The EBay Digital Products Ban to Start March 31

It has been a week since I commented on the eBay decision to ban Digital Products. On Monday, March 31, it will start the ban.

It was coming out of the blue, everybody was caught by surprise.

Some people spend a precious amount of time just bashing eBay. Others, me included, have tried to stay in the positive side of the story and have worked every minute to come with solutions.

This is my opinion, in the 21st Century when print newspapers, magazines suffering massive decline in reading, doesn't make any sense to stop producing and selling Digital Products which can be downloaded or transferred electronically.

We can continue to sell and market Digital Products in our Web Sites but we all love eBay. The reason is clear eBay has a huge custom base, this means traffic, sales, recognition, and promotion of other business outside of eBay using eBay custom base.

Let's see what solutions we have now:

1. We can use eBay classified ads just to advertise digital products.

- The ads will appear on eBay listings, eBay Stores but no selling through eBay will occur. It is a confusion about this, no PayPal button will appear on classified ads, if you see one it is illegal.

- You can put a URL to get customers outside of eBay, where a sell can occur, but being outside you don't get a feedback for the sell.

- The sell will not count toward PowerSeller status

- You will pay a $9.95 per Classified Ad for 30 days. This is not so bad because it is just $0.33 per day, and you don't have a fee at the end of the month because the sell is outside of eBay.

- Classified ads are promoted by eBay as a method of lead generation and this is exactly why sellers who sell e-Books starting with $0.01 did up till now, they upsell after the sell on eBay and they made a lot of monet but they compromise the eBay process. I do not blame eBay, they do not like to have items of $0.01 and some people get rewarded with feedbacks for it, I do not like it as well.

2. Create a physical item: CD-ROM, DVD out of your digital product and you can sell it on eBay

- It is a lot of work; you need a CD burning, packaging and delivery that sales remain automated.

- You can outsource this service. There are a lot of companies doing it. Additional cost of outsourcing.

- Sells count toward PowerSeller status

- You will receive feedback from buyers

- This mothod does not breach e Bay policy

- You can monetize better putting unadvertised bonuses on the CD

- It will be additional costs of CD, packaging and postage, the price will rise, and I hope good e-books will start to sell at the real value again

- Not all digital products can be transferred to CD. We have to find a solution for Memberships and Websites

3. Stop selling Digital Products on eBay, and sell them only on Websites.

- You have to set up you own website to sell them.

- You will be responsable to get traffic to your website.

- You can use paid or free methods, I have some good articles about free traffic, Squidoo lenses are my favorite

- You can use YouTube as an alternative lead generation source, and use the option of allowing others to put it on their websites and blogs

- Google loves YouTube, your ranking will be improved.

4. You can use alternative Auction sites to sell Digital Products.

I cannot give you any suggestions. I try a couple of them and I don't like any of them. I have to say, eBay is the best.

In summary, we, the entire community of Digital Products seller, are coming together and we will deliver methods to continue to sell them.
Tomorrow when it is the day of starting of the new rule I will recommend a nice procedure to overcome this new rule. After tomorrow, the MyDD will present some new features they are working day and night to enhance MyDD. They will offer the service of transforming e-Books in CDs and they will deliver them at any address in the world.

I say, it will be a vacuum of DP for a while, take advantage of it, be creative, informed and start the new methods tomorrow.