At Beer Stuff Here, you’ll find collectible beer cans, supplies for brewing your own beer, beer steins and beer mugs, and more… more beer stuff than you ever imagined existed!

There’s camo stuff in the expected places, of course: camo hunting gear, camo tents and backpacks, and so forth. Nothing surprising there.

But there are camo window blinds and drapes, camo knives and multi-tools, camo dog beds (for hunting dogs, obviously!) — even camo wedding and party supplies.

Anyone interested in buying anything camouflage from eBay would do well to browse through this site. These items can be awfully hard to find in eBay — it took a lot of custom-crafted search queries to bring in all the camo stuff.

This kind of site is a lot of work, but I’m pleased with the result.

I figured what the heck, I’ll try it out. I had used Commission Junction for my affiliate marketing attempts, but had never had much success. It seemed that no matter what approach I used, it just didn’t result in a lot of sales. I tried targeted product ads on pages that talked about that specific product. I tried banner ads. I tried product listings from CJ’s datafeed. I tried it with photos of the product, with text links within the copy, with and without listing the price. I only got the occasional commission, and AdSense continued to dominate my passive income streams.

Almost immediately upon launching my first BANS site, I started getting commissions. My commission income is now at about one-third of my AdSense income, but it’s growing, and I expect that it may well exceed my AdSense income within the next few months.

The above graph shows my CJ earnings trend. My first affiliate commission was last May. Earnings stayed pretty moribund throughout 2007. It was in mid-December of 2007 that I bought BANS. It was in January that I started building BANS sites in earnest. You can see the progress I’ve made with affiliate commissions since starting to work with BANS.

I love that the script comes as full php source code — I’ve spent a lot of time customizing and modifying my BANS script so that it looks and behaves more the way I want it to. Some of the modifications I’ve done include:

Code Output/CSS/HTML

I edited the core files to remove the stupid non-breaking spaces, hard-coded table widths and table cell widths, and various other presentational code that was hard-coded into the script files.

The navigation is automatically populated with eBay’s categories and subcategories, and the navigation elements are indented by one, two, three or more non-breaking spaces. I removed those and added specific classes to each level of indent, along with specific ids for each level when the link is the current page. This allows me to target each category level with my css — I generally make the top-level categories bold-face and in fairly large type, then the sub-categories indented by a few pixels, and non-bold face but still in large type, then the sub-sub-categories indented by more pixels, non-bold-face and small type, and so on.

Also, by removing the hard-coded table and table cell widths, and adding specific css classes to each table cell, I can target those easily with my css as well. I’ve done this with the product listings, the search form, the site navigation, the “view more on ebay,” the pagination — pretty much all the code that’s output by the script. This gives me much greater flexibility in targeting these page elements with my css, which is very important to me, as I don’t use any of the boring default templates that come with a BANS purchase.

Call To Action

I edited the core source files to add a line of text below the item name, which reads either “Buy now,” “Bid on this item now,” or “Buy or bid now,” depending on whether the item is BIN only, auction only, or both. That line of text is a clickable link that takes the user to the product on eBay, just like the item name. This is the classic marketer’s “call to action.” You must tell the visitor what you want them to do. I’ve seen my click-through rate to eBay go way up since implementing this little hack.

I also edited the source files to make the Buy It Now button a clickable link. It struck me, whenever I’m looking at one of my own BANS sites, that I expect to be able to click that Buy It Now button, so probably other people do too. Let ‘em click it! Get that cookie planted!

Search Form

I edited the source files to automatically populate the search box with the user’s search query after they conduct a search. If someone searches for, say, “Masonic rings” they might want to refine their query to search for “Masonic gold rings.” I say, make it easy for them. Along with their search results, I give them a search box that contains their already-searched-for term so that they can easily refine that search.

View More Items on eBay

There’s a line automatically displayed at the bottom of each listing page that says “View more items on eBay.” This line is a link that takes you to the appropriate category on eBay, with your custom query already applied. This is a nice touch. I edited that line so that instead of the default “view more items on eBay” text, it reads “Visit eBay to see more [product name].” For example, on my Knife site, on the page for Santoku knives, below the listing of Santoku knives it reads “Visit eBay to see more Santoku Knives.”

