This post has been stewing in the back of my mind for the last week to ten days, but each time I start to think about writing it a little voice in the back of my head says “Get over it. Why should you care?”

But today several things came together that made me see red. They also made me realize that, even though it’s gone through several transitions over the years, caring and not wanting to see people being taken advantage of and paying good money for questionable information about eBay all for the almighty buck was why The Auction Rebel originally came about.

The rest of this post is totally a rant and represents my personal thoughts and feelings. Some of you probably won’t like, or appreciate it, and if that’s the case I invite you to hit your back button and leave. In fact, I invite you to never come back again. But, I believe this needs to be said and, with one exception, I don’t see anyone else williing to say it.

This morning the most recent issue of Paul Myer’s TalkBiz News newsletter showed up in my mail box. In his current newsletter Mr. Myers goes on a little rant of his own and one of the things he says is:

“It’s been speculated for quite a while that there are lots of
“gurus” who will promote absolutely everything and anything if
there’s a big enough commission attached.

Some of the “fire sales” in the past couple of years lent a
lot of credibility to that belief, since much of the stuff
they included was, to put it bluntly, pure crap.”

A short time later I toddled over to Lesley Fountain’s The Friends In Business Forum and read the latest posts on this thread.

I do not understand how anyone, in good conscious, can recommend or promote this program and I’ve questioned this in the past. To my knowledge, the only other person who is saying “wait a minute” is Sydney Johnston.

The fact is that the person who is providing all the “how to succeed on eBay” secrets and information in this program closed up ship on eBay and declared bankruptcy a little more than three months ago. As one of my granddaughters is fond of saying, “DUH?”

From what I’ve read, when questioned about this by affiliates, the response by the International Marketing Center (IMC), the company that sells the program, is that Mr. Dupsky’s bankruptcy was caused by his financial investment in a software development project that went bad, and had nothing to do with his eBay business.

From my point of view, that dog don’t hunt for several reasons.

First, I read several articles about Mr. Dupsky’s unfortunate circumstances in March of this year, shortly after he filed bankruptcy. Although his eBay auction business and eBay store had already been closed at that point, I looked back over his closed listings and a few things were obvious.

• His eBay business consisted primarily of selling close-out items, drop-ship items, or items available from numerous so called wholesale sources. In other words, items thousand of others were selling on eBay also.
• Nearly all auctions had extremely low starting bids of $1 or less - many $.01 and no reserve.
• From the final selling price of most items that sold, it was obvious that Mr. Dupsky may well have been making $8,000,000 a year, but he sure wasn’t doing it on eBay. He may have been selling $8,000,000 worth of product, but there’s a big difference between selling $8,000,000 and making $8,000,000.

Second, let’s assume he was making $8,000,000 a year from eBay. Let’s also assume he’d invested as much as a million dollars into the software project.

If the software project went completely sour and the million dollar investment was a complete loss, why would you close down a perfectly good business that you were making $8,000,000 a year from? It would seem to me that the ebay business would be your way out of the mess. It makes no sense to me.

Third, while I have no legal background, years ago I was the vice president of a good sized credit union and I sat in on several bankruptcy hearings and it would seem to me that a bankruptcy judge would look a little unkindly upon anyone who shut down a perfectly good, profitable business that was bringing in $8,000,000 a year and then declared bankruptcy. My guess is his first question might be, why wasn’t the business still running to help repay creditors?

All of this brings me back to my original question. How can anyone, on good conscious, recommend or promote this program? The answer to that question is simple - $65. That’s the affiliate payout for every program sold. If just ten people a month buy through their affiliate link that’s $650 a month delivered into their bank account each month which is probably a lot more than the vast majority of them ever made on eBay.

IMC is still marketing this program as though Mr. Dupsky was still cranking out a few million a year on eBay. In fact, as Sydney Johnston pointed out, they’ve developed a back end product that sells for a lot more than the $197 price tag of the original program.

The late Cory Rudl built IMC into a highly respected company that sold some very good products. Out of respect for Mr. Rudl and IMC’s reputation, I would suggest that it’s time to close the door on this program, accept whatever losses they may incur in doing so, and get on with the business of developing and promoting other programs that further and build upon that reputation.

Baring that, they should at least be up-front with potential customers about the circumstances surrounding the program as Sydney Johnston suggests.

For affiliates, if they truly feel this is a worthwhile program, then they should at least have the balls to stand up and say something like “oh yeah, just as an afterthought, the guy who wrote this has closed up shop on eBay and declared bankruptcy, but I still highly recommend it.”

For those who are considering purchasing this program, I’m sure there is some basic useful information inside if you are just getting started selling on eBay. But you should ask yourself if simple “how-to-get-started” information is worth $197, because once you get past the basics a lot of it just might be a recipe for disaster rather than a recipe for $8,000,000.

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