Use Dropbox? 5Gb Free Storage for BETA Testers

I was passed this from one of the chaps I play games with. If you watch the video and also check the link here, its an official thread as part of their beta program and while I’ve not personally verified this (which I am doing right now I hasten to add), 2 colleagues have.

If you’ve not heard of DropBox before, see an earlier article where I covered this tool here “DropBox, File Backup & Transfer Matt Proof

Update: See the image to the top right, current gained an extra 3.5Gb & there is just under 4Gb of photos and video on my camera currently

Do I Need an eBay Shop Design to Sell on eBay?

The short answer to this question is no, you do not need an eBay shop design to sell on eBay.

While having you eBay shop custom designed by a third party design company may look fantastic and most are able to offer features and functions that are not found in the basic eBay shop structure, it is not a requirement that you have your eBay shop themed or custom designed.

This article is quite brief, I’m just making the point that you can easily use one of the standard templates that eBay provides for your eBay shop and I will be covering the entire eBay shop in great detail in the forthcoming weeks.

 

You can theme the eBay shop yourself

While I’m not going to cover the fine detail of the eBay shop here, you are able to change many aspects of your eBay shop very easily using the tools that eBay provide to you.

For example, you can pick from approximately 30 pre-built themes and advanced, more customisable themes are available.

Example Standard Themes

A couple of examples are shown below:

Selecting a Standard Theme

Selecting the one of choose is really easy and you can pick your standard eBay shop design in eBay here:

http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtChangeTheme

While these are not specifically tailored to your business and branding, these themes are perfectly acceptable, can be enabled in seconds and included free on your subscription level.

Advanced Themes

There are five advanced themes provided by eBay that allow you to have more control over the elements of the eBay shop without needing to know any CSS or HTML, or if you are comfortable in making design changes, these themes, especially the ‘Custom header Only’ theme easily allow the insertion of HTML & CSS to extend the eBay shop design further.

Paid-for Themes

There are many design companies out there offering eBay shop designs for various prices and at various standards. I recently covered the eBay listing templates in a two part series here and here and also an interview with DZine-Hub whose business is focused towards eBay Shop and eBay listing template creation.

Summary

As I mentioned in the beginning, this article is quite brief, just to answer this question specifically as its been asked too many times now. So… No, you don’t need an eBay shop design to sell on eBay.

One of the basic designs will be fine for the interim and while the designs offered are not all equal in what you can do with them, you can easily save yourself several hundred pounds of outlay and focus on shifting product first.

I will be covering the entire eBay shop in minute detail in the forthcoming weeks. If you’d like to be notified when its released, use the subscribe box below to be notified.

What if the prices for everything were the same?

 

This whole price parity issue with Amazon over the past few days as got me thinking. What if the prices for everything were the same?

Let’s imagine for a few minutes what would happen if we say, all governed by a communist government worldwide and one of the parts of the establishment was that for all products, the prices had to be the same.If Prices Were the Same?

I mean everything, from a can of coke to a Plasma TV. If it’s exactly the same product it has to be exactly the same price set by a third party, no if’s, no but’s and you go to jail if you break the rules. (The jail part is harsh, but I’m just making the point).

Now before you start picking holes, unbranded goods would fall into categories, for example, a printed T-Shirt, regardless of design or material would be a fixed price. All broken or refurbished goods have to be scrapped. Every single product is categorised and has its own fixed price, regardless of country of origin or point of sale and cross-border trade was not allowed.

How Would You Differentiate Your Business?

Humouring me for a few moments, that everything businesses product has to be sold at the same price as their competitors.

What would you do to to compete in a marketplace where everything was equal as far as pricing is concerned?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments box below.

How eSellerPro’s Channel Profile Can Help Your Business

One of eSellerPro’s core features is a function called a ‘Channel Profile’, in this article I’ll be covering the basics to what a ‘Channel Profile’ does and how it can help your business.

Multi-Channel selling is now an assumed practice for eCommerce businesses, unlocking the power to reach a much wider audience than you could ever have imagined, but sensibly. The Channel Profile feature in eSellerPro can enable you to achieve this.

I’ve put together a short video, where I describe the key benefits of using a channel profile and how it could help your business when dealing with multiple sales channels.

What is a Channel Profile?

The purpose of the channel profiler is to maximise the exposure of your inventory exposure across more than one channel, then once an update has happened to let the other channels know of that update to the stock level.

In eSellerPro you can create more than one channel profile (hence ‘profile’ in its name), which you can apply to more than one inventory record and each profile can have different attributes. I’ll cover these later on in this article, but for now the easiest way of explaining what a Channel Profile does is by using  an example.

Let’s say we have 10 of the same mugs in stock and we wish to sell them on:

  • One eBay account
  • Amazon
  • Our website.

