16 New Ecommerce Books for the 2012 Holidays

Here are new ecommerce and Internet-marketing books for winter 2012. There are new titles on  social media, conversion optimization, entrepreneurship, email marketing, and content creation.
I compiled this record using Amazon’s "Books" category. I selected “Browse Subjects” and chose the "Business & Investing" sub-category. From there, I selected "Industries & Professions," and chose "E-commerce." Then I handpicked titles from that group, based on customer ratings, publication date, and relevance.

New Ecommerce Books

One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs by Stephen Key

One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs
This book provides a roadmap for the entrepreneurial dream by delivering a straightforward process for starting, growing and running a business, without the need for an M.B.A. or millions in funding. Develop, test, and protect your idea. Launch you business, market your product, and grow your business. Kindle $12.10; Hardcover $13.09.
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How to Sell Your Crafts Online by Derrick Sutton

How to Sell Your Crafts Online
With over 400,000 sellers on Etsy, how can you make your shop stand out and increase your sales? Learn how to boost your Etsy sales, attract more customers, expand your online presence, optimize your Etsy shop, and more. Kindle $9.99; Paperback $14.95.
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Likeable Business by Dave Kerpen, Theresa Braun, Valerie Pritchard

Likeable Business
You can have a rock-solid business strategy, unlimited resources, and the most talented people on staff. But only one thing is guaranteed in today’s hyper-connected society: If your business isn’t likeable, it will fail. Likeable Business lays out 11 strategies for organizations of all sizes to spur growth, profits, and overall success. Kindle $12.10; Paperback $14.06; Hardcover $20.70.
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You Should Test That! by Chris Goward

You Should Test That!
Part science and part art, conversion optimization is designed to turn visitors into customers. This book guides you through creating an optimization strategy that supports your business goals, using appropriate analytics tools, generating quality testing ideas, running online experiments, and making the adjustments that work. Paperback $18.04.
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The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker, Andy Smith

The Dragonfly Effect
The Dragonfly Effect shows you how to tap social media and psychological insights to achieve a single, concrete goal. Features customer loyalty case studies of global companies like the Gap, Starbucks, and Facebook. Leverage the power of design concepts and psychological research with practical strategies. Kindle $14.27; Hardcover $17.13.
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The Connected Company by Dave Gray (Author), Thomas Vander Wal

The Connected Company
When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your customers are disappointed, they can seize control of your brand message, spreading their frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today’s connected customers, become a connected company. Change how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. Kindle $9.99; Hardcover $14.14.
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Think Like Zuck by Ekaterina Walter

Think Like Zuck
The book explores the critical elements that drive the success of Facebook and businesses like it, such as having passion to change the world, clear vision, and higher purpose to execute, extraordinary team-building skills, and a flexible business strategy. Hardcover $14.60.
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The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan, Julien Smith

The Impact Equation
To make people care about what you have to say, you need more than just a good idea, trust among your audience, or a certain number of followers. You need a potent mix of all of the above and more. Use The Impact Equation to figure out what you’re doing right and wrong. Apply it to a blog, a tweet, a video, or a mainstream-media advertising campaign. Kindle $12.99; Paperback $11.26; Hardcover $15.85.
 
Guerrilla Facebook Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, Kelvin Lim

Guerrilla Facebook Marketing
This book contains practical tips on building Guerrilla marketing strategies in Facebook that can work for any business. Get insights on Facebook’s culture and Guerrilla Marketers’ beliefs, and what these insights mean to your overall marketing strategy. Learn how to use Facebook data to shape your marketing campaign. Boost your knowledge of Facebook features by familiarizing yourself with 25 Facebook-specific Guerrilla weapons. Kindle $7.99; Paperback $11.20.
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The Social Media Manifesto by Jed Hallam

