April 2012 - The Last Drop of Ink

How to: Remove Provider Credit Images From eBay Listings

April 28, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

I was asked on Thursday if I knew of a way to remove the “Powered By” logo’s from the bottom of eBay listings. You know the ones, the little 88×33 graphics that you see added to the bottom of your listings, that were not on your template, a few examples are to the right.

So instead I whipped up a little snippet of JavaScript that hunts for the last center tag there is on the page and then just in case it was something really important (like part of the description), it then has added an extra check to make sure it was only hiding the provider links if they match.You could crudely use CSS and set the CENTER tags to “display:none” eg center {display:none;}. The problem with that approach is that you may have text in your templates and descriptions that use the HTML <center> tag and that would hide those too, that’s not ideal…

The Code:

Drop this anywhere in your listing template, whether this be for eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor, TurboLister, GarageSale, manually in the eBay Sell Your Item Form, Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro, BlackThorne, it’ll remove the logo for them all, at the bottom of your eBay listings.

<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload=function(){
 findcenter();
}
function findcenter()
{
 nodes = document.getElementsByTagName("center");
 subnode = nodes[nodes.length-1];
 var link = subnode.getElementsByTagName("a")[0].href;
if(link.indexOf("eseller") != -1 || link.indexOf("channel") != -1
|| link.indexOf("iwascoding") != -1 || link.indexOf("pages.ebay") != -1  
|| link.indexOf("auctiva") != -1)
 {
 subnode.style.display="none";
 }
}
</script>

You can download this as a text file from here as the formatting isn’t great in the text above.

Summary

It’s been commonplace for providers to include logo’s on the bottom of your eBay listings for a long time now. From a personal perspective, I can understand both sides of the table.

On one side the providers would like to show that your business is using their eBay tool by including a logo at the bottom of a listing, thus promoting their services or offering and on the other side some businesses would rather not show to their competitors which back office tools they are using.

Your Feedback!

But… What do you make of this, should they stay or should they go? Let me know in the comments box below.

Birdtables & Competition, What on earth could they have in Common?

April 26, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Birdtables & competition, what on earth could they have in common? Quite a lot actually.

It’s a story I have enjoyed sharing with a couple of people and each time I share it, it gets added to and I’m hoping you’ll get the idea too and add to it as well by leaving a comment at the bottom.

The Almighty Bird Table

Sat on the doorstep one morning, sipping the first coffee of the day with the sun just coming up. I can see numerous little birds darting around the next door neighbours bird table.

This isn’t just any bird table, this is a monster bird table, you know the ones, side trays, four hanging points and a collection of goodies to attract even the most timid of creatures.

The owner, who I’ll call Mr B spends a fortune on bird food to attract them, he had tried the cheap stuff and now spends £40 a bag on the really expensive bird feed, some special seeds of some form and takes delight in after a hard days work, watching the birds come from all around to feast on the banquet through the kitchen window.

Mr B has really got into bird watching and now in his office he has started to collect a library of books to help him identify the different species of birds that arrive at his table. For over a year that bird table has been the hub of all bird activity for the row of houses where I live.

We put a small one up ourselves, but due to the cats we have, the peanuts & half-hearted attempt we made, we’ve only seen one bird on it in maybe 6 years. No competition for the all-mighty table that Mr B has.

And Then…

We had a new next-door neighbour arrive, Mr A a few months back and Mr A popped an equally large and luxurious bird table. I’m going to label this as “The Competition”.

But Mr A, had put his table in the wrong place, it was in the clearing between two large shrubs and very few birds actually visited the table & it’s not so luxurious offerings. The little birds like a lot of cover to keep safe (mainly from our two cats, as they like to eat little birds if given half a chance) and the table being in the middle gave them no cover.

Now Mr B, could have thought “Bastard Mr A, he’s nicking my birds”. After all Mr B’s table has been the hub of all bird activity in the street for quite some time, he’d taken the extra step to research the different species of birds that come to the table and spends in my mind, an excessive amount on bird food, watches them each night after work and its developed into a pleasant past-time.

Working Together

Mr B, gave Mr A some advice on where to place his table, after all those little birdies need to feel safe when feeding and even gave him some of his expensive bird food. Mr A’s table was moved nearer to one of the shrubs and Mr A gave it a little more interest than he had been doing previously.

If Mr B had looked at the situation differently, well from the point of view of “He’s nicking my birds”, then I doubt that Mr A’s newer table would have had so many birds frequenting it the table and its delicious snacks this morning without Mr B’s advice.

