Sign-In With eBay Connect, A Rival for Facebook Connect?

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It only just occurred to me while reading the comment in the article ‘How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less‘ that I really do not want another web account with another company, literally it has to be the quote of the year:

“I need more website accounts like I need an asshole on my forehead”

Facebook have Facebook connect, that enables buyers to join with popular websites, twitter has a similar service called ‘Sign in with Twitter‘ and I’m sure there are others that I’m neglecting to mention (comments section at the bottom please!).

Such services are super neat for me, I am all over the web every day, as I am guessing you are, who really needs that extra account anyway and I’ll normally connect using my Facebook or Twitter accounts in preference of filling another web form.

There are extensions for Magento to do this and almost all major shopping cart systems, damn, I need to get this for this WordPress site too. Its on my list!

facebook-connect

An Example of Facebook Connect in action

eBay Connect?

ebay-connect-buttons

Graphical Representations of what eBay Connect buttons could look like

Even in 2008, eBay was boasting over 14 million active users, imagine the raw potential here for such a service, its fair to say that most people have a email address, a Facebook account, possibly a twitter account and definitely an eBay account.

So link them up, imaging being able to pay for your goods, one sign in, eBay already has your details, yes a confirmation for the password for PayPal, but how slick would that be?

Your Feedback

Have I stumbled upon a golden idea or a flop because its fatally flawed for XYZ reasons? What do you think? Would you use it if it existed?

How to Beat eBay DSR’s – Use Positive Psychology with the Customer

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I was reading an excellent post by Chris Dawson on Tamebay regarding the flaw in the eBay iPhone & iPad Apps where sellers can be rated for shipping on items that have free shipping and by their[eBay’s] own design, sellers whom offer free shipping are exempt from being rated & automatically receive a 5 star rating on this aspect.

You can read the full article here eBay DSRs: Are you rated on dispatch or delivery time?. It reminded me of a simple tactic I used employ, which I’ll share with you in this article.

I’ve held off and releasing this article for a Friday, so you can ponder it, get to grips with the concept and let your orders back-up over potentially three days of orders and let rip this beauty on Tuesday, then watch the instantaneous results.

Knowing the Rules

Firstly knowing the rules and how to leverage them is just one part. By offering free shipping, you are immediately incur five stars for DSR rating for ‘Postage and packaging charges’ (although, from the Tamebay article, obviously eBay need to work on this a little for their Apps).

You can see the help page on eBay for the DSR’s here and I have quoted the interesting part:

If you provide free postage, buyers will see a note when they are rating your postage & packaging charges that a 5-star rating is appropriate

Not forgetting this exit too:

No detailed seller rating can be given for local pick up items

Did you know the latter one? I had forgotten, a neat exit point. Offering free shipping and offering pick ups for orders can be two variables worth experimenting with.

The Despatch Process

You most likely contact buyers them when they buy, pay (as for eBay the paying part is not always immediate) and when you ship their order.

Notifying a buyer you’ve received their order and their cash, that you value you them, the order is not in some black hole, have reassured the customer that you’re dealing with the order is great and is an important part of the despatch process, even eBay’s SMP (Selling Manager Pro) does this rather well.

You should do everything you can, to work out a process or employ software that makes the despatch process the most efficient possible, however my questions is, why leave yourself open to the lag of delivery?

Lets bend the perception of time in our favour, after all, we are the time keeper in this process. I’m suggesting while you may have a rapid despatch process, the latter part of the process can be tinkered with, in your favour.

Didn’t you mention positive psychology?

For this you need to use positive psychology with your customer. Let me spell this out in simple words as some might not get this:

Mark your orders as despatched the day AFTER you despatched the order.

Yes that’s right, instead of eagerly marking orders as despatched, flag them as despatched instead and here is the key, then the following morning, mark them off as being despatched.

The automatic despatch email will kick in and the customer will be notified that the order has been despatched.

Imagine your sat your desk and receive the email from company XYZ. The order you made yesterday has been despatched. Sweet. The paradox is later this afternoon it arrives. Has that not exceeded ones set expectations of tomorrow? Have we just warped time in the eyes of the customer?

time-warp-spiral-colck-face

Its all about how time is perceived

If you’re using a slower services say 2nd class or may be a 48hr courier rather than a 24hr courier as your default courier service (I am ignoring any courier rules you may have in operation, for where orders match criteria their courier service alters, eg an order over £20 goes to recorded and so on…) then by marking the orders shipped as a day late, then you’ve already won a day back from the slower courier service. Essentially the 48hr courier service is now a 24hr service.

