Digital Goods on eBay Restricted

If you are considering selling digital goods on eBay and haven’t gotten started yet, eBay has changed the rules. Beginning March 31, 2008, digital items sold on eBay are now restricted to classified ads and can no longer be sold on eBay auctions. Early this week, eBay made the following announcement:

New Policy on Digital Goods

This affects not only digitally delivered ebooks, but sellers of websites, audio/mp3 files, digital videos, domain names, downloadable software and anything else that can be delivered digitally.

This is a great disappointment to a lot of sellers of digital items, who have been able to build a list using eBay as a lead generation tool. I have spent a lot of time in blogs and forums this week listening to people comment on this topic. The two main things that are coming out of these discussions are that many people have had entire businesses devastated by this decision, and that some have an alternate plan to continue selling digital items by converting them to CD format and including even more back-end sales materials on CD.

When it comes to the idea that people have lost their entire incomes, I think this needs to be a lesson in general to people that weren’t victims this time around. Any time you put all your eggs in one basket, you set yourself up for the possibility of losing your shirt. So the lesson of the day is:

Diversify!

It is imperative that you have multiple sources of income. When you choose only one product or one marketing strategy, you can be a victim in this type of sweeping change, and you become in essence the baby thrown out with the bath water.

Take a look at your business plan. Are you too focused on just one area? Do you use Adsense exclusively? Do you use Click Bank exclusively? Take a look at how you can expand and grow your business, so that the rug can’t be swept out from under you. If you are doing something that is working for you, it’s human nature to continue to move in that direction. Still, a back-up plan is always in order for people who are self-employed.

The suggested solution all over the internet to continuing to sell digital products seems to be to download your product to CD and continue to auction them on eBay. To me the problem with this solution is that this is a generation of instant gratification. Most people that decide to buy an ebook or any other digital items want and expect instant delivery. They don’t want to wait for snail mail, let alone pay extra for shipping.

And to the sellers of digital goods, what has made this a great way to do business is the freedom from having to deal with trips to the post office, or handling physical products. So then the next solution has to be to the question “Where else can I market my digital goods?” Or if you are a purchaser of digital products, “Where else can I purchase digital goods that are instantly downloadable?”

The answers to these questions will be revealed in the near future, as we all adjust to eBay’s decision.

I will continue to offer digital goods on my ebook site www.vals-bargain-ebooks.com. I plan to update my bargain ebooks page in the next week or two to make ebooks more readily available to my website visitors. All ebooks discussing selling ebooks on eBay are now obsolete.

The only thing secure in life is change. Whenever one door closes, another always opens. The sure thing is that in this change, there WILL be new opportunities.

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