For maximum market exposure, we’re going to use the channel profile to list ALL 10 of these mugs onto eBay, Amazon and also show them on our website too. A couple of hours later, a customer called Jane buys one from eBay.

We now only have 9 in stock and the channel profile will now update Amazon to 9 and the website also to 9. Then another customer, Jim buys from the website. Again the channel profile will update the other marketplaces, eBay & Amazon with the new stock level of 8.

The next morning a new delivery of these mugs arrive and we have 10 more, so we now have a stock level of 18 mugs. The Channel profile will now update each of the selling channels where the products are listed with the updated stock level.

In this basic example, we gain maximum market exposure for our products and keep each of the selling channels in-line with the latest stock levels. Neat eh?

The Negatives of Using A Channel Profile

I’m going to note here the negatives you might have already realised are minor in comparison to the positives of exposing your inventory across as many channels as possible. However you need to be aware of them.

In theory if you only have 10 in stock, then you only have 10 to sell. By exposing your inventory across just 3 platforms in the example above, you are actually exposing 30 items and again in theory if they all sold at the same time, you could go to a negative inventory count of 20 (that’s the 30 sold, minus the 10 you had in stock).

The Channel Profiler is a process that runs on eSellerPro’s servers and it does not update the marketplaces instantaneously, there is a time lag on eSellerPro’s side and with the marketplaces themselves. While I now don’t know the exact figures, a period of about 30 minutes would be about right for each passing of an eSellerPro account to make updates to the 3rd party platforms.

We also need to understand that eSellerPro is a 3rd party to the marketplaces and as such there are time delays in the communication to them. Again referencing the earlier example, the orders from eBay & Amazon are not picked up instantaneously, they’re scheduled. Plus we also need to account for time delays in the marketplaces themselves, Amazon orders are not immediate, they tend to sit for 15-30 minutes before being released and also you can only ask for order reports every 30 minutes or so.

So it’s perfectly possible for Jane and Jim to buy on two different marketplaces within a time window of say 10 minutes and eSellerPro is not capable of updating the other channel to let it know there is a deduction of the inventory level, if there was only one left, this could have caused an oversell or back order. Hardly ideal.

It should also be noted that in relation to eBay, eBay auctions and BIN listings of 10 days or less, are regarded as being committed to the eBay marketplaces, thus if you have 10 in stock and 2 of those are in two auctions, then eSellerPro sees an available stock count of 8 and will use this value to keep the platforms updated.

Note: You can use the true stock level of 10 called “Percentage of On-Hand”, however this is where you’re most likely to be caught out, as using this option I strongly advise you never to use this option (although there are situations where it does not matter, such as virtual or limitless stock).

Channel Profile Tolerances

The channel profile process also has “tolerances”, for items over a stock count of 20, there is no compelling reason to keep the selling platforms updated with the latest stock count for each change.

If we had 10,000 of those mugs in stock, then updating them every time we sold one would be silly and slow down the really important updates for other stock items which have much left. As such eSellerPro has different tolerances for different stock levels and they can be found in their Wiki.

A Simple Example of a Channel Profile

A really simple example of a channel profile is the first example, where we were listing all 10 of the mugs on the 3 platforms. In this example we are committing 100% of  the “Available stock” (10) to each of the channels.

An Advanced Example of a Channel Profile

There is likely to be situations where you don’t want to commit all your stock to all of the channels all of the time and this is where the ability to create multiple profiles comes in really handy.

For the first example, we would have named the channel profile something like “List 100% to eBay, Amazon and Our Website” (naming the profiles to what they do is again strongly suggested, it makes them “Matt proof”).

For this second example, we’re going to want to keep two of mugs in stock at all times, this is because they’re end of line and we want to keep safe just in case we get a return of breakage.

Similar to the previous example, we’re going to commit 100% of the “Available Stock” to platforms, but we’re going to add a number 2 to the column called “Min. Qty Avail”. By setting a value of 2 in this column, we’re saying list 100% of our stock, but when we get to our last 2, take them off all the platforms.

We could of course just set this value of 2, to just one platform, so that when we get to our last 2 items, we take it off Amazon, but leave the 2 on eBay and the website. I did say that this was ‘neat’ :)

Further Examples

The abilities of the channel profile doesn’t stop at just listing 100% of items onto marketplaces and keeping their stock levels in-tow and basic stock control. You can also configure a channel profile to use these cool features:

  • Percentage based listing, not just 100%, maybe only 50% to eBay and 100% to Amazon & the website.
  • Force set inventory levels onto one or more marketplaces, that never go out of stock
  • Force set inventory levels onto one or more marketplaces that are removed when the available quantity drops below a specific level
  • Using a “Cost Formula”, dynamically calculable your selling prices for each channel and also the minimum and maximum prices for Amazon & Play.com accounts.
  • Cap the number of listed items on a platform to a maximum number
  • And there are some funky things you can do with sequences and stocked sub skus of products that 99.9% of the people reading this wouldn’t ever use.

