Tools Archives - Page 4 of 7 - The Last Drop of Ink

eSellerPro Banks Another £1m Investment What Do you Think?

February 16, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

I’ve received the release below this morning from eSellerPro. They’ve taken in another £1M in funding as the first round of funding of £2M was around two years ago.

I have two questions for you at the bottom of this article, I’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Press Release

eSellerPro receives a further £1m in funding from Notion Capital
Funding follows a record year with £233m in sales processed

London, 16th February 2012: eSellerPro, the leading eCommerce software provider for multi-channel sellers, today announces a follow-on investment of £1m from Notion Capital. The funding follows Notion’s initial investment of £1.8 million in 2010 and will support the company’s ambitious growth plans over the coming years, which include accelerating momentum in its core business together with entry into new markets and further investment in the product.

In just 2 years since the last round of funding, eSellerPro has become one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the UK, having tripled both its revenues and its customer base which now includes well-known names such as: Tesco Outlet, Dixons, Royal Mail, BMW, JJB Sports, Maplins, Whirlpool and BT Outlet. eSellerPro’s multichannel ecommerce platform processed £233m in sales on behalf of its customers in 2011 and will soon move through the £1m per day threshold.

Following the appointment of Keith Bird as the CEO early last year, the business has also further strengthened its management team adding a CTO, Director of Sales, Director of Product Management and Director of Global Partnerships & Alliances.

The new funding will go towards expanding the business both technically and geographically, ensuring the company maximises on the opportunities in markets beyond the UK, including the US market, worth more than $300bn.

Keith Bird, CEO at eSellerPro, commented, “Since the first funding round in 2010, eSellerPro has both accelerated our growth and laid the foundations for further expansion into new markets including the all-important US. Our vision is to be a key part of the ecommerce ecosystem, ultimately helping retailers to sell more through seamless integration with multiple online channels. The market is expected to continue to grow rapidly over the coming years and this new funding will help us to accelerate our growth in the UK, US and beyond, while continuing to improve the experience for our existing customers”.

Ben White, Partner at Notion Capital, added: “eSellerPro helps customers respond to the changing retail environment and maximise the value of their online presence through integration with third party channels like eBay and Amazon. The ecommerce market is expected to grow to $1tr by 2016 and online marketplaces is one of its fastest growing segments – as such we are very excited about the company’s future prospects and believe they have what it takes to build a very big business.”

eSellerPro’s technology helps retailers integrate their entire online sales process, simplifying and automating tasks and maximising sales opportunities across multiple channels such as eBay and Amazon. eSellerPro currently has customers across the UK, US and Europe.

What Do You Think?

An observation of what is included in the release is the statement “Funding follows a record year with £233m in sales processed“. Taking a guess at the revenue generated from this at 1.5%, allowing for variations on the fee taken as part of the SaaS application, that figure comes in at around £3,495,000.

Obviously this is likely to be out by miles, with anything up or down of this by a value by 40%. So with the extra investment in mind announced today and ongoing revenue stream, this appears to be a bridging loan, to keep the wheels turning (maybe we’ll see a poke at the US marketplace?) while not being restricted by revenue.

As such I have two questions for you:

What’s been your experience with eSellerPro over the past few months and do you think that the extra funding will make a difference to the service you receive?
Do you believe that eSellerPro is going to follow the route of ChannelAdvisor with numerous funding rounds?

Let me know in the comments box below.

How eSellerPro’s Channel Profile Can Help Your Business

February 1, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

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

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

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

What is a Channel Profile?

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

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

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

One eBay account
Amazon
Our website.

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

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

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

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

The Negatives of Using A Channel Profile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Channel Profile Tolerances

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

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

A Simple Example of a Channel Profile

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

An Advanced Example of a Channel Profile

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

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

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

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

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

Further Examples

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

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

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

My eSellerPro Channel Profile Tips

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

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

The “Channel Profile” Summary

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

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

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

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

Your Feedback

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

What is eSellerPro & How it Can Help Your Business?

January 31, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

So what is eSellerPro and how can it help your business? To answer these questions effectively, I’ve put together a 3 minute video overview where I discuss the following:

The 3 core parts of eSellerPro, these being:
- Inventory data & stock management
- Order aggregation
- The “Channel Profile” to keep the sales channels up to date
Suitable business types

Answered in a 3 Minute Video

Before you watch this video it’s important to note that I am a former employee of eSellerPro, clients that I work with use eSellerPro for all or parts of their businesses.

I’m not a sales rep nor do I receive any incentive from eSellerPro to publish this content. I certainly do not believe that eSellerPro is perfect, no solution provider is. What I am motivated to do, is to ensure that you choose the right back-end tool for your business and eSellerPro “could” be one that is most suitable to you.

Your Feedback

I haven’t covered the 3 core elements to eSellerPro in any great detail, the video was only designed to give you a brief overview of what these are and how they could help your business. However, these will follow in the next few days.

However did you find this video useful? Have you or are you using eSellerPro to run part or all of your business? Let me know in the comments box below.

