Common Sense eCommerce

Every year we go through this: eBay announces fee changes, sellers get mad, threaten in the online forums to quit. A week or so later, life returns to normal. But is that the case this time?

This article from CNN Money, discusses a few of the eBay alternatives and it seems they are suddenly picking up new sellers by the droves. Specifically they mention OnlineAuction.Com and eCrater.Com which picked up 7,500 and 1,400 new sellers respectively in the week after eBay made its announcements.

Perhaps the competitors are smelling blood here? Even Overstock.com which had nearly thrown in the towel on their auction business has put it back on their front page and placed it more prominently.

There’s a balance in there somewhere. The big question is: How many sellers will have to leave eBay to affect that balance to the tipping point? That’s the point where the lack of sellers degrades the buying experience and therefore the buyers begin to look elsewhere.

The buyers won’t necessarily follow the sellers off eBay except for those sellers that have established strong bonds with their customers (hint: that’s the way to do it, take your customers with you!). It won’t be until the buyer traffic drops significantly that eBay will begin to notice the pinch in the bottom line. I don’t know what effect those sellers who left in the last two weeks will have on eBay if any. For the 7,500 that went to OnlineAuction.Com, I’m betting 7,500 more sellers will join eBay.

eBay, eBay Sellers, eBay Markeplace

If you’ve noticed, this blog has been in hiatus for awhile.  Not dead, just hiatus. You need them every so often.

I was blogging an awful lot about eBay and you probably won’t see that as much anymore. You see, over the last few months, I have reformed my home based business to exclude eBay. While some eBay sellers were ramping up for the holidays end of last year, I was busy winding down my eBay business.  Why?

Well the short answer is: too much work for too little money. I don’t mind doing a lot of work, but I want to see some return on my work.  And it doesn’t have to be an immediate return either. I was a Powerseller on eBay for more than 3 years and just decided my time is more valuable than what the eBay returns were giving me. 

I will still observe eBay and perhaps post an occasional blurb about it, but this blog will drift back to its original purpose: Common Sense ECommerce.

Funny how Paypal is now.  The other day, I noticed that the “add tracking” button had disappeared on all my listing.  I called support and recieved some lame explanation about some ‘changeover’.  I asked how I was supposed to notify the customers.  They said “Send the notice manually”. Yeah, right. Like I have time for that. 

So I tweaked my Dazzle software from Endicia to send the notices out. That took some tweaking because they were pretty ugly by default.  So never mind Paypal.  Besides, things are showing up rather haphazardly lately.  Today 11/4 still did not show a transaction from 11/2 although it showed some from today. Called PayPal support again.  Same lame explanation.

The new Paypal!  Very Exciting!

Such is the case with some eBay shoppers. Each week we get the questions on auction items “I need 2 of these for a gift, what’s your best price” blah blah.We respond by telling them to visit our eBay store where there are plenty more with free shipping including. And of course we include the listing number of the store listing so they’ll have no trouble finding it.

Yet we seldom hear anything from these shoppers again. It’s as though they have a natural aversion to going to an eBay store. They come to eBay to wheel and deal, and compete for a good price. There will always be that group of folks who just won’t bite on the eBay store thing.

And of course eBay doesn’t make things any easier with their whopping store fees forcing sellers to hike their prices to make a profit. Oh and it never hurts to point to out we sell them cheaper on our website (heh).

A few weeks ago, I starting noticing this little text ad nugget appearing at the bottom of each of my listings.

I remember being a little miffed at the time, but shrugged it off. Then I read Sydney Johnston’s newsletter where she says:

When you pay your eBay listing fees, what you are buying is advertising space on eBay’s giant site.”

I got to thinking, how true! And how unethical on the part of eBay. When you consider that we pay for listings on eBay (and oh how the listing fees have gone up over the years) the space inside the auction listing should be ours. At the very least, we should have a choice whether or not to display eBay advertisements. There’s no telling how much extra revenue this little ad brings to eBay. But the bottom line is that we’ve already paid for that space and we should have some control.

