Amazon, An unbelievable marketplace.

Amazon was the marketplace that threw investors during the dot-com boom because they had a ten year plan, while all the others had a a two week plan if they were lucky. The Year-On-Year growth of Amazon is to be ‘awed’ at and unlike other marketplaces, you never annoy their customers, because its their customers and they’ll kick you off with no chance of getting back on again for upsetting their customers. In short, Matthew aspires to eventually working with Amazon directly as the UK CEO.

Matthew has vast experience with launching merchants onto the Amazon platforms, including ‘Fulfilment By Amazon‘ or more commonly known as FBA.

Matthew is an Amazon expert and can help you leverage this channel effectively. You can contact him on his dedicated Contact Matthew page and see how Matthew can help your business.

Barcodes, GTIN’s,UPC’s, EAN’s, ISBN’s, JAN’s & ASIN’s Explained

Barcodes, these can cause confusion, especially if we account for all the different names they can be referenced as and even the term barcode isn’t technically correct, GTIN is. As such this article aims to dis-spell the myths & confusion around them and give you the 101 on the different variations, what they are and how they’re used.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to broadly call all GTIN (Global Trade Item Numbers) as ‘barcodes’, this is what you’ll likely to recognise them as from day-to-day items and will help keep things in plain English (which I know you like).

What is a Barcode?

A ‘barcode’ is the visual representation of a set of numbers. In the video below, I show several products and on the back of each of them are images and some numbers, like in the image below:

What is a barcode?The ‘barcode’ is the vertical lines and these are the visual form of the numbers below, ie 012345678900. However for ease, very few people know what GTINs are and the term “barcode” will make more sense to more people as we’ve all seen them on products, like soup. So I’m calling them ‘barcodes’.

A barcode by its correct name is a GTIN or its full name ‘Global Trade Item Number’. These come in various forms and are globally universal indentifies to find product information across databases and differing platforms.

Think of them as an international “postcode” that identifies a single address, but for products.

Video Explaining Barcodes with Examples

This video covers the contents of this article, including examples and where you can obtain your own barcode range for selling on eBay & Amazon.

Note: Before you watch the video, I’m going to quickly add that this was recorded last year, since then I’ve solved the lighting and sound quality issues, plus my office has been re-decorated with the artwork from the children.

Why are Barcodes Important?

When you’re shopping (say in Tesco’s) you’ll see the clerk scan the items through the till, the till is scanning the barcode on the product and then this is being looked up in a database to obtain its price and do some other stuff too.

Barcodes are ‘keys’, this is a term for used in databases and the idea is just like your front door key, the key should only fit one lock, thus that key belongs to that door and ‘ideally’ none others (see the note on this later).

This is why when your items are being scanned in the supermarket, the price is returned and you gain an accurate bill. Also in the background, this key is also used for many other purposes, such as stock control and reporting functions.

In short, one barcode = one product

Barcodes on Amazon

Just like in the supermarket when shopping, Amazon also uses these ‘barcodes’ as unique identifiers for products.

There are some exceptions which are for seeds & plants, furniture and home decoration categories and in such instances approval must be gained from Amazon to do this. However as a general rule you will need a barcode to create a new product on Amazon.

Note: While barcodes used for Amazon should be unique, it’s possible to find products on Amazon that have more than one GTIN used to identify a product. This is caused by two reasons:

  • Expiry
    As I cover in the video above, barcodes are leased, not owned. It’s quite possible for the barcodes to be re-used and thus two different products have the same barcode identifier for them.
  • Duplication bySellers
    It’s quite common for two different businesses to have their own barcode ranges, as such with unbranded goods its quite possible for the same product (say a pair of boots) to be listed more than once on Amazon under different identifiers.

GTIN Variations

There are five main types of GTIN’s that are in use (with regards to Amazon), these are:

  • ISBN
  • UPC
  • EAN
  • JAN
  • GTN-14

ISBN’s

ISBN ExampleThese you’ll find on books, this is because ISBN is short for ‘International Standard Book Number’ and can come in both 13 and 10 digit numbers.

I’ve included a photo of the back of one of the books I’m reading at the moment and you’ll see in the bottom right-hand corner an ISBN both as a number and the visual representation of that number for barcode readers.

UPC’s

These are “Universal Product Code’s” and generally you’ll find them on most USA (American) based items.

The use of these in the UK for products is somewhat limited and you’ll see EAN’s far more more often and you’ll see why in the next section.

EAN’s

EAN is short for ‘European Article Number’, hence this why you’ll see these more frequently in the UK.

EAN’s are everywhere, some examples are below on some random items I found in my home, if you look around your’s, you’ll find they’re everywhere!

Examples of EAN's from Household Items

JAN’s

These are ‘Japanese Article Number’s and, to be honest, you’re unlikely to come across them in the UK for products listings to Amazon or just about anywhere.

GTIN’s

Global Trade Item Number or GTIN’s have a few names, the first is GTIN-14, UCC14 or ITF-14, ultimately they are 14 digits.

ASIN’s

Amazon LogoAn ASIN is an acronym for ‘Amazon Standard Identification Number’. Once an inventory record has been created on Amazon, Amazon assigns their own version of a barcode, called the ‘ASIN’ and it’s a key that is unique to the Amazon marketplace.

The crucial note here is that ASIN’s are Amazon’s own product identification system and is unique to Amazon.

Note: I am working on a more in-depth description of what ASIN’s are, it’ll be published in the next week or so, if I forget to update this article (quite likely) search for ASIN at the top of this site.

Obtaining a Barcodes

Barcodes are not technically owned by a business owner, instead they are leased for a period of time. You can lease these from numerous companies, however, the source of these is a company called GS1, you can find more information about them here http://www.gs1.org/barcodes or http://www.gs1uk.org/ for the United Kingdom.

Allocation is based upon the companies requirement, for example if you are a small manufacturing firm with only a few products, then you may only be allocated 1000, however if you require hundreds of thousands, then you’ll be allocated many, many more.

The fees for the subscription are based upon company turnover, using the current figures (July 2011) from the UK GS1 site, the joining fee is £107 and the annual company annual subscription fee is £117.

You can contact GS1 at http://www.gs1uk.org/about-us/Pages/Contact-Us.aspx if you have any specific questions regarding pricing and subscriptions.

Summary

Barcodes or should I now say GTIN’s are everywhere and they are a way for businesses to assigned unique product identifiers to their products.

They appear in several common formats and we should also note that while a ASIN is not a true GTIN, its so commonly used in eCommerce for Amazon, it might as well be.

So do you feel more comfortable with ‘barcodes’ now, how and where they’re used? Let me know in the comments box below & if you have any feedback, I’d also love to hear from you.

I Dared Amazon to Deliver And They Did!

I’m going to share with you a short story with you about my Christmas shopping experience with Amazon and the thing is, only Amazon would have delivered that special Christmas day experience and only in Amazon I would have put my faith in to do so.

Setting the Scene

Christmas eve fell on a Saturday this year. Judging by the amount of people getting drunk & updating  Facebook, it was an all round good thing for many. But not if you’re a Dad and hadn’t bought that token present yet for the girls.

Don’t get me wrong my oldest isn’t even four yet, so the whole Christmas experience was going to be amazing whatever happened but fulfilling my appointed duties as a father, I felt it required that I deliver the token Christmas present.

