It made me start thinking about double checking my eBay “TO DO” list.  Am I prepared for the holiday? 

Here is just a quick glimpse of what I like to do to prepare for the Holiday rush:

- List all remaining Holiday items – clothes, toys, gift items.  You can’t sell it if they don’t see it!  I always tell my readers to just keep listing to your store.  List all seasons, all the time.  Don’t ever wait and hold on to an item because you feel it is off season and no one will buy it.  Some of my best sales are from off season items. 

- Clean out the toy boxes!! We do this twice a year – before Easter and before Christmas.  Both times we list any sellable toys at least a month before the holiday.  Any earnings go towards new toys, it’s usually a great motivator to get my 6 year old to write a Christmas list so we have a solid goal of the money we need to raise.

- Stock up on shipping supplies!  I know a lot of eBay sellers get their supplies off of eBay.  Boxes, packing supplies, postage supplies, mailing envelopes, extra printer paper, ink…etc.  A couple of my absolute favorites for supplies and postage off eBay are, Uline.com and Stamps.com.  Stamps.com has a promo code – C-8RRH-ZNJ – if you’re interested in checking them out.

- Crock-Pot meals! – Nothing is more satisfying than sitting down to an already prepared meal after a busy day on eBay!  Prepare it when you wake up and it’s cooking all day.  Keeping a schedule is key to making sure your family is not neglected – and you need your down time as well.  Keep crock pot recipes handy so you can fix it and forget it.

Good luck this holiday season!

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Create Multiple Custom Store Categories

It makes total sense!    eBay lets you create up to 300 Categories AND Subcategories in a single store.  That’s a lot of categories!!  Make sure you are using relevant, popular keywords in your custom category names.  This will ensure you are placing on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called “Spark an idea Thursday.” As part of this tradition, I’ll be sharing with you my experiences and interpretations for each week’s topic for those of you who sell products or services online.

I invite you to grab our image over there to the right and carry the tradition through to your own blog. If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

The theme of this week’s Spark an Idea Thursday is: Spark an Idea about Email.

This is a great Spark an Idea topic!  In one of my previous posts, I spoke briefly about the eBay DSR (Detailed Seller Rating) Scores. 

Communication (one part of the DSR score) is such an integral part of everything eBay, especially as an eBay seller. 

It all starts with your first email to the buyer who purchased one of your items.  This is the email that will ultimately win the future relationship of repeat sales.  You’ll want to walk through every step of the transaction from the begining, to the end and beyond.

Do you do a little Happy Dance when you sell something from your eBay store, or have an auction that has ended way higher than your wildest expectations?  I know I do a little dance! 

Well, so does the person who won that auction or found that something special in your eBay store!  They’re pumped and ready to receive their items as soon as they submit payment! 

Here are a few tips to follow up with, using email to create a lasting relationship.

When you start to build your email list, you will want to utilize the email marketing tool on eBay.  This is a wonderful tool and can be fully automated.  Mine is set to shoot out an email once a week, showing any newly listed items.  

Before you know it, you’ll begin to see repeat buyers and track your progress to see what is working best.

Happy Selling! 

Having a store will save you time and money. Currently, store listing fees are only .03-.05 cents per listing, depending on your asking price. If you elect to use the GTC (Good ‘Til Canceled) option, this will enable your items to automatically re-list at the end of 30 days, giving you more time to concentrate on making sales. You can list hundreds of items to your store inventory for practically nothing, as opposed to maintaining auctions all of the time. With store items, fees will still apply when your item sells, but the over-head for stocking your store is a lot less than constantly running and re-listing auctions each week. An added advantage is that you will be saving time by stocking your store rather than bothering with listing auctions. By listing all types of items throughout all seasons, you are opening yourself up to a wide variety of buyers. Shipping worldwide will also allow unlimited potential for buyers in other parts of the world who are in opposite seasons and in need of items that may be difficult for them to find at the time, but readily available for you to sell in your shop.

A major key to having a successful store is to continually keep it stocked. This lets you build your inventory to include hundreds of items. The more you list, the more you sell – it’s been proven time and time again. Why? eBay is a wonderful generator of automatic traffic, built in for you to harness without the needed technical experience of running an actual separate online store.

Having an eBay store is your own slice of the Internet. Buyers will check out your store, and by cross-selling other items within each item description, you will be able to recommend items in your store that may interest them. If you offer combined or discounted shipping for multiple
items purchased, customers will be compelled to buy more from you at one time. A store also allows sellers to use features like the Markdown Manager which is not available to non-store owners.

eBay offers tons of additional features at no additional cost. These added features will help you build up clientele for email marketing and more. This will allow you to keep in touch and let your personal email list know of special discounts available to them first before it’s open to the public.