The Social Media Manifesto
The Social Media Manifesto is a handbook on how social technology can be incorporated into a business, with practical advice, case studies, and insights from global business leaders. More than just technology or marketing, explore social technology, organizational culture and the way people work together. Hardcover $28.09.
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Advanced Social Media Marketing by Tom Funk

Advanced Social Media Marketing
Advanced Social Media Marketing cuts through the fluff about how social media is changing the world, and it gets down to what really matters: How to use social media to benefit your business. Written by a veteran online marketer and ecommerce professional, the book shares practical strategies and tactics to let you launch and scale a successful social media program. Kindle $9.99; Paperback $19.79.
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Renegades Write the Rules by Amy Jo Martin

Renegades Write the Rules
Renegades Write the Rules reveals the innovative strategies behind the social media success of today's top celebrities, brands, and sports icons, and how to follow their lead. Learn how to build a faithful following and beat the competition clamoring for people's attention by continually delivering value — when, where, and how people want it. Kindle $12.99; Hardcover $15.81.
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Email Marketing That Sells by Robert Coorey

Email Marketing That Sells
Here is a no-nonsense guide that shows you how to be a great email marketer. Learn how to get your emails opened, when and how often to send your emails, and more. Kindle $9.99.
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The Network Is Your Customer by David L. Rogers

The Network Is Your Customer
This book shows business owners and company leaders how to think strategically about customer networks and harness their power to create new opportunities for any organization. It focuses on five core behaviors of networked customers: accessing, engaging, customizing, connecting, and collaborating. Kindle $13.20; Paperback $17.00; Hardcover $14.27.
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Cash Content Creation by Stuart Brown

Cash Content Creation
Discover web content creation secrets that can help you to produce great written content for your websites. Learn how to turn your market research strategies and great ideas into content you can be proud of. Kindle $8.71; Paperback $13.95.
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Online Reputation Management for Dummies by Lori Randall Stradtman

Online Reputation Management for Dummies
In today's social world, managing your online reputation is more critical than ever, whether it's your company brand, or yourself as a brand. One thing is certain — everyone needs a plan. This essential book shows you how to set up a system that works every day, helps forward your brand's online goals, and is able to deal with negative chatter. Kindle $15.11; Paperback $15.91.

Related Articles

• 16 New Ecommerce Books for Summer 2012
• 25 Top-Selling Ecommerce Books
• 12 Sites for Ebook Publishing

by http://www.practicalecommerce.com

6 Essential Google Analytics Features for Every Retailer

Google Analytics can help focus your business on its most profitable areas, and can also help attract more customers while spending less money in the process.
Here are six valuable features that Google Analytics can provide your online retail operations. With these tools, you can make your operations more cost effective, and spot new, lucrative opportunities.

Tracking Outbound Links

Understanding where your traffic comes from is one thing. But being able to see when — and where — it's going is another.
To track outbound links, first check the “Yes, an E-commerce site” button in Google Analytics. From there, install the necessary tracking code. There are excellent plugins for this for popular platforms and frameworks. You can install them on your site quickly and easily. If you need raw coding, Axllent.org has an excellent outbound tracking guide that provides the code, tells you what to do with it, and where to put it on your website. In short, if you can follow directions, you can start tracking your outbound links today.

Ecommerce Tracking

Google Analytics can actually track your sales. This is an incredibly useful tool because it puts all of your sales and conversion metrics in the same place, and lets you compare them alongside the rest of your data. But it doesn’t come easy — unless you’re using popular platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Cart66, which all have plugins to simply copy and paste your tracking codes. For custom coding, you may need professional assistance. Ask your shopping cart provider about this.
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Clicking the option "Yes, an E-Commerce Site" in Google Analytics.

