The Amazon Buy Box – You know the Secret Formula Right?

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If you’ve not read this article before, then you’re in for a treat as the Amazon Buy Box pretty much obey’s the formula and has been proven to do so time and time again.Amazon UK

If you’re new to Amazon, then in short the holy grail of Amazon is the blue buy box and if you’ve not come across the buy box before, you cannot miss it, it’s blue and on the right-hand side of almost every product on Amazon.

Hey, they’re infectious! There is one over to the right :)

When there is only a single seller fighting for the buy box, there can only be one winner, but when there are two or more sellers, then assuming that everything is even, you can win the Amazon Buy Box with the formula in this article.

The Amazon Buy Box Factors

However there is a but… This assumes that everything is equal and we know that nothing is ever a level playing field, especially when it comes to marketplaces and Amazon, well is not always even either (see this article Why do eBay Sales Stay Consistent? for further reading).

There are many factors that influence who gets the buy box on Amazon and ChannelAdvisor points out the obvious in their help file,  as a reference, I have put an amended table below.

Factor What Amazon is Considering Winning Practices
Featured Merchant Status How trustworthy you are based upon account history. Being noticed by the Amazon account managers.As ChannelAdvisor suggest, it doesn’t hurt to ask Amazon support about your “Featured Merchant Status”
Price What is your product price? What is your shipping charge? Low total price, including product price and shipping
Availability How many do you have in stock? How quickly can you ship? Quick and consistent fulfillment
Volume Do you sell many of this product? Consistency
Refunds How often do you issue a refund for seller error? Low refund rate
Customer Feedback How do customers rate your service? Low negative feedback ratings
Customer Support How quickly you deal with customer queries Answering in less than 24 hours, 7 days a week (yes that’s weekends included)
A-to-z Guarantee Claims How often do you get returns? Low A-to-z claims

A Special Note on FBA

But that’s not all, because we have not included the “motherload” which is “Fulfilment By Amazon” AKA “FBA”.

FBA means that the seller has one or more of their products in Amazon’s fulfilment centres and because Amazon has it, have verified it’s condition and knows it can get the product out to its Amazon Prime subscribers, then it promotes FBA held items heavily against seller fulfilled items and routinely it’s going to take a hefty price difference to shake FBA products out of the buy box, or is it?

The Amazon Buy Box Rule?

If you have had a slap from Amazon, whether that’s an account warning or a suspension and very worryingly even if it was not your fault and a mistake on Amazon’s part (we have this documented in a support email back from Amazon) then this can count against you if everything is even.

But course your business exceeds in every area on Amazon, you are the perfect seller, well second to Amazon that is, so for the following to work, we’re assuming that everything is level.

So to the “Amazon Buy Box Formula”:

(Lowest Selling Price – 2.7%)

– £0.01
= The Buy Box, For Longer

By taking away 2.7% off the lowest selling price (including postage) and an extra penny, you receive the Amazon buy box for much, much longer.

It took me ages to work this out, testing, refreshing over many days it’s this worked out to be the lowest % and value I could get trigger the buy box and for it to stick.

The minus one penny is in the formula for the lower priced goods in the sub £20 area, it always seemed to take that extra penny to kick the box into action.

There are a few clauses, on the accounts I tested this out on, they were ALL of a great standing with Amazon, no major issues and all had long track records of great service. The other is none of these accounts were using FBA (Fulfilment By Amazon). FBA is a lethal advantage as I mentioned above, to shake FBA items takes a little bit more.

Also none of the products that were tested on were over £50, I am sure there is alterations in the trigger for the buy box, the percentage is likely to be a lot less than 2.7% at these levels.

Your Feedback

I would like for you to try this on ONE product for ONE day and let us know your results.

I know that several of the readers here have used this formula to great success over the past year since I first published this article, what I’d for you to do is try it for yourself for a day and let me know your results here by leaving me a comment below.

Alternatively if you have been using it, let us know your feedback as the formula does move around in different categories and price brackets, again let me know in the comments box and of course if we lost you anywhere in this article, don’t hesitate to ask in the forums.

What is an eBay Second Chance Offer & Why are they Important to a Business?

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Not such a daft question as you first think and in this article I’ll do my best to exceed what is most commonly known about eBay second chance offers and put them into context for you.

To explain this as clearly as possible lets start this with a quick story.

For the past few week’s I’ve been coaching the mother-in-law to sell a collection of items on eBay that she’s been getting ready to clear out, the first batch of 19 items went through and while only 15 of them sold, several did really, really well.

While being left to pack the items, a message pops up on Skype from mum, “What’s a second chance offer? Do I want one of those?“. So not a daft question if you were wondering what one was.

 

So what is an “eBay Second Chance Offer” anyway?

eBay Second Chance Offer

Every time you sell an auction on eBay where you have had two or more bidders on the auction, once the listing ends, you will be able to make a second chance offer to an under-bidder if you want to.

