Snow White & The Seven Cyber-Scams – Huffington Post UK (blog)

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 December 2011 04:10 Written by External Post Sunday, 18 December 2011 04:10

Snow White & The Seven Cyber-ScamsHuffington Post UK (blog)BE SURE to use well-known sites if you want to buy by auction. If you fancy yourself as a cyber-bidder, then play-safe and shop via established sites such as eBay or iOffer and, whichever auction site you choose, read the small print and…
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SoldUSA.com online sale is already underway; concludes July 17

Last Updated on Friday, 2 July 2010 08:50 Written by a2e Friday, 2 July 2010 08:50

(MATTHEWS, N.C.) – Around 1,200 lots of rare and vintage firearms, militaria, ammunition and advertising collectibles are being offered in an Internet auction already underway by SoldUSA.com. The sale went online in mid-June and will conclude July 17. SoldUSA.com is a premier collectibles auction site, with over 42,000 registered users.
Many items in the sale are [...]
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BidsTick™ – #1 Rated Online Penny Auction Site

Last Updated on Monday, 7 June 2010 04:17 Written by a2e Monday, 7 June 2010 04:17

One of the more established penny auction sites on the web today is Bidstick, and “old” player in the game right behind Swoopo. Bidstick stood out amongst the pack by being one of, if not the only, online penny auction sites that had a chat box. Unfortunately, that feature seems to be down, as many regulars at the site have noted.

Largest ever eBay scam uncovered

Last Updated on Friday, 5 March 2010 01:30 Written by a2e Friday, 5 March 2010 01:30

For golfers who pay hundreds for a single putter, it was a dream come true – top branded clubs being offered on eBay for as little as £35.

Thousands across the world were tempted and parted with an estimated £3million.

But when an Essex pensioner complained about the quality of her purchase she helped unravel the auction site’s biggest ever fraud.

The clubs were fakes, produced in a Chinese factory in a scam masterminded from Essex by Gary Bellchambers, 46.

Christine Manz had complained to Bellchambers about the poor quality of a club she bought. But when she was ignored, she went to her local trading standards office.

The pensioner was not the only customer who was left unhappy with their buy.

more.. link to news article
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Tipton Grand Opening auction marks Ritchie Bros 170th unreserved auction in California

Last Updated on Saturday, 23 January 2010 04:30 Written by a2e Saturday, 23 January 2010 04:30

AuctionInfo.org

AuctionInfo.org
Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers , the world’s largest auctioneer of industrial and agricultural equipment, will celebrate the Grand Opening of its new Tipton, California auction site with an unreserved public auction and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday, February 12, 2010. The new Tipton site is the third Ritchie Bros. auction site in California and its 41st [...]
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Crafty Live Support

Last Updated on Monday, 23 March 2009 05:55 Written by a2e Monday, 23 March 2009 05:55

One of the biggest problems with a new auction site is maintaining a level of use that gives comfort to a new visitor. What I mean by that is a people look for evidence of a an auction site being used to give them confidence that they can sell their items there. Another way to increase visitor confidence is to show them you are putting in a major effort. You may want to give the impression that the company behind the site is bigger then it actually is.

At one time live support was only for top-end site with the resources to throw at that but now with the help of a product called Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) – ed. yes I know terrible name but the product works well and it’s open source too.

Live Support Window

Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) is an open source live support solution that helps customer support with live help functionality that can be proactively pushed to visitors to your site or requested by the consumer. Crafty Syntax includes a large range of features to allow multiple operators, multiple departments and multiple languages to be used. Crafty Syntax Live Help is free and is programed in PHP with MySQL for the database. Other highlighted features include the ability to create your own questions, auto inviting visitors, referrer tracking, page tracking, ability to view what the customer is typing as they type, multiple chat sessions, sound alert, leave a message if offline, push URLs, quick responses, Customizable graphics, and multiple operators. runs on your server and is open source GPL.

I must say the web site and whole branding of this product doesn’t do it justice and a lot of people could be put off for that reason alone. Don’t be worried to much about the install it’s not difficult, you can quickly get up and running but one word of warning if your hosting is on a budget. In the admin section you’ll find all sorts of data collecting options. Keep an eye on the number you turn on as not only can it make accessing your admin area sluggish it could slow down your site while also collecting a lot of data can fill up your space rather quicker then you might think.