Goals

"Goals" are like Ecommerce Tracking, but more thorough. Goals are essentially conversion tracking, but you can identify many different things as conversions, instead of just basic purchases. If you’re aiming for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, click a link to an affiliate, or just follow a link to a special web page, you can create goals and then track.
Setting up goals is easy. Search Engine Land has an excellent primer for it. Just create a goal from a basic metric, like pages visited or time on page. You can also track specific conversion funnels, with the goal set at the final confirmation page after a purchase. For advanced goals, there is a little code to implement. But it’s not difficult, even for the technically challenged. Once you have goals set up, Google Analytics provides graphics to show your progress and help you see where you can improve.

Custom Campaign URLs

Do you wish you knew where your traffic was coming from, across all of your various promotions? Google Analytics can help you identify visitors that come from special promotions, and all other sources. Using Google’s URL Builder, you can customize links using URL extensions that won’t affect your website’s performance.
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Google Analytics' URL builder.
Though the finished URL looks complicated, the idea is simple: You’re giving each URL a special tag, or campaign code, that identifies it and separates it from the rest of your traffic. For example, when creating a link to your website that you want to share on Facebook, append something like “/?utmsource=facebook” to your URL. For email campaigns, the URL could be “/?utmsource=email” — and so on. Tagging your URLs will help you sort your traffic into logical groups, to understand where it's coming from so you can measure how effective your campaigns actually are.

Exclude Internal Traffic

To make sure your analytics aren’t skewed by your own repeated visits, there are a number of ways to keep your internal visits excluded from your own site’s metrics. Hallam Internet Limited offers simple directions to block your own IP address.
If you’re more technically savvy, you can give your computer a cookie from your website that includes a variable that tells Google Analytics to ignore your traffic no matter where you are. InfoTrust offers a good explanation of how to do this.

Advanced Segments

"Advanced Segments" is a powerful tool to separate your traffic into highly focused groups. You can track repeat traffic to learn more about what your loyal customers are doing, or keep tabs on related traffic sources to gauge your relative performance, or simply customize a report to show you more on whatever is helpful to you. The point is to find actionable data within specific key categories. I addressed this previously, in "Using Google Analytics Advanced Segments to Find Actionable Data."
Setting up an advanced segment is easy. Under "Standard Reporting," click the Advanced Segments button and you can start separating traffic by many different variables and traffic factors. Once you’ve found the factors to focus on, you can create a dynamic analytics segment to refer to any time, providing a more detailed look into how your visitors behave, where they comes from, and what they are up to.

by Jaime Brugueras

Facebook Marketing Apps Worth Your Attention

Facebook's modifications to fan pages — most importantly the shift to Timeline — has reduced the use of specialized, third-party marketing apps. However, that does not mean these apps have gone away. Many offer promotional opportunities not found within Facebook's native platform.
In this article, I share 13 new apps from 7 different companies that are worth your attention.

1. Lujure

Lujure has transitioned to a new brand called Heyo.
Lujure is one of the more popular Facebook Page marketing applications. However, the company recently made the most significant change in its history and transitioned from being solely a Facebook Page app provider to one that incorporates mobile apps and a website building tool. The company also changed its name from Lujure to Heyo.
Heyo Social
The fan page builder — now called Heyo Social — remains the heart of the new platform and provides the content for use in the mobile app and website.
Page owners can choose from template-driven or custom options. The company also offers over 30 widgets that can be incorporated into fan pages, including contests, buy buttons, and email opt-ins.
Heyo Mobile
Once a fan page is built, its content can be included in a mobile app with a single click. "Customers can call you through your phone widget, email you through your email widget, follow you through your twitter widget, or redeem a deal using your deal widget," states Heyo. Six mobile widgets are available in all.
Heyo Web
Lastly, Heyo offers a hosted, drag and drop website building platform. As with the mobile app, content that has already been created via Heyo Social can be used within the site.
Prices start at $3 per month and scale upward based on the number of fan pages, widgets, mobiles apps, and websites used.