That’s Curious BrightPearl is Releasing a Magento & eBay Integration?

January 31, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Brightpearl, now that’s a curious one.

It appears they’re adding a Magento & eBay link to their arsenal (see their shhhh page here) and I’m super curious!

If we look at the different SaaS (Software as a Service) providers out there, they’ve all originated from different angles:

ChannelAdvisor came from the perspective of eBay
And so did MarketWorks too
eSellerPro came from an order processing perspective, for which the marketplaces & listing were added later.
247 TopSeller has hefty Amazon slant to it
StoreFeeder came from a Fulfilment perspective
Linnworks came from an ERP and MRP satellite systems
ChannelGrabber from a need to combine eBay & Amazon together

Brightpearl, Where Did They Come From?

As we’ve seen above each of these providers have come unique points of view and Brightpearl isn’t exception. Brightpearl came from two entrepreneurs and co-founders Chris Tanner and Andrew Mulvenna, whom was frustrated with the likes of NetSuite & Sage and how everything from a website (osCommerce) & accounting perspective was not linked and hindrance to his business at the time called “Lush Longboards”.

A years coding bender in 2006/2007 led to the development of Brightpearl, two investments later from Eden Ventures & Notion Capital, Brightpearl have over 6000 customers, a solid product that combines the features of a inventory management system, full-blown accounting (including purchase orders, quotes & invoices), contacts & a CRM tool (which is excellent I hasten to add! They’ve extended the Rapportive extension that links with Gmail), a web-based EPOS system (this is very cool) and an eCommerce offering for integrated websites.

Recently Kate Gover from Lahloo Tea discussed how Brightpearl helps her business. The video is below:

When I met the team at Brightpearl last year (hola!), the irony was that the businesses using Brightpearl felt it so valuable to use Brightpearl for their online channels that they were manually importing sales orders from other sales channels like Magento, eBay & Amazon, so that they can leverage the functionality of Brightpearl to its full potential.

eBay can get deep very quickly and Magento API is pretty poor currently, especially if you want to do complex tasks. I don’t know how far they’ve gone with the integrations yet, but even if they’ve done the basics such as stock control and order aggregation, it could be pretty slick.

Now it’s looking like they are adding a Magento integration and an eBay integration…. From a different perspective, that of website & accounting, that’s why I’m curious.

You can find out more about Brightpearl on their website and Shhhhh page where I found this information is here http://www.Brightpearl.com/shhh.

The Top 8 Pitfalls of Using 3rd Party Software To Manage Your Business

January 25, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

“I thought using 3rd party software to automate my online business was one of the best decisions I ever made?”

I asked myself this question back in November last year, since then certain events have happened and I strongly feel that adding software to manage repetitive parts of an on-line business is a sensible move.

This is to the point that it doesn’t matter which tools you use, as long as they’re automated and take less work than processing the tasks manually would take is a good thing. However, sometimes the pitfalls are overlooked and in this article I delve into these.

Setting the Scenerio

Let’s make a fictitious company called “Widgets Ltd”.

This company started from one person and as the business model was proved, several members of staff were added and a team formed.

Widgets Ltd sells on multiple channels, they started with eBay, dabbled with Amazon and also have their own website, they also have a trade site and a trade counter with a simple till, with no real stock control over any of the platforms.

Approximately a year into the business, multi channel software was employed and while this took a few weeks to employ & for the staff to get up to speed, due to the forced efficiencies of the software, better stock control & they looked at Amazon more seriously, sales grew within a few months, compounded by a seasonal period, sales figures rose to levels they’ve only dreamt about and everything looks rosy.

Pitfalls, What Pitfalls?

On first glance, Widgets Ltd has done really well, mainly because they got past the one person stage and had a business model that worked at small scale, with efficiencies through the use of software, the business was able to amplify the model worked and allowed them to add the important factor scale and grew.

As I suggested, everything looked rosy. More & more money going through the business, everyone looking busy, feedback rocketing & receiving some real kudos from their family, suppliers & friends.

To quickly clarify, automation especially when it comes to labour intensive tasks is a generally a “good thing”. By automating these tasks, it can allow the business owner(s) to work on their business and not always in it. Purely because of this, this is why most 3rd party tools are a positive to their business, to a point that is, which I’m making in this article.

The moment you add software to automate a process, you become removed from it and this is the stem of majority of the issues that 3rd party software creates.

However, I’m going to take the most basic of examples, probably the most highly desired automated process of them all, leaving feedback on marketplaces such as eBay.

Can you remember when you first started on eBay? You probably bought a few items and gained some feedback, you then started selling a few items and leaving feedback was a personalised affair, tailored to each customer, you were leaving them manually and keeping a keen eye on what buyers were telling you.

After all the rest of the selling process was probably all manual as well and you knew everything about the products, listings, questions, orders, customers etc… However the second you automate one of these processes, you become removed and tend to focus on the visually detrimental parts, such as neutral, negative feedback & DSR scores and forget about the positive comments that may hold the key to moving forwards with the business.