Fixing Stupid Listing Formatting

I noticed that a lot of eBay sellers write item titles like this:

Product—feature—feature—feature—feature—feature

or this:

Product~feature~feature~feature~feature~feature~feature

This approach forces the product name to not wrap, which forces the listing to take up way too much space horizontally. I design my templates so that this doesn’t kill my page layout, but it does force a page width that’s way too wide for users on smaller monitors.

I used php’s simple string replacement function to replace instanced of — or ~ with space – space or space ~ space. This allows the product name to wrap appropriately.

Fixing BANS Quirks

I also added php’s mysql_real_escape_string in appropriate spots in the source code to fix a few bugs that shouldn’t exist. It’s impossible, for example, with the default BANS script, to use apostrophes in the page content, or to use quotation marks around a custom search query, or to use apostrophes in the link name for a category page.

The BANS programmers did such a bang-up job with this script, I’m astonished that they didn’t use the escape string everywhere that apostrophes and quotation marks might need to be inserted into the database. But they didn’t. Fortunately, with source code in hand, I’m able to fix that myself.

Custom Templates

I use my own template designs — none of that default stuff for me. I generally rotate among 4 or 5 different standard templates, which I’ve designed specifically to make it easy for me to place a product-related photo in the header. My templates use different color schemes, and I generally just choose whatever color scheme seems most appropriate for the particular niche I’m targeting.

I use a detailed stylesheet to style the navigation links, item listings, and other items just as I want them to appear. I generally remove the PayPal logo from the product listings, place the search box at the bottom of the page instead of the top, and repeat the navigation in the footer. Since I applied special css classes to my navigation links, I can target the main categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories differently in my footer than in my header. I’ve been experimenting with showing only the main categories in the footer, by using display:none for the sub-categories in my css for the footer nav links.

Easy Privacy Policy

With the requirement of a privacy policy for all sites that use CJ and AdSense, I made that easy, too. I wrote a generic privacy policy, which lives on one of my websites, and I have a very basic, very easy page on each site that simply pulls in that page as a php include. It’s linked to from my footer. It exists as an actual page, so it automatically gets included in each site when I upload my files — I don’t have to mess around in the BANS admin area creating a new content page every time. It’s just automatically there. And by including the actual policy, if I ever need to rewrite the policy, I can re-write it once and have it updated on every single site. I love timesaving techniques.

Chief among the the offending changes is the increased final value fee — the percentage of a product’s sale sale price that goes to eBay.

I really appreciated the semantics that eBay used in announcing its fee changes. Their official announcement said they were “reducing the listing fee” and “adjusting the final value fee.”

Power sellers at eBay are understandably upset about the upward-trending final value fee. I don’t actually sell items at eBay, but I send buyers to eBay and make affiliate commissions from their purchases. The fee adjustment wouldn’t affect my bank account very much on its own, but if enough eBay sellers get fed up with eBay and depart for greener auction pasture, I won’t be a happy camper.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy this past few days launching a Boats for Sale site, which focuses exclusively on affordable boats in Florida. That’s a niche need that isn’t met very well by the existing marketing and advertising vehicles, and we hope that the Affordable Boats Online site meets that need for boaters in Florida wo need to buy or sell a boat under $25,000.

How wrong I was!

While I was setting up the Antique Car Site, I found any number of references to “rat rods.” There are a lot of rat rods for sale on eBay. I thought perhaps it was some new term that people were using now to refer to what I always thought of as “hot rods.”

I didn’t look into it at the time. But a few days later, I saw another reference to rat rods somewhere else, and a few days after that, I stumbled across yet another reference to rat rods. It was time to find out what in heck a rat rod is.

It turns out that rat rods are … well, after a fair amount of research, I don’t think there is a standard definition of rat rod, but it’s apparently an unfinished, or partially finished, or badly finished, hot rod. Rat rods are old hot rods or vintage cars that are restored only sufficiently to be driven. There’s no concern for original or authentic parts or trim, and they’re often dotted and splotched with patches of primer — because hey, a car doesn’t need paint to be driven, right?

