Are you fed up with eBay? Then learn to Sell on Amazon.

A recent study by Compete found that, compared to the previous year, eBay's traffic decreased 5.2% last month; while Amazon's traffic rose 18.7% in the same period and Craigslist traffic rose 40% compared to the previous year.

EBay's visitors who shopped at Amazon jumped from 41% in February 2008 to 53% last month; while Amazon visitors' cross-shopping of eBay has remained unchanged at 58%, suggesting eBay's fixed-price strategy failed to attract significant numbers of new shoppers.

In February 2009, 11% of eBay's visitors, or 7.8 million customers, made a Buy-it-Now purchase (up 20% from the previous year). However, gains in fixed-priced activity have been eclipsed by declines in eBay's traditional auction business. 1.5 million fewer shoppers placed a bid on eBay last month than did in February 2008

So you see it's not only sellers that are fleeing from eBay to other sites like Amazon.

EBay recently announced it was returning to its roots as an auction site more focus on the "secondary market". We shall watch.

Selling on "The River" is written by an eBay instructor, Steve Lindhorst. He has thoroughly researched all facets of selling on Amazon from the perspective of an eBay seller.

Click here to read more about and buy your copy of his important tutorial. If you value what I have given you here, you won't be disappointed by what he has to show you. I highly recommend this ebook.

"The River" refers to Amazon River (the world's largest river). In the eBay forums, members find their posts deleted by eBay censors if they mention Amazon.com; so, in their discussions, they use "The River" to protect their posts from deletion.

Amazon.com has pro shops that cost $39 per month and you don't need one of those until you are selling over 39 books per month. The advantage of the pro shop is reduced Amazon commissions after the first 39 sales. I don't quite qualify for one of those yet, but I'm working on it.

You can get started selling the "free" books you have lying around on your shelves and what you can beg from friends. I have found that fiction generally does not make easy profit, but non-fiction does very well.

You can buy books for $1.50 or less at thrift stores and garage sales, but before you buy any book for resale, you need to look up the ISBN number of each book on Amazon to see if you can profit from it. So take a pad and paper with you when you shop and possibly stop into the library to use a computer or carry your laptop to check the books before buying.

I went to a warehouse of books and spent an hour writing down ISBN's of books I thought might sell well. Then when I got home I went through 40 numbers and only found 3 that would sell for profit. I went back and found those books to list the next day. One is a craft book that can sell for lowest price at $35. I hope it sells fast!

If you want to move your stock fast, you will have to list at the lowest price. This means staying away from any books that are currently selling on Amazon for a penny. Those are most likely being sold by high volume sellers with pro stores. They might be taking a loss on penny books as a loss leader, or maybe Amazon gives charities a break on their commissions... how they sell for a penny is not clear.

I have bought some brand new $1 books at the public library. That's an easy one to do as they have free wireless and I take my laptop to check the ISBN's on Amazon before buying the books. So far I bought 6 and 3 of them are sold. In a city, there are lots of libraries and they all have a fresh supply of books for sale every day.

You will profit, if there is a low number of used books with that title listed. You will profit, if you can list the book as the lowest price book at more than $2.00.

Your expenses for selling on Amazon are:

*of course the cost of any items you buy to sell (stock)
*Amazon commission
*packing materials (I am inventive by cutting up cardboard boxes I rescue from the trash). All I pay for is tape and paper for invoices.
*Postage
*gas to drive to the Post Office. The more books you can carry to the post office each trip, the lower price per book on that one.
*of course, if you make enough to have to pay taxes on this, you will have other expenses to deduct... lots of house space to store books, computer, etc.

Drawbacks... you have to actually ship a product and your business is not portable to carry to the beach with you. If you get serious about this, you could need to rent a garage or storage locker to keep your books in while they are listed and waiting for a buyer. Right now, my books fit in a cardboard box and I did take them with me on a car trip.

I bought a music CD at the library sale for $1 and that sold for $5. Just check to see what the value is before you buy things and you won't get stuck. Give a nice description of your books and CD's on your listing and carefully pack and your customers will be happy too.

I am using up old Christmas wrapping paper. Every book I post is first gift wrapped and then boxed with an invoice. I'm really enjoying this business.

Today I stopped by the library on the way home from the post office and found 4 salable books. These cost me $4.24 and one of them will list for lowest price at well over $15.

In order to calculate your shipping from home you need a scale that can weigh at least up to 10 pounds. I bought my little 50 pound electronic scale on eBay.

All of us who have sold items on eBay know that Paypal lets us buy postage and print shipping labels for no additional fee. I was initially frustrated with my Amazon business because I had to carry my parcels to the post office to pay for shipping. This would be fine except it costs me $1.28 in gasoline round trip to drive to the post office. When my profit on a book is only $1.20 and I only have one to post, that's producing a loss - which is unacceptable.

I figured out how to get the Paypal print shipping label for items not purchased on eBay! I'll be testing this out on the very next book I sell. When I can pay postage and print a shipping label; then hand the book to the letter carrier, I will be a very happy Amazon seller.

Just log in to your Paypal account and up in the browser address bar notice the part of the address that reads "cmd=" You want to make that read "cmd=_ship-now" and hit the enter key. You should then be on the page to create, purchase and print shipping labels.

Update: This method works very well, but PayPal will only let the payment go through if you have enough PayPal money in your account to pay for the postage. They will not debit a credit card or bank account to pay for postage. Just keep a small positive balance on your PayPal account to cover postage needs.

Amazon has this electronic book reading gadget named Kindle that takes it's own special document format for contents. This means if you own the rights for any information, you can publish it in Kindle format and sell it from your own Kindle store.

Find your Kindle account by looking on the front page of Amazon. Just click on the Amazon logo at the top of any page. Then scroll down and look on the left side in the box titled "Features and Services". Click "Publish on Kindle".

This means you can publish to Amazon Kindle any information in the public domain and sell it from your Kindle store.

Better take a new look at all those PLR files on your hard drive!

Amazon Pro Store (Pro Merchant Subscription) costs $39.99 per month.

Advantages:

The $0.99-per-sale fixed closing fee is waived, but you still pay 6 to 15 percent commission and the variable closing fee. This means it's not practical to upgrade to Pro until you sell at least 40 items per month.

Pro Stores have Bulk listing tools that make listing and managing thousands of items easier.

Pro Sellers are allowed to add items to the Amazon Catalog that aren't already in there.

Basic Ebay Stores charge a $15.95 monthly subscription. There are three levels of stores (Basic, Premium and Anchor).

Advantages:

Ebay store items can be listed in store format for only $.03 listing fee for 30 days. Other fees such as final value fees still apply.

Store Inventory listings appear in your Store with other regular Online Auction and Fixed Price listings. They also sometimes appear on eBay.com search results pages.

Ebay stores also have special inventory listing and management tools.

Live auction is a format that mirrors auctions in the real world, where people bid in real time, and the transaction closes as soon as bidding stops, unlike the more popular auctions that last for a preset time. This format has been mostly unused on eBay; so won't be missed too much.

Stephanie Tilenius, General Manager of eBay North
America promised "even bolder and faster changes at eBay, stating that eBay's goal is to deliver a more retail-like experience."

"by this time next year eBay.com will be unrecognizable in comparison to today."

Best be ready for more changes coming down the pike.