And that’s why it’s quite easy to identify the pitfalls, because the dangers are all around the business when automation is employed and this is what I have dedicated the rest of this article to.

The Eight Common Pitfalls

There are way more than just eight of them, however, these are the common occurrences.

Not at ground level any more
As I suggested in the simplest of examples above, when you automate processes, you can easily become removed from the ground level and only focus on the bad points, rather than the good points that become overshadowed. This happens throughout the business, as the decision makers become further removed the ground.
Mistaking marketplace growth for business growth
Focusing on eBay & Amazon, these sites have seen double digit growths over the years, however eBay has slowed down & Amazon has picked up pace (on a global scale), however we’re not seeing huge growths with eBay anymore and it can be misleading to assume that the 5-25% growth in your business has been to the effects that your actions have had, rather that the marketplaces have grown by these numbers and you’re riding the wave.
Note: This is discussed in detail in two articles called The eBay “Best Match” Position Bias Modifier Hypothesis and Why do eBay Sales Stay Consistent?
Unable to identify trends effectively
This goes back to the ground level view again, when the business in the example above Widgets Ltd was only one or a few people, it was easy to identify which products were moving and which ones we not, because the staff knew them intimately. However as the owners moved up the ranks, they became further & further removed from the front lines and if the software that they’re using is able to report on data their business is generating, then can lead to the business hitting a plateau and no-one knowing why and in the next one the most lethal of them all is covered.
Happy with the businesses performance
Some business models have a natural plateau point in them due to the factors that make the business up and while adding automation to a business can remove most of the softer walls to a business to progressing, if we combine a spike of growth over a few months and the owners becoming complacent, the business becomes ‘happy’ with the current results and doesn’t take a serious look on how to expand further.
Unhappy with the businesses performance
And a complete inverse of the above is that the business owners may mistake the automation of their systems and growth of their business as a huge demand for their offerings, when in fact the automation part, just allowed them to work more effectively, focused on a few key issues like stock control, sourcing, customer service and order management, but continuously expect the same amount of growth of the business that the employment of automation first provided.
I have one question for this, do you define success as a business that lasts 10 years with ever decreasing profitability or a business that lasts 10 years and keeps a competitive advantage and a decent profitability? Maybe both are right, but which one do you automatically get pulled towards?
Unsupported or time lag to new features
When working with multiple marketplaces, things are bound to move. This is especially true of eBay you release updates every few months, some of which can completely alter the way that the marketplace works, such as best match did or the introduction of multi-variations (see earlier article here for examples), the same goes for updates to other platforms & software products, take a courier integration, they shelve the older version and you’re forced to the new version.
Now imagine that your current software provider, that was previously automating the courier process is unable to support the changes for 2-3 weeks. That’s a scary thought & while I’ve never experienced a courier software change that inflicted weeks of failure in automation, it can happen and crucially does happen.
Owners are not always good managers
Before you draw insult from this, I am the first to admit that I am not a very good manager. People that are brilliant technicians rarely make brilliant managers. While they are outstanding at ground level, maybe creating code or graphic design, they can lack core skills to be able to manage people & businesses effectively. Employing automation can blur this, but without a core understanding of the processes required to scale or adding members to the team that can manage such roles, then this as I know all too well, can cause issues.
Tell others about their automation tools
I’ve personally seen this a few times now, where business owners have seen obscene growths in turnover have spilled their tools to others (either knowing or unknowingly) and competitors and even suppliers have jumped in too and taken the advantages the automation provides.
While I’m not going to name examples of the latter, I can note here that one of the first tasks I made when using MarketWorks (a tool to automate eBay processes), the first task that I took was putting a layer on top of the MarketWorks logo that was automatically inserted in the listings, so that competitors could not readily work out which tool I was using.

Summary

While the above was not exhaustive and that 3rd party software products can provide huge benefits to businesses through automation, there are downsides to using them.

Some are obvious, such as competitors or even suppliers picking up that the business is using certain tools to manage their business and then using them to compete more fairly with the business, while others less succinct issues like the owners not being competent managers, or time lags in changes to marketplaces or being unable to trend their business can all impact a businesses effectiveness.

Image Source

How to: Add a YouTube Video to Listings Using eSellerPro

January 16, 2012/by Matthew Ogborne

Adding video content, especially video content that you’ve made for your business on a product or service to eBay listings easily done and I covered this in an earlier article “Add a Youtube Video to your eBay Listings in 5 Steps“, however when using 3rd party tools, the actual listing template is normally separated from the description.

In this How-to guide I’ll be showing you how to automatically add a YouTube video to your eBay listings in a scalable, structured manner, which once completed is as simple as pasting in the YouTube video ID and the rest takes care of itself using eSellerPro.

Note: For this article I’m using the example product video I made for an earlier article, this is definitely not a good example of a great product/service video but it’ll suit the needs of this article. If you’ve not seen it, it’s quite funny and you can watch it here.

Before We Start

I’m making the assumption that you are using eSellerPro as your back office tool, that you have a YouTube account and that you understand a little HTML. The rest I’ll take you through step by step.

