At the end of March 2008 eBay made their announcement about banning products sold via digital download. There were an awful lot of sellers of these kind of products – not just eBooks, but also software, web site templates, graphics, the list went on and on.
I had actually intended to release my first self-created information product on this very subject – “How To Make Money Selling Digital Download Products On eBay”. Everything was ready to go – I’d spent a huge amount of time researching the subject and spent quite a lot of money as well. Then came the announcement from eBay; I had created a product for which there was no longer any demand!
So you can imagine how deflated I felt at that point. I did the same as a lot of other people – went onto eBay and Internet Marketing forums, checked out the blogs of some of the bigger eBay sellers, just to try and get some information, to see if anybody had any idea what to do next. Quite frankly there was carnage on the blogs and forums. Ebay Power Sellers were complaining that eBay had taken away their livelihood without any prior warning – there were people on there making 5 figures a month from selling eBooks who were now closing down their businesses.
Many people made the comment “I’m going to have to go back to getting a real job”!
I personally couldn’t believe it, so many people were just willing to quit, no-one seemed to have any ideas as to how to overcome this. Then someone mentioned the idea of actually burning each eBook onto a CD-ROM so that a physical product could be sent out to the buyers. This would be in compliance with eBay policy.
Interestingly enough that suggestion was generally met with a lot of scepticism. I suspect many eBook sellers had got used to the easy life with their orders being automatically fulfilled, instead of actually having to do some work. A lot of these people had probably never burned a CD-ROM in their lives, and judging by the comments most of them had never sold a physical product before on eBay. The idea of creating a physical product, packaging it and posting it to a customer was a novel one to sellers who had got used to the “automated delivery” lifestyle.
About 95% of them left overnight, never to be seen again. By the way, this isn’t just a figure plucked out of the air, along the lines of “88.6% of statistics are made up on the spot”
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March 2008 – 27.475 ebooks listed on eBay UK alone
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October 2008 – 542 only and over half of those were mine….
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Instead of eBay having killed off eBooks, they actually offered up a fantastic new opportunity which most of the previous sellers simply overlooked.
A week later, having got over the fact that I had wasted several weeks researching and writing a product that no-one was ever going to buy I decided to start all over again and conduct my own research – How To Sell Ebooks On Ebay Without Digital Downloads.
And so, at the beginning of April 2008, the idea of BestMultimediaGuides was born……