I needed a video to use as a product video for an article in #ProjectE. I had some electrical tape and Facebook open (bad I know) and saw “Pistols the Pirate” on there. The scene was set for possibly the worst product review ever.
Howdy, I need your help in answering the following question. Its ProjectE related and thus would be a massive benefit for me to help understand how I can help you the most.
Any feedback you have would be exceptionally useful and I’ve created a simple form that allows you to post the reply without using the comments system on the site if you’re uncomfortable with leaving your reply publicly.
Imagine a website that is targeted towards helping small businesses on eBay and amazon, what topics, resources and content would you find most useful to you?
You can use the form below to post your reply/comments or use the comments box at the bottom.
[contact-form 3 “ProjectE Question Form”]
I just wanted to say “thanks” for the feedback on the video from Friday. I really enjoyed discussing this with so many people over the weekend, it was quite the conversational piece.
I have always wanted to learn another language, say Spanish or German, but as it was pointed out, I now know several programming & markup languages instead. Result!
That book really did change the game for me and even though its over ten years old, learning HTML, in a caravan with no computer, in a week (not a weekend as the title suggested) was possible and if I could do it with no computer, I’m sure you can learn it too (with a computer of course!).
If you missed the video, I’ve posted the updated version below, the original was “stuttery, but still managed to get the point across. This one has an updated slide as well, so I don’t look like a hamster on the opening image yay (thanks Nick for pointing that out).
PS: This book can still be found on Amazon for 1p + £2.80 delivery, go to lastdropofink.co.uk/htmlbook (aff link) to buy it.
“I owe everything to this book and if I can learn its contents in a week, in a caravan with no computer, you can too.“
I’m going to share with you the book that is solely responsible for where I am today and it just might have the same effect for you too. However before I spill-the-beans on the name of the actual book, I’d like to share the events that happened after reading the book.
After reading this book, I ended up going back to college, now this wasn’t “I’ll do a course on…” this was “I’ll do EVERY course that interests me” and I promptly did. I did a dozen or more short courses at Bristol College, from HTML to Visual Basic, from graphic design to Java, I even did two courses on ASP and three courses on C++.
At one point I was spending four nights a week on these and still found room to start the revision needed to set myself on the way of studying for a MCSE through self revision. I still remember punching the air and that thrill of passing all those exams. They weren’t cheap and I failed a few but I got through a fair amount of them in a relatively short time. One set of books cost me over a £130 and contained 12 or so books and I still have a romance with Windows 2000.
This book also provoked me to make a computer, I wasn’t going to buy a computer I was going to make a computer, by pure fluke the latest copy of PC Advisor was covering this and over the next two issues I built my first computer. I still have it in my roof!
With the new computer, the first thing I wanted to do was get on the “Internet”, I had spent so much time at Uni covering the fundamentals (a HND in Electrical & Electronic Communications Engineering apparently) but had spent so little time actually working out how this[the Internet] could help me.
With the combination of the book that promoted me to go on a education bender, I ended up finding eBay, starting a business on eBay, quitting my (what was well paid) job, burning myself out, working for two SaaS companies and now starting a new business, that encompasses everything I’ve learned along the way.
Learn HTML in a weekend. Ironically I did not learn it in a weekend with a computer, no I learnt it in a CARAVAN in a week with no computer. I can still write HTML without editors and enjoying playing with it today.
Of course, there are other distractions, such as PHP, Pyhon, CSS and so on that follow similar structures, but they all end up back at HTML and I sincerely do not believe for one moment that I’d be where I am without this book.
I checked this morning and you can pick this book up on Amazon for 1p, well 1p plus £2.80 postage (make sure you pick a UK seller if possible, the delivery time sucks from the US). Seems somewhat a bargain now considering the changes it made to me.
Have you had a similar experience with a single book before? If so what was it?
This is the final part in the three part series on how to increase your on-line business. In the first part we covered the two sides of efficiency, internal efficiency and external efficiency and then in the second part (which I had to cut short due to time) we covered more sales channels.
I want to quickly recap on the sales channels section, these provide the largest spikes in turn-over for businesses. Even when done poorly, they can still offer the quickest returns on investments of time and money. Over time, both internal and external efficiency will kick in and make the new channel(s) more productive.
I didn’t really cover the the how and the where-to particularly well in part 2, I’ve got this noted to look at it again in more depth at a later date, as the article is compounded by the use of multiple tools for backend systems and I’d be looking at creating one larger article that covers the common ones.
To the final instalment, the title has already given the thunder away, its simply “More Inventory”.
“More Inventory” could mean a couple of different depending upon its application, it could mean the leveraging of ‘range selling’ so that you’re better able to tackle the exit strategy (for when the item being viewed is not the item desired) for listings on different sales channels or completely new products (or services) to be added to your business.
Staying with “Range selling” for a few moments, this simply means that you offer the majority of a range of products. As its raining here currently I’m thinking umbrellas. So imagine you have a couple of umbrellas that you sell quite frequently, also the supplier has 20 or so other umbrellas, that you’ve just not ventured into as of yet. These are different colours and different sizes.