The thing is, it was Friday, Christmas eve was tomorrow! I had already been around the shops the day before and managed to scrape a win with some glasses & a stunning photo frame for the far-better-half. But the girls, they had plenty of toys but were missing that one present that I know that they’d use all year. As a rather late decision, I had set myself on getting the girls a Nintendo Wii. The problem was, checking the stock pretty much everywhere in Bristol there were none and it was Friday!!!

Amazon was still offering next day delivery on the bundle if I ordered before 11 am and I believed that the Mario Kart version would be a great choice and had already arranged for the Resort disk to be borrowed from a friend for a few days (which reminds me we need to give that back).

Lost Orders

I have been an Amazon Prime subscriber for the past year or so. I’ve enjoyed next day delivery on almost all items (after all, I like almost every other Prime subscriber go for the Prime items first), however one book I was really looking forward to reading called “Nice Girls Do Get the Sale” (aff link) had got lost/stuck in the Bristol hub of HDNL (Home Delivery Network Ltd) and had to order again.

It took a couple of emails to Amazon to get it refunded and thinking aloud, it must be pretty obvious which customers are taking the piss with fake lost items, as I had already ordered a duplicate from Amazon, as I had heard the book was really good and wanted to read it (it was and is now out on loan).

My estimation of HDNL was also pretty low anyway, personally I had not been that impressed with deliveries coming out the boot of someone’s car, although the one delivery person I did speak to around this time last year was really nice and we chatted about couriers and it turned out that she had worked at Parcel Force around the time I had a few years back.

That Sinking Feeling

So after hitting the buy now button you can imagine my heart sinking when I saw this in my Amazon account:

Amazon-Order-Wii

Yea, I wasn’t that impressed. I knew most of Bristol was out of the Wii & Mario Kart combo’s and I certainly was not going to flit around Bristol trying to get one (plus I had a meeting that morning), so deciding not to cancel the order and to see what happened next (can you imagine the article here that Amazon didn’t deliver?).

Delivery of Orders IS Part of the Order

The delivery of the order is part of the service from Amazon, as it is with any on-line retailer. They’re an extension of the business and a damn vital part of it too.

You don’t see an Amazon representative delivering your orders, you only ever see a 3rd party delivery driver.

This is one consideration that some businesses overlook, it doesn’t matter if you get every order out in super quick time, if your courier company then takes 2 weeks to deliver it, has no local collection points and their staff are rude (just making a point here, only ever met one “spanner” delivery driver and that was years ago).

WoooHooo!

My partner was on strict instructions to not leave the house until the package had arrived, also as I live up a couple of steps, we left the fairy lights on during the day just to give the delivery person some incentive to make the trip up them as there was a good indicator that we were in (yea I know the risk/reward calculation when faced with steps as a delivery driver, I used to be one).

I had just got to my 3rd place and was waiting for a colleague to arrive. I got the call, two boxes had arrived and not a scratch on them, WooooHoooo! Christmas was fab and the girls loved the Wii (so did Daddy, after all we did get the Mario Kart version ;) )

Are Amazon Nuts?

There is no way I would have ordered such an important gift from another well known Marketplace or any other site for that matter at such short notice and I placed full faith in Amazon to deliver what they had promised.

Thankfully Amazon (and HDNL) delivered, on a Saturday, which was also a Christmas eve. It would have been a completely different article if it hadn’t and also a dull’er Christmas for the girls too.

Every other business that I knew of, had already planned to add notices to their on-line operations way before Friday that week for last their last shipping & cut off times, where as Amazon, they took it to the line, (well 11am that Friday).

This raises an important question, if even I was not prepared to put faith in a 3rd party other than Amazon at a critical time, why should your customers do the same or at any other time of the year?

So my question is…

Would you have dared to make an Internet order, on a Friday before Christmas eve?

Comment in the comments box below.

Solid Advice from 250,000 Feedback eBay Seller Bamford Trading

Bamford TradingIt’s fantastic to see John & Gill from Bamford Trading being featured on eBay’s SellerSphere this month. Both John & Gill have covered several key elements that should be considered when running a successful eBay business.

The original article is eBay focused however we should take note of the breadth of Bamford trading sales channels, as eBay is only one part of the multi-channel approach:

  • eBay
    As focused in the article, their eBay shop is here Bamford Trading
  • Amazon
    Amazon is also part of their sales channels, here.
  • Website
    Their website is at BamfordTrading.com
  • Twitter
    While not “massive”, the Twitter account is up and running and branded towards the company here.
  • Facebook
    John & Gills dedicated Facebook page is here.

Below are the 3 video’s from the eBay article, there is some fantastic advice in them and I strongly suggest you take the 5 minutes each to watch them.

How to Sell Successfully on eBay

Tips for Successful eBay Selling

Bamford Trading eBay Case Study

Summary

Both Gill and John have included some solid advice in these video’s. What you’ll be seeing from me in the forthcoming weeks, is the expansion of this advice into focused articles that delve into these much, much deeper.

Also an interesting observation, out of the 5 featured sellers featured in eBay’s SellerSphere, I’ve either helped or worked with 4 out of the 5 so far.

Question: Do you believe that you’ll reach 250,000 feedback on eBay? Comment below!

3% of Sales Coming from the EU? Say Hello to the EU VAT Bomb

If your business has been happily taking orders from around the EU and even if this is as low as 3% to one EU country hot-spot for a £1M turn over business, then you could be sat on an awkward issue regarding VAT.

This was another one of those ‘ah-ha moments’, although quickly followed with ‘wtf’ and ‘omg’ that’s going to be fun. In this article I do my best (as I’m not an accountant) to bring this topic into plain English.

This is certainly an issue that hasn’t been highlighted to businesses from either Amazon or eBay to my knowledge and is quite concerning eBay has been in such a push for Cross Board Trade (CBT) in recent months with statements that it fuels half a billion export boom and pushing the international site visibility upgrades and featuring eBay UK listings on the EU sites.

Disclaimer

Firstly lets clear a few points:

  • #1 I’m not an accountant
  • #2 I’m not a VAT expert
  • #3 I’ll never be #1 or #2.
  • #4 If you are #1 or #2 or have experience of this topic with your business, then fell free to comment and I’ll amend this article accordingly as needed.

That said let’s dig in and take a look a potentially nasty issue for medium to larger eCommerce businesses, because its really easy to go past the VAT limits, as they’re sooo low!

The UK VAT System

Starting from the beginning, VAT in the UK is pretty much a given. At around £73K of gross turnover or if expected to exceed this, a business is pretty much required to register to become a VAT tax collector and give the HMRC 20% of sales (and to be able to claim back the VAT on purchases and on expenses). This may not be technically correct, as there are deviants of this, but that’s the crux of it for most product based businesses.

So if you exceed or ‘expect to’ exceed ~ £73,000 of sales in one year, you normally need to register for VAT in the UK. Relatively straight forward so far. Yay!

The EU VAT Thresholds

Now this is where it can get nasty. As that expectation to exceed the threshold in the UK, also applies to business delivering products from the UK into the EU member states (called distant selling), but these states don’t all have such high thresholds when compared to the UK. In fact some of them are really low at around £30,000!

Let’s say you’ve been happily running a £1M p/a business that uses the marketplaces and also a couple of other sales channels. As you’ve been processing your orders from the UK, in most circumstances you’ve also bee taking orders from a wide variety of countries outside of the UK too.

The shocking reality is that if as little as 3% of these orders have come from one of the EU countries such as Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Malta, Portugal or Sweden. You have an issue

Each of these countries have a VAT threshold of €35,000 (approximately £30K), when you hit this threshold then apparently you’re then required to register for VAT in those countries locally.