Aside from that, it’s not even relevant advertising. All the ones I’ve seen go to a Credit Bureau ad. Unless I’m selling something credit-related, this has no business on my auction listing. Now, I thought eBay was going to try to ‘improve the buyer experience’ this year. Isn’t that what they said? Hmmm. Dishing up junk ads is not improving, but it’s deteriorating the buyer experience if all they’re going to show is credit bureau ads.

As if that’s not bad enough, the text ad links do not initiate a new browser session. That means if the buyer clicks on it, he or she’s gone! Gone away from my listing which presumably they were intersted in to begin with.

This is one of those little things that is bad news for sellers. It’s not like we need any more things to complain about is it? Now, the ads are tied to the counters. Sydney points out that a way around is not to use the eBay counters. This might be a good reason to go with an auction management system like Vendio where counters are provided.

However, what will they do next? Build ads into the main eBay listing CSS?

Tags: eBay Credit Ads, eBay Experian Ads, eBay Listing Ads, eBay Counter Ads

eBay has a feature where you can add certain users to the “banned bidder list”. It’s self explanatory. Needless to say there has to be a pretty good reason to add a user to that list.Recently, we had user ask if he could be removed from our ban list so he could bid on an item. Hmmm. After doing some research, we found the reason he was on the list was that he decided not to pay after the auction closed because he thought the shipping was too high ($24 to send a cookware item to Thailand is not high).

At any rate, we did not reinstate him. We had to eat the fees on that listing he didn’t pay for and there was no reason to believe he would behave any differently if we let him back in the bidding game. The eBay banned bidder list serves a valuable purpose and serves as a safeguard against eBay ‘window shoppers’ who buy and don’t pay. In addition, eBay users like this can be the ones dragging down the new 5 star feedback system. Sometimes, you just have to fire the customer.

Tags: Banned eBay Buyers, eBay Feedback System, eBay Ban List, eBay Window Shoppers

I noticed this post on AuctionBytes and was really quite alarmed after I started reading some of the complaints by sellers. There are alarming complaints in both the AuctionBytes replies and in the eBay forum thread.On one hand, I can understand the idea behind this robotic removal of non performing sellers. Non performing sellers undermine the marketplace and deteriorate the buying experience.

However, I cannot appreciate the way they are implementing this. There is no apparent appeals process. Ok eBay is not a democracy, but last time I checked it is a business. eBay forgets who pays their paychecks - the eBay sellers. While they do get revenues from other sources as I was reminded by Corey Kossack, let’s face it. The lion’s share of eBay’s revenue comes from its sellers.

As Ina pointed out in her blog post, eBay has “increased the demand for customer support, but ….. capacity has not increased.” Randy Smythe has long complained of the lack of scalability in eBay’s business model. ‘One size fits all’. This cookie cutter punishment is along those same lines. Problem is, one size doesn’t fit all and there is no perfect algorithm that can catch every wayward seller perfectly.

This ‘our way or the highway’ method of doing business is not unique to eBay. I see a similar pattern with the way Google does business. There are numerous complaints about Adsense accounts all over the web suddenly getting zapped with no apparent way for the account holder to inquire or appeal the decision.

What’s an eBay seller to do? Wow this comes out like a rant. Don’t get me wrong; I still think eBay is a super place to do business. But this underscores the idea that one should not rely completely on eBay. eBay sellers should have a plan a do business off eBay as well as on eBay.

Tags: Selling on eBay, eBay Crackdown, eBay Smackdown, eBay Seller Crackdown

I was interested in researching Memory Foam as I see a lot of Memory Foam mattresses and mattress toppers for sale. But I was a bit confused as to how memory foam is measured for quality and what the “5#, 6#, etc” means.So I decided to check out eBay reviews. eBay lets sellers post reviews and somehow they get into the top 1000 of reviewers. I am not sure how that is tabulated but it must be pretty easy to get to be a Top 1000 reviewer!