Instead of sticking with just the few that sell or you’ve found that sell in the past, take one of each and add them to your inventory (virtual stock is much better for this) . Now if you’ve not included them in a multi variation listing (best case) or via size/colour attributes on Amazon in a single record (again best case) you could add extra images & links to promote the other umbrellas in the listings themselves (on Amazon this is related products). The simplest way of look at this is as a buyer “Oh I don’t like this one I’m looking at, but I might like that one”.
Note: “Range selling” was introduced to me by a seller in the toys category several years back. I didn’t really get it at first, but once I started treating them as “ranges” and cross-promoting them as such, I would find that the entire range would do really well, rather than just a few more popular items. And often as the other items in the range did poorly for others, I was able to negotiate better pricing on the entire range of products.
It frequently surprises me when I explain this to clients and they get the “ah-ha” moment. It does not matter if you are selling an house or a pen, the selling process is essentially the same. You document the product, you market the product, the product sales, funds change hands, the product is delivered.
A Product
= An Umbrella
= A Computer Keyboard
= A House
= …
With this in mind, what is stopping you from expanding your current product range outside of the ‘safe boundaries’? Think about it, you probably already have access to hundreds if not thousands of extra products already within your supplier groups, its just a case of looking for them.
Once you’ve found one supplier, finding their competitor is relatively childs-play. But every supplier is different and with a little effort you can easily move around the supplier-food-chain. If you’re using backend tools as mentioned in the first article, the efficiency of adding more products is amplified both in the backend creation process (internal efficiency) and also in the steps you make towards greater external efficiency. These are both universal regardless of product type.
Note: I always pick a house as the opposite end of the extreme, it has its complexities, but its still a product…
Frankly some people either don’t like this concept or just don’t get it. The former is because they “believe” you should be specialised and I agree, you should be specialised, specialised in making more money. You’re either growing or you’re dying. Pick one.
Through these three articles you should have a better idea on how you can increase your on-line business. From using tools to make both internal efficiency and external efficiency greater, to adding more sales channels (hint this is the second largest spike producer in turnover) and finally to adding more products, because they’re ALL essentially the same.
Here’s a quick peak at a tiny part of ProjectE
Note: The red bit is on purpose, it would give too much away ;-)
I’m on a 10,000 word bender today for ProjectE and need a warm up and this is it. If you’re not on this list, don’t get your knickers in a twist, I probably value your input so much I want to keep it ultra secret :)
Sooo… now to the five people I follow regularly and why.
I’m not sure how I found Rob, it was probably via Twitter. I’ve since spoken with him a couple of times and even laid down an “affiliate challenge” to him (I’m waiting…. I’m not letting you win thou!).
The content that he’s created is absolutely fantastic at both his personal site at robcubbon.com and one of his other sites at wordpressseomarketing.com and I’ve found both to be a brilliant resource. This is why this site has a sign up form on the right from one of his articles, although I need to do more.
Put it this way, when I get stuck with WordPress, Rob is the person I ask. You can follow Rob via his twitter feed here.
I mainly like Seth as he has less hair than me.
But seriously this chap is amazing, I think I’ve now read or listened to 6 or so of his books. I even bought a purple jumper, solely because of his book “Purple Cow” and he is one of my virtual mentors.
With his uncanny ability to see straight through bullshit, if there was one person I could only follow, this would be the one.
If I ever need motivation and a firm “slap with a fish for desiring to be a corporate monkey”, I read his blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.
I stumbled across Rob when searching the keywords ecommerce expert and he just so happened to be occupying #1 the spot. past the envy part (mainly because of the amount of work he’s put in to get there), turns out Robs a really great bloke (shocker that) and his last tweet sums it up:
Google admit they were at fault – my mother always says, when you admit you were wrong, that makes you right http://t.co/LsNQFE4
Totally hats off to Chris (& Sue Bailey of course), from the booze up when TameBay was first birthday in Manchester a few years back, to today its still running and being frequently updated, which is no small feat.
Normally Tamebay is one of the first sources of news (quicker than AuctionBytes and not USA biased) and most posts are followed by some very interesting & hilarious comments.
Chris might say “Good night moon”, but I’m sure he doesn’t sleep, he’s really a machine!
Been a long standing follower of his blog at chrisbrogan.com and his musings on his twitter feed. No nonsense advice and suggestions on numerous topics, you really just need to read some of them to see if they’re of as much value as I find them.
They each add emense value to myself and I sincerely hope these five people can add some diversity into your social ventures.
Now only 9514 words to go before I can escape this office. Better put the coffee pot on I think…
A bold title, but I’m sure at least two of these four you were not aware were features in eSellerPro. There is a story behind each of these, let’s dive in and see what they are and if they can help you and your business.
There are three key parts of eSellerPro that I see, these are sales order processing, collecting orders from many channels and being able to process them in a single location and thus keep stock levels updated, which leads me onto the second which is the channel profile, which is flexible enough to be able to manage stock updates of 100% across multiple channels in about a 20-30 minute window, while worth an entire article on both, neither of these are in these four features. The third that I’ll cover next.
