Market Places Archives - Page 15 of 20

We (Almost) Have a Winner! – Missguided.co.uk

February 24, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Back in October, one of my first articles was relating to a company called Misgguided. You can read the original article here What a Silly Design Flaw – Missguided.co.uk. They had just had a new website redesign, but neglected one crucial thing…

They had lots and I mean lots of keywords stuck in images.

Before:

This is a before screen shot and was the basis for the article:

Missguided With Lost Keywords Hidden in Images

Looking Closely

And you’ll see that 38 words are hidden from search engines as sadly search engines cannot read words contained in images. Yes they can read ALT and TITLE tags, but having the description on the page is far more important.

And Today We Have?

Something different. While not so pretty as the first, they’ve not only remove the text from the images, they’ve also included the category links.

We have all text now, including new category links

Superb, Yes?

Nope. While releasing the keywords from the images and adding several as links into the sub categories, we’ve reduced out keyword weighting and also reduced the appeal of the header section.

First off, we’ve lost the style of the header, namely the particularly ‘fit’ model and the accessories line. I’ve high lighted these in blue below:

Loss of Two Key Sections

Also while actually gaining two words to the word count, we’ve lost the flow of the text.

From:

Scarves, bangles and bows… charms, belts and bags- add delightful details, luxurious lockets and perfect pearls to complete any outfit! See below for our full range of bags, belts, bangles, bracelets, eyelashes, necklaces, headbands, scrunches, watches and sunglasses.

To:

Get the latest accessories to go with your perfect outfit. We’ve got the latest trends to complete every outfit for all occasions.

Hats, Scarves & Gloves Bags & Purses Jewellery Gifts Beauty Tights & HosieryNail Polish Hair Accessories Belts Sunglasses Slippers View All

So What Would be better?

Join the two together, just like in the original article. We take the styled images for the category header name, the model, the decent description and the raw text and combine it together so it looks something like this:

Excuse the Photoshop Skills, but it makes my point clearly

Anymore?

Yep. Check the top menu out, they’ve actually fixed the issue of the top tabs not being links themselves to the categories (pet hate of web designs #3, I need to find another example for this now), but have left a dead link in the header as shown in the image below.

Category Menu Dead Link

Importance of Excellent Design

The visual appeal of a website is only one part of an entire picture of how the websites performs, I’ve worked with dire looking websites that have been successful because of the other factors far out weighing the lapse in design. Its when you get everything right, is when magical things happen.

Watch This Space

So watch this space, the earlier changes did not happen by accident. If you now see these changes happen you know where they found out about them ;-)

Business Ethics & Ones Moral Compass. Fraud & Alibaba.com

February 22, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

News came out yesterday regarding the CEO and COO’s departure from Alibaba.com amidst +1,000 customers that have been the victim of fraud. You can read two articles on this at TechCrunch and AuctionBytes.

Background

Alibaba.com has slowly been gaining pace, it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for a mere $1B in cash and stocks. Its a marketplace for trade between countries.It’s quite a beast and should not be dismissed for early trading.

Moral Compass

This article isn’t on the marketplace or the fraud that took place, but rather on the outcome from the news becoming public. Which provoked the the resignation of CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee.

Note: For those not used to these terms, CEO is ‘Chief Executive Officer’, AKA the “top dude” and COO is ‘Chief Operations Officer’, AKA “top dude’s minion” who deals with the day-to-day operations.

I’m covering a lot of ground work currently around the coveted MBA (Masters of Business & Administration) and ethics are a core part of such a program.

From what I have read and interpreted, its all about keeping ones own moral compass aligned correctly and this can actually be hard work, for which David Wei and Elvis Lee kept aligned when they accepted ownership of the failures that arose. They could have possibly come out of this with their jobs, yet chose to do the right thing.

Quoting AuctionBytes:

However, the Board accepted Wei and Lee’s wishes that they “take responsibility for the systemic break-down in our Company’s culture of integrity.” Ablibaba founder Jack Ma said the two executives were doing the honorable thing in accepting full responsibility and thanked them for their tireless service to the company.

Cannot Ignore

Whether directly or indirectly responsible, such fraud of a scale of $1.7M cannot be ignored. David Wei and Elvis Lee I suspect, must have hit their moral compasses North when this happened and woke up to the fact that as “top dude” and “top dude’s minion” they are ultimately responsible and stood down.

I’m really looking forward to the case studies in the Business Ethics section of the MBA and how it relates back to this set of unfortunate circumstances. I’m just glad to see that such a moral compass works regardless of faith or region.

No, No, No. Its Your Domain Name, Use It. ChannelAdvisor Not Advised?

February 15, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Channel Advisor Seller Buy4Less

Oh this made me giggle, while researching after posting the earlier article on a ChannelAdvisor customer called ‘Buy4less’ and ‘Wasting Your Most Important eBay Marketing Asset‘ I stumbled across this chestnut.

The Search Results

Click this link and let me explain the results you’re seeing.

You are seeing two things, the first is the use of the site: command, this is very useful for seeing how many pages have been indexed for a site, while not 100% accurate by Google’s own admission (see Matt Cutts from Google explain it in this YouTube video) its a great indicator and the second is a baw-drop by ChannelAdvisor for one of their featured retaliers. Let me explain.

Errr What Happended?

Now for the first link I gave, it shows lots of URL’s that have been indexed, great, but look again, the URL’s start ‘stores.channeladvisor.com/buy-for-less-online’ whats happened to the thier domain name ‘http://www.buyforlessonline.co.uk/‘?

I’ll tell you what’s going with it

NOUT, NADA, Sweet FA!

There is a single page for this domain indexed in Google, what they’ve done is use masking on the domain name instead of setting up a CNAME alias or similar to make the server treat the real domain name properly. So then everything starts from buyforlessonline.co.uk rather than some horrid domain path like ‘stores.channeladvisor.com/buy-for-less-online/’.

