EBay has changed its policy so that Digital Delivery items can no longer be put up for auction. Instead, one must sell a physical product, without the option to deliver digitally. If one wants to sell a product digitally, they can use the EBay 'Classified Ads' ($9.99 for 30 days)...but there is no transaction through EBay. Instead, you just direct them to a sales website of your own. Personally, I think this is bad in quite a few ways and haven't gotten my head around their reasoning yet. (They give some bogus reasoning about artificially inflating feedback scores, but I can't believe they couldn't come up with a more elegant solution for that issue.) I know of one EBay store that generated over $15 million dollars in FEES to EBay....they're going to lose a ton of money with this decision. The only thing I can think of is that there's some pending legal action or copyright ruling for which their current structure has too much exposure. On the upside, for those entrepreneurial enough, there are some big opportunities here. Folks that have no transaction websites will be looking for hosting, scripts, etc. And someone really ambitious and technical enough could create a competitor website (or companion, depending on how you look at it), that allows Digital Delivery auctions. I'm really glad that I've learned a few other techniques for monetizing my product. I create the first gold-guide for World of Warcraft on eBay...and made a killing early on. It was a hoot telling people that I was making over $1000 per week selling a guide on how to make virtual currency in a game. There's lots of competition now, but I still make a couple hundred a month from EBay. But thanks to Digital Point, Warrior Forums, etc., I've now learned about the other revenue streams beside EBay. Now the hit won't completely take me down to zero income.
This sucks, I used to sell software on ebay very often. Considering piracy you can understand why ebay is making this move.
NOOOOOOO . I used to make 400$ with digital products! Then again I was one of those guys farming positive feedback with 0.01$ guides....
Probably cause ebay owns paypal, or vice versa and i can't imagine the amount of scams there are for digital goods which means tons of lost revenue for one of the two companies.
But I was only shopping on eBay for the delivery speed of digital products - which is instant, I wont want to wait weeks for a digital download (so to speak), it's the availability and instant download that was the selling point. Which is the reason for it going up, the blackhat methods of building a positive score/feedback. I think it's going the way of craigslist and soon we will see some new eBooks on how to make 1000s of $$$s using ebay classified ad's, I think it will be a good way to gain traffic to your website, although I am not quite sure on how it (classified ad's) works .... yet.
There has been a ton of changes with eBay and more to come through April. Time to find a new avenue to sell on. This is very minor in comparison to what is to come if you read their forums.
eBay has been making some aggressive moves lately to try and make themselves seem more "legit" to the average consumer. In doing so, they've alienated a sizable portion of their loyal users that have been with them for years. Since they're a public company, their main problem (as they see it) right now is lack of growth. If you're not growing at an ever increasing rate, the street stops liking you, and your stock tumbles. So, while I understand why they feel the need to shake things up, I think they're going about it the wrong way, and moves like this will only end up hurting them in the long run..
It sucks for a lot of those who sell these products, I understand. But for shoppers like me, it has been VERY annoying to see all of these types of products being sold. For example, I've searched for a World of Warcraft account on eBay and had to dig through PAGES of results of guides. Marketers have completely abused the system and are now getting ready to pay the consequence.
Ah... thanks for your comment, I never thought of it from that perspective. But wow if that's the case it must be stressful for eBay, especially given their size and market saturation already, having to show continual growth.
I know what you mean. I've experienced that too. Too bad they didn't have a search function to filter out digital ebooks, or to look for just digital eBooks. I never understood why they didn't just have a category for digital eBooks since there were so many. Then a way to just eliminate that that specific category when you search. It's good to hear this from a buyers perspective. So, in addition to the feedback manipulation that eBay gave as the reason in it's official statement, maybe this was their version of cleaning up and improving the 'user' (read buyer) experience. Similar to what Google tries to do when it implements a Google slap.
I've bought eBooks on eBay for the same reasons - I don't want to pay for shipping to NZ and have to WAIT.... Yes, they say in the official announcement that this policy change is to prevent feedback manipulation. But in view of that I wonder why they didn't just opt for having a reasonable minimum price for digital eBooks - eliminate the 1 cent and 99 cent auctions? Or even just not allow feedback for any digital product priced under whatever they think is a good threshold? I was thinking exactly the same, give it a few days and we are going to see a flood of products about how to make money with classified ads on eBay. It's an opportunity for anyone who has a good solution and can get a product out quickly. Then we will see a flood of products, well I'm starting to see some already, about how to turn your digital product into a physical product. It would have been nice to have had a bit more notice of this change, to give us time to swich our products over. I've closed my store in the meantime until I get everything converted. It's just going to take a bit of time to put everything together for the packaging etc. I've already bought one product with eBook and videos detailing how to do this. Technically I know how, but I'm looking for ideas on how to put it all together to look really professional and to still be able to make upsells etc. Once you have your product all set up, packaging and CD image, etc you can still automate the whole sales process, which is great. That would be a big concern for a lot of booksellers. But really after looking into it, it's the least of my worries. The extra cost will be $1.75 in most cases for me. And customers get something with higher perceived value. Buyers will have to pay shipping, but I'm hoping they will understand that's just what we have to do now.
I am sure this is a calculated business decision where their reputation is worth far more than the fees they are collecting through digital products. It seems ebay is finally getting serious about cleaning up their environment for consumers.
This is shocking. I agree there should be a better way to deal with this. Looks like all big companies are failing to come up with new innovative ideas to resolve the issues.
The main reason for them is that ppl are getting good feedback easily by just buying 30 1$ item from ebook seller. They get 30 Feed back. With 30$ they can start scamming ppl. This is not what they want, because 1$ don't leverage the feed back system.