Auctions have long been a staple in the toolkit of nonprofit development professionals. The emergence of ubiquitous online access have made online auctions an excellent vehicle for nonprofits and charities to raise funds while engaging stakeholders and other consituencies in their causes. eBay, the leader platform for online auctions also provides a number of offerings for running nonprofit auctions. Running a charity auction on eBay is simple, but getting the most from your efforts involves developing a strategy and understanding the ins and outs of eBay. Luckily eBay provides lots of information on how to be successful using their services.
Many first time sellers have one thing in common - they fail. Many of them fail time and time again, never understanding what is going wrong. They do hours of research looking for the perfect item to sell, get the auction set up, and wait for the bidding to begin. Hours go by and no bids are placed. Days go by, and there are still no bids- or there are very low bids. Finally the auction ends, and it turns out to be a total failure. Considering the huge number of sellers who run eBay auctions, there are specific things you must do, and specific things you must not do if you are to be successful.
There are many reasons why auctions fail. The most common reason is that the item is not in high demand. This problem can be avoided by doing the necessary research to determine which items sell well, and which items should be avoided. This research takes a great deal of time ? but in the end, you will find that it is time well spent.
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In addition to eBay, other vendors offer vehicles for nonprofits to run fundraising auctions. CMarket - www.cmarket.com offers services emphasizing the importance of bidders, donors and sponsors, and their respective roles in a successful auction. Their Website is a valuable source of fundraising auction tips.
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Another reason for eBay failure is pricing. No matter what your reserve price is, your opening bid price should never be more than $50 or so. This is how you will attract potential bidders to your auction. If you set that opening bid too high, most people won't even click the link to read the description for your item. Another pricing problem is lack of research. Before you set your reserve price, you must determine what the item is really worth, and the price similar items have sold for in past eBay auctions.
Poorly written descriptions are another cause of failed auctions. Poor grammar and misspelled words drive people away. Failing to post a picture of the item will also keep people from visiting your auction page. Make sure that your description is well written. This is essentially your "sales copy."
Shipping prices scare people away from auctions if they are too high. Find the lowest shipping prices that you can find, and consider paying for the shipping yourself if it won't cut into your profits too much. Do not charge handling fees.
Offer great ?customer service? for all of your auctions, and ask your buyers to give you feedback. If the items that you sell are everything that you said they would be, and you offer great customer service, you can expect wonderful feedback ? and this feedback will help a great deal in your future auctions.
Michael Saunders has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He edits a site on Fundraising Auction Tips and is president of Information Organizers, LLC.
How to convert your visitors to customers?
No matter what you are selling on your website, if you are not able to convert your visitors to customers, your website will not survive for long.
Surely, SEO can drive a lot of traffic to your site, but it does not guarantee you any success in your Internet business. Most importantly is how well your website is converting the visitors to your customers.
By following the tips below and make some changes to your site, you will be able to improve your conversion ratio.
Provide great content – Content is king. If you want to attract visitors, provide useful content that is of great value to them. Internet is a place full of information. If you are not able to provide your visitors with useful content, they can always find it somewhere else.
Keep It Simple and Sweet – Keep your content simple and sweet. Do not attempt to write an essay to explain why your product is the best. Most users have the habit to quick scan a couple of paragraphs before they decided to read on or leave the page. Make your idea easy to understand and get it across in the first paragraph.
Publish a regular newsletter – A regular newsletter allows you to revisit your visitors again and again and it gives your visitors reasons to revisit you.
Site structure – Be consistent throughout the site. Ensure that the navigation bar is at the same place in every page and the navigation process is smooth and hassle free.
Page organization - Every page should discuss only one topic/idea. Do not attempt to confuse your visitors with too many ideas in a page. They will have problem digesting it.
Pre-sell to your customer - Customers like to buy, they don’t like to be sold. Do not attempt to sell to your customer, write to pre-sell instead.
Clean up all the broken links - Broken links always turn people off. It tells others that you are not professional and not to be trusted. Beware and prevent this from happening
Provide plenty of resources – Provide plenty of free resources to your visitors. Resources can include links to other related sites, free ebooks, product reviews, tips, testimonials etc. The more useful resources you provide, the more credible is your site.
