April 2014 - The Last Drop of Ink

Update:

Howdy,

The webinar took place on Friday 2nd May. A recording will be made available this week and I’ll pop a blog post up for you the moment it’s ready.

The blog post is now ready, see here http://lastdropofink.co.uk/tools/magento/sell-ebay-using-magento-webinar-recording/

Matt

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Howdy,

This Friday, 2nd May at 2pm myself & Dave are holding a free webinar and you’ll learn how easy it is to sell on eBay using Magento.

We wanted to make it a challenge for us and for you to be able to get the most out of 60 minutes. So we decided that starting from scratch would be the most challenging for us, but also help you the most.

After all the best place is to start from the beginning right?

We’ll be starting from nothing and you’re going to learn the following:

That Magento only takes 2 minutes to install
The basic UK settings for Magento
How to create your first product in Magento
What attributes are and how they’ll help you list smarter on eBay
How to install the eBay endorsed M2E Pro extension
How to list onto eBay using Magento
And how you can revise live eBay listings easily
How to process orders from eBay in Magento
And heaps more

All in just 60 minutes.

< Sorry registration is now closed, check the UnderstandingE blog for the recording once live. >

Sell on eBay Using Magento?

You might not have known this, back in 2011 eBay bought Magento after having a 49% stake for quite some time.

Not a bad choice if you ask me, as Magento powers over 26% of the top 1 million eCommerce websites so it was only natural considering Magento’s open source base that sooner or later an extension would be created to allow business owners like you to sell on eBay using Magento.

M2E Pro (which stands for Magento to eBay), an extension for Magento does just that and the cool thing about this extension, it does everything you would expect from multi-channel software, but without the whopping monthly fees or a cut of your sales (and no sales person will call or nag you either).

eBay have been subsidising the extension for the past few years and is set to continue for the next 3 or more years or so. Other marketplaces such as Amazon are supported too.

M2E Pro has been downloaded over 50,000 times by business owners like you across the globe and has a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5 over 179 reviews (really high for a free extension!).

Here are just a few things that Magento & the M2E Pro extension can help you achieve:

Sell on ALL 23 major eBay sites
Manage stock levels & prices across your marketplace accounts
Help you sell internationally, locally into the other eBay sites (Cross Border Trade)
Sell on eBay using custom listing templates with comprehensive keywords available
Revise live eBay listings
Collect and manage eBay orders from your Magento sales orders dashboard
Everything you would expect from 3rd Generation multi-channel software

Magento CE is Open Source, there are thousands of extensions available on Magento connect (the online library of extensions) off the shelf.

If you need something that doesn’t exist (most cases, unlikely), because it’s written with the two internet staples, PHP & MySQL that’s not a problem. There are millions of developers available that can help you.

Oh and of course, you can have a Magento website too, but that’s optional.

So just because you’re using Magento, you don’t actually need to use it for your website, what I’m sure you’re most interested in right now is the stock control, inventory management and sales order processing abilities for eBay (but more on the website in a few moments).

All the major couriers have integrations to Magento, including extensions for Royal Mail DMO, the same goes for accounting too, Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, Kashflow, they can all be integrated with Magento.

Back onto the topic of using Magento as a website.

Owning a Magento website doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated.

The one thing you cannot skimp on is decent web hosting, so none of that £1.99 hosting. You’ll need web hosting in the £20 mark per month and the good news is that there is specialised Magento web hostings all over the world, SimpleServers in the UK or SimpleHelix in the USA for example.

As for a great looking Magento website design.

If you’re on a budget, how’s $100?

There is a Magento theme called Ultimo which has been sold over 7,600 times and comes with free support & updates. Plus we’ll be including a step by step video course on how to design your own Magento website with zero coding over at UnderstandingE.

The Webinar

I’ve got all excited and gone slightly off topic. The webinar….

< Sorry registration is now closed, check the UnderstandingE blog for the recording once live. >

It’s free to join and we’ll show you how easy it is to get started.

The webinar will be held live and that means if you have any questions you can ask them there and there.