It was the time of my sisters wedding and I had decided to take a few days out from my eBay business and how horribly wrong did that go! I had received a slap for doing something naughty in my listings (I forget what now, I think I broke every rule & policy going) and ended up spending the 3 days prior to the wedding manually revising listings.
Revise 1 or 10,000 live eBay listings
You know what I mean, going into several thousand listings, changing one line of code in the template I had made, it took a total of 7 or so clicks to make the edits, which isn’t a lot, but when there were soooo many of them I had square eyes by the end of it.
For anyone who has gone through this kind of pain, then you’ll know how much value is to be gained from having the ability to revise live listings on eBay. Not only can you revise the descriptions (essentially reposting the entire listing, but keeping the item number) you can change almost every other aspect of the listing too. Well you can change the title, when there are no sales, but when you have a sale(s) made on the listing, this becomes locked, besides that everything is fair game.
In my early days at eSellerPro, I made a mistake, I accidentally entered the {{ItemDescription}} keyword in the item description tab and then saw some interesting results, what happened was that the item description got parsed (processed) about 40 times and went right-off the preview window. It hit me then, we could stack keywords inside of each other and what was a bug, was veto’d to never be fixed and classed as a feature (as all ‘bugs’ are :) ).
what was a bug, was veto’d to never be fixed and classed as a feature
What this means is that you can put keywords inside keywords, one of the best examples of this application is that you can create a drop down selection box of options in custom fields (another key part of eSellerPro, but I’m not going to cover here, think of them as like options or eBay item specifics that you design) that contains keywords.
So if you were to create a paragraph (another key part, again think of them as short snippets of text) called “Computer-Mice”, now in the custom field if you were to create an option called “{{Insert:Computer-Mice}}” (“Insert:”. is the keyword to bring in the paragraph). This now becomes an option that is available in the drop down box, you can then make the data entry to creating inventory much easier, instead of using cumbersome item descriptions, you can break these up and make miniature, specific descriptions for each product type.
You could then make several descriptions per product type, say “Computer-Keyboards” & “Computer-PSUs” and have slightly different descriptions for each, however make the process of adding them to inventory records easy peasy and crucially have three key factors included,:
Neat eh?
It was becoming apparent that it was just impossible to include every field users wanted in the standard import & export sheets, plus this was compounded by Java having a 2Mb or so limit for processing excel based files (ended up being capped at about 2500 records), so an alternative needed be found.
The section you’ll find in maintenance called “Export/Import Layouts” (with a funnel image) is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally flexible too. Not only can you change the format away from the clunky & bloated excel format and use CSV, PSV or TSV, you can select which fields you want and also which field is the ‘key’ to import against.
This means that you can actively work on just the data that needs to be updated, include more records than is possible with the excel format and also use a different ‘key’ other than the SKU (Stock Number). Sometimes using the ASIN or Barcode might be needed when updating data from multiple sources, you can also use some of the advanced features to drop images, treat the stock as a delivery (*coff*, think fulfilment) and so on.
Note: There is a ‘script layout’, that I don’t believe actually ever worked to the degree that users needed, this would be to pre-fill certain parts of the data or run logical tests/alternations on the data that is being imported. This had a lot of potential, although can easily be worked around by processing import files outside of eSellerPro in the next step using other programming languages like PHP or Pyhon.
The key point here is that you can design your own import & export layouts, this is critical for the next feature.
This one again comes with a story, bear with me! It got to the stage that the time it was taking to actually import the new inventory that was being created with a client was taking longer than it took to make the inventory in the first place, somewhat ironic as the inventory being created was in some cases exceeding 100 records. Also numerous issues were being found with the data being sent to Amazon, generally it was caused by inconsistent data being populated, so a solution needed to be found.
Import product data automatically from remote sources
The time being wasted importing data using the layouts mentioned above and the Amazon issues were both quashed by using FTP imports to import the data into eSellerPro.
There is a section called ‘Reference Data’ in maintenance (if you cannot see this ask eSellerPro support to enable this, also with the lack of screen shots, here ask for assistance in setting this up) that allows the collection of files via FTP. There are a couple of types, but the two big ones is that you can specify an export/import layout (as mentioned above a custom layout, so you only import the data you need to import) and an Amazon import layout.
The Amazon import is the export sheet you can get from the Amazon tab on an inventory record and if you populate this in-accordance with the amazon inventory creation sheets you get from Amazon, you can pretty much quash 90% or more issues with Amazon regarding data; Because IF you’ve done the homework and made sure that the data that is in the sheet is right, so when its sent to Amazon, the bounce rate for failures due to crappy data should be much much less and saved a whole heap of time waiting for files to import. Result.
The sales order processing and the channel profiler are topics I have been meaning to write about for some time, however between these four features found in eSellerPro, with some consideration, there are huge benefits of time, scalability and consistent data entry to be reaped.
Question is, did you know about these features before this article and would they be of use to you?