Now the latter part “if you want to” is the important part and the bit that confused granny. In Grannies case, she only had a single item for each listing and thus absolutely no need or desire to offer a second chance offer on the successful listings.

If you’re a private seller on eBay, this is very much likely to be the case for you too, so you can ignore it.

There is a but to that statement, which is… but if you have exactly the same item to sell again and you like the price(s) the under-bidders made you can offer it to them, the same is true if your original winner backs out for some reason and you can offer it to an under-bidder at their highest bid price.

Why are Second Chance Offers Important for Businesses?

In the example above, Granny really did not care about the second chance offers option, however if you are a business seller, there are circumstances where you definitely want to be using second chance offers as part of your business model.

If you have many items for sale, some or all of which are repeatable and you’re using “bid auctions” to sell your item through, then as long as you are happy with lower bid prices when then listing ends, then you can make “second chance offers” to the under-bidders and scoop some easy extra sales.

How Do You Make a Second Chance Offer?

Making a second chance offer is dead easy to do.

Regardless if you have Selling Manager, Selling Manager Pro or just plain old “My eBay”, on the left hand side of “My eBay” click on “sold” and next to listings where you can make a second chance offer to a buyer, it says “Second Chance Offer”, if you’d like to make one, then click on the link.

A screen will appear something similar to the one below:

Making an eBay Second Chance Offer

  • Select the number of available items that are exactly like the one that sold
    Note:  This is capped to 6 items
  • Select the duration you would like the offer to the buyer to last for.
    Tip: Normally I would suggest 1 day for this as it adds a real sense of urgency to the offer
  • The select one or more bidders, noting that their highest bid price is to the right
    Tip: If you lost of the item that sold and the prices are good, tick them all if would like! Also, another tip is to just be sure that you have no already sold the item in another auction to the same buyer (awkward!).
  • Hit continue at the bottom & confirm

The second chance offer or offers that you just made, will now appear in your “My eBay” section.

But unlike a normal auction where lots of people can see the item, only yourself and the potential buyer account you made that offer to can see it. Also the auction is now a “fixed price” listing which means the buyer cannot bid on the item, they only have the option just buy it at the price that was set (if they want to of course).

The person you made the offer to will either accept it or if they do not within the listing time you specified, the listing will end and cannot be repeated.

How Long do Second Chance Offer Last For?

As a seller, you can specify the duration of the second chance offer as either 1 day, 3 days, 5 days or 7 days.

One of the tips above was that if you have lots of an item that you have been listing in auctions and the under-bidder prices are acceptable, I’d personally suggest you work with 1 day listings for the second chance offers as these add urgency to the bidder and can help them convert into a buyer (yay).

It’s also worth noting that buyers can turn off second chance offer notices in their communication preferences on eBay (bummer eh?).

Can You Cancel a Second Chance Offer?

Yes, just like a normal auction/listing you can do so using the end an item early form here on eBay (you’ll need the eBay item number).

Can Second Chance Offers be Automated?

Oh yes! But it does mean you need 3rd party software.

Believe it not while the statistics may be showing that the number of auctions may be decreasing (and the number of fixed price listings increasing heavily), that does not mean that you cannot still leverage auctions on eBay to gain buyers.

As far as automating second chance offers, you of course, need to be using the auction format and have a listing that ends with more than one bidder, whose price you like and of course at a price you’re happy selling at.

You used to be able to do this in eBay’s own “Selling Manager Pro”, but they removed it from the automation preferences quite some time ago, so instead the only option to user a third party tool that allows you to set rules and send second chance offers automatically for you.

They all vary in features and functionality, here is a short list of software products that I know support the automation of second chance offers on eBay:

  • Inkfrog
  • Auctiva
  • ChannelGrabber
  • Linnworks
  • eSellerPro
  • ChannelAdvisor

There are probably far more software tools that offer the ability to make second chance offers, while this may be important to you, this is just one of many options you should consider when looking for & using 3rd party software.

Tip: You may find a video I made in an earlier article called “What is Order Aggregation & How Can it Help Your Business?” useful to give you a deeper understanding on what such software can help you with.

In Conclusion

eBay second chance offers are really straight forwards, if you’ve got more than one item in exactly the same condition, have an under-bidder on an eBay listing with a price you like you can make them an offer second to the main bidder for the listing they were bidding on, you can do when the listing ends.

You can also automate the sending of second chance offers using rules in third party tools, in combination with these, they can be an absolutely lethal strategy to gain extra sales using the eBay auction format, which is certainly far from dead.

Did you like this article, have a question or a comment or what has been your experiences with second chance offers on eBay? Let me know in the comments box below!

So How Many Orders Are “Lost” on eBay Compared to Amazon?