Knowing…

If you’re using a third party tool such as Channel Advisor, don’t settle for a crap website setup, make sure everything is in your ‘domain’ name, don’t be afraid to ask for the assistance outside for unbiased views & guidance, automaton tools are only one part of your businesses success.

Getting Out of Such a Mess

If you’ve managed to do this this, don’t panic. Ask your provider to create 301 redirects for every page they’ve got to the new domain paths. The new pages on the correct domain name are forwarded from the old domain, so you are not penalised for what would-to-Google the entire site disappearing an popping up elsewhere.

Curiosity

I wonder how much was taken on their website last year, I wonder if anyone noticed. I suspect ‘not a lot’ of revenue was taken this year on ‘that’ site. Pity, I quite liked the visual design.

How To: Knowing the 10 eBay Shop/Store Design Mistakes

February 3, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Oh how these drive me nuts, please, please do not make the same mistakes. We can’t blame the shop owners featured in this article, they just don’t know better. You however cannot use this excuse after reading this article though!

Top 10 eBay Shop Mistakes

Here are top ten common mistakes sellers make when designing their eBay shop.

#1 The Giant Header

This award goes to http://stores.ebay.com/connies-bargains-galore

Check the header area out on this page!

Navigating the page to the line items means you need to scroll an entire page (yes an entire page I could not believe it) and more to get to them. Plus the header is on every page, so they’re all doomed pages.

Matt’s Tip: Keep your header to 250 pixels high as a maximum, anymore than this leaves the buyer having to think what to do next and we all know that’s a bad idea.

#2 The logo is not a Link

This award goes to a previous winner, http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Camisera-Clothing

Oh how this drives me nuts, the logo in the top header should always be a link, I covered this off in an earlier article, you can see the full details My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design

Top left logo = Link to Homepage

Never forget this. Its basic common manners on the net. Making user the think again is a bad, bad idea.

#3 No categories

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/phatpocket

102,169 that is over one hundred thousand items and no categorisation?

Even adding categories by Author Name (which they have, see the listings) would help.

You can have up to 300 categories, three levels deep, there is really no excuse for this.

#4 No Description

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/AZCARPARTSUK

Take a look here http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/_sl.html?_an=1 and note that these are anchor stores, each paying £350 a month to be in this list. Now how many have no description?

Even though this store uses a custom header, you can still fill out the shop description area, because this description is not only used in the header, the shop search page (which we just saw), but also in the meta description.

#5 CAPS LOCK

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/YES-4-CAR-PARTS

Using caps lock is widely regarded as SHOUTING, also using caps lock for all the text, does not make the text clearer to the reader, it actually helps the person typing the text.

Never used excessive amounts of caps text in a description, title, or in the case the categories because its VISUALLY VERY ANNOYING.

PS. I am ignoring the image in the header that is in the header, they appear to have forgotten to re-register their domain name

#6 Paying for a design but forgetting how it will look

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/megabooksuk

Never fork out cash for a design without seeing how it will look with your information in it.

I’m guessing that if this seller had realised that they have no categories and that they were not using any gallery images at all for their listings, they might have ended up with a different design and layout.

It all looks a bit bare.

#7 Forgetting the rest of the Shop

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Superdry-Store

This one is brilliant and had already earned a ribbing in six articles, you can view them here: http://lastdropofink.co.uk/?s=superdry

So what’s wrong? They have a stunning homepage, but kinda have forgotten about the rest of the eBay shop, no categories, no real header, no left navigation, just a stark white page. This is the best case of ‘homepage blindness’ I have seen in years.

#8 Not doing anything

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/all-your-music

Well, lets be fair here, they did open an eBay shop, 1/10, but have left it as that. No categories, pretty sure that the default design, no description, no logo, no nothing.

Quite sad really.

#9 Main logo, not a home link

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/RSJ-Motor-Factors-Ltd

Nice design, although was a contender for #10 spot, however as I was typing I spotted the issue. I recently included this in an article My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design.

They’ve forgotten to realise that the default user action to go back to the homepage is to click the icon in the top left, the logo part where RSJ is written, sadly this entire header contains no a single link, so the browser is left flapping with no-where-to-go.

#10 No custom pages

Awarded to: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/WHATEVER-LAPTOPS

I’m not knocking this store to much, the owner has completed a great job, added a logo, changed the header, added a shop description (not shown on this layout, but it is there), has really nice categories, two feature boxes along the top, nice product images, decent titles.

But has not picked up that there are up to 15 ebay shop custom pages to be abused.

Not making the Common Mistakes

For those eager readers, yes the lack of header logo link is here twice, it drives me bonkers, don’t do it! Its like a door to a house, but with no handles.

I know its really hard, there is normally a lot going on in a small sized business, its not surprising I was able to find all these issues in a few pages. But at least you now know what the most common mistakes are and to avoid them.

I have been working two other articles on the eBay shop, these are linked to below, the first article is already live, the second is due in the next 2-3 working days:

How to: SEO for eBay – 10 Minutes Per Day

February 1, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Just because you pay eBay a fee for your eBay shop, insertion of a listing and a final value fee when items sell, unfortunately this does not mean that eBay unleash a team of experts to promote your business.

In many ways you’re left to your own devices and as long as you convert buyers now and then, it kind of keeps everyone relatively happy. But why should you be happy with mediocre?

I'd like to eat the entire cake, but I can only take one slice at a time

Cumulative effect

Once you’re in the game (see my earlier post on “getting in the game“) its only a matter of “practice to make perfect” and it does not need to consume hours each day. Just a few minutes here and there and the combination of lots of little things, make one monster!

