So several months have passed and although there hasn’t been much activity around my blog, there has been a lot of activity off-site. Most of it has been related to bingbangbong and keeping a wee ship afloat in heavy seas but I’ve also been expanding my web work. I’m a long way off generating a retirement income, I’ll tell you that!
Late in January I was approved on the eBay Partner Network. This permits me to access ebay and display their items on my sites. The benefit for them is that they get increased traffic from having many more outlets and the benefit for me is that I earn a few pennies when a visitor goes on to purchase something.
As a member of the Partner Network there are many ways of using the ebay content, but for me I look on it as trying to provide a relevant service to those who come to my sites.
I know myself from experience of trying to find something on ebay and having to trawl through hundreds of irrelevant listings to find what I am after. I mean how many bodhran-playing porcelain figurines does the world need!
I help my site visitors by providing the ebay data BUT only after running it through a series of filters that remove the dross. This means that if you go to a site like fiddle.tradauction.com you will see only real fiddles. No paintings, brass ornaments or figurines. If you look at fiddle strings, you’ll see only strings, not skimpy underwear; Rosin brings violin rosin, not dancer’s rosin etc etc
For some sites we don’t just filter! in Tradauction, If you want to look at items for sale in a different part of the world, you don’t have engage in a .com / .co.uk / .ie / de shuffle. Simply select which country’s auctions you’d like to view- 1 click!
Want to see finishing soonest / recently listed / cheapest / most expensive? no problems, we can choose to do that
A lot of the filters are automatic using the software and then I manually build the detailed filter to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is very high but nothing is 100% perfect! The sites do take time to build and the filters take time to set up. It takes effort to bring traffic and maintain the sites, particularly when there’s a major software update. It is easy to build sites quickly but it’s time consuming when you need like 100+ of them to make it worthwhile.
So how is it made worthwhile? Under a system called ebay Quality Click Pricing (QCP) the affiliate (me) is paid on the basis of the number of clicks I send to ebay… but …each click’s value is calculated on the value of the merchandise sold historically and is adjusted daily. Basically if my site drives through lots of clicks but nobody buys anything then those clicks are of less value to ebay. It is vice versa if everybody buys of course and therefore the key is to work toward having mainly purchasers click on the links.
The nature of the relationship is between ebay, me and the customer. The way to make it work best is based on the pretty simple convention of being the right site in the right place at the right time. Here’s a hopefully helpful explanation.
When people are considering purchasing an item online we usually fall somewhere along the following research path
- Broad subject research (Benefits)
- Segment Area research (Features)
- Product Type research (Product Makers)
- Product Model research (Model Options)
- Product detail search to Purchase (Specific product model number & colour etc)
I build various sites for most of these levels.
Sites like Bodojo.com or drumdojo.com for example are useful for someone looking for information on bodhrans or snaredrums and to find out what makes one different from another. However ebay would not work well there because the majority of the users are researching the subject and not considering purchase. Any clicks to ebay would be less likely from buyers and therefore have a lower overall click quality.
Commercial sites can however usefully come in at the third level dealing with a product group for example www.tradauction.com which displays the instruments commonly in use in Irish Traditional Music. In the guitar sectionot jn, you canbuy not just guitars but 6 string, 12 string, strings, cases, tuners, and no wee figurines in sight. Same for concertinas, banjos, uilleann pipes and the rest
Clearly the last two sections of the list above are where I need to be placing my sites to catch those with the greatest likelihood to purchase. People here are looking for more specific searches, often times ‘x product model xyz blue’ or ‘wingwang ltd, model WingWong-abz/001 pink’
Once we know that more specific searches generally happen closer to purchase, there are a range of techniques that we can use to attract those visitors to our lovely filtered site and to ensure that we have the specific product that they are search for – I have to say that without the scale of ebay and the huge product breadth and global presence this would not be possible.
When I am building a site that is specifically for the very last stage in the process, where a person is looking for the actual product to purchase, then the best thing I can do is to connect them and not put anything in the way or distract them with additional offerings. The final-stage sites at the bottom of the list above are extremely basic and not at all pretty. They display listings and not much else. No global site distractions, no ‘sort by’, just the listings. These usually provide the best quality clicks because the buyers are more targeted and there is nothing to do apart from click to ebay.
Since February I reckon I’ve built around 30 sites. Half in February and half on the last week of April, in the time between I have been building the tradauction structure so that eventually it can be more than trad listings. That project alone had required 9 sites. Some sites take 15 minutes from start to finish, others suck at your life for weeks.
Here are some other examples of sites that I have built.
IrelandRugbyShirt.com – Yep Irish rugby shirts – very specific search and lots of sales during the 6 Nations
weseg.com A simple Segway listings site – this is the most basic tytpe of site that I build, these are fast to make but not pretty.
Snaredrumsticks.com umm…Drumsticks 
another super-basic site
Vintage Zildjians.com – This is a thicker site with useful unique articles based on my research
So there you go, thats my update. I’m really just scratching the surface because there’s a whole load of keyword and niche data research to get you to the point that you build a site but that’s the fun part – where’s the next niche.
30 sites down 70+ to go then we’ll see where we’re at!
Watch this space
