Date: November 29, 1999 07:37 PM

Author: Brian Waring (admin@interspin.com)

Subject: Get traffic from E-bay

Following is a tip that Bob from Lagarde inc. the makers of Storefront 2000 had originally posted to his support newsgroup, I thought it was a good tip if you can use it.

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A while back we found what appeared to be a pirated copy of StoreFront on E-Bay's auction web site. E-Bay was pretty good about getting it pulled but the irony was the traffic that was targeted from the listing. The pirate had also placed a copy of our opening web page, complete with links, on his listing and suddenly E-Bay was a top 5 referrer for us.

I stewed on how to pick this traffic back up for some time until I finally carefully read the E-bay policies and realized that I could keep a single copy of StoreFront listed at E-Bay with a reserve price equal to retail for less than $5.00 every ten days.

We now keep this listing continuously. We occasionally sell the product from the listing but more often than not we don't -- we just rake in the traffic. E-Bay continues to be a top referrer pretty close to Microsoft.

I strongly recommend taking the time to keep an item or two listed at E-Bay with the listing showing a compelling page for your web site, complete with links to the site itself.

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Lagarde, Inc. may not be the only one profiting from e-Bay. I had the pleasure of being on a panel of E-commerce experts at a local college a few months back. One of the panelists was an older woman who started a profitable business selling clothing patterns on E-bay. She barely knew how to create a Web site but she said she was making a steady income from reselling her patterns solely on E-bay. She became very excited after I told her that she could expand her business even further by marketing her products on the search engines as well.

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