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“Item Not Received” how I bet you love that message appearing in your inbox, but how much more common is it for eBay purchases compared to Amazon purchases to go AWOL?

It’s a curious question raised numerous times now in conversation and this time around I’m going to share parts of an ongoing email conversation with a chap called Mr B.

So that they remain anonymous, Mr B obviously isn’t their real name, the quotes are though.

We’d both love to hear your experiences by leaving us a comment in the comments box at the bottom of this page.

So let’s dive in…

Mr B Says: On my Amazon store I have just passed the 2,000 orders sent mark and so I feel a reasonable figure to start drawing comparisons Item not received: on Amazon I have had exactly 2 from 2,000app. and both were for less than £5 sale price and so I’m absolutely sure genuine losses

It’s never nice to have a disappointed customer because of the delivery part of the order, but it happens. That to me seems about right, yea we all get losses, but it’s never really that high and 0.1% is tolerable and to be expected, stuff just gets lost, regardless of the carrier being used.

But….

Mr B Says: If I was to compare this like for like with my eBay UK only sales I can often expect maybe as high as 2% I am no mathematician but I think this can be as much as 15% of my bottom line after all expenses involved in resolving.

So that’s about 20 orders per 1000 orders despatched, as the point is made above, when you factor in the extra legwork needed to solve these issues, 15% is probably quite generous, especially in a small business where there maybe only one or two members of staff. Those kind of numbers hurt.

Mr B Says: To be fare on eBay I think perhaps dishonest customers are a legacy of the old eBay the dodgy professional sellers have by and large been weeded out but the scam buyers remain and in my opinion are rather cynically protected by eBay/paypal policies as of course they still generate fees all be they completely at sellers expense.

I do mostly agree with ebay and paypal policies ultimately no customers = no sellers but ebays policy in pushing for these cases to be resolved with ought opening disputes does sadly keep the minority of dishonest customers hidden (I am sure you have also noticed item not received customers very very rarely leave feedback even after issue resolved) something I have noticed is that it is most likely the genuine lost in post customers that do leave glowing feedback on how issue was resolved.

On a side topic here, notice how Mr B refers to an “Old eBay”, this is now becoming quite common in discussions and hats off to eBay, their plodding to transform the site from its beginnings are starting to pay off in it’s sellers community.

Mr B also makes another very interesting point, if your order had been lost and the seller had been super helpful in resolving the issue for you, then why the hell would not leave them glowing feedback? His suggestion that the people who do not, probably have something to hide, while may taint the odd genuine loss, but for the best part is probably very true.

 

A Possible Solution?

Normally sellers have solutions to such problems already worked out and ideas on how they would tackle them if they could change the system to do so. Mr B not surprisingly, has his own ideas and it’s not bad:

Mr B Says: I feel a very simple solution would be to implement a system allowing sellers to atleast report customer has not received an item the chronic cases will be high lighted very quickly and a few prosecutions I’m sure will benefit all.

Failing that if a customer has a history of items not received perhaps a personal warning to seller that secure postage advised on an individual rather than global basis would atleast allow seller to make an informed decision before posting would be welcomed.

While we have settings in the Site Preferences under “Buyer Requirements“section of My eBay that covers some basic options:

  • Buyers without a PayPal account
  • Buyers with unpaid items recorded
  • Buyers in locations to which I don’t post
  • Buyers with policy breach reports
  • Buyers with a negative Feedback score
  • Buyers who may bid on several of my items and not pay for them
  • Buyers with no credit card on file

The only one option of these that could possibly help Mr B and you is the “Buyers with a negative Feedback score”, but since sellers are not unable to leave negative feedback on buyer accounts, the last line of defence is now gone.

With the feedback out of the loop and let’s face it the unlikely chances that eBay will tell you that a specific buyer is suspicious or has a risky address (more on this in a moment), then taking Mr B’s suggestion and adding a claims/ item not received option to the buyer requirements would be a very good addition.

Amazon LogoQuickly flipping over to Amazon for a few moments, for purchases made directly from Amazon, it’s always bemused me that why exactly the same product at very similar prices would be delivered by two different methods to two addresses within a few minutes walk of each other.

Even when queried in the past, Amazon staff are not entirely sure what causes one order to be sent via one method and another via another method, especially when you factor in a slight change of postcodes for exactly the same product.

Makes you wonder what extra processing of risk assessment Amazon has at their disposal, but that’s a topic for a different day…. So going back to Mr B.

Mr B Says: I don’t know if you have any contacts within Royal Mail? Personally I rarely make lost parcel claims at present due to time and effort involved lol but I am sure lost parcel claims specifically ebay related must be a big chunk from RM’s bottom line and so they would probably welcome and perhaps atleast partially fund needed changes at eBay

Just after receiving the OK from Mr B to use parts of our conversion, I contacted Royal Mail and they have not been back before the publishing of this article.

