Surely you have heard the saying “Do not put your eggs in one” a piece of advice / warning I never could really get my head around, until NOW!!

You see for me putting everything in one basket so to speak was easier. I found it less time consuming, easier and hassle free. But in the Internet Marketing World and when making money online this is something you should never do.

Today I am going to tell you what happen to me recently when I didn’t heed to this warning so hopefully you will learn from my costly mistakes.

For people who know or do not know I make comfortable passive income from eBay and have been doing so many years. I try to expand my inventory many ways I can sourcing my products everywhere from charity shops, UK wholesalers to wholesalers from around the world. It was during this process that I came across some action figure logo pendants. I did some research on eBay and quickly realized that it was a hot selling product with a few hundred sellers selling them. This didn’t worry me because the price I had sourced them at I knew I could undercut many sellers and make a health profit out of it.

Well you know what I did next I bought a couple of dozen from the international wholesaler. Now here at this point of the story I would like to say that I got the goods, listed them on eBay and made a killing out of them, end of story. However this is far from end of the story, yes I did list them on eBay and make killing with the ones I sold. But a few days into the listing I opened my eBay account to get a message alert from eBay say my listing had been removed due to using a stock photo, so I took my own photo and re listed the item.

All was fine for another few days until I opened my eBay account again to get another message alert saying the same listing had been removed due to VeRO violation (Verified Rights Owner Programme). Not knowing any better at the time I thought I could re-word my listing and relist the item again as other sellers where still selling their items so why couldn’t I?

However doing this was the biggest lesson and the worst move I made for my business. Because once I relisted it, it was removed again. And this time I didn’t just see a policy violation message in my eBay inbox I also saw a 30 day account suspension where I could not list, edit or sell anything for 30 days!!!

To make the situation even worse it was coming up to Christmas the busiest and profitable time of year for my business. I started panicked not knowing what I could do, this was my income I relied on. I phoned eBay customer services begging them to lift the suspension from my account but they were absolutely NO help at all. All I could do was watch my eBay earnings shrink from to nothing. 🙁

All my eggs in my basket got smashed!!!!

The situation became a nightmare when I realized I was stuck with over $1000 worth of stock I didn’t know where to sell the item, I couldn’t sell it on eBay even when my 30 days was up. I didn’t have my own website I had no idea where to sell the item to get my investment back.

This is where it truly dawned on me I had put all my eggs in one basket, so I started to take them out. I started researching and discovering how to sell on Amazon and started listing my items on Amazon, which they did not have a problem with it. I was able to recoup my investment and make some profit out of the item.

I learned a few lessons with this ordeal

Do not rely on one income stream source for anything, for me at the time it was eBay and because my account was suspended near Christmas I lost a lot of money due to their polices. Even in the internet marketing world you can’t rely on one source of traffic to make money. Don’t just use Facebook, for example, to get traffic to your site. Because out of the blue Facebook can change their policy and from having hundreds of visits a day you can be reduced to nothing overnight. Resulting in ZERO sales and making ZERO money.

Don’t rely on a 3^rd party website for your income as they have control over your income and if they change their policy that affects your income you can see it reduce drastically or even worse see if disappear overnight.

Always try and stay control of your business.

Until Next Time . . . . .