I have got the old spreadsheet out and worked out the number of listing which justify upgrading the shop level.  If you recall under the new fee system, sellers will get discounts on insertion fees based on their shop level.  There are:

• Basic shop (cost:  £14.99), IF = £0.2
• Featured shop (cost:  £49.99) IF = £0.05
• Anchored shop (cost: £349.99) IF = £0.01

To calculate the costs I looked at the cost of the listing and the cost of the shop.  The cost was calculated in the following way

Total Insertion fee = insertion fee + (shop subscription fee/ number of listings)

Doing the maths, it turns out that if you list 233 or more products it is worth getting a featured shop, and around 7500 to make it worth getting a anchor shop.  These figures do not take into account any other benefits which a shop may give.

So most sellers will probably go for a featured shop, but only those with a huge inventory should go for the anchor shop, purely based on fees.  Remember that as the search ranking of a listing will be partially based on its success (i.e. the number of products it sells) then each SKU will only have one listing, a opposed to multiple listing as at the moment.  This will drastically reduce the number of individual listings which a seller makes.

I have just been playing around with BT tradespace, something which I know Dan Wilson has been involved quite heavily with.  Why not visit the Vendlab Tradespace page.

BT are onto a good idea with this offering, which has been around for a while now.  However they have missed, or at best are missing, the boat in terms of functionality.

With its blogs, videos and recommendations, BTspace is trying to combine social media functionality with a simple way for businesses to get online.  Whilst I think that there is room in the marketplace for some sort of MySpace for business which creates some sort of social experience around business listings, tradespace’s functionality is very limited.  The service is very static and does not have the facility for content to be drawn from elsewhere.  This is very much the trend at the moment e.g. Friendfeed, plaxo and facebook.

Presumably there are some companies out there who would appreciate a simple way of creating a web presence, however for businesses which already use blogs and trade online, are they really going to duplicate their content on Tradespace.  Take the products and service section for example, is anyone already selling online really going to go through the laborious process of listing all their items here if they all ready sell them elsewhere.  This is where a link to eBay or amazon would be useful.

It looks like Arena flowers have done their best to use Tradespace (see Arena Flowers Tradespace page) - any thoughts Will?

On an optimisation point, as ever with these services the platform does not give access to the the <title>.  A way I always get round this is by changing the company name from to something like “Vendlab - online marketing consultancy” to get some extra keyword in there.

Gosh it has been exciting day for eBay watchers.  eBay has made fundamental changes to the way in which fixed price are sold on the site.  The site is going to largely loose its time sensitive nature and the listing options simplified, with a single listing format replacing BIN and SIF.

The End of Shop inventory format and changes to Buy it now format

Shop inventory format is going to be phased out and replaced with a longer duration buy it now format.  The new format will last 30 days (with a good til cancelled option) and will have a standard insertion fee of 40p no matter what the starting price is.

Shop owner will get a discount on the insertion fees, with basic shop owners paying 20p for a listing, featured 5p and anchor 1p per listing.

The End of chronological listings

According to the eBay announcement, best match will now longer present listings primarily in chronological order.  Instead, the order will be determined in part by listing success, encouraging sellers to use one listing per SKU.  Seller performance (as measured by DSRs etc) will also be a factor.

As eBay will still include the more time sensitive auction format, it is not clear how these will be  displayed in the order looses it chronological nature.  Will auctions take a  back seat?

Comments

End of the level playing field

These changes are a further nail in the coffin of the level playing field.  Larger sellers will not only benefit from lower final value fees, but also from cheaper insertion fees.  The low insertion fees for volume sellers will encourage larger sellers to list a wider range of inventory.

Similarities with other online marketing platforms

In moving away from chronological presentation of listings and factoring in listing success, eBay will be becoming more similar to other online platforms.  eBay’s new system will have aspects of both the amazon marketplace (long duration fixed price listings) and Google Adwords (rewarding advert success)

Shops in search

The last time that shop inventory format was included with the core eBay was flooded with low quality listings. eBay combated this problem by hiking the eBay shop final value fees.

With the insertion fee being lowered, will this problem happen again with the overall quality of eBay listings suffering?

I have just been playing around with Bidboogie as the nice PR people were kind enough to give me some free bids.

BidBoogie is a penny auction site which is like a traditional auction except bids go up to 1p each time and it costs each time you place a bid.  In this way it is a bit of a cross between an auction and a competition.