Also in the example video being used, the dimensions are 960 wide by 576, this probably will not suit most and you’ll need to alter these both. However for completeness, at the very end instructions on how to complete a fully customisable version is included. If you cannot see any of the sections mentioned in this article in your eSellerPro account, contact their support and ask for them to be enabled.

A “YouTubeID” is referenced several times in this article, this is the string of text you see in the URL when viewing YouTube video’s. For example, the example product video used is “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDSwAuApbwc” and the YouTubeID is part after the = sign, namely “zDSwAuApbwc“.

Using eSellerPro Custom Fields

To make this as scalable as possible, we need to leverage customfields in eSellerPro, I’m not going to cover what these are here, just that we’re going to create a custom fields group and a custom field to place the YouTube video ID.

To do this we need to follow these steps:

Open eSellerPro
Go to the Maintenance section on the left bar
Locate the “Custom fields” section and double click on it
Press the new record icon at the top and name the customfields group “Video” (the first box labelled “Group Name”)
We now need to add an edit box called “YouTubeID”, enter “YouTubeID” into both “Field Name” and “Display Name” and press the “Add Field” button

Create the Holding Paragraph

If we were to put the logic code we create in the next step in every template we use, this would cause unnecessary overheads and possible headaches later on when if want to update the layout operation of the video player & associated code. So to make this as easy as possible, we’re going to now use another part of eSellerPro called paragraphs to create a container for the video code & associated logic.

To do this, follow these steps:

Select “Inventory/Listing” from the left menu
Select “Paragraph Builder” from the left menu (you may need to scroll down to locate this)
Press the new record icon at the top
Give the paragraph the name “YouTube”
At the bottom, tick the box called “HTML Only” so that the editor is disabled

The Logic to Sshow/Hide the Video

Now that we’ve prepared the customfields and the paragraph, we need the code to show the video player in the listing. In a previous article called “How To: Add a Youtube Video to your eBay Listings in 5 Steps” it was noted that IFRAMES are not allowed on eBay listings and we need to use the older method that is allowed to show YouTube video content on your eBay listings.

The code for this, looks like:

This is fine for a single listing, however we’re building a more flexible version so you don’t need to post this each time.

Firstly we replace the YouTube ID with the custom field, so it reads as:

However, we don’t want to show the video player when there is no video to be shown, so to do this we use the IFNOT keyword, to show/hide the entire video player if there is or is not a YouTubeID present in the customfield.

This now becomes:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Video:YouTubeID]]//
 }}

And it’s this code that we now enter into the paragraph we created earlier.

Adding the Paragraph to your eBay Template(s)

Instead of pasting this code into each template, we’re going to leverage the paragraph feature in eSellerPro to make this as simple as copy/paste.

If you now follow these steps:

Select “Inventory/Listing” from the left menu
Click on eBay templates
Select the template you wish to add the video content to
go to the “description” tab
Ensure that the “HTML Only” box is checked
Place this code “{{Insert:YouTube}}” where you would like the video appear if it’s been set
Repeat as necessary for other templates you may have.

Note: Its actual placement will vary from template to template, if you’re unsure either experimentalist or ask someone that is comfortable with HTML to help you.

Enter an ID to an Inventory Record

To be able to test that this works, we need to add a YouTube ID of a video to the custom fields of an inventory record.

Pick any inventory record (inventory/Listing > Inventory Details)
Go to the custom fields tab.
Select “Video” from the drop down box
Enter your YouTubeID (or enter “zDSwAuApbwc” for the sake of example) into the edit box called “YouTubeID”
Now go back to the “eBay Auction” or “eBay Inventory” tabs and press the preview button on the right
You should now have a video in your listing template

Advanced eSellerPro Video Template

If you had not changed the size (width and height) as used in the example snippets above, then you will have seen a massive video in your listing. If you are using just one template setting the width/height once in the HTML will be fine, however if you have multiple templates and some need to be bigger than others, you can evolve this a little further by adding two more custom fields called “Height” & “Width” to your customfields “Video” group we created earlier.

Then using the following code, you are able to specify the width/height as you desire AND have a catch width of 960 and a height of 576 if they’re not set (you probably need to alter these to fit in your template)

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Video:YouTubeID]]//
 }}

Summary

Adding video can be easy with a few simple logic tests and the right set-up, also because the YouTubeID’s are in a custom field, they can be imported against using excel or CSV sheets and of course if the inventory record has no YouTubeID set, its not going to show with the advanced versions.

Now go and try this in your eSellerPro account and let me know how you got on by posting a comment below (or if you get stuck, leave a comment and I’ll point you in the right direction).

Data is the Life Blood of an eCommerce Business

December 9, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Introduction

Firstly let’s quickly identify whom this article aimed at and why on earth you should even consider reading the rest of this article.

I’ve personally spent over four years at 3rd party software providers working with businesses that have got themselves into operational & data issues that could have been avoided when it comes to marketplaces such as eBay & Amazon.