Take this article for example, I conceived this while eating lunch on the back of a napkin, nothing major, a few notes, then prepared the layout, back filled it and this morning added some images and annotations. It is putting everything together, the idea, the notes, the layout, the back filling, the visual candy. The cumulative effect of this is the final product, this article.

Breaking it down

I was once asked this question:

How do you eat an elephant?

I paused for a few moments and honestly thought *k, that is a an enormous beast, I’m going to need a slab of garlic butter to go with that steak. While day dreaming on it for a few seconds, I was given then answer:

With a spoon

Yep a spoon. I got the point instantly. I’m hoping you do too.

See even elephants need spoonful sized mouthfulls too. Yummy. (Look at the people in the car, the dent on the roof and I'm pretty sure he's got his pinkie out too, rofl)

Only 10 minutes, set the calendar right NOW

Before you continue with this article, open outlook, Google calendar or write on your diary for the next two weeks, a 10 minute block at the same time each day, to look at and make these changes.

If you drink tea or coffee, all we’re saying is that we are going to have a quick 10 minute break, with a cuppa at a set time each day. With this done, lets dive in.

The areas of eBay to focus upon

We’re going to focus on a few key areas and then make the tasks really simple to do. These areas are:

Research
Listings
The eBay Shop
Reviews & Guides
Outside of eBay

Research

If you are just starting the ball rolling, your first few mini sessions should be focusing upon looking at your competitors and understanding how they are better than you and how you can learn from this to ultimately sell more.

Firstly we need to identify who the real competitors are, do not use gut-feel for this, use facts. Go to Terapeak/ and sign up for the ‘advantage’ account, its $25 or £16, it’ll be the best £16 you have ever spent.

Searching by category and keyword searches to find the real competitors, compile these into an excel list based upon value of turn over and make a point of reviewing each of these, noting the points you like about them and equally the points you dislike.

Oh and do not forget eBay Pulse, somewhat limited, but can help with identifying top keywords and top sellers.

Once you have found your list of true competitors, check this list once per week to see how they are doing. Then once per month, go back and review the list and see if any new competitors have arrived and track those too.

I know companies that know more about their competitors than they do about themselves. A healthy paranoia is good, although some to border on excessive.

eBay Listings

To focus on this effectively, we are going to break this down into further sections, these are:

Listing Titles
Listing Descriptions
Additional Text

Listing Titles

Even the most seasoned sellers can improve their titles, using the research in part one, you should already know top keywords for your categories. If you only do 20 titles in the 10 minute session, in a week you would have done 100, two weeks, 200 and in a month, a staggering 800 titles. Get started now!!!!

Listing Descriptions

I’m pretty sure every single description every written could be improved in some way. Again do not panic, we’re not after the entire elephant, we’re just after a tasty spoon full. You may have already learned through research that others may be creating clearer, more friendly descriptions that what you have.

One by one, with some time. That’s all it takes.

Additional Text

I’ve added this as an extra section, because we’ve covered the main two sections, title and description, however what about the rest of the auction contents?

I’ll give you some idea on the degree of scale I was recently given from a client, there had two lines, totalling no more than than 40 words for the description. The other 1454 words were terms and conditions and other useless scary junk.

Make all other content so simple, you’re mother could read it with her glasses off. Shipping, simple, terms, simple, anything else, simple. Customers are paranoid creatures, do not scare them. Caress them with nice information. Kinda like I am doing to you now :D

The eBay Shop

Again, this needs to be broken down in to spoon sized chunks so that it can be tackled in just 10 minute chunks.

eBay Shop URL
eBay Shop Pages
eBay About Me Page
eBay Shop Description
eBay Shop Categories
SEO Keywords

eBay Shop URL

The first task when looking at the eBay shop is to look at the URL. If we are dealing with an extremely well known & established eBay shop, then do not alter it.

However, if you are just starting out or have only a small following, then choosing a eBay shop name, making a URL that includes a nice keyword right name is strongly advised.

Edit your eBay shop name (thus URL):
http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtEditDetails

eBay Shop Pages

I have an entire article dedicated to this. You can view it here:
How To: Using eBay Shop Keywords to Leverage the Extra eBay Shop Pages
(This may not be live at the time of publishing this article)

Edit your eBay shop custom pages:
http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreManageCustomPages

eBay About Me Page

I have this noted to dedicate an entire article to this page, however in short the eBay about me page is a very handy page, as it gives you an extra icon next to your eBay ID. Its the ideal pace to promote your business and is the only page you are allowed to include a link to an off-eBay store on.

Edit your eBay About Me page:
http://cgi3.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?AboutMeLogin

eBay Shop Description

The eBay shop description can appear in more than one section. The first section you need to be aware of is that its used in the meta description tag for the eBay shop, also on some eBay shop templates its also used in the header area.

You’re allowed up to 300 characters for the description. I’d suggest the first 40-50 are human readable and then the majority are a list of the brands or other unique attributes and then are ended with another human readable sentence of 10-15 words. This way it reads well for both humans (primary goal) and search engines (secondary goal).

Edit your eBay shop description:
http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtEditDetails

eBay Shop Categories

You can have up to 300 categories, down three levels. Named what ever you want with in reason, up to 30 characters each. The added bonus is, that you can set separate keywords for these categories too!

Edit your eBay shop categories:
http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreCategoryMgmt

SEO Keywords

You can give each of your shop categories up to two primary keywords and six secondary keywords, plus you can specify your own keyword sets for the homepage as well.

If you are dealing with a wrath of categories you created in the earlier step, just plod your way through them, Just think in a few weeks, they’ll all be super hot, loaded keywords words and the task will be complete for a short while. Because you’ll want to be coming back to look at these again later to improve them further!

Tip! Refuse the urge spam the keywords. Think or even better, research what people are searching for an how that matches your category and match the keywords you use to the products you have in that given category.