So What did Mr B Know?

Mr B is a smart cookie, Mr B knows that for the short-term at least, the number of birds that will go to his table will decrease. There is only a finite number of birds available to feast on his offerings and now it’s potentially been halved by Mr A’s new table. Bad thing right?

Little birdies (as you can tell I’m not really into birds, I’m a big child and laugh at some of their names) when given enough time will multiply with offspring and become fatter birds.

This could take a while to happen, but the combination of the original table & delicious snacks on offer, combined with Mr A’s new banqueting table and some coaching from Mr B will mean that next year, there should be more birds and possibly a great variety too.

Mr B really could have thought “he’s nicking my birds” and pushed the table over drunk one night, but instead decided to take a different approach and help Mr A with his table with some advice and even offered some of his expensive bird food to help attract birds to his table, so Mr A could enjoy them too.

Mr B and Mr A like birds. Together they’re stronger together than just one of them by themselves, after all we’d like to have more birds and possibly some fat ones too.

I’ve spent the past 6-8 months reading a single book. It’s called “On Competition” by Michael Porter, a Harvard business review book, see the Hardback & Kindle versions (both aff links).

It’s taken me so long to work my way through the book as I’ll read two pages and then relate it back to real life. There are some topics in here I had never even considered such as the competitive advantages that nations have and how fragile diversification is when a company expands outside their core competencies.

In this absolute monster of book Michael covers the topics of “Clusters & Competition”, how the Italian footwear and fashion is clustered by location, how the inter-related businesses from the California wine cluster join together to create a competitive environment and how that by competition in a cluster (Michael uses location for this in the physical sense, but this easily ports to marketplaces as the location) can provide competitive advantage through clustering the businesses together.

So bringing this back to the original bird table owned by Mr B and the new table from Mr A, they are stronger together and will complement each other, MR A certainly is not going to spend £40 on some seeds and will offer a different food source and while crudely the new table could have been seen as competition for Mr B’s original table, together they have a more compelling case to attract more birds from the local area.

My Table, Come Snack at it

I have a bird table like Mr B’s & Mr A’s table, but it needs you to come and snack on the potential goodies from it. You can find out more and see how you can get involved in 3 steps and the forums are here.

Tesco Marketplace Now Partly Live – Already Showing Signs of Flaws

April 18, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Tesco has soft-launched the redesigned Tesco Direct website with two “Marketplace” sellers and guess what…we’re already seeing that there has been little learned by looking at the core rival Amazon.

The Tesco marketplace have two merchants live on the platform already, Crocus & Maplins and its the latter merchant that is making it clear that Tesco haven’t really worked out that Data is the life blood of an eCommerce business just yet.

Product Page – Tesco Owned Item

I’ll be back to that topic in a few moments, but for now let’s have a drill down of the features of a 3rd party item and a Tesco owned item. There are going to be a few comments I’m not going to make, the reason is sat in the previous articles here regarding the Tesco Marketplace.

To the right is a screenshot highlighting some key points on the product detail page, if you click on the image it’ll open in a full sized window or you can view the live item here.

My first observation is the catalogue number, its base ten and not base 36.

If I’ve lost you already let me explain. We work in base 10 from 0 to 9 (that’s our fingers which caused that), base 36 is from zero (0) all the way to Z, so numbers and letters.

Why’s that important? Base 10 has a very low number variations for products, well in fact 7^10 = 282,475,249 possible variations. Yes, that’s 282 million variations, but we’re dealing with products and as they are potentially opening the platform up to 3rd parties, then 282 million SKU’s is nothing given enough time.

A quick flip to Amazon’s ASIN’s (ASIN’s are Amazon’s unique identifier for each product, see here) and an example is B005890FU. Taking this to the ultimate limit of ZZZZZZZZZ in base 36, this is normal numbers from 0 to 9 is 101,559,956,668,415 or 102 Trillion variations give or take a few million for rounding :).

102 Trillion V’s 280 million = No comparison

Let’s go a little deeper for a moment, if I’m loosing you from the above section, this one is even more important. The product identifiers have a hyphen between them. In the case of the TV above the catalogue id is “210-7084”.

But what importance could an hyphen have? It means it’ll be parsed as a text string by a 3rd party system. If we count 1, 2, 3 etc… it makes sense, counting 210-7084, 210-7085, 210-7086 does not because they’re’s a hyphen in the way. So a sub-function that splits or removes the hyphen needs to be run, the number value then incremented and then inserts the hyphen back in.