VAT Thresholds For European Countries (Sept 2011)

Doing some homework prior to writing this article, I found this document on the European Commissions website under Taxation & Customs Union. The middle section shows the thresholds for each of the member states in this document and I’ve extracted this to form the table below and highlighted the thresholds in bold.

Member State Threshold for application of the special scheme for distance selling
Belgium €35.000
Bulgaria 70.000 BGN (€35.791)
Czech Republic 1.140.000 CZ (€46.570)
Denmark 280.000 DKK (€37.557 )
Germany €100.000
Estonia €35.151 
Ireland €35.000
Greece €35.000
Spain €35.000
France €100.000
Italy €35.000
Cyprus €35.000
Latvia 24.000 LVL (€34.052)
Lithuania 125.000 LTL (€36.203)
Luxembourg €100.000
Hungary 8.800.000 HUF (€32.257)
Malta €35.000
Netherlands €100.000
Austria €35.000
Poland 160.000 PLN (€40.293)
Portugal €35.000
Romania 118.000 RON (€28.012)
Slovenia €35.000
Slovakia €35.000
Finland €35.000
Sweden 320.000 SEK (€36.232)
United Kingdom 70.000 GBP (€81.843)

Even with the approximation that €35,000 is £30,000, for a £1M p/a business, this is only 3% of sales and actually very easy to achieve by sheer accident into one or more of these countries.

It’s reassuring to know that the more likely culprits to top the £30K limit such as Germany, France & Italy have a much higher threshold of €100,000 or approximately £83,000, although in some circumstances, this could also be easily achieved without a second thought.

Summary

The aim of this article was purely to highlight and bring this topic into a ‘plain English’ format. I hope I have done that successfully.

If you even suspect that you’re likely to approach these figures to any of the countries above in your trading year, then please consult expert advice, such as from your accountant.

PS: If anyone knows how this applies to Amazon FBA items that are held in say France or Germany, I’d love to hear from you and please post a comment in the comments section below.

Urgent: Dealing Amazon Pending Orders

 

Firstly apologies, I’ve know about Amazon’s pending orders for a long time now and they can be dangerous. I should have considered their impact at this time of the year earlier. I never suggest anything as ‘urgent’ that I cover here, but this is the exception…

What Are Amazon Pending Orders?

Amazon pending orders, are orders that have one or more issues with either the customer or the payment for the order. This means that there is an order that has been taken by Amazon, but not yet been made available for download and/or processing.

Taking a direct extract from the Amazon help system, pending orders are explained below:

Orders in pending status indicate an issue with the customer’s payment method. Those orders are not in a shippable status, and should not be shipped, even if the buyer contacts you directly. Pending orders will not have confirm and cancel buttons in Manage Orders, and they will not appear in either the Order Report or the Unshipped Orders Report.

Once an order is in a shippable status, the confirm and cancel buttons will appear in Manage Orders and the order will appear in both the Order Report and the Unshipped Orders Report. At that point, the order should be shipped and the shipment confirmed in Manage Orders or with a feed.

Note that Amazon assumes the risk of buyer non-payment for every order in your Unshipped Orders Reports or that has confirm and cancel buttons in Manage Orders. Of course, just as now, there may be circumstances where payment may later need to be refunded, for example when the buyer does not receive the order, or it is not as described.

Why Are Amazon Pending Orders Dangerous?

Using the Amazon help explanation of pending orders, I’ve highlighted the key points above “orders are not in a shippable status” and “will not appear in either the Order Report or the Unshipped Orders Report“. To clarify such orders are dangerous because:

  • They’re sat in a different queue
  • Stock may or may not be allocated to such orders
  • They don’t appear in the standard (or any) reports that can be exported

Pending orders are both a liability & risk to the business. Such orders can sit in this status for weeks sometimes, however at this time when there is a higher velocity of sales than normal the low risk of these turn into a serious risk.

Stock can be locked in Amazon orders and 3rd parties may not know of them, thus keeping the stock available on other channels and open the business to higher chances of overselling. The orders are not shown in the order reports and any system, whether it’s the sellers own or a 3rd party can overlook these and not account for them in the current stock levels.

The Scale of Amazon Pending Orders

Now this is curious, I checked on four Amazon Seller Central accounts this morning, roughly their account types were like this:

Average Order Value Order Velocity
Very High (over £150) Medium
Medium (below £50) High
Medium  (below £30) Medium
Very Low (below £10) High

Now my logic beforehand would have indicated that both the “very high value” and the “high order velocity” for the “very low” orders would have been the two accounts that displayed issues with pending orders.

However I was wrong, both these accounts had very few pending orders (one had 3 and the other 11). It was both medium order value accounts with moderate to high volumes of sales that had the most number of pending orders, one account had over 150 of them and the other was over 50.

However they ALL had pending orders, some were showing back to late November and the numbers differed from account to account (they’re four unrelated accounts in four different product verticals).

How Do You Locate Pending Orders?

Locating Amazon pending orders is relatively straight forwards, there are several paths and I have also included a direct link to them as well:

  • After logging in to your Seller Central account, on the right column, scroll down to the section called “Your Orders (Amazon.ext)”, under the section called “Seller Fulfilled” there is a line for pending orders and the count is a link
  • From the top menu, hover on “Orders” and select “Manage Orders”, then click on “Advanced search” and select a date range (I’d suggest 365 days for the first time) and set the “Order Status” drop down box to “Pending” and hit search
  • A direct link to the last 180 days of Amazon pending orders is here and if you want to search for less or longer change the value of the “preSelectedRange” attribute

How To Handle Pending Orders?

Firstly the good news…

3rd parties such as eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor & Linnworks use Amazon’s newer API called MWS (Marketplace Web Services).

Why is this important? Included in the calls is the ability to locate and account for pending orders. This allows them (3rd parties) to allocate stock lines that are held in pending orders so that they’re not allocated for sale on other sales channels (like eBay or websites for example). If you’re using either of these then you have nothing to worry about.

This is of course assuming that you have setup MWS with these platforms. If there is any doubt at all, contact them immediately.

Now the bad news…

If you are using the order reports from Amazon to process your orders either manually, through a 3rd party or through AMTU (Amazon Merchant Transport Utility) then you are likely to have a potential issue.

The ability to integrate to MWS is there but requires time & a developer, this is ruled out. The same goes for integrating to any of the fore-mentioned 3rd party platforms. So you’re stuck in a limbo period.

Also this only affects merchants that either use a virtual business model or are also selling the same products on other platforms/marketplaces. If you only sell on Amazon and work in a stocked business model, then you can ignore this completely.

Dealing With Pending Orders Manually

However if your business does sell its product ranges elsewhere or uses parts of a virtual product model, then I suggest the following:

  1. Check the pending orders 2-3 times per day, once in the morning, then around lunch and once in the evening (this depends upon the velocity of your orders and the amount of pending orders you’re seeing)
  2. You can copy/paste the pending orders list to excel (it doesn’t paste that well, but its workable)
  3. Take a few minutes to highlight new pending orders that have appeared and allocate stock levels accordingly.
  4. Track orders exiting to real orders and orders that are removed

A 5th option which may or may not be an option for your business (and I suggest you do so, because of the complicated risk factors with Amazon as we need to allow as much lea-way for returns and cancelled orders post Christmas) is that you actually order the products in the pending orders and allocate them to one side.