2. North Social

North Social offers a suite of more than 20 Facebook Page apps.
Facebook Page app developer North Social offers a suite of more than 20 apps. Two of the newest include Holiday Advent Calendar and Trivia Contest.
Holiday Advent Calendar
This app allows merchants to set up a series of daily promotions that automatically run from midnight to midnight each day during Advent.
Types of promotions vary from deals, coupons, downloads, or sweepstakes. For example, the app enables page owners to run a week of deals, 12 days of coupons, and up to 24 days of holiday deals (in keeping with the Advent calendar).
Trivia Contest App
The Trivia Contest app is designed to provide page owners with a way to engage their fan base and help spread the word about their brands. Three contest options are included: True/False, Multiple Choice, and Personality Quiz.
Sharing is built in so that, after users complete a trivia challenge, they will be shown their results and prompted to share the application by challenging their friends to beat their score.
North Social offers tiered pricing, which starts at $1.00 per day, and is based on the number of fans a page has. All apps are included in the price.

3. Tabsite

Tabsite recently launched a series of "engagement" apps.
Facebook app provider Tabsite recently launched a series of "Engagement" apps. Three that I recommend are: Pin Deal, Share Deal, and Group Deal.
Pin Deal
This app integrates Pinterest into Facebook by giving page owners the ability to create a special offer or deal. However, to "unlock" the deal, fans must first pin it on Pinterest.
Share Deal
Similar to the Pin Deal app, to unlock a special deal on Facebook, the fan must first share it with others.
According to Tabsite, the Share Deal app is a "great tool for offering a special discount, an e-book download, savings code, or other promo that spreads because fans need to share the deal in order to get access themselves."
Group Deal
The Group Deal app picks up where Share Deal leaves off. In this case, just like using group deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, fan page owners set how many times a deal must be shared in order for it to be unlocked.
Tabsite pricing starts at $15 per month for its most popular plan. A 14-day free trial is also offered. However, the apps listed above require the use of what Tabsite refers to as its Platinum plan, which costs $25 per month.
 

4. Blazon

Blazon is a newer player on the Facebook Page marketing scene.
A new player on the Facebook marketing scene is Blazon, which provides a social marketing suite built around promotional campaigns and contests.
Blazon positions itself as the "fastest way to convert impressions into sales leads," and does so using photo, text and video contests, as well as giveaways and sweepstakes.
Prices begin at just $5 per promotion and $0.99 per day. The most popular option starts at $19 and $2.49 per day. Promotions can be run for any period of time the user chooses.

5. Woobox

Two of Woobox newest apps are Pinterest tab and Photo Contests.
Woobox offers a number of apps including group deals, polls, sweepstakes and coupons. Two of its newest, however, are Photo Contests and a Pinterest tab.
Photo Contests
The Photo Contests app, which works with both Facebook and Twitter, allows fan and followers to upload photos that others can vote on. Entrants provide captions for their photo that are shown on the voting screen. Users can also share their own photo entry or that of others.
Fan page owners can download all entry data including email addresses for use in follow-up marketing, which is a particular benefit to using this app.
Pinterest Tab
Though not tied to a contest or promotion, this app allows page owners to showcase their Pinterest boards and pins as a tab on a Facebook page. Users can be required to like the page before viewing the Pinterest tab.
Use of the Pinterest tab app is free. However, the Photo Contests app requires that users pay a monthly subscription fee of $29, which includes use of all Woobox apps.

6. FaceItPages

FaceItPages offers a promotional app to target relevant fans.
Like the other companies included in this list, FaceItPages provides several Facebook Page marketing options. However, there is one in particular that I want to mention. It's called +Promote, which helps page owners gain "targeted likes" to their Facebook pages.
"With targeted fans, you have a much better chance of turning your likes into leads. The more targeted fans you have, the better chance those fans will engage with your page which will also help your Facebook Page Edgerank," says FaceItPages.
The app promotes fan pages using Facebook ads that are targeted around the merchant's market and ideal customer. The company focuses on setting up targeted, low cost, yet high converting ads that produce, according to the company, an 80 percent click-to-like ratio.
The key benefit to using this app is that it places the emphasis on quality over quantity. In other words, it is not designed to get the most fans for the money, but the ones most likely to engage with the brand.
Pricing is $15 per month of the most popular plan, but is free for the first 30 days.