Pity, but what I would add is that part of the business contracts with RM, is that as part of the discount you get, is that you forfeit the ability to claim for losses. Ironically so if an order does get lost in transit, that you are actually paying RM to do that for you. Something that has driven me personally nuts in the past.

Your Feedback

Myself & Mr B would love to know what your experiences are when comparing Amazon to eBay for ‘lost’ items.

  • Do you see a difference in order losses between eBay & Amazon?
  • How much they impact you and your staff?
  • What would you change?

You can let us know in the comments box below.

Google Checkout is now Google Wallet – New Logo’s Included

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Google WalletI’ve used Google Checkout, sorry ‘wallet’, for years and I’ve experienced zero fraudulent transactions to date and as a buyer, I tend to use it over PayPal if the merchant accepts it. It just “works”.

Well its official, Google Checkout has today now been re-branded to “Google Wallet” and branding goes in-hand with the new Google Play.

I do actually like the new look & feel to both. However the purpose of this post is to remind you that the logo’s for Google Checkout are now changing and I’ve included the links to the latest versions below:

Big Buy Button

Normal Buy Button

Donate Button

Support Button

Contribute Button

Google Wallet Accepted Button

They’re much more stylish that the previous versions google-checkout-old-buy-button and it’s worth checking your shopping carts are using the latest logo’s for customers as any slight deviation in branding whether its your’s or a third parties could mean the difference between a customer converting and not.

Do you use Google Wallet for your checkout or have you used it as a buyer? What were your impressions? Let me know in the comments box below, I’d love to hear from you.

 

Free Dynamic eBay Store Categories For eBay Listings

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Important: This tool has moved to a new home at WidgetChimp.com and is no longer available. If you’re looking for a self-hosted version with more control, see here.

If have been using this, then it will continue to be supported for you as I understand that it may not be possible for you to remove it from your listings easily. It’s been moved so it’s performance can be improved & extra features added in a more user-friendly way.

This is a cool little app that will show your eBay store categories easily and simply in your eBay listings without you needing to update them each time you change them.

What are Dynamic eBay Store Categories?

This really simple to use application will allow you to show your eBay store categories in your eBay listing template and style them as you desire.

This is normally paid addon to custom eBay listing template and eBay shop designs and can cost £99 or more to have it included in you custom design work.

As I found out recently, this could be the only reason why you would want to stop paying a monthly fee to a 3rd party design company just because you can’t carry your shop categories over when you leave and now you can!

The code that powers this application has been coded from scratch and directly integrated into the eBay API. The first time its run, it will take a few moments to process your eBay Store categories and then each view after, your eBay store categories load exceptionally quickly.

An Example

I’ve put an example together for you to see this in action in the link below. The example category tree is quite long, I chose this eBay ID on purpose so that you can see what it looks like over multiple levels and I will be adding the ability to just pick your top categories, level 2 categories or as in this example, all of them if you wish.
http://apps.lastdropofink.co.uk/eBayShopCats/example.html

The eBay Shop categories widget will update every 24 hours automatically, if you add or remove categories from your eBay Shop then your live listings will reflect those changes within a day and you’ll never need to worry about “hard-coding” your eBay shop categories into your listing templates, to only then a few days or weeks later when you change your store categories again.

How to Create Your Dynamic eBay Store Categories

Creating your dynamic eBay store categories is dead easy to do.

Using the form below you can create a simple copy & paste line of code that you can use to show your eBay Store categories in your eBay listings and they dynamically update ever 24 hours. It’s really that simple.

If you’d like to style them to make them look pretty, I have included some custom styles lower down this page so that even if you know nothing about CSS, the sample styles will help you and it’s as easy as copy and paste and if you’re comfortable with CSS or maybe a web-designer then you’ll find the level of CSS class tags that have been included exceptionally versatile.

Steps to make your dynamic eBay categories:

  1. Enter your eBay ID into the form below
  2. Select your default eBay site
  3. Press “Create Categories”
  4. Copy and paste the HTML code into your eBay listing template
  5. Use your own CSS or one of the sample CSS styles below to make your categories look great

This Tool has Moved

This tool has moved to a new home at WidgetChimp.com

Customising Your Dynamic eBay Shop Categories

This is a really simple job if you know CSS and don’t worry if you have no idea what CSS is, because I have included some copy and paste examples for you to use straight away.

Styles:

If you have any custom colour requirements beyond these examples, please see this thread and I’ll update the style library for you.

Advanced Dynamic eBay Shop Categories CSS

This tool was built with designers in mind and each element that this app creates is completely controllable using standard CSS. I also elected to follow the DIV route rather than using unordered lists because they’re far easier to work with when we take multiple browsers into consideration.

