www.affiliateconfession.com

While there are several great niches on eBay to put together a Build A Niche Store for, there are some that just aren’t worth it. There are 2 niches you especially want to stay away from because of the way people buy things on eBay. I’m sure there are more as you will probably figure out from reading this post, but I’ll just cover 2.

First, understand why eBay is successful and why people love to buy from an auction. Not only are people able to find just about anything they want on eBay and purchase it, but they can also win it. That sets up a whole different mindset to making a purchase for your customer. It’s exciting to win and people will go out of their way to do it. The desire to win drives many to make a purchase they might not otherwise make.

With that in mind, one of the niches that doesn’t do well on eBay is travel. While travel is a great niche to earn some good Adsense money from, it is terrible for a BANS store. Probably the number one reason for that is because the travel niche doesn’t involve a physical product and people like to win physical products on eBay. I can also imagine people buying a cruise or reserving a vacation rental probably want to speak to someone when they make a reservation and are very hesitant to transact travel business on eBay.

Case in point, a travel based BANS store I run generated 1,045 clicks to eBay last month, yet only 8 people placed bids, meaning only 1 out of every 130 people placed a bid after reaching eBay from this travel site. On the other hand, on my best BANS store that sells a fairly popular high priced item, I sent 1,829 clicks that produced 311 bids, meaning 1 out of every 5 clicks produced a bid. All is not lost with the travel site though because I’m modeling the rest of it off of my best Adsense producing site and adding more content. I already earn more from Adsense on this site than I do by sending traffic to eBay.

The other niche I would never build a BANS store on again would be a business opportunity site selling ebooks. I have a fairly good domain name I bought and it had been sitting for about a year or so and I thought I’d throw a BANS site on it and see what happened. Nothing has happened so far. The business opportunity niche is so unbelievably saturated and the competition is so fierce it’s not worth getting into any longer. While ebooks can still be sold on eBay if they are delivered via CD through the mail, selling ebooks via eBay is dead. You rarely see an ebook going for even as much as $9.95 on eBay and you aren’t going to make any money as an affiliate selling items priced below $10. The only exception to this rule may be if you have a site selling hugely popular items such as some iPhone or other cell phone accessory where you may be able to convert some of those sales to new member sign-ups.

To be fair I probably could add some content and build out this ebook selling BANS store a little better, but it wouldn’t be anything I would spend much more time on.

There are plenty of very good niches for BANS stores on eBay so it’s really not worth your time to work on something that’s not going to pay you well. Don’t take the magic of eBay out of your buyer’s hands. Physical products will always win out over something an eBay shopper can’t touch.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.