Beware, There Are A Lot Of Crooks On Ebay

I hope you have not had a negative experience on ebay. I was very much enjoying the site until one day, some freak tried to steal nearly £200 from selling me an item which did not exist. This article explains what happened and also the advice the police gave to me.

As I have already mentioned I was having lots of fun buying and selling on Ebay for a number of months without any problems at all. I regularly sold second hand mobile phones and was doing very well for myself. If I ever bought anything that cost over £100, I would offer to meet the seller somewhere, normally just off the motorway. I pulled off what I believed was some good deals and also managed to offload some of my unwanted items which I either had no interest in anymore or that I had no longer a need for.

Unfortunately all good things have to come to an end and it certainly did with ebay.

One particular morning I was looking to purchase another second hand mobile phone, which I would then re-sell on. There was an advert for a buy it now phone with the asking price low but not extremely low.

There was a mobile number to phone if I had any questions. I decided to phone the number, his name was Tony and I asked him the general type questions. He sounded and seemed really nice, however stated that he was unable to meet me as he was unable to drive as he had not past his test. The alarm bells should have already started to ring, but me being a bit stupid they didn't.






His house was a long way from where I lived and reluctantly I agreed to pay via a bank transfer. He assured me he would post the phone, that very day via Royal Mail Special Delivery to arrive by 11am the next morning. He seemed very genuine, they always do your thinking and that was that.

Next morning have a guess what arrived, yes nothing at all, nor the next day, nor the next.

I tried e-mailing him, texting and ringing his mobile phone, guess what, there was no reply.

I realised what a fool I had been, however decided to go to the police. They were very helpful and half an hour later I had a crime number however was warned that it was very unlikely I would ever see a phone or recieve a refund of my money which was £170. The police advised me to be very careful as they regularly have complaints from people who have been defrauded on ebay, I was not alone!

Outside the police station I sent Tony a text with the police crime number. To my shock he phoned me straight away swearing at me but eventually agreed to refund me the money, if I stopped the police action against him.

I was very lucky, I am sure many other people as the police stated, never get their money back.

Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Broadly speaking, affiliate program seems including everything, no matter as hot as pay per click advertising or as old as pay per impression or pay per sale or lead marketing. So, it is true that all businesses, no matter big or small, are making money online with affiliate programs. The doubt is only how to select suitable affiliate programs to make money.

What is a partner? What is an affiliate? A partner is an associate who works with others toward a common goal. An affiliate is a subsidiary or subordinate organization that is affiliated with another organization. It seems the difference is there but the basic meaning is the same ?for sharing benefit.

For home base business, affiliate programs have huge advantages: 1. no hustle and be your own boss; 2. with low or even no cost to set up; 3. no hard task to deal with, such as customer service, shipping or inventory management; 4. high income potential and keep running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no holiday no stop and sales everywhere.






Based on individual company's policy, there are some rules that do not allow you to sign up all affiliate programs, such as PPC search engines or gambling affiliate programs may be not compatible. Meanwhile, you may know that every company has its minimum payout and commission rate is different.

In my personal experience, I strongly recommend you sign up third party for your affiliate programs. This will bring you two major advantages: one is save your time; the other is collecting your money together.

There is thousands of individual affiliate programs offered on the internet, many being through third party affiliate program networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction Linkshare and so on. These companies connect a large number of advertisers and publishers together via their own network.




As a publisher, one registration gives you access to tens, even hundreds of advertisers simultaneously. Tracking partner performance is easy: there is only one technical support contact and easier to manage, like only using one user id and one password. The payment is received as your monthly revenue. Another is third party check affiliate programs' credit and reputation.

Payment thresholds can often be fairly high ?a $50 US minimum is common for international publishers. Finally, a payment delay of two months or more from the date of a sale/lead generation can occur often. Not mention some affiliate programs have been known for not fairly treat affiliate to track sales and leads properly as honestly as they could be. Not mention some affiliate programs announce they are not responsible for missing check. Can we ask whether they really send check?

For those big affiliate programs, like Google AdSense, Amazon, you may participate directly with their affiliate programs.

How should you choose an individual affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a affiliate program only according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website, it means relevance. For example, if you are targeting home based business on your site, links to affiliate programs with school recruiting program, text-books sale and the like may generate less revenue than banners that link to paid survey companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.

Another suggestion is not necessary to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some gurus suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are only sign up a small amount of affiliate programs.