It should also be noted that if you have the WebXML interface enabled for up to 10 external channels, the channel profile can also apply inventory update rules to these too and via the new eSellerPro API, the status of the SKU can be checked to see if its been set to list on several of the ‘channels’ in the channel profile.

My eSellerPro Channel Profile Tips

Here are a collection of tips that you may find useful:

  1. Never edit the default profile
    Think of this profile as a off switch, keep it set to manual and use this profile to take items off all the platforms and for new records that are not ready to be listed yet.
  2. Keep calculations to a minimum
    The more you ask for a channel profile to do, the long it will take and the slower it will run. Where ever possible, keep calculations for prices to external tools lke excel or PHP before entering into eSellerPro.
  3. Never use product specific channel profiles
    If you create product specific channel profiles, you’re missing one of the huge benefits of eSellerPro ‘profiles’. If you do have an exception product that needs its own rules, just create another profile and name it accordingly. Then ALL your profiles are in one place and easy to administer.
  4. Name the channel profiles sensibly
    If the profile is listing 100% to eBay, Amazon and the Website, name it that. In the bulk update tool, in the inventory record and in the import/export system you only see the names of the profile, thus name them clearly in relation to what they actually do.
  5. Think through each channel profile thoroughly before creating it
    Take a few moments to write down what you want the profile to do, then once written, use this to guide you to the configuration of the profile.
  6. Use ‘Bulk Update’
    You can use the bulk update tool to update as many records as you would like, remember that naming them clearly will make this task a cinch.
  7. Import/Export with care
    Don’t forget you can import a channel profile name as part of the custom import/export sheets. But use this with care, as you can enable products to be listed from an import sheet, this may not be desired straight away and may cause other issues, especially if you are loading new products and images need to be collected from a 3rd party before listing, the listing may go live and be incomplete!

The Channel Profile Summary

Using a channel profile is not without its risks, as you can in theory oversell heavily if the products which have been assigned a channel profile are in ultra high demand, accounting for the lags of the platforms themselves and giving eSellerPro enough time to react (although in reality this is quite rare, I can only remember of two instances in 3 years of this happening).

Sensible configuration of your channel profiles for different velocity products is key and also keeping them as straight forward and aptly named is strongly advised.

The examples in this article are quite basic, however if you consider you may have thousands of inventory records, numerous eBay accounts more than one Amazon Seller Central account (yes this is possible), multiple websites and maybe 3rd part integrations to other selling platforms, being able to expose your entire inventory across ALL possible channels and keep them updated when items sell and stock deliveries are made, makes the “Channel Profiles” in eSellerPro one of the core parts of the entire system.

Try doing all that manually. You’ll have no hair left like me!

Your Feedback

Do you use the Channel Profile in your eSellerPro account, is this something you could or couldn’t live without? Let me know in the comments box below.

Reverse Engineering The Data From an eBay Listing Part 2

Welcome to the second part of a 2 part series in this final part I’ll be looking at the data that is posted into the template to show you how easy it is to create a fantastic eBay listing, but with minimal data.

In the first part here, I worked out what the probable layout of the eBay listing template that was used, introduced you to keywords and pointed out that eBay templates don’t have to be a single template, they can be made up of lots of smaller templates, that once combined form the the final finished eBay listing.

So let’s have a look at the ‘data’ used behind an eBay listing.

Reverse Engineering the Data From an eBay Listing Video

To make this as easy as possible for you, I’ve put together a video to explain how this works and where I have pulled the data from and I have attached the excel spreadsheet that I created from this video later on in this article.

While you’re watching this video, keep in mind how ‘light’ or ‘easy’ the listing data is when you look at it in its purest of forms.

Data File

The Excel file that was created during the video is here and includes the formulas that were explained to create the price saving value & percentage.

What Have We Covered?

While it may appear that large eBay sellers spend a lot of time ‘listing’ items to eBay, they’re actually not. They’re in fact spending time on quality data to create eBay listings through listing tools that allow the use of one or more templates to create the finished listings that we see everywhere on eBay.

When you break down the actual data requirements for a product (a fashion item in this example) then the amount of data is actually very, very low. What makes it look great is the way the data is formatted through the listing template and most larger sellers are clever to recycle data that is needed for item specifics, into the eBay listing too. What looks complex, is actually very easy to do.

In this two part series, I have shown you how an eBay template could work, what the elements are and in this final part what the data behind the actual listing could look like before its been sent to eBay. My question is, did you expect for it to be this straight forwards? Let me know in the comments box below: