Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Axel,

Social networking is a low cost high time demand activity that you can exploit to start the generation of sellers to your site.

Local offline promotion would also start the ball rolling. Although the internet is a great way to raise profile of a business you have to be realistic in your expectations.

Print some flyers and distribute them to the area you are targeting. Get some PR with articles in the local newspaper and raise awareness on other local portals with banner ads and commentary on local forum boards. To get customer engagement it may be worth sponsoring a local charity so the site has a local edge.

As has been mentioned above, if you really want to make it work then you should contract a local marketing team, this will depend on your budget.

The edge you have on EBay and Craigslist is you are local.

Best of luck with your enterprise

Nigel T Packer

You have a number of different problems:
* technological (creating a website with auction module)
* product (finding things to sell)
* customers (people to sell to)

But underlying it are 2 other problems: a marketing strategy (who/why should someone care about your website) and sufficient funding to make it happen. If you don't have $, then you could try to appeal to people who don't want to have their own garage sales and instead trust you to sell their stuff for them (in exchange for taking a % of the sale).

My questions are:

Have you already built the site?
Have you tested the technology?
Have you written a business plan?
Have you researched the market sector for auction sites?
Have you well understood the margins /commissions that you can earn from this kind of activity?
Have you understood the legal issues regarding sale of fake and stolen merchanside etc.
What about fullfillment and returns policies?
and, and, and...

You are planning a major business and as such, at this late stage of the game, you need to be fully ready to face all the challenges which also means financially ready. What you want to undertake will cost several million dollars t build launcha nd market with NO guarantee of success.

Think long and hard wheter this is really the business that you want to do.

Good luck.

Matthew