Edit your eBay shop keywords:
http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtViewCustomKeywords

Reviews & Guides

These are stellar places to pick up well targeted browsing buyers. The last time I had a stab at the reviews, I got an account to the top 100 reviewers on eBay UK. It took a lot of work and I did have a team to help me achieve this. But it can be done.

Take a look at http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/ You can review almost anything within reason. I’m not going to cover why you should be doing this in great detail here as again I have this already noted for a future article. But in short, it will help you be seen as the ‘Authority’ in your given area.

Tip: Stuck for an idea? Pick three items and say why you like one more than the others, now go!

To create your first review:
http://cgi3.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CreateProductGuide

Outside of eBay

Its all about tipping the scales in your favour

I’m not going to be lame and suggest Facebook, Twitter as you already know this. What I am going to suggest is that you start your own blog, so you can talk about your items with your own community.

In short ‘blogging’ only requires some time, you have 10 minutes each day, thats all that is needed. Articles do not need to be huge like this one is, short and sweet works well too. Just be honest and show your passion.

If you’re worried about costs, do not be, here are two free options and they’re both great:

Forum posting and generally just talking about your business and products will attract people. The more you talk, the more people will follow, its quite simple.

One crucial point I feel I need to make is that you should categorically should not use paid search such as Adwords or similar to promote your eBay shop. If you are at this level, then focus your attention on a creating your own web store outside of eBay.

Again the 10 minute rule applies here too, get in and get going and by the end of the month you could have created at least 20 blog posts!

Summary

I have shown you that all you need is 10 minutes with a cuppa to make a difference. We’re not after eating the entire elephant, or a VW with two people in it for that matter, but we can have a scoop of it each day and finally reach our ultimate goal. Now go get started!

Take Action
Now that you’ve read this article, grab your calendar and put down a 10 minute window to make one small change, you’ll be amazed at the effect of this after just a week.

Argos is Kicking eBuyer’s Butt on eBay

January 25, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Here is some irony for you, eBuyer the on-line technology retailer is getting its arse kicked by a catalogue store on eBay. I’ll be quite open when I say I am taking the piss a bit in this article, but on a serious side, I’d have expected a lot more from a solely eCommerce based company like eBuyer.

The thing is I really do quite like eBuyer, they are a natural second behind Amazon for technology purchases (eBay comes in third). eBuyer has to be one of the best examples of a company that has fantastic data, a great brand, but seems to think some-how that does not count for eBay.

Non Fluffy Version

This is actually the first version that you’re viewing now, I did create a second copy that was reworded in many areas, but I felt this version had more bite so kept it. Let me know if you think I was wrong to choose this version and that I should have released the ‘fluffy’ version instead.

Argos

Lets put this in perspective, firstly we have Argos, traditionally a high street retailer that leveraged the huge power of catalogues and in-the-home shopping. The Internet was probably somewhat of a second thought to them, but they’re doing a fine job now.

eBuyer

And then we have eBuyer a Rotherham garage start up whom had £250K pocket change (WTF?) and started an eCommerce giant which we know as eBuyer. Naturally you would be expecting that a leading on-line, technology led company such as this to be creaming anything eCommerce wise.

How wrong are we!

There is a saying for this, its called the ‘Face Palm’, as defined by Wikipedia:

A facepalm is an expression referring to the physical gesture of striking one’s own face in a display of exasperation. In Internet discussions, the term is used as an expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, disgust or general woe.

Argos Rocks eBay!

Argos is the dark horse here, they have really got their stuff together. Lets take a look at one of their listings. A screen shot is below and you can view the item in the flesh here.

Click Image Above for Full Size version

Its blatantly obvious they have customer services issues but its also clear that they give a hoot and are following up comments and must be working hard in the background.

I like the Argos eBay outlet for many reasons, here are just a few:

Consistent branding across all channels
Not the best eBay shop, but it looks like Argos and they have done an awful lot more than some
Semi decent picture (in the listing)
Their listing templates are well laid out (*coff*, need shipping on the right lads!)
Descriptions are about the best you’re going to get from a company of this nature
We have integrated reviews! (monster unique selling point)
OooO I just spotted social links, that’s naughty the official line clarified with eBay only a few days ago that this was still a very grey area on the links policy and this was not allowed.
A categories menu with extra links
A featured listings gallery

I could go on and on, but in short I quite like the operation being portrayed. Yes they need some refinement but its doing them good for now. 8/10 for the lads over there at Argos. Wooohooo!

Brewery, Piss Up, FAIL?

Lets take a look at one of eBuyer’s listings, don’t get too excited though, there is very little to gawk at.

Click the Image for a Larger Version

Errr ok, credit is due for having three images and a better description than Argos. But where is the rest of it?

What about the shipping prices?
No images in the listing area?
What about the other products from Tenda?
What about the the 32 reviews FIVE STAR they have for this item on their website?
Where are the exit points?
How much is shipping?
Am I saving anything?
Is it new?
Is it used?
I’m an idiot TELL ME in PLAIN ENGLISH what this is about
Lead me, I am a sheep
That’s some horrible fine print bullets, can I buy this item, am I eligible?
What about the 14 forum comments for this item?
What about the consistent branding?
What about everything someone forgot to put in the listing?

The Irony Is….

That for the past 30 days, Argos are only just beating eBuyer for sales on eBay by a mere £160K. Argos have almost done £1.2M and eBuyer have done £1.04M for 30 days Dec 21st 2010 to Jan 19 2011.

But when you look at the average selling prices (ASP), Argos is shifting way more kit than eBuyer (about three times), as eBuyer has an ASP of £115 and Argos has an ASP of just £37.

Imagine If…

The technology company actually got its act together and focused on its listings and presence on eBay properly and stopped doing silly things like this video and focused on leveraging the sales channel to its full potential. All the things that an eCommerce should know and should be putting into practice and seem to have forgotten.

