AuctionAddictsAnonymous.com

These are questions addressed by Chris Dawson on Tamebay.com. Interestingly, when you look at the current financial crisis in terms of likely effect on eBay sellers, it would appear that this situation could be a very good thing. After all, people use eBay to search for a bargain and what better time to seek a bargain than when you are feeling the pinch. If someone is interested in buying an item, they are much more likely to seek a second-hand item or search for the best price online. This is where you, as an eBay seller, can step in and fill that need.

Of course, you too will probably want to cut your costs at this time and Chris offers some very sound advice to eBayers on this very subject. To read Chris’s article in full go to Tamebay.com

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Well, I’m back after quite a long absence and of course I’m not surprised to discover that glitches are still the order of the day at both eBay and PayPal! Some things just never change. A group of eBay users were informed last Wednesday that their automatic payment had been declined and were requested to make a one-off payment and to update their automatic payment method. Unsurprisingly this was another error on the part of eBay, but at least it wasn’t related to the recent hacking of eBay accounts or the recent problem with PayPal. You can read more about these glitches and their outcomes at Auctionbytes.com .

None of these incidents make sellers feel in any way confident about their dealings with either eBay or PayPal. In fact, if you’re one of the many sellers who have had their PayPal accounts frozen at any time then you will be dismayed by eBay’s plan to force users to complete payments exclusively via PayPal. They have rolled this system out in Australia despite being ordered by the Australian Competition Regulator not to implement this plan. It looks like they are in for a long court battle on this one. Let’s just hope that justice and good sense prevail and eBay’s plans are scuppered for good!

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Our forum for eBay sellers was invaded by pornographic images last week! After working tirelessly to deal with this invasion we can now announce that the forum is once again up and running.

We wish to apologise to anyone who visited the forum during this time and discovered these offensive images. The images were placed there by people who had registered to be part of our Interest Groups, but this wasn’t the kind of interest we had in mind! Perhaps the best way to protect against this kind of invasion is to make more use of the forums. That way we can all monitor the content and you can let us know straight away if anything offensive appears again.

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Looking back to when we discussed branding and promotion of your eBay Store, it was mentioned that a custom store logo was an essential part of the branding process. Following on from this, we have launched our new range of custom eBay Store logos, which are available to you at just $9.99! This offers a fantastic value to you as a store seller, and can make your store memorable to all who visit.

There are currently 40 logos available, with more to be added over the coming weeks. Just place your order, state the name of your eBay Store and we will take care of the rest! These logos are exclusive to AuctionAddictsAnonymous and are available nowhere else!

If you don’t see a logo which suits you, just contact us with your design ideas and we will create one to your own specifications for just $39.99! Copyright for these custom-made logos will be yours to keep and will never be sold to anyone else!

Don’t let your store get lost in the crowd! Enhance it today with a customized eBay Store Logo.

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No, I think not. If you are a small store owner like me, you’ll know that there’s always some of your inventory that just won’t move! You relist it constantly each month to no avail. In the end you have to give up because the listing fees are costing more than you can ever hope to get for your item. Every month, thousands of new sellers decide to try eBay selling, full of dreams of giving up their job and living solely from their eBay sales. Sadly, this is very, VERY unlikely to happen for them. Unless you are selling something which is in high demand, and for which you are one of a very few suppliers, you will need more than just eBay to achieve this. However, eBay is a great way to start out with your business plans, especially for those with little or no experience of internet marketing.

An eBay store can help you to build your business whether you plan to sell solely on the internet, or run a “real-world” operation. You can brand your eBay store, use the same branding on your own website and, by combining the two selling methods, you can increase your profits. eBay is a vast marketplace with millions of transactions every week. It makes great sense therefore to harness the power of eBay to increase your online customer base.

Although you may sell an item to someone on eBay, this customer is regarded by eBay as being one of their customers, and not yours. You can change this with the use of eBay’s Store enhancement features, such as providing your buyers with a newsletter, thereby allowing you to stay in touch with them, giving them exclusive special offers and persuading them to visit your website to buy from you directly. You can also, of course, promote your own website to them, so long as you don’t place a direct link to it from any of your listings. This is a breach of eBay policy. If you can persuade your buyers to return to you time and again, then you’re on a winner.