If you’re new to designing templates for eBay Shops then the important tit-bit of information you need to know is that each shop category has its own ID number which looks like “2285466014”. The eBay shop categories are created in the users account here and while the users can change the sort ordering in eBay, in the public version of the dynamic eBay categories tool, the categories are sorted alphabetically.

CSS Tags

  • ID: eBayCategories
    This is the main container DIV for the dynamic eBay store categories
  • CLASS: MenuItem
    These are the top-level categories for the eBay store
  • CLASS: MenuSub1Item
  • CLASS: MenuSub2Item
  • CLASS: CatID-NNNNNNNNN
    Each eBay store category has its own number/ID. Use this class to style specific eBay shop categories according to your design requirements

This tool is provided free of charge and all I ask for you to do in return is to press one of the social buttons above and/or let me know of your comments, suggestions or feedback you may have in the forums here.

Stand Alone PHP Version

Due to the feedback already received from the free version, there is now a premium standalone version available that you can host in your own web hosting and comes with more extensive controls, see here for the latest version.

Your Feedback!

This app has been coded from scratch, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions, I’d love to hear from you.

Please use the forums and I’ve created a forum thread especially for this application.

I Need Your Help – eBay Feedback Research

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Howdy,

I need your help with a curious project I am working on.

I’m going to mine 250,000 eBay feedback comments and look for some common themes among them and see what can we learn from what’s been left so that we can make our businesses better.

 

Mining the Data

We take positive feedback as granted and tend to focus on only the bad side, well we would they are the ones that stick in our immediate memories.

But… what really makes buyers leave positive feedback? and crucially what can we learn by looking at a large number of feedback comments that have been left over a variety of businesses? Are there common themes, is one business excelling where another is not?

I’ve already worked out that I need to split them across users that have 3rd party software tools and ones that don’t and a good mix across different eBay categories to obtain a wide set of sample data and also no older than 6 months.

The reason why I’m curious about this project is because I’m really interested in what are the common comments left and from the sample set of data, is there such a thing as a “Perfect eBay Feedback Comment” using the top 10 or so words and if it has left in the sample set?

I’m also really curious how as a nation how polite we are using words such as “thank you” and “thanks” and what makes a buyer use emotional words like “love” and “excited”. How important delivery time is and what percentage references to “fast delivery”, “next day” and to try and apply some numbers to the words used such as “comms”, “communications” and what relationship there is between feedback comments left that use these terms for sellers that use and do not use advanced tools like CA or ESP and then to spin them against the keyword “service”.

What impact does free shipping have on feedback comments that are left, does item value change the tone of the feedback comments left and what, if any difference eTRS has between the common keywords for praise for sellers that have eTRS and sellers that do not.

Your Help

I’ve never seen this done publicly before and I’m going to build out a few theories beforehand and then test to see if they are true or not, but that’s where I need your help:

  • Is there a theme or comparison that I have not thought of above yet?
  • Is there a way of comparing the comment or the contents of the comment to another attribute like eTRS or similar that I have not thought of?
  • What do you think I’ll find?

Let me know in the comments box below:

Looking for BETA Testers – A Couple of eBay Related Widgets

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Hola,

I’ve been working on a couple of widgets for eBay and I’m wondering if you would be interested in using them to help me make them better before they’re released publicly.

There are a few of them as listed below and I’ll cover them in more detail:

  • Dynamic eBay Store Categories for eBay Listings
    (Now live here)
  • Dynamic Related Items Gallery
  • Terapeak Value Summaries
  • Single & Multi-variation data extraction for sales

If any of these grab your attention, the contact details are at the bottom of this article.

 

Dynamic eBay Store Categories

Update: This is now live see this article.

Having the eBay shop categories in your listings can be exceptionally important as part of an exit strategy to your listings. So I’ve build a dynamic categories widget that anyone can use.

What does this widget do?

This widget brings in your eBay shop categories into your eBay listing and updates every 24 hours.

A little background

eBay Shop Listing Frame

This widget has been bugging me for months and a few days ago I finally worked how it was done and wrote the code to create them for any account with an eBay Shop.

It’s fine if you have eSellerPro, a special keyword was added called “{{MenuCategoryList}}” that will bring through the eBay shop categories in your eBay listings from the template and allow you to format them (you also need to set some static information in maintenance > accounts for this to work properly).

But even that’s not the ideal solution as if you add or remove categories from your eBay Shop then you have to revise your live listings, which when you have thousands of listings can take hours to complete.

You could of course turn on the listing frame that eBay provides. This will do the same job, but it’s missing one key ability. The ability to style it as it’s outside the iframe that the listing description sits in. So that’s really only a temporary measure at best.