If you are eBuyer & are reading this:

Read this article, its in plain English Dear eBuyer.com, You Could Be Doing So Much Better on eBay UK. Here is How! I hope it helps, because I would be embarrassed to be having my arse kicked by an off-line, catalogue pusher.

If you’re not eBuyer & are reading this:

I sincerely hope that that your business is not presented so poorly, there is so much to be learnt from Argos and the question is:

Do you agree that Argos is kicking eBuyer’s butt?

Comment form is below!

A Previously Unreleased eBay Shop Exposure Tip

January 24, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

This one is little amusing and I only know of a few people have done this and I was the one told them that it even existed.

The Background

While running my own eBay business and few years back, paying out +£200 for an eBay shop was a large expense, back then it was nothing like today’s eBay shops, I had to be ‘authorised’ by someone in in eBay USA and it took several weeks to be set live, none of this flop £350 on the desk and off you go stuff.

Neither did the store have the kind of listing exposure that you probably enjoy now. We used to have something called ‘Store Inventory format’ or SIF for short. Also in short, it was expensive and equally crap.

Without the exposure and added costs, you were truly left to your own devices to promote your store and its listings, which lead me to explore the threshold that makes one store appear in a category in the eBay shops directory.

The eBay Shop Directory

There is a eBay shop directory (Matt hears *gasps* from the readers, no there really is a eBay shop directory) on eBay that follows the eBay category structure, you can see it here and a screen shot is below:

Taking a closer look we have these features:

A search box
A set of categories to the left, that look a lot like the normal eBay categories
Images of the Anchor stores
Several featured shops

You can see a similar layout in the screen shot below, this is shown after clicking into a sub category on the left. You’ll also notice that no basic shops are shown in these results.

Pay Close Attention

Now pay special attention to the left bar, as I hinted above, this is a copy of the eBay category structure. What I found that the threshold was really low, you just need 5 listings in a given category to provoke the store to show up in the eBay shop categorisation.

So if you’re paying out what is now £350 for an anchor eBay shop (even £50 for the featured eBay shop subscription level is a lot to some), this tactic could gain you extra visitors to the shop and your listings.

Not Spam

I know exactly what one reader (yes that’s you Mr David M!!! I told you I would mention your name this week) of this blog will be thinking when he reads this article, spam.

No, I am not suggesting you spam eBay with random miss-categorised items. I am suggesting that you selectively tailor a selection of items to each category to optimise your search results, while adding variety to the passing buyers.

Possible Example

For example if you sold batteries and mainly computer related items, you’ll naturally be shown in the computing categories, however you could make 5 different battery packs for a specific toy and list it in the toys category #234 or similar.

Check this eBay category structure link, the numbers to the right of the categories similar to (123456) are the item counts for that given category, this tells you which category you should be looking to make packs for.

If you’re anchor level, you should see the most benefit, as the added logo helps convert and the listing fees are dead cheap, even at the ‘Feature eBay shop’ level where the listings are 5p a pop, for 25pence, you can be exposed to an entirely new section of eBay.

Do Not Leave a Comment!

Don’t want to comment on this article? You’re not the only one I can tell ya!

I love receiving emails from my readers, several blatantly say they do not comment because they do not want reveal their names to the outside world, because they do not want others knowing they read this blog, its quite amusing and quite a paradox too.

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My1stWish Smashes +100,000 eBay Feedback

January 20, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Its not everyday someone can say they topped one thousand feedback comments on any platform, let alone one hundred times more.

I still remember getting my first score of 10, then 100 feedbacks and then another new star for 1,000 feedbacks, never did I believe back then that I’d personally top 14,000 feedback on single account on eBay, but be involved with companies that did this for breakfast.

One such company that I have had the delight of working with since its creation a few years ago was My1stWish and I’m happy to report that they recently topped the scale by achieving the level of over 100,000 positive comments on eBay.

The moment it happened was caught for wall mounting:

About My1StWish

If you’ve never heard of My1stWish, then you’ve never been in the eBay clothes, shoes & accessories category on eBay UK. My1stWish are a brilliant example of a small business that grew from a bedroom to a turnover of several million pounds in only a few years. Covering eBay, Amazon, websites and International markets to aid their expansion.

Coming Soon…

There is more to follow along the lines of this topic, may be tomorrow? You’ll have to wait and see. Stroke the lantern Aladdin :D

Fulfilment By Amazon Webinar: Shipment Creation and Inbound Process

January 19, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

If you’re interested to understand in more detail how the shipment creation and the inbound process of Amazon’s fulfilment services (FBA) works, Amazon have a webinar at 5pm GMT on Wednesday 26th January.

I have attended a few Amazon webinar’s in 2010, they were well laid out and always learned something new while watching, the questions & answer sessions at the end can be very useful too.

Register Now

Apparently space is limited (is this a modifier to provoke action?) you can register your place following the link below:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/682209817

Or for those whom need a call to action button, click the button below:

Webinar Overview:

We are pleased to invite you to this FBA webinar focusing on the topic of sending shipments to our UK fulfilment centres. We will discuss the following:

– Quick Reminder about the shipment creation process
– Amazon’s requirements and restrictions
– Examples of common mistakes and problems which occurred last year
– Q&A

A representative from our operations team will be there to share first-hand experience and tips on these issues.

This session will mostly focus on learning how to improve your shipment process and avoid inbound problems. We will dedicate as much time as possible to questions.
For sellers starting with FBA, who are not familiar at all with the shipment creation process, we recommend you to first watch the recording of our previous webinar ‘Create your first shipment’, located here.

Title: Fulfilment By Amazon: Shipment Creation and Inbound Process
Date: Wednesday, 26th January 2011
Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM UK Time

PS: Thanks to Carole from the Amazon FBA team for clarifying the day as the dates were out

How To: Win the Amazon Buy Box

January 19, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

For seasoned sellers, they know when they get the Amazon Buy Box, because they start receiving batches of orders. Its literally an ON/OFF switch for orders once the Amazon Buy Box is enabled for that seller.