Here is a review I found on eBay’s review system on Memory Foam (link here). It appears to be a fairly informative review although not all that well written. It did however, answer some basic questions for me about memory foam so I though I might check out this seller’s listings.

I thought it was odd that the listings shown along with the review were from other eBay sellers so I clicked his feedback. OOPS. Not a registered user — NARU baby. And NARU since about a year ago.

The last of his feedback looks like the seller disappeared or went under. Ok so this kind of raises an issue with eBay reviews. The obvious question here is should eBay have a Top 1000 reviewer that is NARU? In particular, should they have a Top 1000 reviewer that may have ripped people off?

There are some pretty nasty comments at the end of this sellers feedback record and that just doesn’t bode well for being a “Top 1000 Reviewer”. Granted the content of the review is probably still of value, but perhaps eBay should separate the content from the content provider when the content provider goes NARU.

Tags: eBay NARU, eBay Sellers, eBay Memory Foam, eBay Reviewers

Last week I did a brief review of HammerTap Versus TeraPeak on my Home Based Business Blog. Someone from Hammertap contacted me and let me know they’ve actually had a web-based version for quite some time:

I just wanted to clarify that HammerTap now has a web-based version. This PowerWeb version was launched last fall specifically in mind for research on the go. Users can now use any computer or IE based PDA to research their products. While this version is not sold seperately, it is included with the purchase of the complete PowerDesk (desktop) package.

At $19.95 per month, this is a pretty good value. HammerTap (formerly called DeepAnalysis) used to be a whopping $24.95 per month for the Desktop Edition. Now you can get the Desktop version along with the Web version and several other goodies.

I’ve never liked the idea of having to install software on my computer for a couple of reasons.

If it’s possible to get the job done via the web, then that is a big preference for me. In the course of my typical week, I can be on one of 3 computers and I don’t want to have to install HammerTap on all 3. I’ve got 3 computers I’m using (one of which belongs to someone else).

The second is keeping it updated - especially over multiple computers. TurboLister comes to mind. It seems like each time I use TurboLister, I have to wait for 5 minutes while it updates to the latest revision.

But one advantage to a local software product is the abiltity to easier save and retain search data. This is really important in high production researching projects because you might look at something and think, hmm. that looks ok, but I’d like to compare it to something else later in the project.

The HammerTap suite gives me the best of both worlds although I will have to test it to see if the web version is as good as TeraPeak.

Last week, the tragic Virginia Tech killing was linked to eBay in reports like this one:

Tech Shooter May Have Used eBay Account

Not that eBay is to held responsible for this tragedy, but it does tend to shine a bad light on eBay at a time when they really need some good “PR” press. They really don’t need links to unfortunate events like this.

Today, eBay came out with a statement acknowledging that Cho Seung-Hui did have an eBay account, but used it to purchase empty ammo clips and a gun holster - things that are unregulated.

Full Story Here

The other day I did an eBay Kudos, so I guess I’ll have to balance it out with a PFFT. After doing a physical count, I was trying to correct the counts on a few eBay store items.  I get this very helpful error —

This feature is temporarily unavailable
Your selections have caused errors. Please click Continue below to go back and correct your errors.
{ Id : RYI.BIZ.336, Severity : ERROR=3, Parameters : {}, Correlations : {} }

Now, that’s as clear as mud! You click continue and it goes to the start of SELL YOUR ITEM screen. HA! Someone in eBay’s programming department needs a “smackdown” lesson in error trapping and handling.  Aside from that, this seems to be a problem with the new screen only.  A few of our items still retain the old SYI screen I guess due to the fact they’ve been around for awhile in the ‘Good Til Canceled’ mode.  There is no problem with those.