Some businesses have had no tool prior to moving into them and some have done but have made fatal mistakes along the way. Such mistakes have cost them untold amounts of wasted resources. This article is is aimed at helping you identify such issues as early on in the process as possible and to help you understand that data is the lifeblood of an eCommerce business.

New Businesses / Proof of Concept
This article is aimed at a brand new business that has just started exploiting the marketplaces for the first time, after all you need to have proof that the channels work and you need to start from somewhere.

Manual processes at this stage are a “good thing”, there is so much to be learned and as such the ‘manual’ entry experience is absolutely required, so that the people in the business understand the requirement for a tool as soon as possible and that they’re able to scale their operation.

Take the points on board now regarding data and look to the future of your business.

Businesses that have proven the marketplaces work for them.
This article is also aimed at businesses that have already proved that the marketplace channels are viable for them and are paying attention to them each day to manually load on products to the channels and most importantly processing orders from them too.

There is one exception to this, this is a business that has carried out substantial intelligence on the marketplaces and needs to leapfrog the basics and move straight to a large scale model as quickly as possible. If this is the case for your business, then you need to know how valuable data is and why you should retain it when it comes to the popular marketplaces.

As Your Business Grows

As the business grows bigger and bigger, normally by working (harder) on achieving one or all of these factors:

More inventory
Better priced inventory
More staff within the team
Adding more sales channels
Higher quality descriptions
Better order management
Lower operational costs
More profit
etc…

The cracks within the starting phase start to show very quickly, some identify this early on, some never identify it at all. Some unknowingly start to tackle this issue, but don’t actually realise why.

These could be through micro-management of staff & processes, after all most small businesses are rarely started & run by highly experienced managers, but by normal people and haven’t had the training or experience in dealing with such issues and I know personally that when I ran my own business, this is a trap that I got myself stuck in (and one that I’ve done my darn hardest to help others realise).

Putting internal management part aside and the other points above, what a small business owner(s) rarely tend to recognise is that “data” is one of core the reasons why they’re able to operate a business at all.

Data in a Business is Like Blood in a Human

Without blood, we’re pretty much screwed. The same as data within a business. Data is the lifeblood of the business.

This also ports to non-eCommerce businesses too, however is amplified by the very nature of the “e” part in eCommerce.

This article is entirely aimed at helping you understand that when you’re processing your orders in say eBay’s Selling Manager Pro, loading inventory to Amazon via spreadsheets or Seller Desktop, you are dealing with data. Your businesses data.

So when you’re ticking the boxes to print the orders out in SMP, using the sell your item form on eBay or adding items manually into Amazon using the add a product link. You are working with data, data that you should have absolute control over. It is after all the blood of the business.

Also the data that you are creating is exceptionally valuable to the business, the most obvious data is inventory data, however the not so obvious is the order data, that provides a unique history and insight to what the business has done.

So the moment you manually add inventory data into a marketplace like eBay or Amazon or process one or more orders in their web interfaces, you are potentially giving away the largest asset of the business to a process that you do not fully control or own and in the case of Amazon, you cannot get that data back out easily either.

An Example of Bad Data – Amazon

Let’s take Amazon as an example. It’s not unheard of for a business to have spent hundreds of hours loading thousand upon thousand of inventory records onto Amazon manually. And of course, this most likely had some huge positive effect to the business, namely orders & profit.

However what has been happening is that the business has been building Amazon a superb product database, that the business no longer has ready access to. You’re unable (either easily and certainly not officially) to export the product data that was originally created. While at the same time, Amazon are using that data to market not only your businesses data more effectively to more customers, but to other businesses too.

If you are manually creating products on Amazon using the web interface, stop immediately.

(More on this later in this article)

An Example of Bad Data – eBay

The data requirements of eBay are huge. Lets taking the clothing categories for example. In recent updates the pressure to include attribute data as part of the listing process has become mandatory (along with many other categories too).

This compared to Amazon has positive effects, eBay are then able to leverage this data and then allow customers to drill down on their searches and ultimately makes a better buying experience and ultimately more sales for the business.

However, those attributes are now locked into eBay’s platform and getting them out again is painful and will cause a massive mop-up job of cleaning the junk out to make it “portable” later.

If you are manually creating products on eBay using the web interface, stop immediately.

(More on this later in this article)

Ironically in both examples it’s your data. Once it’s been entered into the said platforms, getting it out again in a format that is reusable is in some cases just not possible.

I’ve only ever worked with one company that elected to completely ditch all their product data to start again afresh. What they did make of it a second time around with a structured approach was truly amazing, but out of the hundreds of businesses I’ve worked with, this was the exception, rather than the rule.

What is more common is for businesses to try and do is to extract their product data and bring it into a 3rd party tool. In doing so (as I mentioned above) causes an absolute mess to try and sort out. The descriptions that come back from eBay are the full descriptions, so the data held within them is difficult to impossible to extract. Item specifics can be lost completely and any attribute data that formed variations can also be lost too.

