Digital Items Banned on eBay
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008I opened up my emails today and had a very interesting one from John Thornhill with the topic ‘Digital Items Banned on eBay UK’. I thought this was some kind of ploy to get me to read the email so I read on expecting to find a post asking how reliant I am on eBay. Unfortunately, I clicked through and John is telling the truth. You can read his full post on the topic by clicking here. You can also read eBay’s annoncement and the reaction to this on the eBay forums.
John’s post explains the situation well but to summarise pretty much anyone selling products via digital delivery will be in violation of eBay’s policies. Worst of all these policies come in on 31st March 2008 so there is not a large amount of breathing space available. Unfortunately for eBay ebook sellers such as you and me the implications are quite significant.
As regular readers may know I sell a premium ebook at http://www.theebookcavern.co.uk/ which is entitled “How to set up a Successful, Automated Ebook Business on eBay”. These policies have pretty much made that ebook worthless unless it gets a MAJOR overhaul. On top of this these policies as they stand mean all the listings in my eBay store will need to go unless they too get a MAJOR overhaul. Finally, a lot of the articles I have wrote no longer contain valid information because of these new policies. I’m sure many of you are facing problems similar to these.
So what can we do? Well as you may have noticed my eBay ebook success articles have been focussing on building your business outside eBay for some time now. As I said in ‘New Years Resolutions 2008′:
“The Internet is constantly evolving which means your targets are likely to change during the year. If you don’t revise them accordingly you will get left behind? When I started my eBay store I never thought that I would be running a newsletter or blog and I had never heard of article marketing or social bookmarking. I never thought that I would be diversifying from my eBay related business either but that’s exactly what’s happened. To be a long term success on the Internet you will have to keep up to date with these changes and set your targets accordingly.”
If you were relying solely on eBay for your business you were setting yourself up for failure somewhere down the line whether you sell digital products or not. By relying on eBay alone you are putting your business in their hands, whatever you sell. For example, what if you operate a successful video games store on eBay and then eBay decide one day that you can no longer sell video games on their website because of increased piracy in the industry.
What I am saying is if you have been following my advice you should be prepared (to some degree) to carry on without eBay. I’ve written articles on starting your blog, creating your own ebooks and starting a mailing list so if you haven’t started these things already - GET STARTED NOW.
Now I am not thrilled in the slightest by these changes but at the end of the day it’s eBay’s site and eBay’s rules so we’re just going to have to deal with it. Some people have suggested putting your ebooks on a CD and mailing them out physically which is an option whilst others have decided to just abandon eBay completely. As I have mentioned in the past selling ebooks on eBay was getting increasingly difficult BEFORE this announcement and I advised you to move your focus away from eBay.
So what am I going to do regarding the eBay side of my business? Well in the long term I don’t know. My short term solution is to keep this blog and keep the newsletter running. I will continue to write articles on topics related to building your Internet business. However, I am going to have to close The Ebook Cavern eBay Store (at least for the immediate future) and take down a lot of my websites. I’m also going to have to stop the monthly newsletter (again at least for the immediate future) because there isn’t really going to be much news without a store or premium product.
I will make further comments on this topic as I get new information. So how are you going to deal with this eBay bombshell? Are you prepared to make the necessary changes? Did you have a contingency plan outside of eBay? Let me know what you think.
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