I tried calling it in to Powerseller support, but they blew me off and asked me to email the error message, explaining that technical issues like that should be emailed in (or something like that).  We’ll see what they say. Anyone else seen this?

I am continually amazed at how bad some eBay listings look. I’m not talking about graphics, photos, or general appearances. I am referring to the horrible wording I see in some listings. A couple of examples (sic):

Do to numerous non-paying bidders: If you have excessive negative feedback or under 10 feedback you must email prior to bidding on the auction. I will cancel any bid that does not meet required guidelines.

Or how about this one?

I no longer ship to Canada. If you are in CANADA, do NOT bid on my items.

Funny thing is, these examples are from two different power sellers. If you want people to buy from you and get return business from them, you cannot use offensive language like this. These sellers obviously have chips on their shoulder and there are probably good reasons behind the policies they have in place. But there is always a better way to word policies such as these.

The first example is problematic for a lot of reasons. Most notably is that it fails to define what ‘excessive negative feedback’ means. The word excessive is subjective and might leave someone wondering if 2 negatives is excessive.

The second example is bizarre considering the seller’s listings can ship to North and South America. But not Canada? Some sort of explanation might be in order here.

I would not want to buy from either of these sellers, would you? In either case, offensive sellers like these certainly make the job easier for good sellers! For every seller that says NO to something, there is a seller that makes money by saying YES.

Tags: Bad eBay Sellers, Offensive eBay Sellers, Bad eBay Listings, Offensive eBay Listings

This past week, a buyer won two listings. The listings were for the same item in different color patterns. It’s unusual for one person to buy two of these things so I was not the least bit surprised when buyer wrote in:

I only want the pink one, not the black & white one, can you cancel the black and white one?

I wrote back that we could cancel it, but that we would have to charge her the final value fee plus the listing fee, explaining that it was our cost of the transaction. It only amounted to only an extra $3 which she paid. I would not have not pushed the point over that amount, however I always attempt to recoup the costs on things like this.

In this post, I talked about the mindset of non paying eBay buyers as maybe actually being ‘retail buyers’. I think this example illustrates this mindset perfectly. This buyer simply picked up 2 different variants of the same item and then decided on one. Not unlike what a buyer would do in a typical retail store or online store.

This buyer was not an eBay newbie. She had several hundred feedback points and had been on eBay for a few years. This makes me think that eBay could do a lot more to give the buyers a ‘retail system’ if that’s what they want. I know eBay stores are supposed to do that, but eBay is doing a very poor job of promoting those stores. After all, remember that they had to ‘reset the balance of the marketplace’ last year to steer sellers back to core listings. Meanwhile eBay store owners are pretty much left to fend for themselves in getting shoppers to their stores.

All my listings have incentives for the shopper to go to the store, but eBay itself needs to do more to raise awareness of the store paradigm. If shoppers desire a ‘retail experience’ versus an ‘auction experience’, then shouldn’t eBay should do more to provide that?

Tags: eBay Retail, eBay Stores, eBay Shopping, eBay Selling

Over the past few months, eBay has been rolling out a new Sell Your Item (SYI) screen. They are phasing out the old form and according to a recent announcement, they will kill the old form completely sometime in May 2007.

The new form is actually easier because it gives you access to more of the listing components on one screen then the older form. It eliminates having to move back and forth between 5 screens as the old form required. This one is a two step process form.

The reality of volume eBay selling however, is that you probably will not use the form that much. If you sell in higher volume, you can use TurboLister or a variety of other offline products. With these kinds of products, you can prepare your listing locally (offline) and just bulk upload them. This saves time from the standpoint of waiting for screens to load which even on a high speed connection, can take time.

We use TurboLister for most all our listings now. I only use the SYI form when I have to make a revision to an existing listing. However, I do give the new form a thumbs-up from a usability standpoint. eBay has a page where you can read more about the new SYI form (link here).

Tags: eBay Sell Your Item, Sell Your Item Form, eBay Selling, SYI Form

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