” — it really irks me when other copywriters and marketers “stretch the truth” about what they’re trying to sell.

Claims need PROOF. And they also need a dose of truth!

To protect the innocent, I’m not going to name specific culprits in this example.

I listed to an MP3 audio “special report” just yesterday, flogging a new product to do with online marketing. Specifically, eBay.

Part of the interview highlighted that the product author, until several months ago, didn’t really understand the internet, or internet marketing. Sure, it mentioned this person had had a successful business career as an entrepreneur, and as a marketer, but not online. They’d even been to, and presented at, seminars — but not really about this.

So why then, after just 5 minutes of public research, did I find out the product’s author is an eBay accredited “Education Specialist” who has been teaching people about internet marketing for 2 years?

Clearly a case of message incongruency.

I’m sure the strategy in the interview was to create empathy with possible purchasers, along the lines of “I was just like you, I didn’t really understand the internet until this magic pill — my product — came along.”

In turn, that means to imply something along the lines of … “you too can achieve great results because you are just like I used to be.”

Interesting too that the figures being mentioned dealth with “they made $xxxxxx” rather than the amount of PROFIT. Turnover isn’t profit! There were also a couple of other claims which are not specifcally true, although a little more explaining would have been proof enough to warrant making the claim.

In all honesty, I can’t rate the actual product that was for sale — because I don’t own it. But I don’t intend to own it, especially now!

The funny thing is, as a copywriter, I don’t know why this eBay background wasn’t turned into an advantage, rather than being hidden. There are plenty of ways I could use this info to prevent the 20 percent of the population who have my type of personality (that can be quite rebellious, and need logic, proof and details!) from being turned off a sale.

One of the good online business lessons I’ve learned from publishing a blog is the increase in site traffic we get on a daily basis.

At DMK, our blog isn’t geared towards “hard selling” any products. In fact, if you look at our Rates page, you’ll find that with a pretty full schedule, we don’t generally take on too much new work at any time. As well, we’re really only running this blog in a one-way communication format, as we don’t currently open posts for comments. The anti-spam plugins are quite effective these days, but for this blog we’re still comment-free for now.

It’s been a bit over 2.5 years now since starting with blogs — nearly 12 months directly on this site, plus 30-odd posts from a previous blog now retired. Having the WordPress system well in-hand means we’ve got to the point where I can watch the blog stats quite closely on our daily visitors: we use a great (free, open source) plugin called Slim Stats to give us some great info on our site activity.

Blog posts definitely increase our site traffic. Sometimes, we start getting traffic to a blog post within an hour or two of publishing the post to the site. We can see the search terms of course that we rate highly for (we get lots of matches for “DMK” in various Google, Yahoo, Live.com and other search results from around the world, most often in the top handful of results).

In March, we had visitors from Australia, the US, Great Britain, China, Malaysia, France and 24 other countries to our site. That traffic was weighted slightly in favour of our blog posts and categories over our regular content pages, although not by much.

Case in point: last Friday-week, I posted the article “The Only Time To Bid Early on eBay” - today, on our stats, just over a week later, I can see that a US-visitor has typed in “why do people bid early on ebay” into the US Google, and we’re result number 4, after USA Today, Yahoo! Answers and eBay Forums. That’s a pretty good ranking and puts us in with some rather reputable publishers — and, here’s a lesson in itself — our blog post title is a big help in arousing curiosity for a web user to click on our link in the search results to read what we have to say.

Now, we’re not actually “monetizing” that post — it doesn’t link to an eBay information product, nor does it present a page with Adsense Google ads. For our purposes, we’ve kept away from that opportunity for now. But that post is definitely helping bring good traffic to our website.

I can nearly tell you every time when Ab King Pro run an infomercial ad on tv in Australia — because there are several times per day when people come to our site and read the post that refers to this exercise product — and their search terms indicate they’re online looking to buy the Ab King Pro machine. When I last looked, searching on “abkingpro.com.au” only resulted in 2 matches — one for our post and the other for the company selling the actual machine — and people visit our page after seeing that result list. (Marketing lesson there in testimonials, third-party reviews — although our post doesn’t actually talk about the machine, just one of the selling techniques in the infomercial).

Same for something like Microsoft’s Expression Web: on a search results page full of links positively reporting on the software was my lone post, that, in the brief text match on the results page, included the text:

“I see Microsoft have launched Expression Web, a web building tool stepped up from Frontpage (ugghh!) program. Here’s 2 reasons why I’ll never use it:”

That, of course, was relevant and interesting content for the person searching, so they clicked the link and came to my site to read my two reasons. Whether or not those reasons applied to them, I was able to get their click and their traffic. There are, of course, psychological marketing lessons in that activity to take note of!

I’m sure our ranking is rewarded by having blog entries and regularly updated content. That content starts to bring traffic from the day it is added.

I can see daily that our blog posts are definitely a traffic-building component of our website. There is plenty of opportunity to make sure you make the most of visitors arriving at your site this way, especially if you do have something to offer them (newsletter, product, consulting etc). We don’t yet capitalise on that kind of opportunity, but see how blogs are a powerful business tool in getting great search result rankings.