Hello,

My partner came up with the idea of launching plans on eBay. I've seen some there (been spammed with more) and was curious what the turn over is on that? If nothing else, I suppose it would be good advertising.

I wouldn't bother, people usually are bought by the $1 Unlimited/Unlimited deals there. I know all about eBay so if you'd like to ask anything, I'd be happy to help you out.

I think its just as bad as the companies here giving hosting away for next to nothing.

But you never know.

It is a complete waste of time on Ebay for hosting...

I was thinking to write a review and share my idea. Here's one of the methods I did to improve my monthly sales. Perhaps it's been used by many companies, but I found this out myself after I woke up from a 18hrs deep sleep.

Two months back, I started moving some advertisements on eBay, although it sounds cheap for those proper companies to advertise on eBay, but the results amazingly increased my sales.

I bought a lot of domains, not some real excellent domains, but there are decent. Those domains are easy to remember, no abbreviation, easy to pronouce, and in proper English. I started putting them one by one on eBay to see how the market would effect my business.

Most of the time I started with $19.99 and ended up around $25~$30 after the 7 days of auction. This price includes 2GB of bandwidth, 100MB of disk space, a domain name, simple web layout and those general hosting features.

Obviously, I earn nothing from the $25~$30 bucks after the deduction of eBay listing fees, credit card transaction charge, tech support and hosting service, but what I am expecting that this customer would be continue using my hosting service after the first month free service. Yes, I have average of 85% do continue paying me for hosting, and there are about 15% of the 85% upgrade their service plans.

I've also realised that most customers I have from eBay is those who would like to own the domain for couple of months and resell them, so basically they wouldn't mind paying me a little rental fee to park their page.

It's hard to hide the fact that if you want to compete with the industry's competitors on eBay by offering good service and low price, it's almost next to impossible. My feedback obviously helps me a little bit to get started, and after again receiving some high positive feedbacks from the services I offer, people start trusting me more and more, and yet the bidding price would always be higher and higher.

Besides, consumers tend to trust the companies more if they have a merchant account, even a third party merchant account would be better than PayPal. This is maybe because most scammers and spammers are found to be using PayPal.

Oh, well I had no intentions of dropping prices to compete -- not my style. I only have low pricing when we do huge sales which is what I was going to use it for.

I was more wondering in the terms of advertising (eBay gets billions of people on it monthly) and the effect that would have.

On a different level, I see WHT now allows minimum ads of $500 a month for a banner (not sure if that was top position though and not bottom).

Anyone use that? Does it prove to be worth the $500-1500 a month?

Ebay is actually where I got my start as a reseller but this was 1 year ago when there was actually a somewhat legitimate market. Now it is not worth even seeing what kind of hosts advertise there. I love the $1 auctions with the "$50 setup fee" small print. They must get a lot of suckers.

i sold on ebay, but even when i offered 1 year of hosting for 1.00 it only got bid up to 9.00 at most..

funny thing was, most of the people who bought the plans never used the service or cancelled a few months later because they didn't want to bother with it. i explained they had an entire year, but they didn't care.

no repeast business, no customers signing up again.. i think ebay people get addicted enough that unless the deal is on ebay, they will go elsewhere..

and for advertising, ebay is REALLY expensive if your expecting to get any of those hits.. i've hosted dozens of auctions and usually at the end only 20-45 visitors have seen it..

better ways to get business.

and about "webhostingauctions".. i find sites like findmyhosting.com to be the best approach, why do we need another clearing house... i dunno.. best of luck though

Okay, eBay's out.

What about WHT? :) Anyone buy a banner ad at the top of page want to comment on how benificial it was?