In this article I will explain to you what the Amazon buy box is, what impacts it and how Amazon FBA can weigh the odds in your favour to win it.

So what is the Amazon Buy Box?

Unlike eBay where you can have multitudes of the same item over many listings, Amazon’s format is different, Amazon has one ‘master’ listing and then allows multiple sellers, including itself to sell that item.

This master item, contains information that is an amalgamation of data from eligible sellers of the given item. Although some master items are created by Amazon themselves and contain more in-depth descriptions than they allow merchants to create

The ‘Buy Box’ is Amazons way of sorting the sellers that have the master product available to the customers.

You’ll notice that there are two parts to this ‘Buy Box’, the one that merchants fight for are the upper ‘Blue Buy Box’, this is how the vast majority of sales are made on Amazon.

The lower part was added in 2010 and shows offers from merchants that are very close to the merchant that is currently winning the coveted ‘Blue Buy Box’ spot.

If you look at the blue part, this is coloured differently from the rest of the section and on the Amazon site, coloured quite differently so it stands out, within it, is the primary “call to action” button, ‘Add to Basket’. You can see it dwarfs the other buttons. This is why getting access to the buy box is critically important, if you’re not in the box, you’re literally not in the game.

Amazon Blue Buy Box Winners

This is where Amazon are pretty darn smart and incorporate a large number of factors into whom wins the blue buy box and also it is to be noted that the winner (where there are more than one equally competing merchants) can and does rotate.

In the screen shot of the buy box above, if you look closely you’ll see that not the cheapest option is sat in the blue buy box, instead an offer for ‘£1,380.25 + FREE SHIPPING’ is winning, although the secondary offer is at ‘£1,369.99 + £6.00 shipping’ which is less than the current winner.

In fact looking at the screen shot below, neither of these two are the cheapest and clearly illustrates that you need just more than price to win the blue buy box and crucially the sale.

So as you can see, there are actually four other merchants that have this same item for sale, but even still, none of these won the box and instead another has taken the box.

And if this is not bad enough even after 30 refreshes in different browsers, from different machines on different networks, I could not get the buy box to shift off that seller, but I did win at the game by logging into an Amazon account that had Amazon Prime enabled on it.

So what are the factors that influence the buy box?

We’ve seen from the above that if Amazon decide that they want to give a seller the buy box, then they will give out the keys to sales and sometimes it can be quite sticky even when prices are quite some way out too.

To understand the logic behind the buy box we need to understand what Amazon wants. This is actually quite simple:

Amazon want only to sell items to customers from merchants it can trust. Ultimately if Amazon suggest a different seller, then this is representing themselves.

Unlike eBay, this is Amazon’s own marketplace, they sell on it themselves, it is THEIR marketplace, so you better have some compelling reasons why they should allow you to sell goods along side them and for them to allow you access to the buy box.

Note: This is why I love Amazon so much, it is extremely rare that I have an issue with an order from Amazon, whether its direct from them or a merchant on the site.

While not exhaustive, these are the main factors in winning the coveted Amazon Buy Box.

Price

Besides actually being eligible, the total order price including postage, is the second most important factor in winning the blue buy box. This is only superseded by sellers that use Amazon’s FBA.

Availability

How many do you have and how quickly can you ship? By consistently fulfilling orders in a quick time, improves your chances.

Volume

This goes back to consistency and is probably why the seller in the first part of the article stuck on the blue buy box, they have been consistent when selling this product over a period of time.

Eligibility

Really daft, but first you must be eligible for the buy box. New merchants are not awarded access to the buy box for several weeks, even months until they prove that they can be trusted. Remember this is Amazons own marketplace and their own customers.

I say this time and again, never, ever piss off Amazons customers.

Refunds

By having a low refund rate indicates that you are in-control of your business. Not letting buyers (remember they are Amazon’s buyers) down, you are helping Amazon trust you.

Customer Feedback

By keeping negative ratings to a minimum, you are pleasing Amazons customers. Amazon like businesses that keep their customers happy. These comments can be revised and I strongly urge you to watch the feedback you receive. Remember its their customers…

A-to-z Guarantee Claims

This is Amazons return process. While you are bound to have a number of returns, Amazon expects very few, act fast on these as it will play in your favour. Not getting them in the first place by excellent customer services is probably a better route.

Fulfilment – FBA

This requires a special mention and I will expand on this in the next section

The not-so Secret Pricing Rule

I let this slip in a recent article, you an read it here: The Amazon Buy Box – You know the Secret Formula Right?

Amazon Fulfilment AKA FBA. Guaranteed Blue Buy Box

Quite a bold statement, ‘Guaranteed Blue Buy Box’, but once you understand that by using Amazon’s Fulfilment services called FBA, then you are actually giving the despatch control to Amazon, thus as long as your pricing is relatively close then the buy box is yours.

In the screen shot above where multiple buy boxes are shown, the one to the right includes s screen shot from an Amazon account that has Amazon Prime. This is a service that costs £49 a year and gives Amazon customers access to unlimited free next day deliveries, they do this by offering it on their own and on items that are held in their fulfilment services.

I will be posting more information on FBA in a future article, I did write this up before Christmas but decided it needed more work.

Combining the Factors

Its only by combining all these factors together, can you expect to have access to the Amazon blue buy box and make lots of sales on Amazon.

Sure, you can and will make sales without the buy box, but a common conversation with seasoned Amazon sellers is that they pretty much know when they have hit the buy box for certain items because they get a flood of orders for the item that has won it.

Links of Interest

These links provide further information on the factors that influence winning of the buy box.

