Back from the slopes to eBay digital chaos !
Just got back from a weeks skiing in Morzine, France and have spent the last couple of days digesting the news from eBay regarding the ban on listing digitally downloadable products which started yesterday. By the way, that’s not a photo of me above…if I looked like that it would be because I’d completely lost control and was heading for a crash landing…I suspect the guy above meant to strike that pose !
Anyway here’s the link to the eBay announcement. Typically I was planning to list some ebooks on eBay in the next couple of weeks. Seems like I’m always one step behind things !
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200803.shtml#2008-03-24125416
As you can imagine the internet and eBay related forums have been abuzz with tales of doom and gloom from eBay sellers who see this as the end of their world. I do find it surprising that eBay only gave one weeks notice of such a huge change which will have caused many sellers to have to completely reorganise their businesses
The options remaining can be classified into two areas :
1) turn your digital product into physical product, either by putting all your ebooks etc onto disk yourself or utilising an order fulfilment company
2) list your digital product on the eBay Classified Ad format, which is still acceptable
As you can further imagine, the guys at the forefront of digital product selling have immediately taken action on this and have released positive comments and free reports on their blogs and websites. Check out recent postings from Socrates Socratous (creator of My Digital Dispatch), Dan Thompson (elpasso blog) and John Thornhill (planetms blog)
The eBay changes should mean that many sellers will be put off listing info products due to the amount of work now involved in transferring everything onto disk. This in turn means less competition for sellers who are prepared to get creative with attractive CD’s including bonus features, upsells, lead capture forms etc
OK that’s it for now, I’m off to find out the cheapest price I can get a pack of 100 CD’s for !