43 of 44 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dumber than Dummies - A Waste of Time., Sep 21 2005
By Marcus Abundus - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Your Ebay Traffic the Smart Way: Use Froogle, Datafeeds, Cross-Selling, Advanced Listing Strategies, and More to Boost Your Sales on the Web's #1 Auction Site (Paperback)
First of all I am shocked, shocked I tell you that the American Management Association would publish a series of books of this low caliber.
Like most things these days the buildup and hype is overshawdowed by the delivery. On the back cover of the book it states that "This unvelievably powerful book shows step-by-step how to get all of your items listed not only on eBay but also on Amazon.com..." but it doesn't it only briefly mentions Amazon; in two places in only a very minor way (check it out for youself, use the look inside to check the back cover, table of contents, and the index.)
This is the most simplistic of internet books I have ever read...with all the the practical internet nutrition as a bag of skittles. Most chapters are no more than 7 or eight pages, with unbeleivably huge font type and paragraph headings that it ressembles a kids book.
For example Chapter 10, Creating Yahoo Ads, totals less than two full pages!!! This chapter only has about 48 (FORTY EIGHT) lines of full text, about what a sixth grade reader would expect.
I first picked up the book because of the cover text which states, "Use Froogle, Datafeeds, Cross selling, Advanced Listing Strategies and more to boost sales on the webs #1 auction site."
Being interested in the concept of datafeeds I was dissapointed when I got to that portion of the book.
One other mention here. The author does a good job of making a plug for his other books and websites, but I suggest you go to his website. For someone that is making money on the internet and writing books about it the site looks like those from 10 years ago, about the time eBay was started. It has the coolness factor of white shoes with plaid pants. I will say though that he did have a good idea with the diagram about linking multiple websites on page 127.
Very dissapointed. Do your self a favor and look for other ebay books.
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Waste of time, shallow, filled with spelling errors, Dec 3 2005
By Brian - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Your Ebay Traffic the Smart Way: Use Froogle, Datafeeds, Cross-Selling, Advanced Listing Strategies, and More to Boost Your Sales on the Web's #1 Auction Site (Paperback)
The book is so bad that I'm compelled to review it so that others do not make the same mistake and waste their time as I have.
* Many of the chapters are 2-3 pages each. This would have been less annoying if there was valuable & concise information in those few pages. However, the ideas are shallow, not well supported, but the author rambles and repeats them over & over.
* Spelling errors -- for example, "umbrella" was spelled as "unbrella" and "advertise" as "advertsie" and these were just two I noticed without even looking very closely. This is small thing but makes you think that the author just threw the book together.
* Overall, the book is very conversational & unprofessional. The author used sentence fragments in almost every paragraph, and many times the author would introduce a topic by asking "What is XX? Well I'll tell you." (literally, this is the sentence structure, word for word, what was used over & over).
* Author advises for several topics (e.g., photographing items to sell) that the reader should buy his other books to learn more in depth. This is frustrating since nothing in the book is covered in any depth.
I read through this book in about an hour, and it was enough to decide to return this and look to get other Ebay books instead.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
A one idea book, Sep 24 2005
By Dee "Knowledge Seeker" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Your Ebay Traffic the Smart Way: Use Froogle, Datafeeds, Cross-Selling, Advanced Listing Strategies, and More to Boost Your Sales on the Web's #1 Auction Site (Paperback)
This book has one idea -- feed from a data base -- and he beats it to death. It is not really helpful beyond the data base idea.