Summary

Amazon pending orders can be tricky, especially if your business is not using the MWS API or a 3rd party that uses this to communicate with Amazon & have that part dealt with effectively.

Stock can be allocated without the ability to let other selling channels know and this opens your business to a risk of overselling and the “fun” that stems from cancelled orders.

If you’ve not read this article yet (there is a video too), I cover some core essentials on how Amazon reacts to marketplace sellers. You never cross Amazon because if it was a human, it would be a woman and she is a ………

If there is only one takeaway from this article, go check your Amazon orders right now for pending ones, be aware of them and you can do this via this link.

Why I See eCommerce Differently. I see Data & Lots of It Too!

Introduction

When I look at a website, an eBay item, an Amazon item or pretty much anywhere now, what “I see” when looking at such products is starkly different to most. In this article, I share with you what I see and also why you should be thinking along the same lines also.

I would class myself as one of the lucky few that see the world of eCommerce differently. I see beyond the pair of boots, shoes, phone or dress and see a multi-tiered inventory structure that sits behind it. I also see beyond a single businesses perspective and have a unique view of many and can combine this into a single view, that’s not distorted by a single viewpoint.

In this article I share with you what I see, to help you understand the data that is sat behind the inventory that you interact with daily and why I strongly feel and know that data is the lifeblood of an eCommerce business.

What I See When I look at an eBay Item

eBay Item Data Points BreakdownWorking from the top down, I have highlighted the data points that I see in an eBay listing in the image to the right (to help the full version is here) and I’ve broken these down in the bullet points below:

  • eBay Categorisation
    But not just that, two eBay categories, the category numbers and the listing requirements for the categories being used.
  • The main image
    This isn’t just ‘an’ image, its an image that meets the requirements to cause the highlighted bar beneath it for zoom and enlargement which can only occur when the primary image is over certain dimensions. Also, the main image has been worked on to show the variations in the listing and also watermarked too.
  • Additional Images
    The images in this example have also been sent to eBay and using their hosting services, plus they have been worked on externally to get them to an excellent level (eg backgrounds removed)
  • Listing Title
    A keyword rich title that has been created to maximise the exposure from users searching. It’s also worth noting another data point here would have been the subtitle, but this listing is missing it.
  • Item Condition
    The condition of products has become mandatory in numerous categories now and there are several options for this.
  • Variations
    These require a special mention and the data structure sat behind this cannot be comprehensively covered in this article (and I am working on an article specifically dedicated to this alone). However for now, understand that what we are looking at is a master/container inventory record that has the core details about the inventory line, however its variations (and associated stock levels & pricing) are shown in both the “Exact Colour” and “Size” variation boxes. Some categories require for these variations to be labelled precisely, however other categorise the inventory data can be more flexible.
  • Quantity
    As this is a listing with variations, each variant has its own stock level, for example a small sized item may only have 2 in stock, whereas medium and large of a specific colour will most likely have different stock levels as sized/colour/variations all tend to sell in differing velocities.
  • Price
    This listings price is straight forwards, there is only one price for the entire style of products being shown. However, each variant may have a different price associated with it and attached to the data structure sat behind it.
  • Postage Variations
    I don’t see just £2.99, I see a tiered pricing structure that is likely to have come either a business rule for a templating system of some kind, that is displaying the default shipping method (as an eBay internal code) and a value. Plus the potential for 2 more domestic options to be selected, up to 3 more options for international and additional rules or specifics attached to them (eg a rate that is set specifically for Ireland). I also see either the postcode requirement or sellers location, along with the despatching country from a table of options, so that such an ETA of delivery can be made effectively.
  • Delivery ETA
    With each listing a data field needs to be set so that eBay are able to show the estimated delivery time based upon the sum of the sellers handling time and the default handling/delivery time of the shipping service selected as the primary shipping option by the merchant. This is why we see 2-3 working days as an ETA, not 3-4 if the merchant had included an extra day for their internal handling.
  • Payments
    Again I don’t only see the option that has been set to “true” to accept PayPal, I also see two more options, the first is that the merchant has added in the additional payment option of postal order/bankers draft, but also there is an account wide setting in their account that is set to “true” and thus displays PayPal as their preferred payment method.
  • Revisions
    This listing is handy as it shows that the merchant has also included revisions to the listing. This could have been manual edits or the entire reposting of the listing data itself from a 3rd party application and eBay have kept a record of this.
  • Item Specifics
    The item specifics being shown in this eBay listing are relatively light compared to what could have been filled out. Looking at these I see additional fields that can have either fixed options to variable options completed for them. Taking brand for example, eBay suggest a list of common brands to use, however in this case the merchant has selected to use “Unbranded” as their data point.
  • Listing Template
    This is hard to explain if you’ve had no interactions with templating based system. Looking at the eBay listing below the item specifics line where the bulk of the inventory data is displayed, the logo and all the stuff that makes it pretty, I see a HTML template that is most likely laced with keywords that are populated when the listing is sent to eBay from multiple data points.For example the description is pulled from data field, the smaller item specifics table from multiple data points, the image, even the description from another source and the about us/payment/shipping/returns tabs of data all being brought in from multiple locations, combined together and posted to eBay as the final finished product we’re now looking at.The same goes for the eBay categories down the left, I don’t see categories, I see a table of category names and eBay shop category ID’s that have just been spilled out into a human usable interface. Depending upon the 3rd party application that is being used to create the actual listing, I also see post listing logic. For example in more complex listings there may be IF/NOT logic that defines what is and what is not being displayed. Such functionality can completely change the entire way the data is displayed in the template and the final listing we’re looking at.
  • 3rd Party Attributes
    This listing has two, the first from the team at DZine-Hub and the second from eBay’s Selling Manager Pro.  Its not uncommon for several 3rd parties to be attributed at this part of the listing.
  • Business Seller Information
    While not posted with the entire eBay listing. I see this data coming from the settings that the merchant has specified in their eBay account. Again this is just data fields that have made it to the final version of the listing we’re looking at.
  • Returns Policy
    Having a different view from is also highlighted here, this data could have been sourced from an eBay default in Selling Manager Pro or its come from a 3rd party tool that has stored this data also as a default, most likely with the other template data.

You should now have an idea on how I see eBay listings and I can assure you its not in the same manner you have been thinking about it. I glaze over the product actually being sold and look at the use (or abuse) of the data that actually made the presented item(s) we’re looking at right now.

Ready for the next one? Lets continue…

What I See When I look at an Amazon Item

Amazon is special, well different when directly compared to eBay inventory data. Its different because the inventory data could have come from multiple sources, Amazon directly, that of merchants, a combination of both Amazon and multiple merchants and also user data as well.

To break up an Amazon listing into a more clearly defined image for you to understand, I have used two colours for this image and again the full version can be found here.

  • Red is merchant or Amazon product data
  • Blue is user generated data

Amazon Inventory Data BreakdownMerchant / Amazon Inventory Data

For this item specifically, because its already been created, then it could be looked at much more simply. What I mean by this is that due to the nature of how Amazon’s product database works, the merchant doesn’t need to know all the attributes about the inventory record, just the essentials to enable it to be sold.

These essentials are:

  • ASIN
  • Merchants SKU
  • Inventory Count
  • Selling Price

This makes selling on Amazon for merchants exceptionally easy. If they can match their data to an existing inventory record then listing a single or many thousands of items is very straight forwards.

However for completeness for this article, I’m going to assume that this item has been created by a single merchant so that we can explore the data sat behind what we’re looking at in full.

Merchant / Amazon Inventory Data

This section relates to all the red highlighted content in the image to the right.

Running with the idea that we (as a merchant) need to create this record from the beginning, when I see this listing, I see the following:

  • Root Categorisation
    Amazon works slightly differently when it comes to inventory data creation. Each root category (Apparel in this instance) has its own data requirements and then below that something called “Browse Nodes” which can be compared to eBay’s category structure.By the very nature of this item (being a shoe) its in Apparel category and is actually a sub version just for Shoes. The “Browse Nodes” don’t actually appear in this listing, but they’re there stored in the background.
  • Product Title & Search Keywords
    The product title is just one factor in the items being found in Amazon’s search, underneath this are up to 5 search keywords that essentially extend the title further. So just looking at the products title, I not only see a listing title, I see 5 data fields that are sat with this, they’re just not shown in the front interface.
  • Pricing
    I’ve purposefully chosen this record because there is a variation in not only the products (size and colour) but also because there is a variation in pricing from the numerous merchants that are offering this product for sale on Amazon.Unlike the eBay example where it was just a single merchants product being shown, we are looking at the cumulative of multiple data sets and multiple merchants all hijacking the same record to sell the variants of this product. As such we can see there is a price range from £23.50 to £86.84.While on the topic of pricing, I see much further. I see a minimum price and I see a maximum price, I also see that there is likely to be repricing software running in the background that also needs these and maybe extra data points to move the pricing around to achieve a higher, but profitable number of sales for each merchant. I also see such 3rd party applications with large data sets and complex rules, all in the aim of profitability for such merchants.
  • Variations
    With regards to Amazon there are four variation types, none, size, colour and size & colour. We’re looking at the latter and we have both size and colour variants being shown.However it doesn’t just stop are text fields from defined lists,  if you look at the colour options, you’ll see that some of these have smaller images, these are called swatches. When I see these I see additional data that has been processed by one or more merchants to improve the visibility for the user when making a selection.
  • Main Image(s)
    Again assuming that the merchant is to be posting this entire product and its variants from scratch, I see numerous images all held in data cells, but not just images of black shoes, I see rows and rows of data, each with their own sets of images and hopefully swatch images (for the variant) with them as well.
  • Attributes /Product Specifications
    Different Amazon root categories (not browse nodes) have their own requirements and available options for specification extra data that appears in both the product specifications section, but over-spills to the product details  as well, weight is a good example of this along with the item model number.
  • Bullet Points (missing from this example)
    Missing from this item are the display of upto 10 bullet points that describe this product further. Most merchants include just 5, however its possible to include many more than this via the API. Again all I see is cells of data that are being posted by a merchant and in this case not being displayed back to the user interface.
  • Product Description
    Amazon by far as the most primitive (or restricted depends on how you look at it) method of accepting descriptions. Again this is just a chunk of data that may just be a wedge of plain text or it could be the combination of multiple data fields being joined together to make a description. This product is quite boring in this respect as there are some fabulous examples of merchants that I have worked with to bring in numerous data points to the description to make the product more effective.

User Generated Data

This section relates to all the blue highlighted content in the image above.

Amazon is again special when it comes to product data because as shown by the sheer amount of blue in the image I’ve included there is an awful lot of user generated data that while not pure to the merchant side of inventory data, is when it comes to when the product data is displayed back to the user (especially after time, as more and more user data gets added to the original inventory data).

  • Reviews & Likes
    I’ve joined these together, although they are separate parts. Likes is just a counter of users hitting a like button, however reviews… they’re special. This is user generated content that can be absolutely lethal in the conversion of products shown on the marketplace. Personally I have bought expensive goods on the reviews of people I have not and will not ever meet. However if they’re bad then that’s pretty much sealed the fate of the product.
  • Customer Images & Videos
    The example above is actually a semi-decent one, as beneath the main image there is a link to 6 user generated images, these are images that users/customers have uploaded and have been added to this product. You can also add video content to products too.
  • Tags / Lists
    Lists aren’t really shown in the example, however an additional component to an Amazon inventory record is in the inclusion of customer generated wish lists, however tags are shown and these are again generated by users to help others locate similar products.
  • Purchase/View Driven Data
    Now this is where Amazon excels. Using the viewing and sales data (probably other sources too), they manipulate this data back to add several key features to a products detail page, the most obvious is the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”, however bundles can also be automatically created and shown to the user (not shown in this example), along with numerous other sections such as “What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?” and other related products.
    The data that is driving this may not entirely driven by the actual product data a merchant(s) first created the record with, but multiple other data points to make the final detail page more productive to the conversion of the viewer.

What You Should See

It doesn’t matter if I’m browsing for a book on Amazon or in a “real” retail store, I can’t help it, I just see data. That can of beans, its a SKU and it has attributes (shelf quantity, store quantity, warehouse quantity, distributor quantities, variation, container size, price, cost, margin to name but a few) . That book I just downloaded to the kindle, its a SKU and it has attributes. The parcels that arrived this morning, just a by-product of inventory data.

This is only inventory related and only the tip of the iceberg. When you mix in multiple data sources, the complexities of data that needs to be ported to not just one marketplace, but many and then the order related data that then is obtained by making inventory data visible, business processes, supply & distribution chains let alone the countless other messes of data such activities creates. It gets deep and fast.

The way I look at the world of eCommerce and product driven commerce, looks completely different to most and I hope I have given you a glimpse of what I see when I see a lonely product shown on a website or just a tin of beans on a shelf. What do you see?

Data is the Life Blood of an eCommerce Business

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

eBay UK LogoThe 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.

What Does Online Gaming Have To Do With Marketplaces like eBay & Amazon?

In this article I pose the following question with an aim to draw a comparison between features found in gaming, to that found on marketplaces like eBay & Amazon.

What Does Online Gaming Have To Do With Marketplaces like eBay & Amazon?

Before I can attempt to draw a comparison, I need to identify some of the core components of online gaming. Being a self-confessed hardcore gamer, I feel I’m at least semi-qualified to attempt to document some of the qualities that online games have to offer, as for the marketplaces comparison I also feel I’m semi-qualified there too.

 

Understanding Online Gaming

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2

My history of gaming goes back to the original days of WON, which was the system that Valve used for multi-player games using the Halflife 1 (HL1) engine before it was migrated to Steam. This now includes games such as CounterStrike & TeamFortress Classic & the variations that spun from these, like FortressForever.

My online gaming has taken a specific slant, multi-player. I’ve never really been a fan of single player games, HalfLife 1 & 2 are prime examples, I’ve not played more than a few minutes with these two, but I must be into the realms of years now of the hours put in for the multi-player versions. Also it’s worth pointing out that I took several days off on the release of TeamFortress 2, so that I could sit down and enjoy the newly released game.

To give an indication of the extent of my lust for multi-player, I’ve dabbled with MMOG’s (Massive Multiplayer Online Games), however because I know my personal weakness for them, I’ve steered away from the likes of Guild wars & World of Warcraft, because I know I’ll have no life after them. I’ve recently been hooked on World of Tanks (WoT) and my gaming community lost me for over 8 months to a web based MMOG called Tribal Wars.

It’s also a good time to indicate that I am not a fan of football, this may explain in part my obsession with online gaming, as I miss the key elements I detail later in this article from bot being a “fan” that can readily port to the game of football as well, not just selling marketplaces like eBay & Amazon.

Tribal Wars is an interesting game to consider, as its not the normal type of game that you would consider as online gaming, as its all based in the browser & is highly focused towards strategy. Starting with a single village, you go plundering other villages to get more resources, the aim is to increase your buildings & troops to a level, where you can educate a nobleman, then go off and over 4-5 attempts, win over another village. This is all done in a web browser, while fending attacks from other villages, attacking other players,  joining tribes and plotting the demise of other tribes in the world that you’re playing.

Tribal Wars ignoring the core requirements that make an experience (XP) MMOG based game, also sunk into another passion of mine, coding & mathematics. Now this is where I seal my fate for that game as I’m now willing to admit that I wrote a masterpiece of over 52,000 lines of code to automate that game and this was the reason why I ended up dominating an entire continent (or K as they’re known). Naughty I know…

Flipping back to some current games, these being TeamFortress 2, CounterStrike Source and World of Tanks. While these games being in a different format (employing role play, first-person shooter, real-time strategy etc…) where you play an humanoid or tank object, rather than being focused on an image in a browser, the cross-comparisons are exceptionally similar.

Core Elements of an Online Game (for me)

Each of these games employ the following features:

  1. Ease of play, even for new players (called n00bs)
  2. Social interaction
  3. A scoring mechanism
  4. Team play, with real people (see note on AI later)
  5. An experience mechanism & Achievements
  6. A token mechanism (this is another form of Economics)
  7. A single or set of characters that you can improve over time
  8. Ability to be totally random
  9. Respawn events or never-ending

It’s critically important that new players are able to join and understand the game quickly, then to build a lust for gaining experience & achieve some or all of the other core attributes. Some games do this by having tiered levels of games, taking WoT (World of Tanks) for example, there are 10 tiers and players only play with other players in tiers up toa  maximum of 4 above them, to keep the game enjoyable for them.

Social interaction is huge for online games, it’s been known for people to get married in games! A really nice story to add here is that out of the gaming community I created a few years back, we now have our first real life baby that would not have entered this world without it. Now that’s the power of social interaction, forget the rest of the normal stuff, chatting, plotting, team work etc… Social can go to real world too and we’ve had some amazing nights out with the lads when we’ve all met up from all around Europe to a single place and take the virtual to the real-world (Big Chief looked pregnant, but he was a bloke).

Team play and the interaction of other real players is absolutely key, they’re needed to keep the game random and also to allow team work. Now this teamwork may be in dual units or as entire tribes of hundreds of people, but its this co-operation that can truly make a simple game, hugely addictive.

Now this is a good time to cover artificial intelligence (AI) and I’ll be back to the core elements shortly.

Artificial Intelligence In Games

You may also be wondering why I have spent a couple of hundred words with this topic, when you get to the marketplaces comparison later, AI has its direct comparison to “automation” and it’s critical you understand AI and how it’s linked to together.

Now this is where I’m going to slate one of my favourite game providers, Valve. Although to be fair they had a brilliant stab at it & I just prefer playing with real people.

Left 4 Dead Characters In two recent releases, Left for Dead and Left for Dead 2, this game is based upon a AI engine that works out the skills of the players and adapts the game to suit. The problem is, the more you play, it doesn’t take much to work out the trigger events and when you’re likely to find a witch (she’s lost a child& sits there crying and goes ape if you have your flash light on, then proceeds to attempt to kill either you or one of your 3 team mates) or a rank (a whopping great big zombie that can rip the floor up & lob it at you, you gotta burn that one with a petrol bomb and it takes some kill I can assure you).

The original incarnation was just a team of 4 players, this was an immediate fail for me, as I need at least 10 people each side to consider it worth my while, any less, the game dynamics start to suck. In later updates a “verses” game appeared, so instead of just 4 players, 8 could play and the first team, the survivors take on the opposite team, who play one of 5 roles as zombie-fied creatures. With random hoardes of zombies appearing, or not so random as you figure out as you play more and more. Yes, there was an hack to allow more players, but the amount of server load caused by the AI engine, made it unplayable.

So, for me AI sucks. I’d rather play with humans, you can never tell what they’ll do next and no game is exactly like the one before, ever.

Economics & the Other Factors

Economics are a curious addition to online gaming, not only can this provide an amazing gaming experience, but it can also allow game creators to find extra sources of revenue or even make it their sole revenue stream.

World of Tanks - American TreeTo focus on the gamers side of this equation, lets take WoT’s, in this game you start with a level 1 tank and you gain experience (XP) with each battle you fight, you get more if your team wins and less if your team fails. You also gain credits for each battle and they follow the same path as the XP, if you win, you get more coins. Its the combination of the XP to unlock higher tier tanks and you need coins (lots of) to buy the tanks. So the more you play, the more XP & coins you get.

Now while this game does not have sharing abilities that I’ll cover in a moment, this game does have the ability to buy gold coins that can be used for several purposes, such as having a premium account that allows you gain 50% more XP & coins each battle, or they can be traded to buy special tanks or ironically even to convert XP or buy normal coins.

world-of-tanks-gold-1As you can tell this can could get expensive, I did a few quick sums and with a small group of us, we’ve easily ploughed £1500-2000 in this game alone in the past few months.

Now flipping this to the game makers, this is where freemium kicks in and the best example is the TeamFortress 2 game I referenced earlier. In this game you play one of 8/9 characters in teams of up to 16 per side and battle it out in one several game formats capture the flag/point, attack defend or death match.

Bots (AI/fake players) were added, these were a feature in the original game Team Fortress Classic (by their modding community, as the game has an API), however again they’re actions are relatively poor compared to humans (although the way-pointing has come on quite a way since the original), however as per my earlier note on AI, these generally suck and the general community of players tend to keep away from BOT servers.

This is where it becomes interesting because this game originally started as a typical game, buy it and play as much as you like, however Valve at the time had started to implement a drop mechanism for extras in the games, such as weapons or items you can wear. These items could be stored and new items could be built, but in a stroke of genius, they allowed the items to be traded and then that’s where the whole game changed. TF2 turned into a free game and the revenue stream is now made from the massive user base sporting customised items, that new players want and can buy from the in game store.

Modding Engine (API)

In the case of Valve games, they have for a number of years now allowed 3rd parties to leverage the gaming engine, either to create new games or to change the way the current games are played.

This has been done via a link to the game engine on the server and communities like SourceMod that sports over 450 plugins that can completely change the way the games work and have allowed longevity to the gaming engine, because of the hundreds, if not thousands of addon’s & extensions that have been created by 3rd parties to the original games.

Achievements

In all the games I’ve covered above, they all sport the feature of experience & ability to improve from what they originally started from, this can be with time input or via paid for addons. Another important factor I have not covered up until now is the ability to “respawn”, this is where the player at the end of a round or game, starts again at the beginning, to play another challenge against the players.

In TF2, its normally a round based game, this could be to capture a flag or point(s), counter strike source is similar where a bomb needs to be planted or hostages need to be saved (or inversely,  a bomb site or the hostages need to be defended) and for WoT all the enemy tanks are destroyed or the cap point is taken.

In almost all the games I’ve mentioned there is the ability to be awarded achievements from the actions taken in the games. For WoT this may be sniper or a medal, for TF2, this could be the number of kills scored with a weapon or other combinations, some are obscenely hard to get, in fact one of the spy achievements due to a bug that was introduced a year ago, cannot be completed.