That’s one way of doing it, it can be done with regex & other methods, but my point is, its an unnecessary and a carry-over from the catalogue side of Tesco.

After that, the rest is mustard.

We’ve got…

Titles that overflow the navigation
Customer reviews (nice)
Primitive bullet points
Poorly formatted descriptions
An ugly specifics table
Half hearted cross selling
I love the orange add to cart button, I really do. Have you tried green though?
And my last note, look at the top right, the wording has been added “Buy from *”, which changes between Tesco and the 3rd party merchant. But where is the link?

Wonky Product Data

There are two merchants live on Tesco’s Direct website, Crocus & Maplins. Nice touch on adding Crocus, I really want some onions with my TV.

My point, however is picking on one SKU, of which I assure you that if you cross compare the data between the two sites, it’s not alone. Take a look at this item on Tesco Direct. A screen shot is below.

Can you see the issue?

Not spotted it yet? Take a look at the item from the Maplins site here. Look at the picture and read the title. Yep, that’s a purple product and a black title.

Dig around the other product data from Maplins on Tesco Direct for a few minutes and it’s not alone. Not to mention the pointless extra images in items such as this SKU or this SKU.

Tesco Seller Stores & ClubCard Points

I really like the idea of buyers being able to obtain “Club Card” points with 3rd party sales, there is a dedicated “Sellers at Tesco” page that you can read over he re .

Tesco Seller Stores & ClubCard Points

I also like the fully customised store landing pages for both Maplins & Crocus, screen shots are below and if you click on them, it’ll take you to the pages:

But to deliver this to a wider audience, that needs back-end tools in place and even Amazon have not even come close to the ~£81.4M that eBay take from eBay Shop owners every year in the UK alone and the eBay Shop is one of the most poorly supported product eBay have.

By the way if you think that number is obscene, I added up the USA & international eBay Shop revenues, you better brace yourselves for that in a later article, I did fall off my chair.

Summary

I’m going to leave this article at this point. Mainly because if I continue I’ll edge on the negative side and we’ve got to be fair here, Tesco have made a good crack at it so far with picking two unrelated merchants, even if one is odd and the other has data issues.

If let unchecked, then the Tesco Direct marketplace for Tesco is quickly going to go down the pan as far as duplicated & inaccurate data is concerned. To a data freak, this is alarming, but to be expected and I frankly did not expect it so early. It’s a nightmare/plague/cancer on Amazon with duplicates and just indicates that the process to check data needs some work.

Your Thoughts?

The grape-vine has already spilled that discussions have been made with 3rd party software providers a long time ago. So let’s run with a hypothetical question here.

What would you pay to gain access to the Tesco customer base?
For both commission on sale & would you consider a start up fee?

You can let me know in the comments box below.

Delving into Niches with Multiple Websites – Part 1 Why & How

April 15, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Hola! Welcome to the first part of a series of articles on how to run multiple niche websites and really tap into multi-channel eCommerce without eBay & Amazon.

I have been meaning to write this series for quite some time now and it’s going to take me a while to work through the different aspects I’d like to cover, hence breaking it up into multiple parts which will take me a few weeks to cover.

It’s my intention to start from the beginning in this article and cover the theory, then in the following articles work through turning the theory into practice to reach the final goal of you being able to run multiple web stores from a a single installation and really tap into the power of going niche.

I know I’m going to get distracted along the way, this is for good reason, I’m going to be focusing on a single open source eCommerce platform called “OpenCart” to deploy this concept with you and there are a couple of extensions that I’d like to include as part of this guide, this includes a free to use addon that will enable you to sell on eBay from OpenCart and also to delve into an Amazon integration as well.

To be completely up front with you, I have developed a complete integration from eSellerPro to OpenCart and while it would be handy if you have eSellerPro to power multiple websites from, I’d like to stress that this is not a requirement and I’ll be keeping this in mind throughout the series of articles as I delve into the how to power multiple nice websites with OpenCart.

So for now in this first article, let’s focus on the “Why” and start on the “How” parts.

Why?

I’m fully converse with deploying numerous selling persona’s on eBay & Amazon. I’ve done this previously with +15 accounts and I know of one company that has taken this & thrown it to the wall and has over 30 limited companies all specialising in niches just on eBay.

I previously wrote a pair of articles that desperately need a rewrite that covered why using multiple eBay accounts might be a good idea (you can read them here and here). As I mentioned, they need a rewrite and let’s summarise these, as the theory is straight forwards and comes back to a just three key factors, these are:

Timing
Personal choice
External factors

For the vast majority of manufactured goods, you are not the only company selling them, thus every single day, customers choose your competitors over you. There are an infinite number of reasons for this, timing, colour scheme, layout, description, title are a few factors.

