Increase sales without reducing prices

Increasing our international exposure has allowed us to sell more of our current inventory without dropping prices.  The set up cost have also been pretty minimal with the only a few template tweaks required.  Our lovely European interns have helped with the translation.

Easy to set up

Using a product like eSellerPro, the setup of additional marketplaces is pretty trivial, if a bit fiddly on eBay.  For example, eBay categories are different on different countries and so we had to build a lookup table.

…But

Delivery causes multiple headaches

The biggest problem we have had with international sales is with delivery.  Firstly, customers either don’t realise that items are being delivered from abroad or have unrealistic expectations about delivery times.  Secondly, international deliveries seem to be delayed and go missing more often.  It does not really help that our eCommerce platform, eSellerpro only supports that standard character set (WHY OH WHY OH WHY?)

Feedback problems

Anecdotally, it would seem that European buyers are generally less likely to leave feedback, and more likely to leave bad feedback if they feel something went wrong.  Most of the feedback was due to perceived late delivery of items.  Things reached a bit of a crunch point the other day and we had to engage in some rather undignified pleeding to get some feedback removed so as to avoid being kicked off Amazon.fr

Translation requirements

As would be expected, we now get many more queries in European languages.  Google translate is surprisingly useful for deciphering these and we also make us of boiler plate customer service replied using Zendesk.  About 50% of our questions are along the lines of ‘where is my item?‘.

Export your store is an interesting new service which allows eBay sellers to quickly load their inventory into the Amazon marketplace.  Being both an eBay and an Amazon seller I know only too well:

• uploading inventory on multiple platforms is a real pain
• selling on Amazon has a massive potential for sales.  At Hello Baby we make over 50% of our sales through Amazon UK, FR and DE

1. Please explain briefly how your product works and how it benefits customers:
Our service lets you export your eBay store to the Amazon Marketplace in a few clicks. The service is easy to use and helps sellers increase sales and benefit from what the Amazon Marketplace has to offer – reaching a wide variety of customers and markets.

A seller can choose which items he wants to export to Amazon. Our service lets you choose the items and then review and edit item descriptions, key features, product codes, condition, price and quantity with minimum effort.
Once finishing the review, the export is completed automatically, notifying the seller via email when the items are on Amazon.

2. What kind of eBay sellers would most benefit from selling on Amazon?
Any seller wishing to increase his or hers sales will truly benefit from our service. Becoming a Multi-Channel seller with a vast selling span has never been easier.

Our customers are very diverse sellers, selling items ranging from electronics, art, fashion apparel and collector items.
Moreover, we think that selling on both platforms is a prospective strategy because of the stats that show that Amazon and eBay are growing rapidly. Amazon is the largest online shopping site on the internet attracting 20 million visitors a month followed by eBay which attracts 15 Million visitors.

3. From my experience of uploading products to Amazon, most categories require a barcode. Does your software support this?
Yes, our service supports defining item parameters such as ISBN, UPC and EAN codes.

The main product code input is as follows:

• ISBN, UPN, EAN parameters that can be added manually by the seller.
• If the codes above are part of the eBay listing, our system will recognize this and import this data automatically.
• Usage of the “Amazon Product Match” system.

4. What happens if a product being listed is already in the Amazon catalogue? How does your software pick this up?
Continuing, what we stated above, the service has a product matching, automatic process which analyzes if the product is already in the Amazon catalogue. The match is based on item title, description and code (ISBN / UPC / EAN).

5. Which countries are supported?
At the current time, we support the Amazon.com domain. In the near future we will support the UK and other domains.
We see expanding to these domains a very important objective.

6. What are your plans for the future?
We’re planning to expand our service so that a seller’s eBay and Amazon stores \ items are fully synchronized, giving him or her full control over inventory, selling information and enabling them to maximize ones selling opportunities.

• “Sorry but we don’t sell to online only retailers”
• “Sorry but we don’t allow our products to be sold on eBay”

Last week we even got ‘sacked’ by one of our suppliers who had decided they no longer wanted to sell to an online only business.  All very tedious.