Branding your eBay Store is an easy undertaking. A logo is a great way to start. For a very small investment you can purchase a logo, customized with your store’s name, and then either use a matching template, or choose colors from the logo to integrate your listings with your store and enhance the overall appeal of your listings.

These methods, while so simple, are a very effective way of expanding your reach beyond eBay and growing your business to it’s full potential.

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If you have a blog then you are probably always on the hunt for new readers. Now comes the best opportunity for your to get readers who are interested in your topic. New Blogrush works by showing your RSS feeds on blogs related to yours. Just add the Blogrush code to your blog to display the feeds on your blog. For full details visit Blogrush.

Signup for Blogrush!

You can see the Blogrush links on the sidebar of this page.  Really simple to install and use. Don’t waste any more time.  Go get it now!

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I haven’t posted anything for a few days now because I have been working on a couple of things for the site.

I have been making another video tutorial for you about how to promote your site outside of eBay. This should be on by tomorrow (I hope). I have also been spending many long hours on photoshop. This doesn’t come easily to me as photoshop is something I don’t know much about. A budget here would be really useful!

I am also trying to fix up the forum so that we can breathe some life into the interest groups. I will integrate a new forum with the blog so that you should only need to login once to enjoy both the blog and the forum. It would be great to have more people interested in these interest groups! I have had a number of people actually sign up for the interest groups, but not the blog. Very confusing!

Hopefully by next week I will have finished with the design of the new graphics and I will make an announcement about them here and on the auctionaddictsanonymous blog on eBay. I hope you will love them! Stay tuned.

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There has been a significant development in relation to the Botnet attack on eBay which we reported to you on 6 September. It appears that the bot, which uses phishing as part of this attack, has been focusing mainly on eBay UK accounts with the Trojan distinguishing between accounts inside and outside the United States.

The bot, which is one of the first to employ extremely complex multi-stage attack methods, performs a distrubuted and covert attack on eBay accounts in an attempt to obtain personal information and/or items sold or purchases through the eBay site.

Please be very careful when visiting sites and never enter your eBay username or password into any form which was accessed via an email or any site other than eBay. If you want to check the status of your account or login to eBay, always type the url into your browser so you can be sure you are on the legitimate eBay site. eBay will never ask you to login from the link in an email!

It is recommended that you keep a close eye on your eBay account, perhaps change your password periodically to help improve the security of your account details and immediately report ANY suspicious activity on your account to eBay’s Trust and Safety department.

You can read this story in full at CNN.com

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It’s been reported that eBay is under attack by a botnet! (See article here) Unsurprisingly, the company who discovered this attack has been unable to contact eBay directly to warn them. Sound familiar?

eBay must surely be one of the worst organisations to work with when you try to make contact with them. It’s as if they have no staff at all! If your eBay account is compromised by this attack, you would hope that eBay would be able to help you out. Not much chance of that if they don’t even respond to an attack on their user database. It looks like it’s up to us to keep a close check on our eBay accounts and immediately report anything suspicious to eBay. Stay safe! Check your accounts now!

Our message to eBay? Wise up and protect your users! We are, after all, your customers!

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An outage at PayPal has caused mayhem for users of their subscription service. The outage was reported on 30 August and is still ongoing. PayPal has stated that the problem will be fixed by 5/6 September, which seems like a ridiculously long time, considering the number of staff and, presumably, programmers they employ. (You can read the full article at: Techcrunch.com)

If you have made a subscription payment to a site or service, the owners or administrators of that site, may not know about it. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself denied access to the services you’ve paid for. As far as their sites’ systems are concerned, you haven’t paid! If you’re frustrated by this, then the appropriate placed to vent your anger is at PayPal.

Even though it was the Labor Day weekend, it would have been easy for someone on PayPal’s “skeleton staff” to place an announcement about this problem, somewhere prominent on the PayPal homepage. It’s common courtesy! (Not PayPal’s strong point. Not surprising really when you consider it’s owned by eBay!)

Update: Just moments after publishing, it was announced that the problem has been resolved and PayPal are now working to clear the backlog. (Heave a sigh of relief!)

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