The part that has been bugging me is that not everyone has eSellerPro, even the keyword that they use is not ideal, plus as mentioned above the eBay listing frame is a viable alternative, but you just can’t style it using CSS and to have this as part of your eBay listing template can cost the best part of £100 from a couple of eBay design companies. Nice, but not worth £100 for that alone IMHO.

So now I’ve written a block of code that will give you the eBay shop categories dynamically, just add your eBay ID, paste into your eBay listing and it just works.

For advanced users, I’ve added ID and CLASS tags to the right sections of the category tree, you can style them however you like too. They’re cached overnight and if you add or remove categories, then they’ll be reflected the next day.

Dynamic Related Items Gallery

This also stems from a me seeing a piece of functionality a few weeks ago and putting it on my to-do list and actually getting around to coding this.

What does this do?

This will give you a scrolling related items widget that you can use in either your eBay shop or in your eBay listings and also control what is or what is not shown by shop category or keywords.

If you take a look at this eBay shop http://stores.ebay.de/Crumpler-Outlet you’ll see that there are two pretty cool rotating widgets for “Best Sellers” and “New Arrivals”. A screen shot of this is below:

Related Items Widget

While best sellers and new arrivals are nice for an eBay shop, what would be much better is that such a widget would be better off in the eBay listing and that’s exactly the route I took.

I now have a dynamic related items widget that will accept:

  • No input for all the items in the shop,
  • Items from a specific eBay shop category
  • A specific keyword or set of keywords
  • Or a combination of both a shop category and keywords

Oh and they can be fully customised to your eBay shop/listing template design as shown by the live listing here and in the screen shot below:

Related Items eBay Widget

Terapeak Value Summaries

Terapeak is fab for mining one part of eBay which is sales related. But it has bugged me for months as I just can’t do the maths on the search results quick enough.

This is the first of two scripts that bend rules, hence you’ll need to read the disclaimer section further down when it comes to this and the eBay variations one below.

What does this do?

This will summarise the results page in less than a second for you and add it as summary line on the page. Thus saving you from trying to guestimate the results and give you accurate figures instantly.

I showed this to someone on Friday and they came back with an excellent suggestion (which I’ll add), which is that showing the totals and average sale price was fantastic, but they’d also like to know the market share of that keyword for each seller ID.

So next to eBay Seller ID, I’ll be adding percentage share that each Seller ID has for that specific search term. That’s exactly the reason why I’m sharing these to make them better!

A screenshot of this in action is below. Imagine you wanted to know what the total value of a specific search term(s) , the number of listings, bids, sold quantity as a total and a better idea of a ASP, you can now easily find out:

Terapeak Example

Single & Multi-Variation Data Extraction For Sales History

While we’re on the topic of Terapeak, Terapeak is excellent for working out relatively accurate sales figures for eBay listings, but the part where it falls down is that it does not report on the actual variations of a single or multi-variation listing.

That information is absolutely critical to making a buying decision based on sales history data.

Let me explain this to you with an example. I’ve made a search for “Maxi Dress” on eBay and found this item number http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/300648608435 now let’s assume that we are able to source this or a similar product.

eBay Sales History Example

eBay tells us that +1,000 of these have sold and that’s great. Terapeak will give us a total sales value for that listing, but what it does not tell us is what combinations they sell and in what velocity.

So to make an informed buying decision on the same or similar product, we need to know what has sold, in which variations, at what price and when. That kind of information can make the difference between potentially buying the wrong sizes, the wrong colours and making profit.

This will extract this for you to a CSV file, with each variation on a separate line and able to handle up to 4 variations and for a total of 100 sales. The limit of 100 sales is what is imposed by eBay from the sales history page. Buyer details are not extracted as they’re irrelevant.

Disclaimer

The Terapeak script and the eBay extraction script both come with warnings as they both bend terms of service agreements and I’m writing this with two specific people in mind.

In both these instances a user can obtain this data by a basic copy/paste from the page and sorting it out in excel. Neither of these scripts make subsequent calls to other pages (ie: no extra page load because of their usage) and are either manipulating live data on a page or saving it in a well formatted manner for the purposes of bettering the users research activities. Also in both instances, neither are detectable as they are run client side :P

Your Feedback!

If any of these tickle your fancy, please contact me directly here and if you have any comments or suggestions on what I’ve covered above, I’d love to hear from you in the comments box below.

Tesco Marketplace Now Partly Live – Already Showing Signs of Flaws

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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

Tesco Marketplace Product Page 1I’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.

Tesco-Marketplace-Product-Page-2

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 here.

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:

Tesco Marketplace Maplins Store Tesco Marketplace Crocus Store

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

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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.

Multiple eCommerce WebsitesI 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:

  1. 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)
  2. 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

Choices, Choices, Choices. Which Colour do you like?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

WorldStores +70 StoresIf 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.

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

I look forward to hearing from you :)

Two Week Update & eSellerPro to BigCommerce Integration

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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 :)

BigCommerceI’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.

