Selling Digital Products on eBay

eBay has done it again.

Yesterday they announced a massive change to digital download listings that will completely overhaul the way those of us selling eBooks do business.

From March 31, eBooks and other digital download products can no longer be listed in auction format. Instead, they must be listed as a Classified ad.

Okay, fine, you might say. Except for when we tell you that selling via Classified ads means no feedback.

Because Classified transactions take place outside of eBay, the feedback option is nullified. And this is one big ‘uh-oh’ for any seller trying to build a good reputation or achieve powerseller status. 

For many of you, this announcement is going to come as a nasty shock.

But before you let the doom and gloom sink in, remember that survival in business means adaptation. Also from what I’ve seen over the years, every so called ‘shock’ in eBay, Google or any other online income source usually helps some people while hurting others.

You can use this situation to your advantage as many eBay sellers will not know what to do and will give up following this latest announcement.

Luckily for you, as a member of Sky High Auctions you’re up to date on what to do.

My first suggestion is that you list your eBooks as classified ads. You won’t be able to earn feedback points, but you’ll still get the most important thing from your eBook sales… qualified leads!

Now as far as feedback is concerned, you can still sell your eBooks (or other digital items) on CD or DVD, if you list them on eBay as a physical product.

While this does mean that you can’t automate this part of your business entirely, the upsides more than make up for it.

For starters, up-sell opportunities are now going to be tripled. Yes, tripled. Physical items are taken way more seriously by customers, so there’s going to be more chance of your other offers being viewed and actioned. And don’t let’s forget that this is actually the most important part of selling digital items anyway!

I suggest that you sell your physical product cd’s for $7 + shipping and handling (which should be pretty cheap). That equate to a similar profit after costs are taken into account, as to selling ebooks. And you should get quite a few leads out of this.

You can still sell some of your physical products at higher prices (e.g. a 5 cd pack on self hypnosis for $30+ etc), but in general, as taught in the Sky High Auctions lessons, you’ll want to sell this kind of package on the backend, after selling someone a lower priced product. These leads are invaluable.

For those of you doing big digital product business and worried about the time required to burn and ship CDs, you can outsource this to Disk.com or you can check out a solution offered by our friend Dave: he teaches you how to create an auto-run CD and get someone to burn and drop ship them for you! Nice one Dave – we like anything that gets other people to do our work for us.

You can find Dave’s awesome Quick & Easy Info Product Creation Guide right here

There’s no doubt about it: this is a pretty big shake up for all of us digital product sellers. But we’re very excited about the solutions we’ve put in place and can only wait with baited breath to see how the results pan out in our bottom line over the coming weeks.