Using auctions to promote your business --

Listings as advertising/marketing messages

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)

The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.

A major online auction site -- like eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo -- is a marketplace with millions or even tens of millions of visitors. Hence, regardless of whether you sell anything, you can get value by making your goods and services visible to this audience. Basically, for less than a dollar, you can insert your message in a catalog seen by millions.

If you are simply reselling brand-name merchandise that fits into very crowded categories, the advertising value of an auction listing is likely to be minimal. But if what you have to sell is unique and appeals to very few people, then buyers are likely to search rather than browse when looking for such items and there's a good chance that they might find your listing. In such cases, auction listings can put you in touch with potentially valuable customers that otherwise you would never have been able to identify or reach.

In some cases, you may not actually want to sell the item that you list; but, rather, you want potential buyers to know that you can provide items of this kind.

You might have a large number of collectibles that fall into a category that is very crowded with similar items. In that case, you might want to post a listing of the absolute gem of your collection -- with a very high reserve and with no expectation or desire to sell that item. Rather, you hope that people will read that description and through it learn that you have many other related but lesser items for sale at that same auction site. The gem serves as an attention-getting ad for the rest.

Or you may be in the business of crafting custom-made products to order. In that case, you might want to list one such item, with a description worded well to capture potential customers. You explain what you do and how, and encourage people to contact you directly if they'd be interested in having you design/make something specifically for them. For instance, my parents sell armorial or crest jewelry -- gold rings, pendants, etc. with a family coat of arms engraved on them. They could list and show pictures of one such item at eBay, say with the Seltzer family crest on it, without any expectation that people would bid on it; but rather hoping that people seeing that listing might contact them and place orders for jewelry with their own crest.

There's an interesting related opportunity at Amazon, through their cross-links program. When you list an item for sale at auction, you can include links to up to nine other products that are for sale at Amazon. Currently, there's no extra cost for that service. In other words, if you are selling a book, you could have a mention of your auction appear as a "related" item when people looked at the description pages of nine similar books for sale in the regular book store section at Amazon. For instance, someone is looking for a particular book, goes to that Amazon page, and sees along with that description that you are holding an auction for that very same book or other books by the same author. And you aren't just limited to books. Every product for sale at Amazon -- music, videos, toys, videogames, etc. -- has a unique identifying number; and you can associate your auction with those.

Also, at Amazon, for relatively low cost, you can set up your own online store, in their zSHOPS area and have links back and forth from your store to your auctions, and with cross-links from both to related items for sale at the main Amazon store -- once again using auctions as a form of promotion.

This article and hundreds of related items by Richard is available, in plain text, on CD ROM My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002) for $29. That same CD also includes the full text of his books The Social Web, Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and The Way of the Web. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat, where you can buy an entire library for the price of a book.

Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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