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?

Advanced eBay Listing Creation Tool With Keywords

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For a long time now that businesses that do not employ software tools that have keywords available to them are restricted by not being able to leverage them and simply their eBay listing process.

So I’ve created a simplified, yet advanced eBay listing generator that will allow you to use keywords in a standardised template that speed up your eBay listing process by enabling you to break your listing template away from the data you’re entering into it and use a simple tool to create eBay listings quickly.

If you’re not using 3rd party tools to list onto eBay then you may not have come across this concept before so I’ve included two extra sections to this article for you come up to speed with a way that will allow you to list more quickly & efficiently.

It also helps a few weeks back I created two videos in related articles that reverse engineer this process so that you can understand this process using a live eBay listing example and I’ve included the video’s in this article to help you.

What Are Keywords & Templates?

Instead of manually adding data such as item titles into each listing, in this process you create your template and leave a “keyword” behind such as {{Description}} where you would like your description to appear.

Then using the Advanced eBay Listing Creation Tool I’ve created, you just enter your description by itself, separate from the template and then press the huge button at the bottom and where you added the {{Description}}  keyword in your template, it’s replaced with your description.

Neat eh? This is exactly what larger businesses are using to list millions of items on to eBay each week, they’re separating their listing template from their data and using 3rd party tools to create those data rich listings.

So that’s exactly why I have made a simplified version for you to use that does not require the complexity or cost of using a 3rd party software tool.

An Introduction to Keywords & Templates By Example

In a two previous articles I reverse engineered both the eBay template being used and the data being used in that eBay template and I’ve included the video’s below for you to watch:

Reverse Engineering a Template Reverse Engineering the Data 

View on YouTube
View on YouTube

Keyword List:

To begin with I have created a common set of keywords for you to use, these are below.

Standard

  • {{Title}}
  • {{Description}}
  • {{Buttons}}
    This is a special keyword to create the buttons in your eBay listings for “Ask seller a question”, “Tell a friend”, “Watch this item” and “Add seller to favourites”. There is also another very special button I am working on and will be released once I’ve finished coding it.

Bullets

  • {{Bullet1}}
  • {{Bullet2}}
  • {{Bullet3}}
  • {{Bullet4}}
  • {{Bullet5}}

Images

  • {{Image1}}
  • {{Image2}}
  • {{Image3}}
  • {{Image4}}
  • {{Image5}}
  • And so on…
  • {{Image15}}

Future Additions

Now that I have got the tool beyond the proof of concept stage, I had to learn how JQuery & Ajax worked and also improve my PHP skills over the past two weeks, I’ll hand the project over to one of my developers and add in the additional keywords that I’d like to add.

Such as adding in your eBay shop link automatically, dynamic image galleries and wait for it…. logic testing (like in eSellerPro, see here for an example) so you can make eBay listings completely dynamic depending on what data you enter, plus CSV file exports for eBay File Exchange & Turbo Lister to make your eBay listing process as simple as possible!

While these are being developed, I’m going to work on integrating this listing generator more deeply into this site, so that as a registered user (free of course) you can set up a set of “default” options to make the listing process even faster for you and being supported in the multi-channel eCommerce forums I have also been developing.

eBay Listing Creation Tool

You can test the advanced eBay listing generator tool here.

Your Feedback

I know the current tool is basic currently (but it won’t stay like that for long), it has the potential to save you hours and help you create a standard listing process, so I have two questions for you:

  1. What do you make of the tool so far?
  2. Can you suggest any keywords that you’d like to see added?

Let me know in the comments box below

Work With Matt to Maximise Your eBay Shop For FREE

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Last year I offered the opportunity for 5 businesses to work with me for free for two months, I was blown away by the response and it actually ended up being six and we had an excellent time with some outstanding results.

ebay Shops LogoThis time around I would like to extend another free invitation to you on the topic of eBay Shops for up to 5 businesses. Size does not matter, if you’re really small, just started or have been trading for years, I’d love to hear from you.

I have a couple of questions for you, if you are saying yes to any of them, the application form is at the bottom of this page & I’d love to hear from you.

  • Have you ever wondered how you can maximise your eBay shop to its full potential?
  • Maybe you set it up months ago and have it on your to-do list and would like to revisit it?
  • Would you find value in a personalised & group 101 session on maximising the potential of your eBay shop?
  • Are you about to hit the subscribe button and open your eBay shop for the very first time?
  • Do you have some free time in the evenings over the next two weeks to tackle these issues head on?

What Exactly I am Offering

I feel it really important to stress that I have no affiliations with any design company and will not try and sell you any products or services. I am solely interested in creating the best guide possible and I will be adding a video of the invitation just for you next week.