Also, an interesting set of factors that I delved into a while ago was that there is a limit to the exposure for a given sales platform on a given day. This was started because I could see no viable reason why eBay sales should stay consistent within a specific window of 20% on a single day.

So let me ask you two specific questions here, if the response is anything like the one I normally receive back, this is exactly why you need to carry on reading this series of articles:

By midday, can you make an estimate within 10% on the total value of sales for that day? (if you’ve not tried this yet, try it)
Look at the sales totals for each day over the past two weeks. Do they stay within a 20% window?

Yep thought so. I’ve found some business owners that use eBay & Amazon can estimate their daily sales figures to the nearest £100 quite accurately just using that morning sales and others that can be well within 1-3% window on daily sales values in excess of £15K per day. The thing is, that’s not natural.

It’s what lead me to write a pair of articles, the first called “Why do eBay Sales Stay Consistent?” and the second to explore a hypothesis, that why I cannot prove, but I’d bet money on it or a subset of what I cover being in place, because its exactly what I would do, the article is here and called “The eBay “Best Match” Position Bias Modifier Hypothesis“.

I know I’ve not fully answered the “why” part just yet, but I need to explore a sub-topic, around choices. That’s next up :)

Choices, Choices, Choices

While timing can be pure fluke (when they find your product) and I’ve already made a case for external factors in the earlier section, the one factor that you can most easily influence is choice.

Buyers like choices, I like choices, but what influences my choice of which company to buy from, especially to what influences my partner to what she buys on eBay can vary greatly. Sometimes its just the way the product data is laid out, sometimes its gallery picture, sometimes it’s the sellers feedback, shipping prices, the colours used, the photographs, the list is almost endless.

The fact is here, is that I, as any of your potential customers may open your product listing and “not like it” and move to the next one. It could ironically be for the same product. It doesn’t matter, the point is, I have personal tastes on what I like and so do your customers.

This is one reason “why” you should consider multiple persona’s for your selling activities. For example you could one persona set up as a full professional looking business and the second the complete inverse, maybe one account that just uses variations, one that does not, one that as separate listings for each product variation and there are a whole host of possibilities, as soon as you break away from the “single business” approach.

And back to “Why?”

I wanted to cover the choices section in some detail, mainly because it’s the easiest to understand, I like black, but you may like blue, that means we will respond differently to different pages, it’s a quirk of being human, we have different tastes.

Going back to the three key points, Timing, Personal choice, External factors. Your product may be overlooked, it might even not be shown for a specific search and being at the right place at the right time can and does play a role in the ultimate goal of the customer buying your product. We’ve looked at personal choice in some depth and I’ve already hinted that when using marketplaces that external factors such as my hypothesis for when it comes to “best match” search results, the worrying part is that is exactly what I would do.

These are just some of the reasons why you should consider a multi-faceted approach to eCommerce and I’m sure you can think of more reasons why this approach makes good sense (if you have any you’d like to share, let me know in the comments box at the bottom).

I’m fully converse with deploying numerous selling persona’s on eBay & Amazon, but for websites, this can also be tough nut to crack, mainly because it can be expensive and the results take time to take effect, hence this article series.

Going Niche of Niche

If you have a wide range of products, then it can be relatively straight forwards to slice your products up into groups and create persona’s for each group.

I’m not going to be covering how to do this with eBay here, but instead focusing on a different way of approaching this through multiple eCommerce websites over a couple of articles.

An excellent example of this is in the real world is WorldStores, take a look at this page. That’s over 70 dedicated websites Each site is niche site to a specific range of products and this is the opportunity & challenge I’m going to be tackling in this series of articles. How to go multi-channel with multiple websites, on a budget.

If you’d like a corporate example see shopdirect.com that are responsible for Littlewoods, Very, Isme (previously Marshall Ward), K&Co (previously Kays) and the other is thehutgroup.com, they have at least a dozen eBay accounts that I know of and if they had 30, I’d not be be surprised, let alone the assortment of highly specialised “Niche” websites.

Which website platform to use?

If we pick on a few examples Magento can be, sorry “is” a resource hog, to run multiple websites off Magento (or even one larger site for that matter) then you’re going to need specialised hosting, which costs, its far from a simple platform to use and as soon as you mention “Magento”, all costs go up a minimum of 60%.