7. PageModo

Pagemodo offers a Facebook Cover creation tool.
Pagemodo also offers social apps. One that I like is the Timeline Cover Photo designer.
The process is simple. You choose a template, which can consist of up to eight images, select a background image (Pagemodo provides a background image maker), choose images either from your computer or from images provided by Pagemodo, then publish the cover to your fan page.
It is important to change cover images on a routine basis to add freshness to the page. This app makes that process easy, and even fun. It's also free to use. Pagemodo also offers a free level for use with a limited selection of its apps. Otherwise, plans start at $6.25 per month and scale up. (At the time of this writing, Pagemodo is running a pricing special, which cuts the monthly rate in half.)

Summary

Just because Facebook is offering its own marketing tools, primarily Promoted Posts, you can still use third-party applications such as those listed here. They contain a wealth of promotional opportunities that can lead to increased fan base growth, engagement and sales.

Read More

• Facebook Promoted Posts: Getting Started
• Facebook Launches Targeted Page Posts 

by  http://www.practicalecommerce.com

Increase Your Blog and Writing Income with Chitika

What is Chitika?

If you write online for your own blog, website, or revenue sharing site, you can increase your online passive income by placing Chitika advertisements along side your articles. Pronounced "CHIT-icka," Chitika ads are one alternative to Adsense, yet you can still place Chitika ads and Adsense units on the same page. This allows you to get the maximum use from your ad space. Chitika units have excellent click-through rates, and many writers and bloggers report that the click-through rates are better than Adsense. If you want to make more money writing online, here are some quick facts about Chitika and how to increase your revenue.

Which Writing Sites Allow Chitika?

Chitika is growing in popularity, and many article directories and croud-sourced revenue sharing sites are give writers the option to incorporate Chitika ads into their articles.
Revenue Sharing Sites:

• Infobarrel.com
• Seekyt.com

Blogging Platforms and CMSs (Content management systems):

• Blogger.com
• Wordpress.org (not Wordpress.com)
• Drupal.org
• Joomla.org
• Every other CMS that allows you to insert JavaScript

Basically, you can add Chitika units to any static or dynamic website that you own--that is, you have paid for the domain name and hosting. If you have a free domain and free hosting, your host may restrict your ability to place ads, so read the terms of your agreement carefully.

Chitika Ads are Seach-Targeted

Chitika advertising units are search-targeted; they only appear when someone finds your site through a search engine link. Unlike Google Adsense ads, they are not contextually based, so if someone visits your page through a backlink, the Chitika units will not display targeted ads based on the text of your website. You can specify what happens to the Chitika unit if someone finds your page through a non-search engine link.

• Show nothing. The Chitika space will collapse.
• Show Chitika backfill. Backfill is a set of unrelated ads that may have nothing to do with your page
• Show a different ad. You can configure the Chitika unit to show an Adsense unit with your Adsense code.

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog or articles through search engines, Chitika can help you increase your revenue dramatically. If you get traffic mainly through links, Chitika may not work for you.  Ultimately, you will have to test it for yourself.

Ways to Increase Your Chitika Revenue

The best way to increase your Chitika revenue is to make sure your pages show up high on search engine results pages (SERPs).  Using good SEO techniques will draw more traffic to your website via search engines.  Remember, Chitika ads don't display relevant ad links based on the text of your webpages, they only display ad links based on the terms people used to search for your site.  Using meta tags, updating your site frequently, and creating backlinks to your webpages will help your site rank higher in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Chitika Program Policies

Chitika's minimum payout is $10. The threshold is low so you can get payments more frequently than with Adsense.
Like Adsense, Chitika does not count fraudulent clicks, and if you click on your own ads, you will be removed from the program. Chitika ads are not allowed on pages with inappropriate content, such as porn or illegal drug use.