Order Blindness – Are You Losing Money on eBay?

January 18, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Are you too busy wrapping orders, answering ludicrous, idiotic eBay questions, answering the phone, making orders and every other task that can take the attention of a business owner to not be checking your bottom line?

Its very easy, as I personally know and have seen many times over to get caught up in everything that is going on around oneself, if you don’t keep your eye on the fees being paid you could be going backwards.

Do you have a eBay Fees Back Hole?

I will not be covering the need for ‘delegation’ in this article or how to leverage ‘anticipation’ as a marketing tactic.

I am working on an article which covers ‘anticipation’ with some blindingly good real-life examples, one of which is eBuyer.com and several others fresh from the Internet only a few days old which I am documenting, so you can copy and deploy yourself with ease (I might too, have I built any anticipation here?), but instead focusing on that here, lets churn some numbers on a real company that caught my eye in late 2010.

Background

I was doing some research in the CSA category on eBay.com site and the other eBay sites last year, I stumbled across a number of sellers that caught my attention, this particular company (which will remain nameless) caught my attention for the wrong reasons, as quickly doing-the-sums, I worked out they were losing money (or so I thought).

I said at the time I’d come back and look at them in more detail, so here I am sharing it with you too. Its very easy to become wrapped up in the rush of the day to day tasks, eBay is brilliant at sapping up time, but even a rough P&L, it will let you know if you’re in the red or in the black.

Knowing IS everything

I have a saying, “knowing is everything”. It might sound daft, but I stand by this whole-heartedly and only by experience, I know how valuable this is.

An error, is an output, its just not the desired output. Knowing that it is an error is crucial, if you know you make the wrong decision or the outcome was not as expected, then you can at least write that avenue off and try another, but if you chop and change all the time and do not measure the results, then you really have no idea which way you are going and to me that’s a bad thing.

Sometimes you can only know that the outcome is not as you desired by being in the arena, its great to run theories or models, but sometimes, you got to get in there and try the theory out for real. Only then do you know what really happens and by measurement and control, you can readily work out if you are going forwards or backwards.

What I’m trying to say, get in and try stuff, just be careful and make sure you have ‘events’ you can measure and boundaries on acceptable losses. Be prepared to lose some money, mistakes will happen, only by practice, can you become a master of good mistakes.

Face Value

Even when checking this seller in September, they were churning a decent amount of orders for that month, over December 2010, the month that I will be analysing, on face value, they have been shifting decent volumes again.

Totals
Revenue	£177,553.95
Total Listings	107689
Successful Listings	10880
Total Bids	12219
Items Sold	10924
Items Offered	109473
Success Rate	10.1

These values are from the 1st to 31st December 2010 and a factor worth pointing out already is that these numbers will be erroneous due to conversions from USD to GBP. But they will give us close enough numbers to estimate the fee values, which is what I am interested in for this article.

I mentioned face-value for this section, because when you look at the numbers, they did quite well, £177.5K for the month, over 10,880 orders, that’s an average sale of £16.31.

At the time, this seller caught my attention for three reasons:

Turn over was decent
The number of listings v’s sold listings was low
Only 7,5,3 and 1 day durations were being used

They have a 10.9% sell through rate, which is the kind of sell through rate you would expect from a technology based category, CSA tends to be much higher than this, maybe this is why it caught my attention?

Combine this with the sole use of auctions (bar a few few Fixed Price ones) and no eBay store/shop listings made me very curious indeed, as this is a very expensive way of listing of you do not keep excessive tabs on what’s going on.

Grinding the eBay fees

Now I am going to assume that they are using their free-relist for every auction styled listing. In this assumption, I am being extremely kind to the numbers and them, as some items will sell first time and will not be valid for a free-relist credit, so this number in reality will be higher.

So… The number of paid listings:

107689 / 2 = 53844 Paid Listings

I am also neglecting the 510 fixed price listings for this time period, as they are so small in comparison.

According to the report, they have a average start price of £15.72 and and we have an average sell price of £16.31. Lets now grind these numbers to work out the average start prices on eBay and the average Final Value Fees.

Using http://ecal.altervista.org/en/fee_calculator/ and converting the values to £24.94 and $25.88 for starting and selling prices respectively. Also using https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside&countries= to confirm the PayPal rates are 1.9% + $0.30 to work out the transaction rates.

Insertion Fee	£0.32 ($0.50)
Final Value Fee	£1.42 ($2.26)
PayPal Fees	£0.62 ($0.68* + $0.30)

*This value was including a average $10 shipping to the PayPal payment.

The insertion fees works out to be:

£0.32 x 53844 = £17,230.08

As I mentioned this number is likely to be a lot higher, now knowing we’re around £17K, I’d hazard a guess the fees are more like £20-21K.

Final Value fees on 10,880 sales:

£1.42 x 10880 = £15,449.60

PayPal fees:

£0.62 x 10880 = £6745.60

This now gives us a total of:

Insertion Fees	£17,230.08
Final Value Fees	£15,449.60
PayPal Fees	£6745.60
Total:	£39,425.28

And the Total is…

From a gross sales revenue of £177,553.95 (excluding shipping), the fees account for £39,425.28 of this, giving us a 22.2% channel cost.

22% for eBay is not actually that bad, I noted in a previous article, I have seen such percentages much higher than this, ideally you should be in the 15% range, but anything up to 20% can be worked with and stomached by most companies.

I’ve already spotted a way to save this company £16K per month and I have never spoken to them, they’re not even in this country. Imagine what the effect I could have on a business at ground level, where efficiencies in business processes, such as despatch, software implementation, inventory creation, marketing and so on could be smoothed and refined.

My Conclusions

Actually I was wrong, I had assumed from some rough numbers that the unnamed company was actually loosing money, but after grinding the numbers properly, they are, even with 22% fees still leaving enough room to make profit.

