STAR PUNCH! Who's down to drop the FeeBay Clowns?

[theweaverboy]

I've sent an emails to my past customers telling them about eBid. Thought I give it a shot. What I sent is on my Myspace page just search theweaverboy.

What does the eBid community think.

Postive, Negative, or Neutral.

[theweaverboy]

Please I beg that you take few minutes to read what I have written. You might agree, or you might just like a good exposé on corporate corruption. And after all as Francis Bacon said, "For also knowledge itself is power" or commonly said “knowledge is power”. Oh how I love Wikipedia.
Feel free to verify these things below for yourself. I’ll not tell you to consider me infallible that would be the jobs of the corporate big wigs of eBay Inc.
I’m sending this message to all the Cyberspace Citizens that I’ve dealt with on the VENUE known as eBay. Like a brick and mortar business I am leasing the space there. The rent is way too high at this location, but the beauty of cyberspace is that you only need to type a few keys click the mouse and you can be elsewhere in a second.
If you are looking for better prices both in buying & selling try www.ebid.net or Google/search: eBid. If after reading this you want to join the site let them know that theweaverboy AT yahoo DOT com or simply theweaverboy sent you.

And you don’t have to start off from zero on feedback. Check my “All About Me” page on eBid to learn how to use repatoo to transfer you feedback from eBay to eBid. Hey it is the reputation that you have earned.

EBid has a thing called “Buddy Points” they give to members for referring others to the site. It is a gimmick kind of like “green stamps” they had back in the day. Mostly Buddy Points can be used to get coffee mugs, baseball caps, pens, and etc with the website’s logo on it. They do hold other auctions though once in awhile for other things like digital cameras, Wii games, and other stuff. These auctions can only be bidded on with buddy points.

eBid
Buyer or Seller register an account with a credit/debit card. They charge nothing of course if you just are a Buyer as for a basic Sellers account the cost is nothing up front and the Final value fees for making a sale is 3%.

Lifetime Seller+ $74.99 for 5 stores, but eBid is running a special for the month of February for United States members for $49.49.

“eBid’s” fees for Lifetime Seller+
- Zero for a “Free Auction” no insertion fees & no Final Value Fees.
- 2% for “Gallery Auction” no insertion fees & you get 5 pictures.
- $1.00 insertion fee for a “Featured Auction” but no Final Value Fees! Featured listings get a little more exposure in general searches.

eBay
1 store $15.95 a month. That is $191.40 a year just to have 1 store.

“eBay’s” fees
LOL!
Just for a “store” that costs $15.95 a month?
Insertion fees vary depending on price. Usually for “stores” between 3 cents to 10 cents just to post a store listing for 30 days and then there of course is eBay’s Final Value Fees if the item sells.
Final Value fees for BuyItNow.
$1.00 - $25.00 the Final Value Fee is 12% of the closing price on item.
$25.01 - $100.00 the Final Value Fee is 12.00% of the initial $25.00 ($3.00), plus 8.00% of the remaining closing value balance.
$100.01 - $1,000.00 Final Value Fee is 12.00% of the initial $25.00 ($3.00), plus 8.00% of the initial $25.01 – $100.00 ($6.00), plus 4.00% of the remaining closing value balance $100.01 – $1,000.00.
Over $1,000.01 Final Value Fee is 12.00% of the initial $25.00 ($3.00), plus 8.00% of the initial $25.01 – $100.00 ($6.00), plus 4.00% of the initial $100.01 – $1,000.00 ($36.00), plus 2.00% of the remaining closing value balance ($1,000.01-closing value).
Is it just me or does eBay’s fee’s scales seem overly complicated and scam like?
Oh any guesses why “eBay” wants people to have “free shipping” and only pay with “PayPal”?
Well for the “free shipping” they are not allowed by United States law to take a percentage of a seller’s shipping charges only on the price the item sells for.
$5 item price is and $5 S&H.
They can only take 12% of the “item’s price” or 60 cents, but they want to get 12% on the full $10 or $1.20.
Thus them telling sellers to give “free shipping” is just another way for them to get a bigger cut.
As for only with paying with PayPal it is because PAYPAL was a 2002 acquisition of eBay Inc.

For the freedom of Cyberspace Citizens,
Steve(AKA:theweaverboy)

PS: I will have this posted in my Myspace page in the blog section as well. www.myspace.com/theweaverboy

You might be wondering how I built an email list to send out this message to all of you. In the good faith that you will give it to others as freely as you received it and for the freedom of Cyberspace I’ll tell you. This is all I ask of you. If you would like edit this email so you can take full credit for directing them to eBid by all means. They are the people you have had dealings with and you should get the Buddy Points for referring them to the site.

Getting other people to eBid is my goal. If you have your own website or if you are going to create you own website you might find this useful.