In a recent conversation, it was mentioned that a business had tried using an import tool from a 3rd party software provider and the mess that was left over, not only went wrong multiple times, but was in such a state they were forced into abandoning it completely.

This is exactly the situation that you should avoid.

Step in the Saviours

It does not matter what software tool you use and this could of course be a combination of tools. The critical factor is that you have access to both the inventory data and sales data externally, outside of the marketplaces themselves.

To spell it out very clearly:

The moment you suspect the business is going to work long term, employ 3rd party software that is not created by the marketplaces as soon as possible or if it is, you can easily gain access to the original data.

Frankly I do not care what software it is and neither should you (to a point, that point normally being cost), as long as it allows you to enter the product data outside of the marketplaces and retain this data.

As far as sales orders go, having the ability to process them externally is normally a huge positive to the business, however in the case of Amazon, you are able export the sales data for current or later use, where as eBay, no real export and sales data can be lost after 45 days or so.

There are providers that can cost several thousand pounds over a year are not suited towards smaller businesses, however there are plenty of options out there and again the core criteria outside of cost, is:

Access to the raw product data
Access to sales data

Other requirements such as stock control, order management in the case of this article are either assumed or luxuries.

Free Examples

We all like free and here are two free options for both eBay & Amazon.

Amazon
If we take the Amazon marketplace as an example here, if you stop entering data manually and start using the import sheets they provide for the inventory data, because you’re storing this on one of the computers you have access to, after sending it to Amazon to create the product, keep the sheets, because you can use it at a later date, either to update the records that were in the file or to transfer the data to another marketplace/sales channel.

eBay
If you’re looking for a free option for eBay, then for product data eBay’s File Exchange this covers both product creation, updates and also order data too. However can be clunky and in massive accounts, can take several hours to process requests (I tried this on an account with over 10,000 live listings, it took 5 hours even for a basic export, on a smaller scale it would be adequate though).

Other Providers
There are a multitude of providers that can offer superior options outside of this, they are not all SaaS models (where you pay them a commission on sales) and if your requirements are low, then community extensions to popular website open-source products can be free or very inexpensive (covering these is not a concern for this article, just that they exist).

Ultimate Goal For Your Data

However the ultimate goal in regards to your sales and inventory data is that you have access to them and you can then re-use the data. I call this “portable data”, data that you can use as you need to, where ever that may be.

Sticking with the example approach of this article:

Lets say you start a business on eBay or Amazon, you see the signs that its going to go well and do put some form of software in place to maintain control and ownership of your data, you can then grow and grow as the business dictates. You can move software providers relatively easily and if you want to add in new sales channels, such as a website or another marketplace, with a few tweaks to the data you already have access to, you can do. The other option of not doing this, is frankly nasty.

Summary

Data either product or sales related is the life blood of an eCommerce business.

It needs to be “clean“, it needs to be “yours” and it needs to be “portable“.

If you keep bashing data into marketplaces and don’t retain a copy, then you’re basically capping the potential of you and your business. And that’s something neither of us desire.

ChannelAdvisor Powers 25% of eBay UK Fashion Outlets

October 21, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

I’m working on an article relating to competitive advantage for businesses through software usage and I’ve just stopped to share with an interesting observation.

Using the official eBay Outlets list here, it turns out that 8 of the 31 listed are powered by ChannelAdvisor, that’s a clear 25% (and not the result I expected).

Here is the run down of service providers for backend processing in these accounts:

	eBay UK Outlets	Software Providers
1	Bench	ChannelAdvisor
2	Branch 309	Own API Integration
3	Barratts	ChannelAdvisor
4	Baron Jon	Unknown 3rd Party
5	Blue Inc	eSellerPro
6	Bertie	Docdata
7	Dune	Docdata
8	Ed Hardy	Unknown 3rd Party
9	Fly53	Docdata
10	Figleaves	Unknown 3rd Party
11	House of Fraser	ChannelAdvisor
12	Jigsaw	Unknown 3rd Party
13	Joe Browns Clearance	ChannelAdvisor
14	Karen Millen	Unknown/None
15	Kookai	eSellerPro
16	Kaliko	Docdata
17	L.K.Bennett	Frooition
18	Littlewoods Clearance	ChannelAdvisor
19	La Redoute	Unknown/None
20	M and M Direct	Unknown/None
21	Office	eSellerPro
22	Pied a Terre	Docdata
23	Roman Originals	Unknown
24	Superdry	Auctiva
25	Schuh	Own API Integration
26	Soletrader	Unknown 3rd Party
27	Sports Direct Outlet	Redstar
28	Speedo	ChannelAdvisor
29	Savile Row	ChannelAdvisor
30	Ted’s Shed	Unknown/None
31	Very Clearance	ChannelAdvisor

Note:

These maybe inaccurate and are my conclusions from interrogating the listing data of live listings.
“Unknown 3rd Party” there is a common provider to these.

eSellerPro Appoints Interim CTO Edgar Smith

October 13, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

If you’re an eSellerPro client, then you’re going to want to take note of the email sent out this morning from eSellerPro’s CEO Keith Bird.