The service is undeniably addictive, a bit like a penny machine at the seaside, you think you will win with the next bid.  I could imagine spending hour watching the bids.  Perhaps this service could be good for people with lots of time on their hands, like estate agents or bankers specialising in mortgage securitisation.

Traaa-tra-traaaaaa.  I would like to announce the launch of my ecommerce consulting company Vendlab.  We will be providing services in the following areas:

• Search engine optimisation
• Paid search
• Social Media
• Website Analytics
• Online marketplaces (eBay and amazon)

We are looking for online marketing specialists to help us deliver projects, so if you are willing and able, please get in touch.

I noticed when using Google’s keyword tool the other day that they are now including actual traffic data. Previously only a relative indication of traffic volume was given. This is exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, and more obviously, it helps when selecting keywords for the SEO and PPC campaigns. Secondly, I think that it will be really useful as a barometer of what people are interested in. For example:

• Product selection.  When selecting products to purchase, it can be used to judge which products are most popular by search volume
• Brand popularity.  By looking at search volumes, it will be possible to get a measure of the popularity of a brand.

Previously this kind of detailed information was only available through products such as hitwise which cost a fortune.  I also wonder how keyword tools such as wordtracker will react to the release of this data. Their data is taken from Yahoo, which is a poor measure of search volumes.

I have finally managed to upload my blog database and am ready to supply you with my insights into the eCommerce world.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out, particulary Sam from Arena Flowers, Sue from Tamebay, Melvin and Anna.

I have been playing around with the next flavour of the month friendfeed.  For the uninitiated, friend feed allows users to aggregiate all the social media feeds into one place, see my friend feed here friendfeed.com/trevorginn. Friendfeed has the following difference to other aggregator sites (or certainly plaxo and facebook)

• The friend feed can be made publically available so a logon is not required
• Other users can comment on items in the feeds

There is no denying that this is a very user friendly tool but I can’t help thinking that it is not all that different from other sites which aggregiate feeds such as Facebook and Plaxo and also pretty easy to emulate.  Will it be the twodogs* of the social network market, popular until everyone else bought out exactly the same thing.

* a popular alcopop which faded from view when everyone else realised that it was easy to mix neat ethanol with fizzy pop and sell it to teenagers.

After starting up my own eCommerce Business, Hello Baby, I have been somewhat forced into the exciting world of postage.  This I think is one of those things which no-one really writes about, so here are my thoughts on the most efficient way of getting things out the door.

Using Mailing sacks

Polythene mailing sacks are much quicker to use than brown paper and cheaper than jiffy bags.  Most things that we send out are boxed and so don’t really need any additional packaging. 

Use a Franking machine

Franking machines are expensive (mine cost about £300) but save both time in going to the post office and money (the postage is cheaper).   We have just printed out address onto the end of our franking labels so that each package only needs two labels, the address label and the franking label.

Don’t Use Recorded Delivery

My experience of running an eBay Drop Shop made me start off sending everything recorded delivery.  This is all very time consuming and make postage more expensive for my customers.  Overall for low priced items I think it is unnecessary. 

Use Labels, not Document Wallets 

If your eCommerce software allows you to print address lables, this is much faster than using document wallets, which are a bit fiddley. 

I had never used twitter much until the last few days and I am getting quite into it.  I think it is a great tool for the following reasons:

• Communicating with friends and colleagues.  By using twitter, you can broadcast your activities to an interested audience, promoting activities such as blogging or speaking engagements.
• Adding interactivity to a blog or other online profile.  Writing a blog post takes time, but updating your status is easy.  By adding a status box to your blog will add more frequently updated content
• Updating status across multiple social networks (see below)

Some businesses including eBay are using twitter as a communication tool.  I note however that eBay has less than 100 followers.

One of the reasons why I hadn’t used Twitter previously was that I thought that it would be too time consuming to publish regular updates.  However I have discovered some shortcuts to automate some of the publishing.

Integration with Facebook and MySpace

Using the Facebook Twitter app, Facebook status and tweeks can be synced so that one will update the other.  There is also a wordpress plugin for updating myspace status.  This obviously means that you can use twitter to create a single status across all your social network profiles 

Integrate with Blogs

Using a service such as twitterfeed, when you post to your blog a tweet will appear on your twitter feed.  This is a great way of publicising your blog to people following your twitter feed.