eBay Information - free vs paid - the cold hard facts

I don't own either John Reese's eBay course or the course MaaMaa recommends. However, I have been making my living full-time selling on eBay for more than six years so I'll just offer my twenty-three cents worth here.

When Pete says "You don't have to spend big money to learn Ebay. In fact, most of what you need to know can be found for FREE" he's 100 percent correct. And, in many cases that free information is more useful and correct than what someone pays $100+ for.

At the same time, when MaaMaa says "For me personally, my choice is to buy the best information I can find where it has all been laid out for me step by step" she puts forth a valid point also.

Everyone's time is worth something. And, while what each of our time is worth may vary, if you can buy information that would take you hours, weeks, or months to gather yourself, spending the money may actually save you money.

However, there's a 'but' involved with this, and it's a very large BUT.....

Is the information you're buying of any real value? Does the person you're buying it from know what they are talking about? Have they walked the walk?

And that's where Mike's statement "Yes you can get a lot of information for free. But most of it is inaccurate, posted by well meaning but inexperienced people who inadvertently give out poor information." comes into play.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know squat about gardening or what kind of free vs paid for gardening information is available on the net. But, when it comes to eBay, to a large degree, Mike's statement needs to be reversed. You will find a lot more good free information available than you will good information for sale.

When you're dealing with eBay much of the information you that you will pay for is written by people who have no real idea what is involved with making money on a week-in-week-out or year-in-year-out basis because they have never done it. All they've done is sold a few things on eBay and then decided to write a "how-to" product because people wanting information about selling on eBay represent a huge on-line market.

The result is that many of the eBay courses/programs available for sale are, at best, simple re-hashes of what you can find on eBay's help pages. At worst, many of them tell you to do things that are against eBay's policies and, if eBay catches you, will get you banned from selling on eBay. And while, as I said, I don't own either of the courses mentioned here, unfortunately most of the bad information is the more expensive information.

At the same time, there is some excellent information being offered for sale. Unfortunately, these products are usually not well know or talked about much for reasons I'm not going to go into here.

John Reese's course contains good basic information for someone just getting started on eBay, but from what I've been told by affiliates who promote it that I trust, it doesn't go much further than that. If you want your "how-to get started" information all in one place you will probably learn just as much from reading Terry Gibb's eBay Seller's Guide and it's free.

I know nothing about the course MaaMaa promotes, but I will say that when I read the sales letter it's a little like being next to a major fire station when they receive a call for a 7 alarm fire.

I don't mean to say all expensive eBay courses or programs aren't worth the money, but it's not always a case of you get what you pay for. I know of a couple in the $100+ range that are excellent. But they've both been written by people who I know have actually sold full-time on eBay for several years.

In the end, there are a lot more good $29.95 or less courses out there than there are $100 or more courses. The clue to finding them is that nearly all of them have one or two page sales letters. You don't need a 30 page sales letter to say "here's what I've got, here's what you get, here's what it will do for you, here's what it costs and here's where you can buy it."

After that it's pretty much all additional hype to make your mouth water, to justify the price and testimonials from the same thirteen and a half other Internet marketers.

Most people will pooh-pooh this, but that's what you get for twenty-three cents from someone who's been there, done that, and walks the walk on a day-in, day-out basis.

Gary Hendrickson