I’m not sure I see the appeal. I have no desire for a rat rod myself. But I favor the freedom of individuals to own whatever they want and to do with their own property as they wish, so long as they don’t harm others, so I’m wholeheartedly in favor of people buying, selling, and owning rat rods, if that’s that they wish to do.

The biggest change is the new fee structure for sellers listing products for sale. eBay is lowering the listing fee — the upfront cost to list an item on eBay — and increasing the Final Value Fee (FVF), which is the amount the seller pays to eBay upon sale of the item.

With the listing fee going down, we might see an increase in the quantity and variety of items for sale on eBay, adding value to eBay as a whole. Or we might see a surge in junk listings, where sellers list anything and everything whether or not it has a chance of actually selling, because they only pay the FVF if it sells.

The higher Final Value Fee, on the other hand, is computed as a percentage of the sale price of the item. So a higher FVF will hit big-ticket items harder. Sellers may be less inclined to list high-value items on eBay, because they’ll have to pay a more significant fee to eBay when the item sells.

EBay may have calculated these fee changes so that the aggregate fees would end up being a wash — lower listing fee, higher FVF, same final revenue to eBay — but those calculations may not take into account the unintended consequences. The unintended consequences could result in eBay turning into a giant yard sale, full of low-quality junk from garages and attics that may sell for $1 or $5, but few or no listings of higher value items, such as digital cameras, electronics, valuable antiques and collectibles, or other such merchandise.

The new CEO of eBay also announced that he wants to increase emphasis on fixed-price sales, which means a corresponding decrease in emphasis on auction sales with bidding. Again, I’m not sure, myself, that this will be a good move for eBay. eBay owns the auction marketplace. By moving toward a model like Amazon, eBay will be competing in the marketplace that Amazon owns, instead of focusing on the marketplace that eBay owns.

A couple of months ago, I would have yawned and said, “So what?” But now that I’m deriving a portion of my income from eBay, I have a vested interest in what eBay does and the effect on the eBay marketplace. I hope these moves have positive results for eBay, which will ultimately mean positive results for eBay affiliates. But I’m not at all sure that will be the case.

Then last month I started using eBay listings. First, I launched a few sites using the BANS (Build a Niche Store) script, which allows for fast and easy creation of an eBay store based around a particular niche within eBay. My first BANS site was Bit and Rein Tack Supply — which is probably too broad of a niche, but what the heck, I had the domain lying around not being used, and it served me well for experimenting with my first BANS site. I’ve added a few more since then, the most recent being Masonic Memorabilia, which is a much narrower and better targeted niche. I also happen to know a lot about Freemasonry, and I’ll be adding some informational articles to that site, which will help it get better traction in the search engines.

After starting my first couple of BANS sites, I started messing about with eBay’s API, and figured out how to place eBay listings on existing sites, ones that I built using standard static html and that weren’t developed around the BANS script — for example, my Tropical Boating site, which I manage and my husband writes content for.

And in the first month of this great eBay experiment, I’ve had more, and and more regular, commissions coming in from eBay than from all the other affiliate merchants that I’ve tried over the past few months.

People really do buy stuff from eBay. All kinds of stuff. Sometimes they come to my tack shop site and buy a saddle, or they go to my Masonic Memorabilia site and buy a Masonic ring. But sometimes they go to my Discount Marine Electronics site, click through to eBay, and end up buying a pair of “lightly used tennis shoes”.

Yep, that really happened. Someone was looking for color marine gps/chartplotters, found the marine electronics site through Google, clicked through to the site, then clicked through to eBay — and then bought a pair of used tennis shoes.

With eBay, as with most affiliate marketing, the affiliate marketer gets a commission when a user follows their affiliate link and buys something from the merchant, even if it wasn’t what the marketer was promoting. This can make for some rather amusing commissions!

Heck, I’m not proud. I’ll take my commissions wherever they come from. Even used tennis shoes.