If you have products to sell online and have been using eBay, you might want to try eCrater.com which is free. The set up of your store is very easy you can even add your own logo. Once you have your store set up and all your items for sale listed, you just need to drive traffic to your store. Since eCrater is not like eBay most shopper will not find you through a search on the site although some people do search on eCraters main page. The site gets indexed by Google so most shoppers will find you by searching on Google or other search engines. If you want even more traffic then you need to do a ppc campaign and drive traffic to your site. An example of this would be, say you spend $100.00 a month on eBay fee’s why not take $50.00 and advertise your top selling item through eCrater. You just need to go to preview mode on eCrater which take you to yor live store. Then you find the product you want to advertise. Once you are on the right product page copy and highlight the url at the top of your browser. In your ppc campaign add this as your destination url. All click will end up on the right product page, make sure to test the link before starting any paid search. Simple free and very easy to use I hope more people start using eCrater they have a great site that does not get as much press as other auction or selling platforms. With some products I sell this has been a great choice. Your eCrater shoppers can pay through Paypal.

The new year is here and I want 2009 to be a fantastic year for my online business. With the economy the way it is and a tough year ahead, setting goals can make a difference in what I can get done. Since there are so many things I can not change I will work with what has been good to me in the past year. One of my main sources of income is and has been eBay for a great number of years now. The thing with eBay is that you always have to deal with customer service issues. Then there is the packing and shipping. In the new year I will limit what I sell on eBay and work more on my affiliate offers. With affiliate offers you do not have to worry about customer service or shipping, some one else does it all for you. The first thing I am doing is finding out what my eBay fee’s average per month. Then I can create advertising ppc for some of my affiliate offers and see if I can beat my eBay profits. If I can start to show results with my effort then eBay will be further on the back burner and I will use eBay as a back up source of income for those odd months that my other offers are not making money. In a previous post I wrote that eBay was going downhill and I do think many sellers are not as focused on the platform. It has been difficult to compete, when so many items for sale on eBay now ship direct from China or Hong Kong. How are North American based sellers to compete on price. Last week I bought a usb bluetooth adapter for $4.35 with free shipping to Canada. The same item cost $35.00 in a local computer store. As more and more China based companies get on eBay there will be fewer and fewer sales.

Goal 2009:

More sources of income less dependency on eBay.