So what exactly is wrong with online only businesses?  Whilst I can sympathise that brands don’t want just anyone selling their stuff, having a shop seems to be a pretty arbitrary distinction.  I think that the reasons are as follows:

• Online only retailers are people working out of their front rooms and so are not reputable businesses (I exaggerate, but there is more than a touch of this)
• Online only retailers have a lower cost base and so can undercut businesses with a physical presence
• Online only retailers offer a worse level of service.  With no shop people cannot try before buying and can’t get proper advice on fitting etc

Naturally, being an online only retailer, I do not agree with the logic behind any of these points.

• Reputable business.  Obviously on the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.  Whilst I can sympathise that brands don’t want just anyone selling their stuff, in my view there are better ways of selecting resellers e.g. VAT registered, Ltd company
• Undercutting.  In my experience the worst offenders are the companies with a physical store e.g. Argos, Kiddicare etc.
• Level of service.  With feedback systems on the web, bad service is much more easily exposed. Furthermore, if you live in Dundee and buy a pram some a company in Peterborough, you are hardly going to visit their shop if it goes wrong.

Finally, with the internet still showing strong growth, ignoring companies who only sell through the web is rowing against the tide………

My theory has come unstuck with eBay, who have amazed me with the ineffiency of their customer service.  Recently, an error in the configuration of my listing software caused me to list around 10,000 shop inventory items for a very short period of time costing me around £1,000.  I was pretty upset, thinking of all the things I could have spent the money on, but then I cheered up.  I know, I thought, I will write a letter to the head of eBay UK, who will surely see that this was an honest mistake and refund me the additional fees. Genius I thought this can’t fail.

So I wrote a nice letter to Mark Lewis, Managing Directory of eBay UK, explaining what had happened and appealing to his better nature.

Dear Mr Lewis,

Yours sincerely,

Trevor Ginn

hellobabydirect

I got not reply, so I sent a follow up letter.  Still no reply.

Not to be put off, I sent a letter to Doug McCallum, Senior Vice President for Europe, who did not see it fit to reply to me either

Finally, in a last ditch attempt I wrote to John Donohoe, CEO of eBay Inc, and, you guessed it, no reply.

Now, I think that it is reasonable for a polite letter  to receive a polite reply, even if the request is rejected.  I think it says a lot about a company if they do not have the decency to reply to customer communication.

Market research agencies collate and publish reports on consumer trends. However, the cost of this data is out of the price range of all but the largest retailers. Fortunately, there are some free or keenly priced sources of data which the resourceful seller can use to inform their purchasing decisions.

eBay Marketplace Data

eBay is in many ways a barometer of consumer demand.  Analysing the products being traded on eBay can give a good indication of popular brands, products and consumer trends.   Anyone with an eBay account has free access to the completed item search which, for a given search, shows a list items which have been bought and sold over the last 2 weeks.

The completed items search is only of limited use as the data is unstructured.  However, eBay makes historical data from its marketplace available through third party provides such as Terapeak.  Using a tool like Terapeak to query past eBay sales data gives not only a filterable list of listing but will also provide statistics such as the average selling price and quality of sold and unsold listing.  If a seller wishes to research a particular item, they can enter the product name into Terapeak and learn how many units have been sold, the average selling price and other interesting data such as the time of sale and the sellers.

Unfortunately, there are limits on the usefulness of eBay data.  Whilst overall eBay is a huge marketplace, demand on eBay can be limited for specific products and therefore not representative of market potential.  There is also no way of ensuring that all the products returned in a search are exactly the same, for example many will be second hand.

Prices on eBay can also be misleading as the transparency of the eBay marketplace and its reputation as a place to secure bargains means that prices are lower on eBay than on the web in general.

Google Search Volume Data

The leading search engine Google has recently made its search volume data (i.e. the number of searches for specific phrases) available through its keyword tool.  The Google keyword tool allows users to see the search volume for the specific keyphrases and also generates volume data for similar keywords.

Search volume data is useful in two ways.  Firstly, the absolute volume of searches shows whether there is an interest in the market for a brand or a product.  Sellers should investigate both search volumes for brand names and individual products to gage the popularity of a brand and it products.