Thoughts to come later…

Dear Valued Customer

After 6 incredible years, our Founder and serial entrepreneur, Chris Farrelly, has decided he wants to step down from the day to day operations of the business.
Since I joined in January Chris has been our Chief Technology Officer and has built a well rounded development team of 18 people, a support organisation with 13 people and a product management organisation.
Chris now feels it is time to step down and hopefully take life a little easier during 2012 (but knowing Chris as we all do, I see very little chance of that!).

As you will imagine this has been a controlled plan that Chris & I have had and as part of that plan Chris will remain with the business full time until the end of the year to help us with the transition.
Chris will also act a consultant to the company from 2012 and beyond.
Chris will continue to be a significant shareholder and remain on the Board of Directors.

We are very fortunate to have a senior, experienced person to take over from Chris and effective immediately our new Interim CTO is Edgar Smith
Edgar has been with us as a consultant since the beginning of the year acting as an advisor to Chris & I on the software development & support side of the businesses.
Edgar has a very impressive pedigree and is exactly the right person to build the Software Development & Support organisation we need for the next stage of our evolution.

Edgar has detailed and expert technical knowledge of IT systems, solutions delivery and the Software Development Life Cycle in a software career spanning nearly 20 years. He has a Masters Degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Edgar worked for a number of blue chip investment banks and consultancies as a developer including JP Morgan & PWC. In 1996 he co-founded Cresta Group Ltd, a software development, programme management and testing consultancy, taking the role of CTO and Head of R&D. At Cresta he developed award winning software and managed technical expansion across five countries whilst continuing to participate in some of the world’s most challenging projects.

Edgar is Chairman of two testing companies: Green Mango and Testing4Finance and provides technical advice to a number of SAAS companies.

Edgar will report directly to me as will Eamonn Costello who previously reported to Chris. Eamonn has done a fantastic job since joining us earlier this year as our Director of Product Management.

Myself and the rest of the Board of Directors would like to thank Chris not only for his incredible work over the last 6 years but also to recognise that without his software development brilliance eSellerPro would not exist today! We look forward to Chris’ guidance through to the end of the year and continuing to work with him beyond that.

Best regards,
Keith Bird
CEO, eSellerPro

ChannelAdvisor Amazon 360 What this Could Mean for the Future

October 12, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Two weeks ago I was kindly given a walk around the new Amazon 360 as part of the Autumn Release which also included Buy.com upgrades and comparison shopping merchandiser from ChannelAdvisor.

What struck me the most was what ChannelAdvisor has been and created, could be the foundation parts of a much larger offering which I’ll cover in this article. I decided that it would be easier to explain the points covered in this article in a discussion video and have included this above.

What is Amazon 360?

This is a great question as the Amazon 360 feature includes the follow new elements:

Improved seller dashboard
Displays key information on your Amazon sales, top-performing products, orders pending shipment, and product listing status
Amazon seller metrics
Highlights important seller metrics monitored by Amazon integral in your seller status
Detailed feedback
Imports all negative feedback notes for quick response
Product performance view
Covers seller performance down to individual SKU details
Competitive landscape view
Shows a compact view of your major competitors on Amazon by SKU
Rule-based price adjustments
Configures rules based on margin to automatically change product price

Basically it’s the combination of multiple elements from Amazon, into a single dashboard to empower merchants to have the information that they need know, instantly available to them.

How Do I View Amazon & Why is this Important?

I always refer to Amazon as a person, this “person” has several key attributes and requirements from 3rd party merchants, these are:

Have the highest regards for their customers
Expects the best possible pricing for their customers
Will not be mucked around by merchants that poor results to their customers
Is looking for and at the long term relationship
Expects that ALL customer queries are answered ASAP
Does not tolerate disgruntled customers for whatever reason
Doesn’t like competitors (amongst other things)

If Amazon had a gender, it would be a woman.

Firm, but fair and you’d never cross her (ever).

That’s why (to me) a dashboard system like Amazon 360 is so critical. You need to know this information and if you don’t then that’s asking for trouble.

What Could this Mean?

This is curious as it became glaring apparent that what ChannelAdvisor has done is bring in the core information that sole merchant needs to survive on the marketplace, but has also opened the potential for providing key information to a business that has multiple employee levels.

For this example, we’ll assume that we have three people in company XYZ, their roles are:

Company Director
Dave runs the entire business and manages both staffs and provides the direction for the company.
eCommerce Manager
Ian, is Dave’s “man on the ground”. Ian is responsible for ensuring that all the channels are working effectively and efficiently
Miss Fix-it
Zoe, she’s the do-er. Give her an issue and she’ll fix it. When Ian has an issue, Zoe resolves the issues for him.

Now can you realise that each of these people have different business roles to perform. Dave needs to information to help guide his company direction, Ian needs detailed information to identify where attention is needed and Zoe needs to the information & tools to action Ian’s requests.