Your store gives you your own unique style. Having a personal, unique design allows you to build your brand and specialize, which encourages repeat buyers. Once you master the features of your eBay store, then it’s time to break out and take advantage of outside opportunities to attract more buyers to your product.

When you find your balls unexpectedly dropping, one of the most convenient features of an eBay Store is the Vacation Settings option. You can keep your “eBay Store ball” at the very least hovering by putting your store on vacation while you are unavailable.

In short, the Vacation Settings feature allows you to keep all of your listings available for buyers to search and buy, however it automatically notifies them in each listing and/or your store header that you will be unavailable to answer questions or ship until a specified time. This keeps your buyers’ options open, but prevents them from having a negative buying experience because they are expecting immediate response times from you.

Hmmm, I could have used one of those while I was unavailable the last couple of weeks here at eMoms at Home, huh? Sorry about that. But I digress.

The Vacation Settings feature is just one of dozens of fantastic features available through eBay Stores. However, as a new or prospective seller, do you need an eBay Store right away? Can you be a successful seller without one? When is the right time to open one?

No. Yes. And when you have enough inventory that your volume begins to demand more flexible selling options.

Huh? What? Let me explain.

When I first began selling on eBay, I did not have an eBay Store. In fact, I was already a PowerSeller before I opened my store. I did perfectly well just listing all of my products individually, using only the most basic of eBay selling tools to do so.

At a minimum fee of $15.95 a month, I saw no benefit to opening an eBay Store in the beginning. Aside from the fee I would have to pay, I did not want any of my listings to show up in the “search stores” results rather than the primary search results. I knew that most buyers don’t even know that they can search Store Inventory listings, in addition to the basic listings search at the top of the page. Were you aware of that?

Simply put, when a buyer goes into eBay to search for something, they usually only use that little search bar at the top of each page. Items listed as “Store Inventory,” meaning that it is not an Auction-style or Buy It Now listing, only show up via a link below the search results that says “See additional Buy It Now items from eBay Store sellers.” Store Inventory will show up in the main search results only when 30 or fewer results are present in the Auction-style or Buy It Now primary active listings. Depending on what you are selling and what search terms your buyers are using to find your listings, hitting a result of 30 or fewer listings is uncommon.  Therefore, if your buyers don’t know how or don’t think to search the Store Inventory listings, your listings go unnoticed.

I should note that there are visibility benefits to the alternate search results available through eBay Stores and Store Inventory, including showing up in search engine results (with proper SEO managment), as well as the opportunity to be included in eBay Express listing results.  However, at the time, I saw listing products through an eBay Store as too little return for the effort, particularly because eBay Express was such a new feature that few buyers yet understood.

As far as I was concerned, I was doing just fine without an eBay Store at that moment. I made a point to include a link to my “view seller’s other items” page in the content of every listing and that seemed to be all of the cross-promotion that I needed.

Eventually, my needs did change, however. I began selling an extensive line of bath and body products, encompassing half a dozen scents and a dozen products for each scent. Not including the combination packages I sold and relists of sold items, I was launching more than 75 individual listings for that single line of products each week. Including the combination packages and the other unrelated listings I was running, I was launching well over 100 listings every 7-10 days.

Taking into consideration relist fees for items that didn’t sell immediately, and I was seeing an eBay fees bill of hundreds of dollars a month. Something had to change. I needed a better way to manage my volume. Cue the eBay Store.

I opened my eBay Store in order to be able to utilize their Store Inventory listing option. Store Inventory listings allow you to list items for a fraction of the listing fees of regular Auction-style and Buy It Now listings, as well as choose for the listings to run either 30 days or Good ’til Canceled.

Store Inventory listings allowed me to list dozens of products at a fraction of the price, organized by category, and allow them to run until sold. I organized my store in such a way that buyers could easily build their own gift packages, seeing all of the products I had available in a format I could control. I finally had a use for an eBay Store and it worked beautifully.

However, I absolutely believe that I had no real use for an eBay store before I reached the point of running into volume control issues. Sure, I could have begun building my brand sooner, but I also would have cut into my primary search result returns and marketing opportunities, something that is very important for beginning sellers.

I chose to open an eBay Store when it became clear that the benefits would outweigh the detriments (i.e. lower listing fees coupled with ease of package-building for customers vs. lower main search results), not to mention when it would easily be able to pay for itself in both money and saved time through managing relistings.

You don’t have to be the most polished, professional seller right out of the gate, complete with a dazzling storefront and logo.  You can be polished and professional on a smaller scale, at first.  Focus on your individual listings. Learn what works. Keep it simple. An eBay Store is a fabulous tool, well worth every penny… however, hold off until you are no longer pinching those pennies. You can always open one tomorrow.

However, a lot of these additional features and tools also promise to dip into your pocket a bit.