Secondly, by comparing the data for different brands can be used to make relative comparisons between the popularity of products.

Amazon Best Sellers

For each of its sales categories Amazon provides a bestsellers list (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/baby-products for baby products), listing the products in order of their sales.  It also provides list of movers and shakers (products rising in popularity), most gifted (product orders as gifts) and most wished for (added to Amazon wish lists).

Whilst this data does not provide data on volume or prices, it does provide inspiration for new products to investigate, perhaps using eBay or Google Data.

Sales reporting is hugely important, but unfortunately can be rather time consuming. On eBay it is a real pain to analyse sales on a per item basis, as sales relating to each SKU are spread across multiple listings.  Sales data therefore requires analysing the sell through rate and average selling price of each product, deducting relevant fees and then comparing this against the trade price.  Your sales management tool may do this for you, but otherwise it is a time consuming manual process

I was therefore very excited to hear from Andy Geldman from Auction software review that a company called Prime2S had created an Excel plugin which pulls data from eBay using the API.  Functions available will for example pull items numbers for listed items, fees associated with items numbers and feedback details.  These functions could be used to entirely automate the creation of eBay reports.  They could very useful in building an automated versions of Scott Wingo’s eBay Dashboard, which he suggests in his book eBay Strategies.

It is a pity the Prime2S haven’t produced their own spreadsheets using their plugin, missing a trick there I think…..

Anyway I am getting overexcited.  Here is formulas for calculating eBay final value and listing fees

Listing fee

=IF(D3<0.99, 0.1, IF(D3<4.99,0.15,IF(D3<14.99,0.25,IF(D3<29.99,0.5,
IF(D3<99.99,1.30)))))/E3

Where D3 is the eBay starting or fixed price and E3 is the sell through rate. 

Final Value fee

=IF(D3<29.99, D3*0.075, IF(D3<599.99, 2.24+(D3-29.99)
*0.045,2.24+25.65+ (D3-599.99)*0.019))

Where again D3 is the eBay final price, be it auction or fixed price

Features:

• Two column design.  Although I think the proponents of three column listing and shop designs such as Frooition do an excellent job for a very reasonable price, three column designs are a bit busy for my liking.
• Clear branding.  Too many eBay listings ignore the opportunities which a free text HTML description field gives to build a brand and drive traffic to a website through search.
• Large images.  Images are 600 x 500 pixels, large enough to give buyers a good look at the product.  An image gallery make it easy to toggle between images
• Shop categories.  Hard coded unfortunately, but the idea is to allow browers to navigate between listings.  In the future we hope to have a more sophisticated gallery.
• Shop search.  again, to allow users to find other products for sale
• Contact details.  From a personal point of view, I find contact details reassuring.  It is also an opportunity to display the URL of my (as yet unlaunched) website to customers
• Payment and postage information.  The idea here is to give as much information as possible to customers, encouraging sales and reducing non payers.

I have been trying to get this data for ages! however I am not sure how accurate these figures are as performing a seller report seems to give different figures….  Interesting all the same though

I have noticed that several businesses promote their eBay listings prominently from their websites.  For example:
 

I suspect that the reasons for doing this are two fold. 

1. Drive traffic to the eBay listing and thereby get more sales
2. Save on eBay listings fees by an getting affiliate payment for driving traffic from the eBay site.

I think that giving this kind of website promotion of eBay listings is a mistake.  The eBay listing fee is your payment to eBay for marketing your products , if you feel you have to drive more traffic to the site then you are not getting your money’s worth.  Furthermore, the volume of traffic which will be driven to your products from your website will probably be small compared to the traffic which are driven via the eBay search.

Another reason not to place links to eBay, or any other site, on your homepage is that it drive traffic from you site, which should be the preferred channel as it incurs no fees, to a site where a fairly hefty fee is payable.

Ask yourself the question, do I want people to buy products from my website or from eBay.  If it is your website, don’t place a link to eBay on you homepage.  Building traffic to a site is hard, don’t throw it away.