by  http://paxwill.hubpages.com

4 Tips to Improve your AdSense revenue

How many times have you seen an ad campaign running for “Google Adsense” that makes it sound so easy to make revenue by just copying and pasting their code onto your website? After all the research I have done on Google Adsense, I finally realized how it is not that easy just to copy and paste. There is much more beyond this that must be done in order to make Google Adsense revenue.
The following are techniques that must be implemented in order to really make money with Google Adsense:

1. Design a website that is Google Adsense friendly. In other words, make sure that your website has much content that is keyword rich and make sure your keyword density is decent. Make sure that you are using the most beneficial keywords for your niche. Try to choose keywords that cost more for pay per click. For example, if a keyword such as “dog training” cost $2.00 per click to run an ad campaign, you can be well assured that you will make around half of that per click. By choosing the top competitive keywords, you will increase your Adsense revenue considerably. Once indexed, Google will then be able to known what correct ads to place on your website.
2. Generate traffic to your website using a number of different techniques.
   • Writing articles By writing articles at least once a week and submitting them to article directories such as Ezine. The more article directories that you submit to, the more back links you are creating for your website. You can pay for article directory submission, which can cost as little as $80 every quarter.
   • Search Engine Directory Submissions By submitting your website URL to search engine friendly directories, you are creating back links back to your website. Make sure that you only submit to search engine directories with a Google page rank of four or higher.
   Just remember back links, back links, back links!
3. Google Adsense ads can be published and designed in a wide variety of formats. When displaying your ads, decide upon a size that would be best suitable for your website. There are different sizes to choose from. There are also different fonts and colors you can use to create your ads. Try to use a color that blends in well with your website. Also, although borders can be used, many web publisher's state on forums and blogs, that once they removed their borders, they had more clicks on their ads.
4. When displaying ads on your website, it is best to place them in a place where visitors can review them. One good place to display your ads is somewhere at the top of your website. A lot of web publishers use the top left corner for displaying Google Adsense. However, when you go to a website, what is one of the first things you look at? Could it be how the website is navigated by its menu? That is why another great place to display your ads could be near the navigation menu

by  http://www.wmtips.com

The Basics On How TO Start Making Money With Adsense

Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tool in a website publishers arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their sites easily. If used properly, it can generate a very large and healthy income for them. However if you are not using them rightly and just maximizing the income you squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Something all people hate doing.

How you can start earning money with Adsense can be done easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results you will be getting in such a short period of time.

Start by writing some quality content articles which are also keyword incorporated. There are a lot of people given the gift of being good with words. Writing comes easy for them. Why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process.

There are actually three steps to put into mind before you begin writing your ads and Keyword search. Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrase. Select the ones which you think has more people clicking through. This is actually a keyword selector and suggestion tool that some sites are offering to those who are just their Adsense business.

Writing articles. Start writing original content with keywords from the topics that you have achieved in your search. Take note that search engines are taking pride in the quality of their articles and what you will be writing should keep up with their demands.

Quality content site. Build a quality content site incorporated with Adsense ads that is targeting the subject and keywords of your articles and websites. This is where all that you’ve done initially will go to and this is also where they will prove their worth to you.

The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. Try to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites.

Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you will be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of site on a site by site, page by page, or any other basis you wanted. You should be aware oft his capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

Another thing you should know. Banners and skyscrapers are dead. Ask the experts. So better forget about banners and skyscrapers. Surfers universally ignore these kinds of ad formats. The reason behind this is that they are recognized as an advert and advert are rarely of any interest that’s why people ignore them.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you wanted to achieve and how you will go about achieving them. As with any other kind of business ventures, time is needed coupled with patience.

Do not just ignore your site and your Adsense once you have finished accomplishing them. Spare some time, even an hour, making adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites to quickly trigger your Adsense income.