If you decide to go for the install make sure you also install the front-end client software. This is a really neat way of keeping a eye on whats going on on your site. Not only does it give you an easy start-up options on your computer, it also give a nice feeling inside as it pings away in the background telling you know someone has visited your auction site :-)

Design wise the icons and chat windows are fully configurable to meet the design of your site.

Getting The Adwords Edge

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14 Written by a2e Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14

One of the biggest problems a new Auction site owner faces is getting established. The are many steps you can try but today we will look at just one, Google AdWords and try to give you a little edge to how you can save money while getting better exposure then if you simply stubble along the best you can on basic settings.

Any primer in marketing will tell you that the place to start is looking at who are your customers. On a general auction site you can normally rule out under-age people but then it gets a bit more tricky so common sense would be to go to the other end of the line and look who would be interested in auctions. I’ll give you a moment to think about that ………………………………..OK, so we all agree it’s EBay user :-) but how do you get at them ? Well on EBay.com you use Yahoo advertising and on EBay.co.uk you use Google. I’ll be looking  at Google here because it covers the search opportunities too that are most used in the world and I don’t use Yahoo myself.

Luckily EBay.co.uk gives us a neat way to target their customers by the way of Google AdWords. The problem with Google AdWords is that unless you really understand your target and the way the system works it’s likely to cost more then the average start-up auction owner can or afford or should be thinking about paying perhaps on a leap of faith. Google AdWords should be only one of many streams you look at to see what works for you. Another specific problem for general auctions is the are a limited number of keywords relating to auction, eBay alternatives etc. In a bidding market this mean a high price is paid to just get on the ride and the ones in the front seats are paying big bucks to be the first placing.  So you need an edge and here’s one idea on that theme.  Why not target specific high traffic categories on you auction site.  Using a spread of adverts based on your category setting. As an example we’ll select Woman’s Clothing and an example auction site is called www.myauctionsite.com.

The first thing to do is to select a number of keywords relating to our category Woman’s Clothing. Using the tools within Google AdWords you can search for the best performing keywords pertaining to Woman’s Clothing. Also make a note of the ones which have less competition then you might have thought they would have. A product I like to use for this type of research is one call Web CEO. This software does far more then the scope of this blog can do justice but it’s very good for this kind of work. The free edition is well worth having around (I’ve provided a link to this software in the sidebar). Our research found ten or more keywords we could use but we’ll use the keyword phase “low heeled”.

The are plenty more and these should be added to the general keyword list. Probably like me you thought the phase “high heeled” would be more popular but not according to this link -  ttp://shoes.about.com/od/menwomenchildren/tp/10_womens_shoes.htm. I always do background research, from this I suspect the term “high heeled” would lead our adverts into other areas we may not be interested in ;-) I suspect even worse problem if we had chosen the phase “stockings” or “garters” for example.

So now we have one of our keywords what do we do next ?  Well it may be a suprise but we don’t rush over to Google AdWords just yet. We head over to our web site hosting account first, I’ll assume you understand how to use cpanel or whatever admin software your host has given you. If you don’t understand have a fish around because what we are about to do is very easy and the more you know about Back-end Work the better. It will save you both time and money in the future.

When logged-in to Cpanel look for the domain and sub-domains settings. Here you choose add sub-domain and the words we use are “lowheels” or “low-heels”. It should look like this – lowheels.myauctionsite.comand point this at the root of the auction site, in our example that’s myauctionsite.com. Now we are ready to start our Google advertising and we’ll use this URL in our advert.  Not in the URL where you send the visitor to ! this goes in the box above that one. The site title box – This is not a tutorial in using Google AdWords so we’ll skip ahead and people can ask question if they have a problem.  This is just to show how to use that sub-domain and further sub-domains to get more value out of google. So here’ an example of what the ad might look like;

Our exercise has given us the following benefits.

1. Firstly the sub-domain gets us an higher quality score with Google AdWords because our keyword is in the URL – benefit gained ? Costs less to get higher.

2. In google search keywords searched always show in bold. – Benefit gained? We added an extra bold word to our listing and that makes it stand out more.

3. The URL contains the item the searcher is looking for – Benefit gained? People click on sites they think have what they are looking for. 

Notice the URL shown is not the URL you send people to, that is best pointing to the page on your site that contains the word High Heels most often. In most cases that would be a category page wouldn’t it. And that’s about it for this exercise, I hope you like it and if you do like me know, I have more to offer later.