The question is, “Is it advisable for a seller with big plans and grand goals to pay for extra selling tools right away?”

The simple answer is, “No. Save your money until you make some money.”

But wait, doesn’t it take money to make money? Yes and no. Between your listing fees and any costs that may be incurred through building your stock (if you plan to sell items you don’t already own), you’ll be handing over plenty of money to eBay and PayPal over these first few auctions. If you aren’t careful, you could easily nickel and dime yourself out of your profit in the beginning.

You have plenty of time to pace yourself.

In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at one of those extra selling services that eBay provides. Services that I highly recommend, but not right out of the gate for a new seller. Not necessarily.

Marketplace Research

Marketplace Research is a paid tool that, for selling purposes, allows sellers to research up to 90 days of completed items data for specific search terms. For a fee, you can research and analyze:

• average sold prices
• average start prices
• sold prices range
• sold/ unsold ratio (okay, you have to do the math, but the numbers are there)
• top searches by category (this is great for deciding what to buy, even if you have no idea where to start)
• average bids per item vs. average Buy It Now prices (this helps determine demand, as well as listing format)
• active items metrics also available, so you can keep an eye on your current competition

There are many more features, but this gives you an idea of the usefulness of the tool. The subscription levels break down as follows:

• $2.99 for 2 days (slightly limited access but great to try it as a test run)
• $9.99 per month (mid-level access, though everything you will need in the beginning is there)
• $24.00 per month (full access)

In short, Marketplace Research is a fantastic complement to running Completed Listings Searches on your own. It does all of the averaging for you, breaking it down into easy-to-read charts and graphics. It culls all of the numbers you need and does it with style.

However, I highly recommend that no matter at what level or when you decide to subscribe to Marketplace Research, you continue running manual Completed Listings Searches on your own. You still need to be researching individual listings, seeing first-hand what is moving and why. Even a quick skimming of your Completed Listings results will give you more of a feeling for what sells than pure numbers can deliver.

eBay is not just a numbers game. I can’t say it enough: eBay works best when it is personal. In this case, that means that you educate yourself on the numbers, but you keep your eye on what your potential buyers want and need. What speaks to them. If you can learn to recognize that, as well as arm yourself with solid research, you will be unstoppable.

Next up: The ultimate eBay selling tool… the eBay store. Do you need it? Why? When? Can you be a successful seller without it?

In the meantime, anyone running Marketplace Research and want to share your findings? We don’t need specifics (that’s up to you), but I’d love to hear how your research is going. And, yes, I’ll be answering more of your posted and emailed questions coming right up.

Apparently, very few people actually do their research before trying to sell on eBay. What came very easily to me did so, in large part, due to the fact that I tempered my excitement enough to do my homework. I mean, any idiot knows to do that, right?

Wrong.

A couple of months after beginning to sell on eBay, I got a call from a friend whose boyfriend was a web designer. Let’s call him Bob. According to my friend, Bob had accepted a job helping a woman launch an eBay store. She lived in lower Alabama and had decided to sell local goods that she thought might move well given their Southern homemade flair. Bob’s job was to design her eBay store and help her launch her first few auctions, tweaking template designs and working on her business stationery for invoices, among other things. Somewhere along the line they had run into a snag or two, though, so he wanted to talk to me. I jumped at the chance to talk to Bob because I had been considering hiring him to design a store banner for my own store.

I’m not sure exactly what kind of problems I expected Bob to be having with this eBay store, but I remember thinking that they would be far too difficult for me to figure out, if this web designer couldn’t, however at least I would have an ice breaker to talk to him about design. At this point, I was still thinking that my eBay success was more or less a fluke, and I admit I was a little hesitant to show my cards when pressed on real details of how to run an eBay store.

This would be my first lesson in how a little diligence goes a long way on eBay. Folks, the very fact that you are reading this blog has already put you leaps and bounds ahead of the mass majority of eBay sellers currently hawking their wares. I was about to learn that even the “professional eBay store builders” are just taking shots in the dark half the time.

Bob gave me a little history on the eBay store he was helping to set up, as background to his problem. The store owner had contacted him with her ideas for what she wanted to sell, as she already had the products, but she wanted a professional looking store template. She had never sold on eBay before, but she was familiar with retail sales and was confident that she could make a profit with little effort.

Bob set up an impressively extravagant storefront for her, beautiful, if not slightly complicated listing templates, and walked her through how to launch her first dozen or so auctions. Then… nothing. Nothing sold. She relisted. Nothing sold. She relisted again. Nothing sold.

At this point, she had listed dozens of items a handful of times and was realizing that within another relisting or two she would have eaten up her profit in listing fees. What was she doing wrong? She had beautiful products, they were priced similarly to identical products in stores in town, her listings looked professional… what was she doing wrong?