If we look at the bespoke offerings from eSellerPro, then cost, features & time to deploy is a major factor here and if we look at the ASPdotnetStoreFront from ChannelAdvisor, ignoring the setup costs & design fees, the £200 a month is a non-starter for each niche website.

We need cheap, we need ease of use, some snazzy functions that don’t require massive amounts of processing power & can be run on a shared web hosting account, an arsenal of free or inexpensive themes, an extensions & addons base that is varied and equally inexpensive and that’s why I’m picking on one of my favourite open source website platforms called OpenCart.

If you’ve not seen OpenCart before, then I think its about time you did. You can see both the front end of the base installation of OpenCart and the administration panels through their demostration sites here.

For me OpenCart makes an excellent choice, the admin is easy and the front end is feature rich. It’ll happily run on shared hosting accounts, its free, the themes are super cheap and crucially…. get this!! It will run multiple webstores from a single installation!

Summary & Your Feedback Please!

We know that niche works, I’m in a niche, you’re in a niche. But there are so many sub-niches we can get into with a product based business, we just need a cost effective route to do so and that’s exactly what I’ll be digging into in this series of articles using OpenCart as a base.

My closing questions are below and you can let me know your reply in the comments box below.

Have you considered creating niche websites before? What stopped you?
Do you already have niche websites, what has been your experiences so far?
What would you like to see in this series of articles?

I look forward to hearing from you :)

The First Bristol Multi-Channel eCommerce Meet Up 20th April

April 9, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Hola! I’d like to invite you to the very first Multi-Channel eCommerce meet up on Friday 20th April in Bristol.

One of the biggest takeaways from working with the 6 businesses in the latter part of last year was that while we enjoyed the one-on-one time, there was really no replacement for meeting as a group and discussing the challenges that we face as a group. Some of the solutions were ingenious and meeting on common ground really worked well.

I’ve had a chat about holding such a meeting with a couple of businesses owners in and around the Bristol area that use eBay & Amazon as sales channels and the response has been really good. Well, they’ve all said yes so far :)

I’d like to try & keep it a small, personal affair and if you’re near Bristol on the 20th April, I’d like for you to join us for an hour or two. If anything to escape the office on a Friday morning for a few hours and “talk shop” with your peers, you’re welcome to join us.

Agenda

There is none. It’s the first meeting and while I’ll pencil in an agenda, I’m planning to just roll with it and see where the discussion goes.

Zero Providers Allowed

My role in this meeting is purely as a host and to meet the “cool” people.

I’m sorry this is intended to be a zero service or product provider meeting. Later on, we may invite you to join us. If you are interested in attending in an informal or formal capacity from a provider standpoint, contact me directly using the contact form here. But it won’t be for a few meetings in.

Location & Directions

The location I’ve chosen is my 3rd place, it’s a coffee shop that is sat right on the edge of the historic Bristol harbour-side called “Cafe Gusto”.

Car parking is plentiful with two large car parks within a few minutes walk and there is free parking either within 15 minutes walk (Constitution Hill) or just over the water on Cumberland Road with a swish ferry ride for 70p.

For those who also cannot bear to be disconnected from the virtual world, there is free WiFi and a decent mobile signal. I use this cafe as my second office so I know the connectivity is excellent, although make sure your devices are fully charged there are no public power points.

Sat-Nav postcode: BS1 5JE
(this is for Jack’s which is just around the corner but will get you very close)
Start Time: 10:00 AM
Google Map URL: http://g.co/maps/sp3w9

Parking
The map below shows the 3 nearest carparks in yellow/orange. The prices vary for these and I’m not sure on the actual prices. The green square at the bottom is for Cumberland Road which the parking is free, if you walk/follow the signs for the SS Great Britain there is a ferry that crosses the water for 70p.

Walking
Alternatively if you’re prepared to walk a couple of minutes, the arrow in the top left is for Jacobs Well’s Road, there is meter parking either side and half way up is Constitution Hill for which the side roads are free.

Bus
If you’re travelling by bus, any route to the centre will do, its 10 minutes walk from the centre and walking directions are here http://g.co/maps/nx2v2 (you can short-cut along the waters edge).

Will I be Seeing You There?

I would like to stress, if you’ve got to travel half the country to attend, then this is probably not for you. Well at least until we’ve had a couple of meetings and I’ve hammered the format out.

There is no cost to attending although you’ll want to bring a tenner or so for refreshments. The coffee served is my personal favourite, there is a soft drinks fridge and a selection of speciality teas, and the panini’s are to die for.

