The eBay Marketing Bible

Audience

This book was written with people in mind who want build an eBay store and/or bring more traffic to and from their own website. The authors talk in detail about how these entrepreneurs can market their store through many avenues. The main purpose for this book is to help other eBay sellers market their wares and drive more buyers to their stores.

About The Authors

The authors are very knowledgeable about the subject of how to market an eBay store. Cliff Ennico is a small business lawyer, as well as a Certified eBay Education Specialist. Cindy L. Shelby is an eBay Certified Education Specialist, Certified Business Consultant, and eBay Powerseller. They both have previously written other eBay marketing books. Both authors are considered experts in the field of eBay Education Specialists.

Key Points In The Chapters

One of the key points the authors bring up in the beginning of the book is a new word for all sellers and that is “marketainment: marketing your business in cool, fun, humorous, dramatic, or compelling way that entertains your customers or otherwise manipulates their emotions.” What Cliff is telling you is that to effectively market yourself or your brand in this age of fast moving technology you need a gimmick to get noticed.

The first couple of chapters cover developing a marketing strategy, and building your presence on eBay. The book provides in depth help to the seller to figure out who their customers are, and what types of things to sell to these customers. The authors then describe the necessity for creating your user and store ID on eBay. These ID’s have to be ones that will make a potential customer want to stop and look inside your store to see what you have to offer. Another customer friendly strategy is to have an email address that matches both ID’s, using eBay’s my world pages.

In the next couple of chapters the book discusses using eBay and other online marketing techniques to drive traffic to your store. The authors start off by letting the readers know about many of the guidelines that restrict what sellers can and cannot do on the eBay site no matter whether they have a store or are creating individual sales. Some of these include not posting a URL to your outside website on your eBay listing or store, your customers must opt-in to any emails that you might want to send to them, and a couple of the most obvious ones are-do not misrepresent your items and there will be zero fraud tolerated. Cliff and Shelby also let their audience know about the many marketing tools that eBay has at your disposal. These include markdown manager, joint ventures, neighborhoods, discussion boards, charity donations, and Skype.

The book then goes on to provide some in depth ideas about how to really market your store. Many of these ideas include those that most of us have heard about (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Facebook, and YouTube), but they also brought up many more online forms of media marketing. These included podcasting, RSS feeds, Squidoo, Wikis, and Knol.

The final couple of chapters delve into some of the more common forms of offline marketing (press releases, ads, radio, television, billboards, etc…). There are a few other tactics that are shared in the last couple of chapters that are a must read for any sales person. (I'm not going to give away the whole book).

Weaknesses

The one drawback to this book was that it really was geared towards building a store presence and not on individual listings. The hope was that it would delve more into how to make actual listings and what draws customers to that listing. So while there were some tips for all types of sellers it just didn’t give enough attention to the individual listing side of eBay. One of the reasons for the lack of individual listing tips may be due to the fact that eBay is moving away from the more traditional individual sales and moving more towards the online store setup.

Recommendations

This book is a recommended read for just about anyone, but especially those in sales or marketing. While it predominantly centered on eBay stores it has a lot of great information for anyone in those two fields, and would be a very useful resource book to have handy. This would also be a good book for new or experienced sellers on eBay, since it does talk about several of the guidelines that have to be followed in order to remain in good standing on the site, as well as some very good resources in the appendix. So go ahead read it you might just find out some things you never knew before.