I sat down at my computer as Bob told me the story and then asked him for the eBay store URL. A couple of things stood out right away:

The first thing I noticed, other than the beautiful store banner and listings, was that her pictures were not her own. Meaning, she had not taken the photographs but had rather copied them from either other websites or had been given them by the distributer. Granted, these were locally made craft items, so the photographs didn’t come from a mass-produced drop shipper, but you could still tell immediately that they weren’t photographs as taken by the seller. They didn’t have the “these items are sitting next to me in my home/office/studio” look to them. The more you shop and research on eBay, the more easily you’ll be able to spot these types of photographs. We’ll talk more about the importance of photographs later, but you do want the buyer to believe that you actually have the item to some extent.

The next red flag popped up as soon as I searched for similar items in the Completed Listings search form. Yes, lots of similar items were listed on eBay all the time, as Bob had mentioned, however very few actually sold. In fact, the ones that did sell were selling for a fraction of the starting bids of Bob’s project’s listings. Granted, those selling for so much less were clearly of lower quality, but the higher quality products were not selling at all.

How had Bob and his client missed this?

I asked Bob what kind of research either he or his client had done before opening the eBay store. He said that they compared prices around town in local gift shops and ran a few searches on eBay to see if similar items were listed. He then said, “We couldn’t believe how many people were listing very similar products on eBay, and ours were so much nicer, too.”

• My question to Bob was, “How many sellers were selling those products through their listings versus just listing them and ending up with no bids?” Can you guess what Bob said? “What do you mean? How are we supposed to know what has actually sold other than watching every auction through to the end?”

Neither he nor his client had ever researched the Completed Listings Search. Had they done so, rather than just searching the active listings, they would have seen that those dozens and dozens of active listings were ending with no bids and doing so consistently.

There was no market on eBay for what his client was selling.

That may seem a harsh conclusion to have come to, but all of the market research you need is right at your fingertips on eBay. They could have saved themselves hours of work and a ton of money if they would have just done some very simple research. There are many products that just will not sell, even if they sell like gangbusters in your own local stores.

The simplest and most important bit of research you can do when deciding whether or not selling a certain item on eBay will work for you is using the Completed Listings Search feature. Some basics, though I promise it is self explanatory once you get in there:

From the Advanced Search page, type in the product you want to research and then check the “completed listings only” box. The search results will then be limited to, you guessed it, only listings that have already ended.

If the listing ended up with a winning bid, the price will be listed in green. If it did not sell, the price is listed in red.

The listings are ordered by most recently ended first by default, but I usually re-sort the results to show the highest ending bids first, to give me an idea of what my best case scenarios might be. If the highest ending bids don’t come close to your target profit, given how much you will have to pay for the items yourself or what you consider your time to be worth, you can pretty much wrap up your research right there.

We’ll delve much deeper into the maze that is pricing strategies later, but you will want to begin considering what your goals are while you research your prospective auction items. When all is said and done, do you want to bring in a profit equal to $10 for every hour of your time that you put into this? Is there a minimum profit you would accept per auction? For instance, is it worth it to you to research, design, launch, manage, and ship an auction for an end profit of $5, or is it closer to $25?

Keep these goals in mind while running your Completed Items searches. You will quickly learn to spot which results are going to yield listing opportunities that are worth your time and effort and which are of no use to pursue further, at least given the current eBay market trends.

So now is the time… Grab your brainstorming list of goodies you would love to sell on eBay and start running some Completed Listings searches. Make notes about the highest final bids those items receive, as well as how frequently they sell versus how many auctions end “in the red.” What is the average selling price? Take note of how they sold, also. Did they sell through a Buy It Now purchase or through a bidding war? This information will come in handy later.

The Completed Listings search is also where you will learn what works in terms of auction listing styles. Take note of how the ended listings with the highest bids look. Are they polished? Cluttered? What do the photographs look like? What impression about the seller do you get from the item description? Anything? Would you have bought from this particular seller and why?

I realize that this post is a bit long, but the Completed Listings Search is going to be your absolute best friend forever as an eBay seller. This is that girlfriend that you run home and call after flirting with the cute boy at the grocery store. Only this time around, it’s a computer and you’ll be rushing home from stumbling across the find of the century at a salvage store. The more familiar you are with how the Completed Listings Search works, the faster you will be able to make decisions about what finds you need to pounce on and which you need to let pass.

Now get to searching! Do your research! Then come back and share your finds. Next time I am going to share some of the research I have done myself on a few of your shared brainstorming ideas. I know I said I was going to do it this time, but whew, you must be tired at this point… and you still have homework to do!

BFF! LYLAS!
Megan

(that’s Best Friends Forever and Love Ya Like A Sister for you boys out there that didn’t pass notes in junior high. )