Common Sense eCommerce

If you’re selling on eBay in a large way, you need a quick way to account for your sales. For most of us, that means QuickBooks. Putting in each sale in QuickBooks manually however, is tedious and time-consuming to say the least and if you’re try to sell on eBay large scale, that won’t work.

Fortunately, there’s eBay Accounting Assistant (EAA). It’s a QuickBooks compatible piece of software that is free for the download if you have one or more of the following eBay Services: eBay Stores, Selling Manager, Selling Manager Pro, eBay Blackthorne products.

EAA downloads sales directly from eBay and preps them for import directly into QuickBooks. You can also do this by downloading transactions from Paypal into a QuickBooks format. But unlike that PayPal option, the EAA offers you the opportunity to map each item in each listing to an item in the QuickBooks file. This is important if you are trying to track item level profitably on eBay.

One word of caution: It’s not yet compatible with QuickBooks 2007. So if you’re thinking of upgrading QuickBooks and want to use EAA, you may have to wait a bit. eBay Accounting Assistant can be downloaded by going to “Seller Tools” and selecting “Accounting Assistant”.

Tags: eBay QuickBooks, eBay Accounting Assistant, eBay QuickBooks Integration, Exporting eBay Sales

Ah, those non paying bidders (NPB) on eBay. The ones that still think placing a bid is like window shopping. It seems the more we grow our listings on eBay, the more NPBs we get. In speaking with other sellers, I am under the impression that NPBs simply scale with your eBay business.

I have a theory about why NPBs persist on eBay. I think that many buyers may have a hard time with the commitment to pay on something that they wanted or thought they wanted.

What happens in a regular physical auction when you bid on something, win the auction, and then refuse to pay? In general, you are scolded and are probably blacklisted from that auction house. This is more or less the model eBay follows.

I suspect that many eBay buyers don’t get the auction connection and think of eBay in terms of retail. What happens when you’re in a store (say WalMart), put something in your cart, then get up to the checkout and decide you didn’t want the item — for whatever reason? It’s no big deal there; you simply give the item to the cashier and the cashier places it in a restock bin. Even online shopping systems work this way. If you order something online, you generally have the opportunity to remove it from your shopping cart prior to actually checking out.

eBay’s auction listings more or less fly in the face of this. In spite of eBay’s best efforts to inform them otherwise, I suspect that with many buyers it just doesn’t sink in that there is a real commitment to pay.

Tags: Non Paying Bidders, eBay Non Paying Bidders, eBay Buyers, Buying on eBay

Two weeks ago, Lisa Nowak was just one of many NASA astronauts. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘just’ as she did manage to break many gender, ‘good old boy’, and age barriers. Today she is, well.. news and tabloid fodder. And interestingly enough, memorabilia items from her better days are now worth a great deal more than ever before.

And where else would we see this but eBay? As I write this, a signed photo from her heyday is going for $10,000 (link here). The photo went from something sitting in a box to instant valuable memorabilia.

Would it have been worth that much prior to her arrest? It might have made some money, but hardly this level! This is proof that if you can capitalize on news items, you can turn them around for a big profit on eBay. A little lucky? You bet. A sustainable business? Hmm. Memorabilia can be a profitable business if you can make it work. But you need to have a keen eye and good instincts for possible newsworthy items. This seller gets kudos not only for having that keen eye, but remembering to mention where the proceeds are going!

Tags: eBay Collectables, Lisa Nowak eBay, eBay Memorabilia, NASA Memorabilia

Conventional eBay wisdom will say something like: don’t set up your auction listings to end on days of important events (such as the SuperBowl). A week ago Sunday I listed a bunch of stuff completely forgetting about the SuperBowl. When I realized what I did, I was prepared for some disappointing results.

But I didn’t get disappointed! Of the 23 items ending yesterday, only one did not sell and that one has been a problematic item anyway. The rest performed as well as usual, even some performing better than usual. Skip McGrath of Auction Sellers Resources reports similar observations here.

Is SuperBowl viewing down? Hardly! According to today’s news, it was the 2nd most watched SuperBowl in history with 93 million viewers. It could be that some viewers ‘multi-task’ while watching the SuperBowl. Maybe they don’t ‘completely watch’ the game - that is, maybe the bowl doesn’t get the full attention of every household member.

It could also be that the viewers are taking their wireless enabled laptops to the couch with them. Recently, according to this source, laptop sales surpassed that of desktop computers, so more people have notebook computers than ever before. And nearly all notebook computers are equipped with wireless network cards.

Who knows, but I was happy with the results. Next year, I guess I’ll just forget about it again!

Hmm. I did my research on product “x” and made my ’safe’ initial purchase from the supplier (one case of 6). Cost per item was $3.27; not a real mainstream item. It was mainly to pump up an order for some other things from the same supplier.

Typically, when I get something new in, I put them in the eBay store and send them to auction listings one by one. Each auction listing of course, has an invitational link to buy the item from the store where shipping is free.

The first auction listing was a failure. The item only sold for $3.76 - didn’t even make break even. I thought to myself - oh well, guess I won’t reorder those.

But wait! The next auction a week later sold for $10.87! Not only that, but within the last 12 hours of the auction, 2 were sold from the store at $12.95. What?

Well sometimes you just can’t tell by one listing and it’s always worth a second look. Sometimes eBay can be a very irregular market. By the way, nothing changed in the listing - only the week it was listed. Guess that product will make my ‘reorder list’ after all!

Tags: eBay Selling, Selling on eBay, Selling Products on eBay, eBay Listing Success

If you have an eBay business, do you treat your customers as ‘one shot deals’ or would you like to have your customers do future business with you? The second option is generally preferable for long term business and customer relationship building. You can use PayPal and Microsoft Access to quickly build a customer list from the eBay PayPal records. This is a mini tutorial and it assumes some basic knowledge of working with files and working with MS Access.

1) Log into your PayPal Account

2) Go to History, then Download My History

3) Using ‘Custom Date Range’ you can type in any date range. Under ‘File types for Download’ select ‘Tab Delimited - Completed Payments’

4) Click ‘Download History’ button. This will prompt you to save the file to your hard drive.

5) Close PayPal and open Microsoft Access

6) Select ‘Tables’, then ‘New’, then ‘Import Table’

7) Select your file (you will have to change your file type to ‘text’). This will launch the Access Import Text Wizard.

8) In the Import Text Wizard, you will encounter this screen that asks you about your delimiters. Check the box “First Row Contains Field Names” and under ‘Text Qualifier’ select the quotation mark (”).

9) The rest of the wizard is self explanatory. One option worth mentioning is the table creation option. You will have an option to create a new table or add into an existing table. If this is your first time, you would create a new table otherwise, you can choose the “in an existing table” option. (That would append the records to the existing table).

What’s in this table? Everything having to do with each PayPal transaction so it should be treated as confidential data! It will have the payment details, the item details and more importantly, the customers shipping address and email address.

What can you do with the table? The addresses are great for sending your customers followup ‘thank you notes’ or ‘thank you postcards’ in the mail. Using Access, you can sort the file by just about any field and using advanced queries, pick out only customers that, for example, spent a certain amount or live in a certain state. Access also makes it easy to print out mailing labels. Even if you’re not sure how you’ll use it, this will help you quickly build your customer list from your eBay sales.

One final note: If the customers didn’t pay via Paypal, they obviously won’t be included. For us, those customers are relatively few (for example, the ones who pay by money order) so we just add them in manually when we have time.

Tags: eBay Customer List, Paypal Records to MS Access, Exporting PayPal Records, eBay Followup Marketing