I only looked at the sales values for this company, when looking at their listings and website, there are plenty of areas in which they can can improve, its like every business out there, there is always room for improvement and sometimes its being humble enough to ask for outside help to make them.

Just like myself, I can get blinded by numbers, you can can easily get blinded by the day to day operations, the delights of running a business, but the devil is in the detail as they say.

Your Conclusions?

Do you know if you are actually making money and when was the last time you ran your numbers? Are you really sure?

Exploring ‘eBay Connect’ – What If?

January 17, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

After posting the original idea ‘Sign-In With eBay Connect, A Rival for Facebook Connect?‘ last Friday, I spent most of the weekend thinking on how this could be put into practice and what the implications could be.

Graphical Representations of what eBay Connect buttons could look like

If you’ve not read the article yet, take a quick read here and get yourself up to speed, the basic idea is to leverage your eBay account to interact with other websites, I really do not want any more website accounts and in this article I will be exploring how far this could go and spin offs that could happen.

I feel obliged to make it completely clear, this article is purely hypothetical, there is no real service called ‘eBay Connect’, however if you are reading this and there is such a service, this idea obviously rocked.

So what could eBay connect do that other connection services cannot do?

That was a question spinning around my head for the weekend, how could this be different to the other connection services out there. I came up with the following feature set, although I’d welcome more suggestions from you, the comments box is at the bottom, ironically now with a Facebook Connect button on it :X

The eBay Connect feature list:

Sign into any website with your eBay account
Populate shipping forms with pre-saved data from eBay
Use PayPal to pay for an order
Use a Credit Card (ironically, also through PayPal) to pay for an order
Receive order status updates in your MyeBay
Ask & Receive questions in MyeBay (MyMessages now becomes a CRM system)
Leave feedback for the transaction for the external website on eBay

Now I really cannot wait and I am going to jump straight to item #8. This one truly breaks the boundaries as I am suggesting taking the eBay feedback system and making it available for outside parties.

We’ve seen numerous rating systems appear over the past few years, some a better than others, but they basically offer the same service. Such examples are:

Ekomi
Bizrate
Epinions
PriceGrabber
ResellerRatings
Shopzilla
Yahoo
Shopsafe
Ciao
Dooyoo
Kelkoo
ReviewCentre
Shopsafe

However this time, we’re joining the original feedback system, eBay feedback with the rest of the Internet via ‘eBay Connect’.

First Connecting Businesses to eBay

I came to the conclusion that there was is only two scenarios that need to be dealt with when it came to actually setting up such a services for a business, these were:

A business that currently sells on eBay
A business that does not currently sell on eBay

A business that currently sells on eBay

For such a business, then we would need the business to join their website(s) to their eBay account, thus their feedback will be directly linked to the website and eBay. Purchases made on either platform can be rated and other features enabled.

A business that does not currently sell on eBay

Then simply register and verify a new eBay account and link them up to gain access to the features and functions that are indicated in this article.

Once Connected

Then feedback can be left for transactions that are processed through both eBay and the external sites. Obviously eBay would be mad to just join the feedback system, if they nailed down payment methods, processes (orders, returns, disputes etc) and messages, then this could easily be evolved into a paid for service with some quality service offerings.

Exploring the options

The number of eBay accounts are in the realms of millions, may be more worldwide, I think that you may have just grasped the sheer scale of the potential for this idea, not only am I suggesting with pimp the eBay feedback system allowing for businesses to be rated on external transactions, but for additional value add services to be added to the mix to make such a ‘eBay Connect’ service very attractive.

I’m going to quickly explore the numbered options we started with in the next few sections, these are:

Sign into any website with your eBay account

Fundamental to this entire offering, the promise that by using your eBay account to connect with a 3rd party website will make your transaction, trouble free and as simple as it should be, with no more forms to complete and a payment method you trust.

Populate shipping forms with pre-saved data from eBay

This personally annoys me, even when dealing with an order of an item I really want from a new website, it tarnishes the deal and has been an evil of necessity. Its why I love Amazon so much, two clicks (not one, it takes TWO clicks!), done. eBay connect removes this.

Use PayPal to pay for an order

What a no-brainer, I don’t know the figures, but I bet its extremely high the number of eBay accounts that have PayPal, paying using PayPal is obvious and gives the eBay Connect service a bonus revenue source.

Use a Credit Card (ironically, also through PayPal) to pay for an order

Even in the bullet point for this, I added ‘ironically’ to it, yep, by not restricting payments to just PayPal, an extra scoop of revenue could be taken from the order. I have not even contemplated the full revenue model for such a concept as I am describing here for ‘eBay Connect’, but as you are starting to realise, like I have, this baby has more cash pots that a bent cashier at Fort Knocks.

Receive order status updates in your MyeBay

Emulating what Amazon did to marketplace sellers, take control of notifications in a single place. But why stop there? Create the order as a real order in MyeBay and let it follow the same order track as other eBay orders?

Ask & Receive questions in MyeBay (MyMessages now becomes a CRM system)

Now here is another superb idea, link the communications up beyond standard notifications to the MyMessages section on eBay and take control of the entire process in a fully integrated Customer Relationship Management system.

Make it an API Sir!

eBay’s API (Application Programming Interface) is possibly the worlds most documented and complete API there is, making the ‘eBay Connect’ system accessible via an comprehensive API is a natural step and would accelerate the adoption of such a service.

In Conclusion

The epic scale of such a service called ‘eBay Connect’ is far reaching and breaks the boundaries that are set by limiting eBay to just eBay. By unleashing such a beast to the entire eCommerce world would be shattering and maybe for Web 3.0 (to me anyway) ‘eBay Connect’ means the simplification of all the junk we made in Web 2.0.

What do you think?

Would you use eBay connect if it meant one login and one system to track your orders from multiple websites?