During the reign of the current CEO, there have been many changes to the policies and systems on eBay, and it has to be said that most of them are viewed as decidedly unfriendly to eBay sellers. The trouble is that eBay has the market sewn up amongst the online auction sites which leaves the auction sellers with very little choice of alternative venues to sell their wares.

Although there are quite a few other online auction sites, some with good usage in their native countries and others with what appears to be a worldwide presence, non have really given eBay a run for their money. What about Amazon? we hear you say, well we are really referring to auction sites, Amazon is a different kettle of fish.

So, if you are currently selling on eBay, or seriously considering doing so there are some perils and pitfalls on eBay that you should be made aware of. In fact, there are quite a few. We can’t deal with all of them in this article, so we’ll focus on a couple of the biggies.

If your livelihood depends on your online sales, you should never, ever depend solely on eBay! As a back up, start your own website, ASAP we would advise this anyway as eBay buyers give you a mailing list to send your website newsletters and updates to. It is like a minefield on eBay for sellers these days, and more booby traps have recently been added by way of changes to their DSR policies.

Unless you sell in huge volume, all it will take is a mere handful of unreasonable buyers within a 30 day period to get you suspended from selling for at least a month if your DSR scores fall to an unacceptable level.

Can you afford to lose your entire income for a month? maybe 3 months? maybe indefinately!

If not—protect yourself!

If you are unlucky enough to run across a few bad buyers within a short period of time, with your own website to fall back on, you would have at least a some money coming in and who knows, if your site has been up and running for a while then with a little effort you should be matching or exceeding the number of sales you are making on eBay but if not then at least some sales are better than none.

Another pitfall to avoid: Don’t think of eBay as just your income. Sure, sell all you can. But besides your income from selling on eBay, think of eBay as a marketing tool. Use eBay to help drive traffic to your own website. They refused to allow sellers to post links to their own websites on an About Me page for a while, but apparently the uproar was so loud that the powers-that-be at eBay decided to recant and allow links again.

Post a link to your own website on your eBay About Me page! You are paying very high fees to sell on eBay, so get as much value for your investment as you possibly can.

Probably the biggest mistake sellers can make on eBay is to proceed as though it was the be-all and end-all for making online sales.

So, get your website up and running now!