Provide a good after-sale service – Lack of this will ensure the doom of your business. Provide a good after-sale service to your customers. It can be a thank you email, follow up usage guide, assurance email or even 24 hours technical support. Whether or not your customers return to make a repeat purchase will depend on how good your after-sale service is.
Request testimonial from your customer – Request all satisfied customers to write a testimonials and post it in your site. This is much better than writing a thousand words.
These 10 simple tips have been proven to work. Make use of it wisely to increase your conversion ratio.
Damien Oh has been an Internet Marketer for the past 3 years. He has great experience in SEO, building sites that sell and affiliate marketing, He shares his ideas and various marketing strategies in his blog www.internetstrategyblog.com. Many people have benefited from his knowledge. Check out his blog for useful strategies.
2007 eBay tips and resources of using virtual marketplaces
Selling products on a local (and even national) scale is not enough, so many businesses have taken a decisive step and created virtual selling spaces, from where they could reach a global audience. In the following article we will have a look at the most successful forms of online marketplaces.
Electronic commerce - a multi billion dollar industry.
The terms e-commerce or ecommerce are extremely popular nowadays, and it seems more and more businesses are considering some form of online sales or online promotion. According to Forrester Research ecommerce generated sales worth US $12.2 billion in 2003. E-commerce has the exact same features of a local business - sales, distribution, marketing and servicing of goods - except it all happens over the Internet. Millions of online marketplaces using e-commerce techniques can be found on the world wide web and hundreds more are born every day. In the IT world, ecommerce is defined as an electronic business application that has the primary goal of facilitating online transactions. From e-marketing, online marketing and automated inventory management systems, electronic commerce also integrates other features and tools such as supply chain management or electronic funds transfer. Of course, e-commerce wouldn't be possible without online transaction processing and different data collection and storing systems.
Why e-commerce works
There are different aspects that make e-commerce the power source of all online marketplaces:
Value for money - there are fewer costs to worry about when it comes to e-commerce, so vendors can offer their merchandise at lower prices. In fact, this is the most important characteristic of all the large online marketplaces that exist today.
Personal attention - many ecommerce online marketplace websites offer personalized sales web pages and free buying guides and resources.
Belonging to a community - each online marketplace aims to become your "favorite Internet shopping zone". Many attract visitors over and over - often as paying customers, by creating a sense of community through forums and chat rooms, as well as loyalty programs.
Prompt service - a good online marketplace will offer lightning fast order response and distribution management.
One stop shop - many e-commerce online marketplace businesses try to create a complete experience for the visitor, where he or she can choose from a huge variety of products and services.
Time saving tools - such online businesses often provide customers with integrated search features as well as other comparison tools that help a customer find the product in a timely manner.
The online auction business model
This sort of online marketplace relies on customer's bids on different products. The most popular online marketplaces that use the online auction business model are eBay and Amazon, but there are now thousands of reputable virtual marketplaces where sellers and customers meet. Online marketplaces such as eBay simply facilitate the transaction between sellers and clients and they also offer product display, bidding tools and payment options. Here are the main positive features and strengths of the online auction business model:
International sales - as this online marketplace reaches a global audience, sellers and buyers are no longer constrained by location.
24/7 availability - since the system of purchasing and selling items is automated, you can place or receive bids at any time of the day or night.
Buying intensity - some interesting sociological phenomena define online marketplaces such as eBay. There are many similarities between bidding on a product and gambling, and the person that buys the product is announced as the "winner".
High numbers of sellers and clients - the auction process favors both sellers and bidders, and most large online marketplaces encourage frequent participation in their programs.
Spiraling - this refers to the fact that the online auction business model works like a spiral, with more sellers attracting more bids, and vice versa. The huge success of eBay is based on this phenomenon.
Consumer surplus - the online auction business model uses the so called first degree price discrimination. This represents the price that is above the market's line but also situated under the demand of the consumers.