The most competitive of players will aim to unlock ALL the achievements for one or more player classes, the same as one of the players that I play with on WoT, he’s unlocked every tank & upgrade for an entire country tree.

This has literally taken him months and by his own admission that country tree (USA) & the tanks contained with in it, are crap compared to Germany, to the point that the highest tier tank in that tree is being removed and replaced with another, because its so under powered.

But he knew this & still continued, the game play itself was only one part of the game, unlocking the boxes on the screen was more important to him, than how the tanks actually played and invested months obtaining this level. That I hope demonstrates the power of achievements.

How Does Online Gaming Dynamics Relate to Marketplaces?

I’ve pretty much covered the basics of online gaming in ~1900 words, however how does this relate to marketplaces like eBay & Amazon?

 ebay-feedback-profile-1

Well the most obvious is feedback, when you first start selling on either Amazon or eBay (the game), you start from 0 and work upwards. The feedback system is incremental and ports directly to the experience (XP) model found in games, the more you sell (the game) the more feedback you’re likely to obtain.

Now this is where the game gets interesting, as Feedback is not entirely incremental, it can decrement too. So if you have a dissatisfied customer, they can leave you a neutral or negative feedback, this can be directly compared to the World of Tanks game, because even though you lost a battle, you still got something from it, albeit a negative and because you want more XP & coins (think feedback score & profit) then you do your best [as a business] to ensure that the feedback is positive.

Marketplace Achievements

When we mix in other dynamics of the marketplaces, lets take the eBay PowerSeller status, that has multiple tiers, Bronze, Silver/Gold, Platinum & Titanium and now the ultimate of being a “eBay Top Rated Seller” (eTRS). So that when you reach this level, you are allowed to leverage discounts on your eBay fees and gain extra exposure. This is very similar to the premium model found in MMOG’s and has distinct correlations to the items found in TF2, an item is worn, the same as the eTRS badge is worn.

Now chuck in the eBay “Detailed Seller Ratings” (DSR’s) where sellers (the gamer) can be scored on more than just feedback that had just three levels, buyers can rate sellers on a scale of 1 to 5 for their experience, this absolutely wreaks gaming levels, especially when you consider the business (or gamer) can electively choose to lower its risk to specific DSR ratings by tacking tactical/strategic decisions on the way they list (play the game) on eBay.

Flipping over to Amazon, Amazon is a slightly different game (or business), Amazon is a longer term game where you don’t gain access to the converted buy box for at least 3 months and in most cases is 4-5 months, after proving that you are a worthy gamer, I mean business, as you can see the line is now becoming blurred between business & gamer.

Amazon also leverage the feedback game, with ratings from 1 to 5 and with eBay too, you can play the feedback game by leaving follow up comments or attesting feedback that has been left by buyers. In a gaming scernio this is similar to appealing to the server admin or game providers for a cheat or foul play (think those scummy buyers that try it on) or appealing directly to your eBay or Amazon account manager.

The reviews & guides that is found on eBay is also an interesting gaming feature. As a business you’re able to write reviews for other gamers, sorry I mean eBay members to rate on how well the review is written / its usefulness. You can also sport an extra logo next to your eBay ID (player name) if the sum of your reviews meet specific requirement levels (think XP).

Administration

You can also make complaints about cheaters to the powers that be, this maybe someone stealing your images or breaking one of the marketplace policies or this could be a player with suspect game play.

This can also take an automated approach by either the markeplaces or the game providers, for example listing items that are under the VeRO protection on eBay or by a cheat being picked up by the anti-cheat VAC system that is used by Valve.

What Does AI & Marketplace Automation Have In Common?

I spent a good few hundred words explaining the AI (Artificial Intelligence)  system found in games and I did air a dislike for AI in gaming, this can be directly compared to automation of business processes for the marketplaces. Somewhat ironic that I’ve spent years working on tools to automate marketplaces, however just like AI it has its place, the same goes for automation.

In a recent article I released titled “The Top 8 Pitfalls of Using 3rd Party Software To Manage Your Business” I cover the common issues found when using such tools as eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks, ChannelGrabber and so on, these are all caused by being removed from the games or businesses processes at ground level. The ultimate failure here is when the 3rd party provider goes down, this is the same as the AI engine failing and no-one can play the game, the business almost stops without it.

Don’t get me wrong, AI has its place, the same as automation tools, but if you rely too heavily on them and don’t report on them effectively, then the game or business is pretty much over.

API Access & Longevity

Another striking comparison between HalfLife engine games & the online marketplaces is the API access abilities. Having access to the core engine of the game/marketplace allows 3rd parties to expand on it further.

This could be as simple as feedback automation or it could go exceptionally deep as examples such as eSellerPro & ChannelAdvisor demonstrate exceptionally well.

The eBay API has to be one of the most comprehensive API’s out there and comes in numerous forms. Amazon Web Services rely heavily on API’s also and this has spawned numerous connected businesses, you only need to look at the eBay solutions directory to see the full scale of what can be achieved and its no wonder eBay Inc went for a new platform called X.Commerce, they know full well, without the integrations that millions of 3rd parties can provide will extend their core marketplace & associated companies offerings.

In all cases, because of API access, this has allowed 3rd parties to take extensions to the original platforms into areas that were not even conceived by the original creators, increasing customisation & longevity of the platforms.

Summary

All marketplaces whether knowingly or unwittingly employ several key features found in on-line gaming to keep businesses & users entertained with the marketplaces.

eBay probably have most of the bases covered, all though the XP model could be leveraged more, the feedback stars are nice, but multi tiered achievements could also prove lethal for competitiveness. A wild idea would be to have achievements for selling X value in one day, week or year, dominating sales for a category, badges based upon time, the options are endless.

Amazon have a few areas covered, but could leverage so much more from the core elements of online gaming to their advantage. In both cases, the marketplaces can be quick to leverage and as more experience is gamed (or did I mean gained?) and more automation is put into place, more coins, achievements or profit can be leveraged from them.

Yes, eBay & Amazon are different marketplaces or games, however the most starkest comparison that can ever be made between gaming & marketplaces is this:

Whether its a game or a business, if you take away focus, that is either working on despatching your orders (amongst other key business tasks) or playing the game, the game is going to cease to be played.

Did you enjoy this article? Did I miss out an element or a factor that you feel is important or have you spotted something I’ve completely over looked? Post your comments in the box below

5 Tips for Preparing Your Business for January Not Christmas

It’s now late November and we’ve seen a good couple of press releases from supporting companies on how to increase and keep your Christmas period sane. However, it’s all too late as preparations for Christmas really should have been in place at or before August.

If you’ve not trained seasonal staff, arranged stock transfers, deliveries, put automation software in place, heck everything that gets amplified due to typical higher sales volume, then the next 3 weeks are going to be “fun time” for the business.

 

I Forgot January Once & Only Once!

However… below I’m sharing a short story on why you should not forget January and learn from a mistake I made a couple of years back.

After having a pretty hectic Christmas period, I had decided that on the 1st of January I was going to have a week or two off. Oh boy did we need it. We had been flat out for the past few months preparing for Christmas sales and had thought we had done everything right, sales were good and were very much looking forwards to the break and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

On our return, we started talking to our suppliers and that’s where it hit home, it turned out that our two main competitors had been busy & done their homework. They had an amazing 3 weeks after Christmas. They had been negotiating special deals and jumping on the clearance lines that were abundant. They’re January had rocked to the point that they had cleared more stock in those 3 weeks after Christmas, than in the entire month of December.