So with that said,

See you on Friday, it’s going to be fun!

Matt

Howdy,

Each Tuesday at 10am myself & Dave hold a virtual coffee morning with business owners just like you. It’s free to join and the coffee is optional if it’s not your thing.

This post is an insight to into what you’ve missed so far and a chance for you to pick one that you’d like to listen into.

Click the image to view a recording of this coffee morning

We knew it was going to be the first day back in the office for many of you, so we need to keep things fast and to the point.

This was a fast paced, motivating coffee morning to get you in the spirit of digging in deep and dealing with the backlog from the Easter bank holiday.

With Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula One on the weekend, it seemed fitting to use his success as an example.

Lewis didn’t just turn up and go for a spin in a fast car, he’s been at it since he was 8 years old. He’s put in the time and progressed through the ranks to where he is today.

The thing is other people focus upon the trophy, the result.

But we’re different, you’re different. You know that’s all about the small things.

If a brake pad fails, the car is in the wall on the next bend, the driver is just as important as the smallest of parts. If one of these fail it’s the difference between having a chance at coming first or smashing the car, it’s that simple.

You can view a recording of this coffee morning here (held on 22nd April).

Click the image above to view the coffee morning recording

Data, something that was noted back in 2011 right here is the lifeblood of your business.

The pretty pages that customers see on the marketplaces like eBay & Amazon or on your website, they’re just that “Pretty”.

It’s the data behind the pages that really matters.

If you have clean, flexible data then you can do anything. You can sell on eBay (multiple times), Amazon, build your own websites and do just about anything.

In the coffee morning held on the 14th April, we looked at data and how we (and you) should look at the world differently, much differently.

You can view a recording of this coffee morning here (held on the 15th April).

eBay Best Match 101

Click the image to view the recording

What is the difference between the old search engine Voyager and the new eBay search engine Cassini?

If you sell on eBay you need to know this stuff.

The fundamental difference between them is the old search engine only searched the title, Cassini, well that can do pretty much anything eBay wants.

This now means that no one thing is the important factor for getting your eBay listings ranked highly, it’s a combination of lots of things all put together to get the results you’re looking for.

The coffee morning on eBay’s Best Match was a dry run for that evening over in Newport for the Online Seller Wales Events event held by Prabhat Shah.

The irony was that that evening I presented the same slide deck to a room of ~35 cool people (see here for photo’s, I’m the chap in a black jumper also note cool people = business owners like you), the thing is it wasn’t scary.

What was scary was presenting it for the first time that morning to a group of over twice that size on the coffee morning. A group of business owners just like you who want to succeed online with the marketplaces.

And yes you guessed it, there is a recording of this coffee morning right here.

M2E Pro Release Notes Reviewed

Click the image to view the M2E Pro Release Notes

If you’ve been a nuclear bunker for the past year you will have missed the discovery that you can use Magento and a eBay subsidised extension called M2E Pro to sell on to eBay & Amazon.

This is what I call the 3rd Generation (see part 1, part 2, part 3 & part 4 for the history on this) and unlike the 2nd generation of multi-channel software, this generation is highly flexible and highly inexpensive.

M2E Pro the extension that gives you the ability to use Magento to list products onto the marketplaces, stock & price control and process orders received a huge update.

We knew about the changes way in advance thanks to a heads-up by the M2E Pro team and in coffee morning held on April 1st we looked in deep at what the changes were and how they affect you and your business.

If you are using M2E Pro then you’ll want to take a look at the full rundown of the release notes here and a recording of the coffee morning is also included too.

Next Tuesday?

The problem with the recordings is that they’re just that, they’re recordings.

The audio quality is miles better on the live version (you just need a headset or speakers to listen in) and also you don’t get a chance to ask any questions you may have there and then.

Next Tuesday there is going to be another coffee morning, the following Tuesday another and so on…

Don’t miss out next week you can register your seat for free using the button below:

See you on Tuesday morning at 10am,

Matt

PS. The coffee is optional, some prefer gin, special brew or even tea :)