If you’re in or around the Bristol area on the 20th and would like to attend let me know by leaving me a comment in the box below, I’ll send you my mobile number directly just in case you need guiding in on the day.

If you have any suggestions on topics that should be added to the agenda, they’d be welcomed.

Two Week Update & eSellerPro to BigCommerce Integration

April 1, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

This post is a mainly about what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks, but you’ll soon work out its mostly just for you :)

I’ve now completed the full integration of eSellerPro to the Big Commerce website platform and are on the home run of the bug finding & eyeing up further customisation to the account it’s running from.

If you’ve not heard of BigCommerce before it’s a fully hosted website solution which isn’t expensive (especially as its in USD). The more I’ve played with it, the more I like it, its straight forwards, can be designed with bespoke designs and guess what… it just works :)

Give it a whirl, here is a demo account I created which is open for the next 15 days.

URL: https://store-6eab4.mybigcommerce.com/admin/
Username: [email protected]
Password: ThisIsAPassword2

With the error trapping I’ve added in the 6 hour coding bender on Saturday, if it does go tilt (which it will do sooner or later[you won’t hear that from normal developers]) it’ll be obvious where it has gone Pete-Tong and as much as I’d love to boast about a few of the ways I’ve tackled some interesting features, I’m not going to and I’m just saying its “slick”.

This is the first time I’m publicly eluding to the fact that I’ve written API connectors from eSellerPro to 3rd parties and it’s not the first, more like the 4th now. I have CubeCart, OpenCart & a web based EPOS solution next on my agenda for integration projects, oh and I have a sickly fast Magento integration.

Remember I’m aware the way and what data needs to flow between such tools and as I’m a perfectly capable coder in multiple languages, this is handy as I’m not BS’d by 3rd parties and also I’m realistic with timescales and what can and cannot be done.

If you’ve got a 3rd party integration requirement to eSellerPro/another provider or alternatively you’re interested in the eSellerPro to BigCommerce integration you can contact me here.

Internet Retailing Expo 2012

This year’s event was a weird one for me, I didn’t go to visit any stands, instead I attended to meet people and frankly if they didn’t know me already I didn’t pay them any attention. Instead, I got to speak to the cool people.

I did see one presentation though, it was the team from My1stWish & eSellerPro’s Eamonn, the recording is supposed to be released this week, I’ll pop it up as a post once it’s been made public.

After refusing to pay £34 to get home 2 hours earlier late on Thursday night, I grabbed a Sub & stacked up on more caffeine and there it hit me, the sickest idea I have had in years was conceived. I cannot believe it’s never been done before and you’ll facepalm when they see the finished product. I will be pushing for it to be released with a global free option for smaller businesses, more on this in the next few months.

Advanced eBay Listing Creation Tool Pending Upgrade

This one has been a programming nightmare for me, I didn’t know what was involved in getting this working until now & if I did I wouldn’t have started it.

The IF & IFNOT logic that powers the largest multichannel businesses is about to go mainstream and I’m only a few days away from adding it to the processing core of the advanced eBay listing builder.

If the IF & IFNOT logic testing is new to you, it’s a method to programmatically work with data to make the data you input such as images and bullet points show and hide if or if not they’re entered, which means you can break the listing data away from the template design that makes the listing look “pretty”.

An example is below, so that if {{Image1}} is blank it won’t bring through the image into the template.

[[IFNOT/{{Image1}}// <img src=”{{Image1}}” /> ]]

This is a basic example, as it’s normally better to load image URL’s into a JavaScript array, however, this will be available for ALL the data entry fields and I will be providing use-case examples shortly & support in the forums.

We’re due for some tutorials as well for the tool, the more people I talk to who cannot whose business does not warrant even the first stage tools, they need a tool like this to put the efficiency in their business for both data input and presentation.

I’ve not forgotten the integration into WordPress which will allow me to offer you some heavily customised features per user including customised listing templates, account defaults and… I now have the code finished for the killer feature that is missing from nearly ALL eBay listings which isn’t even a paid for addon by design companies and guess what it’s going to be… free. More on this as soon as the artwork is completed which will be under 2 weeks.

Summary

So a quiet two weeks for blogging, but I’m doing battle with a spoon, I can’t wait to explain what that means, maybe a video this week?

I’d like to thank those who have registered for the forums, if you haven’t yet, its free and you can register here and as you’ll see by the couple of recent threads, you’ll get quality replies back (amongst my gibberish :) ), see you there?