If you abuse this knowledge for evil purposes let karma comeback on you with a vengeance.

Build an email list step by step.

An easy thing to do is when you get an email from PayPal with a customer’s email address is to mark them as a contact in you email account.

First go to PayPal and download you history.

When you are in My Account there is a sub-section with 6 different headings.

Put your mouse on the one that says History another section with 5 choices should pop out.

Choose the one that says Download history.

There will then be a section that says Custom Date Range. If you want to download it within a day or two PayPal can go as far as 18 months back pretty easily. You might want to download that history first, because for example if you have been a member since Jul-17-04 it might take a week or two. I think, don’t quote me, but they have to have financial information that far back incase there is an IRS audit.

Next “Files types for Dowload”. There are about 9 different formats you can download. My choice was “Comma Delimited – All Activity”.

It will be available for download within a day or two depending on the size of course. Mine was in the form of a Microsoft Excel file.

NOW here is how to compact all the emails. Row/columns K and L are emails. Do it one row at a time. From row A to J delete. And then from row B to whenever it ends delete.

Then go to the File on the top left side. Click it and a list of choice will be come out. Click Web Page Preview. A web page will pop up and you can highlight all the emails and copy them to a Microsoft Word file.

When that is done you can SORT the emails alphabetically In Microsoft Word. To do this go to the Table option. Click it. There will be an option for Sort… listed. Click that and it will sort them. If you had repeat dealings with the same person you only need to email them once, so cut the repeats down to just one.

Then open a widow to your email account. Go to your Contacts and add them.

On Yahoo you can simply write as a first name “Fellow Cyberspace Citizens (A to B1)” or whatever you would like. On Yahoo you can put up to 43 emails to one contact name.

Next access the Bcc (blind carbon copy) function on your email. Bcc refers to the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that conceals individual email addresses from the complete list of recipients. Yahoo hides the Bcc at the end of the “To:” it should say “Show BCC” at the end. You can then select 20 people in your contact list, attach the message, and then just hit send.

To double check that there are not duplicate email addresses on Yahoo go to your “Contacts”, click it. An option that says “Fix duplicate entries” should be shown. Click it. It will show “Clean Up Duplicates BETA”. It will show exact and similar matches. Merge or delete the multiples because it is annoying then getting the same message 2 or 3 times.

This is the quickest and easiest way that I have found of adding them in to your Contact list.

[kengillam]

How come you haven't emailed your old customers before. I see that your listings are Run Until Sold, it would be better to change them to 10 day listings with 10 auto relists, as otherwise they are always going to languish be at the bottom of any lists. Then they would get to the top every few days and you only need to relsit them every three months. You could use the new Ninja Lister to edit them.

[TonyBridger]

If I had received a email like that I would have deleted it after reading the first line and seeing its length.

And No I did not read all of your extra long post.

[CarnoustieCats]

Voted neutral - your post is too long-winded - in this instance neutral means I really don't care

[Teddyrose54]

Too long to read~

You may or may not have excellant points.

But if you can't get people interested, then you defeat the object of the exercise.

[poppa501]

Didn't vote. Your heart is in the right place, but I agree that for an e-mail, it is too long. Maybe a few brief points and then point them to your myspace entry. That way if they are interested, they can zip over and read the whole tamale. Just a thought.

[photopheline34]

It's an interesting email and here is someone trying to help by giving info to people like us. You don't have to read it, you don't have to want to learn something new or different, but I did read it, and even if I never use the info, I thank theweaverboy for taking the time to type it all up for us just in case we might like to use it.....

[TexasAda]

Weaverboy, thank you for the instructions about getting email addresses from PPal. I'm a small scale seller but that looks like something to try.

Long ago, after first joining eBid, I did email my past eBoy buyers. A rough estimate: possibly 10 out of the 500 emails i sent resulted in people joining. So I think it was worth it. That's 2% which sounds low but I think that's significant in the world of advertising?

[Idealproductsales]

Too long-winded.. My suggestion: take the majority of that and put it in your blog, then send a shorter, sweeter email with just a synopsis of the issue and explaining that all your product has moved to ebid (Your store link here) and that your prices are lower (if indeed they are) due to the lower costs of doing business and invite them to drop by and buy from you again

However, if you sell a wide variety of product , I would advise trying to first sort out your list of people into groups (I.E. if you sold race car parts, women's clothing and antiques on other places , you'd wanna try and break your contact list down into smaller groups and target them with specific links , which would get better results )

In any case.. the email letter is simply too long.. I'd probably delete it in the first few lines read, not only because it is just too long, but also because it's rather rambling and reading it is almost like watching someone with ADD hopped up on crystal meth, to be honest (much like many of my own long winded, rambling writings I write here sometimes!)