I cannot tell you how sick I felt, I had missed one of the oldest tricks in the book.

No Slacking in January!

January has the potential to bigger for sales volumes that December, the reason is simple people are in “sales mode”. What happens just after Christmas or even just before, 99.9% of all high-street retailers go into sales mode. People queue & even camp out on shop doorsteps to grab bargains and ironically this is really straight forwards for you to hijack.

So instead of making the mistake I made, here are five tips for preparing for the first few weeks of January or before:

Tip #1 – Delay Moving Software Providers

Shelve any idea that moving software providers, that can wait until the middle or later in January, if they got you through Christmas, then a few weeks delay won’t make much difference. If it’s not completely broken, don’t fix it (yet).

Tip #2 – Speak to Your Suppliers in Advance

Ask them explicitly what is going on sale after Christmas, suggest that you’ll be able to take larger volumes or stock that didn’t do well at a discounted rate. Spell it out on them, you have extra buying power after Christmas and you can help your sales rep hit his bonus for January.

Tip #3 – Prepare Several Lines to go into “Sale Mode” Now

By using tip #2, you will have an idea on what product you may have at better rates for a sale, as such prepare any data around these in advance, it’ll only take a few minutes per SKU as you can easily create duplicates or variations of the SKU in advance, with new details and perhaps use a different listing template to go with them.

Also a slightly different method would be to consider products that you would feel comfortable sitting on for 9 months, that you know will do next year and scoop extra discounts now and take a punt on higher returns next year?

Tip #4 – Do the Artwork Now

Designers are typically not very busy at this time of the year and it could be a good time to grab a saving on a mild branding redesign for a sale period. Such as adding sale logo’s to an existing template and preparing the design aspect in advance, so that its a click & go event, rather than a rush job when it’s too late.

You might also want to look at the two articles I wrote earlier this year on How to Make Your Own eBay Daily Deals & Weekly Deals and another on How To: Using eBay Shop Keywords to Leverage the Extra eBay Shop Pages, as you can prepare these in advance and hide the pages in the shop, then when it comes to sales time, swap them over in your eBay shop.

Tip #5 – Email Marketing

The same as the visual aspect, if you’ve worked and have obtained a couple of product ranges that will be worthy of a sale, then combine in the updated artwork to your email marketing campaigns and prepare the notifications in advance, so when the time comes, it’s a quick check over and off you go.

As an idea, if you have multiple products, you could make an event of it, explain which products you have going on sale and when (a delayed sale) and notify customers on say a daily or bi-daily basis of the latest sale item (you’ll need to be careful with this not to spam, just make your offering exceptionally compelling).

Summary

Don’t make the mistake I made, prepare for January, what products can you clear, what products can you buy to clear and how can you leverage the “sales mode” that most buyers go into at or before January?

If you do this now, before competitors have started having the conversations, then you can be first in and negotiate the best deals in advance, prepare a campaign and take January easy, knowing that you’ve worked extra hard now and actually have a plan for the month, rather than just “seeing what happens”.

Import Duty Calculator For eBay Items (as a Buyer)

After receiving an eBay item I ordered from abroad, having to take a trip to the Royal Mail collection point & send ni-on a tenner in charges from Royal Mail, I wondered if there was a tool that work out the import taxes in advance. And there is!

Import Duty Calculator

At DutyCalculator.com you can work out in advance how much import duty you’re likely to be charged for an item, as a bonus, they have a tool for working out the likely duty to be paid for eBay items.

In the example images below, ironically the eBay item I picked as an example, incurred no import duties and most annoyingly used up the 3 free trials of the tool on the very same item.

I had a look around a couple of them and categories and sub-categories offered and the categorisation was relatively straight forward to work out which classification the items would fall under, as it’s not the simplest of jobs for one off items and varied orders,  as the import duty classifications are rather deep on the HMRC site and they change the exchange rates often too.

I’m not sure it’s worth the $19.90 a year for the basic version, it would really depend on the level of your buying habits from foreign sites, if its high and varied, this could be an excellent forewarning for items being received for which the contents are properly declared.

Import duty calculator eBay

import duty calculator eBay

eBay Import duty calculator

eBay Import duty calculator

The Four Standard Physical Product Business Models

The following two video’s are part of the UnderstandingE project I have been working on & I’m sharing them here for any feedback you may have.

This hasn’t been clearly defined before (that I know of) and will be an immense help if you are considering an eCommerce product business for eBay, Amazon, transactional websites, the other channels etc… Or as I’ve found, to help realise that you’re actually using one or more of these and why you’re actually using more than one of them.

Four Standard Product Business Models

There are four standard product models that a business can use when it comes to physical based products which are intended for resale, this applies to almost all incarnations of an eCommerce product based business.

These are:

  1. Stocked
    This is like a retail shop, where the items are pre-purchased, then used as the inventory to drive data for the online channels and to fulfil orders. I cover the advantages in the video, however this has one major disadvantage, the outlay of cash to fund it.
  2. Manufacture
    This doesn’t have to be as hardcore as making glass, where you take sand (silica) and add other additives such as lime (calcium oxide) and then adding immense heat & other processes, it can be the combination of two or more products to make a unique third product. In the second video I use the example of the lighting in my office, taking stands, plugins, blurbs & softboxes and combining them into a kit, which is a unique product offering.
  3. Virtual / Just-in-Time
    I personally hate the phrase “drop shipping”, a more apt description would be “virtual” or “just in time”.
    This is typically where stock is made available virtually and then put on offer by the business, when an order is taken, the stock items are ordered and then fulfilled. This may be directed to the customer, but also to the business for sorting and then sending out (as I learned two days ago, the correct term for the latter part is called “Cross Match”).
  4. Asset Recovery
    We can also include refurbished products under this model, as essentially they have gone through the asset recovery process and been re-manufactured. This model can enable the highest returns, but also some major downsides, such as availability and quality.

In their Purest Form

In the video below I cover each of them in the purest forms, you’ll need to watch this one before moving to the second as without the explanation of them in this form, the hybrid models won’t make sense.

Hybrid Business Models

However, in reality, there are very few business that use only one of these, instead in this video, I explain how and why you would want to use a hybrid of these standard models for your business.

I also cover a model that I have not included in the four standard models called “Flipping”, as I explain in the video, this is not a scalable model and if you do find a product base that you can scale with, then I would suspect that it falls under the asset recovery hat.

Summary

Documenting these have been exceptionally useful for me & I’m sure for you also.

I’ve found when talking with business owners about these, this has helped them realise why they’re doing what they are with their businesses. It also makes it a pick & mix exercise, however you can now see why you would want some elements of each, but to limit as much as the negatives as you can by combining them together.

Stop - Take Action!Which models are you using?

Image Source

Updated Amazon Seller Pages & How To Update Yours

Amazon have updated the Seller Details pages, from the old tabbed style to a new universal page.

To show this more graphically to you, I’ve made a quick video that shows the updated page and how you can edit yours.

Updated Amazon Seller Page Video

All the links used in this video are in the resources section below and its also worth noting that you may find this page more product for referring customers to over the category list pages on Amazon, as there are less “exit” points for the customer to follow.

Resources

Below are the links to the pages shown in the video and the links you need to update your seller information on Amazon.co.uk.

If you sell on Amazon.com the URL’s will alter differently and you can locate the section you need by using the “Your Information & Policies” from your Amazon Seller Central dashboard.