Give it a try and you would not regret having gotten into Adsense in the first place.

John Ugoshowa.(http://www.selfseo.com)

Getting Started with eBay

eBay is a global marketplace and an opportunity for online sellers, including businesses as small as garage-based, family operations — or as large as major ecommerce merchants.
In the second quarter of 2012, eBay's marketplace helped to sell approximately $3.1 billion in clothing, shoes, and accessories; $2.9 billion in electronics, including game consoles, mobile phones, and cameras; and some $2.6 billion in home and garden items.
Add in the dozens of other categories of products sold every day on eBay, and the marketplace facilitated $16.2 billion in transactions in just three months during the second quarter, according to eBay's own data. Put another way, a pair of shoes were sold on eBay every six seconds, an MP3 player sold every 25 seconds, and video game system sold every 24 seconds to name just a few examples.
There is little doubt that eBay is an important sales channel and a good opportunity for some sellers when one considers the massive gross merchandise values mentioned above. The only real question for online entrepreneurs is what to offer on the site. What follows are five suggestions for finding products to sell on Ebay (global marketplace).

Purchase from Existing Suppliers

If a would-be eBay seller already has an online store or a physical store, it may be possible to sell the very items currently in inventory on the eBay marketplace. Be sure to check any dealer agreements before posting to eBay, or any marketplace, as there could be some restrictions or manufacturer approved pricing requirements. Even suppliers that won't normally allow products to be sold on eBay will make exceptions for closeout or clearance products.
Sellers that are just getting started may also purchase items directly from manufacturers or distributors. To locate suppliers, try going directly to the manufacturers' or distributors' websites and searching for dealer information.
There are also many tradeshows for each industry every year, if a seller has the means, going to these shows is an excellent way to locate suppliers.
Finally, there are many sites that specialize in connecting wholesale buyers and sellers. One of the best is Alibaba.

Buy Product at Auctions

Auctions are an excellent source of products to sell on eBay. Storage lockers, estate sales, going out of business auctions, and government surplus auctions are just a few examples of the kinds of sales that eBay merchants should consider.
There are a number of excellent online auction or auction announcement sites. Some of the best of these include the following.

• Liquidation.com
• GoIndustry DoveBid
• Government Liquidation
• U.S. Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services
• GovSales
• U.S. Postal Service Auctions
• U.S. Marshals Service Asset Forfeiture Program
• GSA Auctions
• Shop Goodwill
• Heritage Auctions

Shop on Craigslist

Craigslist is the Internet's ubiquitous online classified's site. It has pages for many cities and each page lists hundreds of items for sale daily.
For example, entrepreneurs could purchase $1,000 worth of collectable comics from a guy in St. Louis, and make $10,000 selling the individual comics on eBay. Pick up used, but functional laptops from sellers in the Houston and Dallas, and resell them for twice the price on eBay. Get salt-glazed pottery from a grandma in Greensburg, PA, and sell it for a small fortune one item at a time on eBay.

Empty Out Garages

In warm weather, going to garage sales can also be a good way to find products to sell on eBay. An eBay entrepreneur might buy items one at a time, offer to take everything that's left at the end of the day, or even suggest selling some more expensive items on consignment.
A seller may also want to post ads, offering to buy certain kinds of items.

Make Something

eBay sellers may also find some success manufacturing items specifically to sell on the marketplace. These manufactured products may be simple crafts or some decidedly more complex items that have been designed and built via contract manufacturers. Contract manufacturers make items to a designer's specifications.

Summing Up

eBay represents a great opportunity for selling products new or used, and between suppliers, auctions, manufacturing items, shopping on Craigslist, or going to garage sales there is nearly an endless supplier of products to sell.

Read More

• How To Set Up Shop on Niche Online Marketplaces
• Back Office Complexities of Selling on Multiple Channel 

by http://www.practicalecommerce.com