Let me share with you a very little known fact: it’s possible to generate a very good income from eBay Australia (as well as other eBay sites) without having to have any stock on hand and its not even from drop-shipping. In fact you never have to even have any relationships at all with any suppliers and you can sell some of the most profitable items on eBay. You may be surprised to find out that eBay itself runs its own Affiliate Marketing program. It’s one of the most productive ways for eBay to drive lots of targeted traffic to its sites and capture buyers who are already interested in purchasing a particular product to buy through eBay. Essentially eBay’s Affiliate Marketing program pays affiliates when visitors to their sites click on a link to eBay and become an active registered user – this means that they have to buy something in a set amount of time. Better still, if a visitor goes to an active auction on eBay through an Affiliates’ link and then purchase the item, eBay will give you between 40-65% of the revenue earned from that auction. The revenue here is the final value fee that eBay makes, not the final bid price as this would obviously be making a loss for eBay. If you already know about eBay’s Affiliate Marketing program, still read on, as I am about to show you a way that can make you a great extra income from this program that is different to what a lot of eBay’s affiliates are doing and that has proven success to generate a healthy passive or full time income even for Australians. This is a great method of really cashing in on eBay’s Affiliate Program. Instead of having the odd link from your site or blog to some products on eBay, why not create an online store that predominantly sells items from eBay. This way you never have to own any stock at all to sell, nor do you even have to drop-ship items which has it’s own inherent problems. To do this really right, you need to do some research on eBay and find items that are “nichey” and that also sell for a good amount. Its no use promoting low cost items as you’d have to sell volumes in order to realize any revenue. You also want to find products that are popular but typically harder to find in online shops. It’s not as effective promoting iPods for instance, as the chance of someone finding your site is very low as the competition out there is huge. To ensure that you do really well, you’ll need to do a bit of research on finding niche keywords that people are searching for. I won’t go into this here as that is a huge separate topic on its own, but if you know how to do this already, this method can be very profitable for you. Pro’s: * This method has all the pro’s of making money on eBay plus the added pro of never having to own/purchase any stock to sell and not even having to drop-ship which has it’s own inherent problems; * Because you are not limited by having to purchase any stock, you are not limited as to the amount you can sell. You can also sell high price items which will generate the best money for you; * You can sell whatever you like whenever you like; * You don’t have to worry about putting together auction listings yourself – no need to research items, put together lengthy auction listings, you don’t even have to have an eBay account! * You’re not the one that has to worry about delivery nor returns, nor warranties on the item, nor anything like that! Con’s: * The success of this method depends on how many people find your site – that is, you need to generate traffic to your site so that people can click through your eBay affiliate links. To be very successful you need to have a good knowledge of things like Search Engine Optimization and Traffic Generation. Of course you can generate traffic through Pay Per Click ads and other means, but you need to know what you are doing in order to make sure you are making more than you pay for these; * You need to know how to build a website and then make it attractive enough for visitors to stay and click on links * You need to find profitable niches that aren’t saturated by competition * Because you are getting a percentage of the revenue eBay earns, you are obviously not getting the same amount of profit if you actually listed your own item. For Australians: I see no impact (good or bad) at all for Australians who want to use this method to generate income. You can promote either Australian eBay auctions or from the US or from anywhere you like. It’s actually recommended that you have a mixture of listings from different countries and this could in fact enhance the visitor’s experience with your site. Naturally you have to make sure that the sellers will post things internationally if you are promoting multiple countries.