The invitation is to work with myself and the other selected businesses & individuals as a group to improve your the effectiveness & appearance eBay Shop. The course will span approximately three to four hours over a period two weeks in a schedule similar to the below:

  • Meeting 1 – Introductions & eBay Shop Discussion
    You’ll not be asked to complete any silly introduction games. We’ll meet as a group & introduce ourselves to each other, have a chit-chat, identify common issues, questions, and concerns and note them for action in the next two meetings.
  • Meeting 2 – One on One Time
    This is where we get to work together one-on-one and address any questions you may have around your eBay shop and work together to action them.
  • Meeting 3 – Strategy
    With the basics addresses, set up a guide for you to follow. Remember there is no magic bullet, just hard work on both our parts. I am working on a creating a guide for us to follow for this.
  • Meeting 4 – Final Call
    Meeting as a group again, to re-evaluate our progress as a group and to share our experiences.

Our time together will really be what you make of it, I’ll do my best to help you where ever I can in relation to your eBay Shop. The meetings will span two or so weeks and obviously you’ll need to be available to join in for the two group meetings and the two meetings directly with myself.

I will be asking you to complete a short questionnaire before we start, with questions like who you are, what your business does and how you currently feel about your eBay Shop. This will give us the base to work from and a reference point to come back to at the end of the course, where I’ll ask you to complete another short questionnaire.

The Purpose

Let’s be very clear here, I am writing a guide titled “The Ultimate Guide to eBay Shops” and would like several case studies to included.

It’s not going to be of those crappy half-cut affairs, its really going to be the de-facto-standard for setting up and leveraging the eBay Shop as a sales platform.  The guide is going to have my name and face attached to it, so obviously I have a strong desire that it’s of the highest standards as possible, after all, it’s going to be directly representing myself & abilities.

The guide will be given away free on this site and my aim is that there will be zero advertising included, any tools or applications included will be free or based upon merit, not paid inclusion.

Restrictions & Terms

There are a couple of restrictions and terms, they’re pretty straight forwards, but need saying:

  • UK, USA & AU businesses welcome!
    The invitation is only open to companies and individuals that have UK, USA or AU based eBay Shops
  • Its not a replacement for bespoke design requirements
    This is not a replacement for bespoke custom design services. I will help if I genuinely can, however the design element is only one part of the eBay shop setup.
  • Sorry no REALLY big businesses
    This invitation is not open to businesses that are either enterprise or strategic eBay accounts
    (If you have no idea what these are, it doesn’t apply to you)
  • No need if you’re an existing client of Matt’s
    Existing customers of mine need not apply, we’ll work through this as a matter of course.
  • Good Spoken English
    You must speak excellent English and have access to a computer that has a stable Internet connection and a headset/microphone or access to a phone line.
  • 4 Hours Total
    We could talk for hours on the eBay shop, so a sensible limit is 4 hours total, this includes group time as well.
  • Be available in the evenings 
    You need to be available in the evening around 19:00 GMT on weekdays (this is 14:00 EST)
  • You’re OK with this being used commercially
    You’re happy with your eBay shop being used in such a guide, both front end and backend views being included (obviously no financial information) and agree to sign a waiver to any rights to the included content that may be used commercially (this is just to cover my rear as I intend to create a specific version for the Kindle).

I am a Design Company That creates Designs for eBay Businesses & Would Like to get Involved

This part is just for design companies.

I understand that you may be interested in being featured in such a guide, however, my primary concern with this is that I do not wish for the guide to be biased in any shape or form. I will be including numerous examples and if your work is of mentionable “merit”, then it will be naturally included.

However, I do have one requirement that you may be able to help me with and that is the cover of the guide. The guide is being created in Word in A4 landscape and may be ported to In Design for the final stage before publication. If you feel that you will be able to assist me in creating the cover that such a guide deserves, then use the application form below.

Closing Date

The closing date for this opportunity is:

Friday 16th March at 17:00 GMT

I will work through the applications on that weekend. If the response is anything like the opportunity last years attracted, this will take me some time to work my way through them.

However I will reply to you personally and please don’t take personally if you’re not selected, remember the final guide will be given away on this site and you will be able to benefit even if you’re not selected.

Application Form

I’d done my best to keep it as simple as possible and there is an edit box where you can add any extra information you feel is important. I’ll ensure that the five businesses that are selected are from non-competing product areas, so that we can keep the barriers of competition as low as possible.

As we’ll be using GoToMeeting to host the calls & screen sharing where required, at no point will I need your login details to any account and please do not include these as they’re not needed. You will not be added to any mailing list and I will reply personally to each application.

[contact-form-7 id=”4245″ title=”eBay Shops Form”]

Looking Forward to Working With You!

I’m really looking forward to working with you, if you have any comments or suggestions on how to maximise your eBay Shop then I’d love to hear from you and let me know in the comments box below.