What we can see in Amazon360 that this is on-the-way to being able to provide these differing requirements to different business roles. Not only can you see the account status, but also identify issues such as products, account status and feedback, but also identify products that require further attention, whether that be to focus upon pricing, data or to look at bringing in adjacent lines to complement the lines that are performing.

An Open Suggestion

Also digging deeper down this rabbit hole [think Alice in Wonderland], let’s think beyond what we can see from the screenshot above. ChannelAdvisor now “has” access to the information that each of these key business roles need to operate effectively.

An open suggestion to ChannelAdvisor is not stop where they are right now, but to introduce a multi-tiered dashboard that can be tailored to each role function and also to not stop at just Amazon, but include company-wide information. Combine all the channels together, but also tailor the information to specific business roles.

Take Zoe in our example above, she does not need to know how well the channels are performing, she needs to know what needs her urgent attention to solve issues. Now!

Ian as the eCommerce manager, needs to know how each channel is performing and also as a group, to identify where the staff should focus their attention and to focus his time upon expanding the business.

Where as Dave needs to know where the business is heading, not only individually on a per-channel basis, but company wide and help steer the direction or follow the direction its following as needed.

Summary

Firstly, nice work!

This was the first time I have seen a 3rd party solution provider incorporate this information into their solution and not only is it fabulous to see, its also exceptionally exciting what could be done with this information, when you look at the larger picture and realise the ramifications of combining data & metrics together.

The First eSellerPro Council

September 19, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

While I’m not going to cover who was there and what was covered in this article, I am going to share a key observation and ask you the question “what does this mean for you?”.

The Table

The table consisted of nearly all the largest, most influential clients of eSellerPro and together, probably accounted for a quarter of all turnover taken on eBay UK by professional business sellers or more.

Ironically there were only two businesses that I did not implement sat at the table, the others I had either implemented personally or were the reason why they were using eSellerPro in the first place and with half the room accounting for FSP’s, eBay “Full-Service Providers”, they represented the majority of the eBay Outlets. I did, on entering wonder why the hell I was there (although equally honoured to be part of it) and wore the hat as “moderator”.

My Observation

After picking myself off the floor, as eSellerPro has now got a documented “road map”, it was really interesting to look at commonalities between the people sat at the table.

In all instances, they were “people persons”.

They actually give-a-hoot about their staff and what they are trying to do. Yes, they were all highly motivated business people, but under each one of them, they each had teams of people assisting them.

In three cases, their trusted “right-hand-man” (or woman) were with them. Some had family members as part of the team, mums, sisters and brothers, aunts & uncles, but it extended further than that, much further.

They employed people as part of the ‘family’ and extended their family as part of their business. One even quoted, “I employ mothers, because when they need me to be lenient, than I know I will see the return two-fold in loyalty”, another accounts for a substantial part of an entire islands economy and the others making a significant difference to their local economies.

And that’s the observation, none of them would would be where they are today, sat at that table, responsible for some of the largest chunks of transactional value carried out on the on-line marketplaces without a trusted team below them, which knowingly or unknowing, treating them as “family”.

Summary

In conclusion, a multitude of topics were covered. Goodness knows what several members of the table actually thought of the interactions, although the feedback given to me personally was exceptional.

The one piece of glue outside of eSellerPro joining them all together was undoubtedly, they care about people and without them, none of them would have been sat there.

So, to the original question.
What does this mean for you?

“Apples are Apples” or are they? – eSellerPro V’s ChannelAdvisor

September 7, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Yesterday was an interesting day’s reading. On the one hand CEO of ChannelAdvisor Scot Wingo was elected to Shop.org’s board of directors, which is frankly quite a feat considering there are only five places for non-retailers & is a highly coveted position.

A quote Scot Wingo:

“I am absolutely honored to join a board of such diverse executives and e-commerce leaders to serve the Shop.org members and continue the development of such a prestigious program,” said Wingo. “I look forward to collaborating with these other industry leaders to influence and inform many of the top issues facing the world of e-commerce.”
Source: Business Wire

And on the other hand a few minutes later, this crops up on Twitter:

It really has been a fantastic year for eSellerPro so far. I joined the company as the new CEO in January,and since then we have seen several other key additions to the management team and the sales team has doubled in size. Our annual revenues have grown to £2.4M with more than 100% growth forecast for the current year. If that wasn’t good enough, the business now has more than 200 customers, including well-known brands such as BMW, Dixons Group, JJB Sports, Office Shoes, Maplins and Tesco.

It is a very exciting time for us all at eSellerPro, and as we continue to grow we can only expect things to get even better.

Keith Bird, CEO, eSellerPro
Source: eSellerPro Blog

While at least three of these are 3rd-party clients is almost irrelevant, what is interesting is the ~100% growth and disclosure (see here) that the platform is churning over £1M in transactions per day.

Summary

While some way from the $3 Billion USD ChannelAdvisor processed in a year[2010 ?], £1M appears to be rather small. However apples are certainly not “Apples” when trying to compare two SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms that operate in the same market, one has been around since 2001, the other is just getting started, however could this be where its heading?

Image courtesy of Fir0002