Note: You should be offering more than one service, gaining sweet upgrades on courier services, people will choose these if its perecived to be faster.

Does it Work?

I know this works because I used to employ this tactic myself. Amusingly my partner just entered my office and asked what I was writing, I explained the article and she giggled. She remembered reading the feedback comments on eBay, where people were leaving comments like ‘I got my item before the despatch email A++++’.

This is also why I have saved this article till today (a Friday), because if you let Saturday, Sundays AND Mondays orders backup (processing them and actually despatching them of course) but marking them as despatched in your back-end system on Tuesday.

So customers receive notifications that their order has been despatched, but the likely-hood is, that their order is going to be with them that day. Quite a paradox.

Try it, for one day

First we reassure customers that we have their order and their money, this is the customers major concern, if they know the company has got their order and is processing it, they feel reassured. So for this I am assuming you have set up automatic notifications that let customers know that you have received their order (and payment if its separate, like on eBay for non immediate payment listings).

Flag your orders for that day and despatch them as normal, however do not despatch them until at least 9am the next day, as we have the weekend tomorrow(this article was posted on a Friday), you should have lots of orders to prove this with. Then on Tuesday, mark them as despatched, even though they left on Monday.

Say you used a 48hr courier service, we just switched it into a 24hr courier service, even better if you used a 24hr service, this shocks the customer because at 9:34 they get an email to say their order has been despatched and at around lunch time, the posty stuffs it through the door.

Deploying this in Real Life

An interesting point raised when running a draft copy across some peers, was in eBay’s Selling Manager Pro (SMP) it would be a waste of time adding the tracking number one day and the next having to go in and marking it as despatched separately. I checked this on one of the eBay seller accounts this morning who had SMP and saw while this is not totally correct, you can add a tracking number and just save it, although not marking it as despatched at the same time would be be rather silly. I think that was possibly his point :)

I have strong beliefs, one of the core ones is that to be manually doing any task that can be automated by either paid-for software or even free software, is categorically not the best use of ones time.

I did at first consider writing an iMacro to automate this task, that worked from a CSV file that would automate the input of tracking numbers and then marking them as despatched, I’d have this working in a few minutes. But there is no need, with eBay’s File Exchange you can do this using their despatch template at the bottom of this page.

For more advanced tools such as eSellerPro, Channel Advisor, 247 Top Seller or similar, most of these have flags in their sales order processing section which can be used to mark batches of orders.

It was also suggested (twice) that this may be of benefit to businesses that generally offer a poorer service or elect a cheaper, slower service. Yes, this would give such sellers an advantage, especially for media products were margins are extremely tight, using such a tactic as explained in this article would give a business the appearance of giving a higher service than they actually achieve, but keeping overheads to a minimum.

How much saving would you make, if you shipped everything you are currently sending via 24hr courier, to a 48hour courier, if it had no negative effect to customer satisfaction?

If you are already despatching orders within really good time frames, buy yourself an extra days grace and that that 4.7 DSR rating to 4.8 or 4.9. As I pointed out in an earlier article, the eBay Top Rated Seller status can be easily abused and you need every advantage you have to ensure you keep it, as it pretty much guarantees you 20% extra sales volume.

Your Feedback

Try it for two days and see if you see the difference in the responses from customers, it worked for me, it can work for you too, ‘Time Lord’.

How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less

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Oh how I LOL’d at this, I’m only going to include the first part of the article to give you a taster, you can see the full article here:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart

The Oatmeal has given me some really great laughs in the past few months, Matthew Inman really does have a wicked sense of humour.

While this is wrapped in humour, he raises some very sensible considerations, I urge you to take on board his sarcastic view of how shopping carts can suck.

Does your shopping cart suck as bad?

How to make your shopping cart less crappy

The Oatmeal

8 websites you need to stop building

Enjoy.

PS: This is also most amusing:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cat_vs_internet

Part 1: Battle of The Giants – Tesco V’s Amazon – Who Will Win?

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Foreword

I’ve decided to release this earlier than what I had originally planned, its verging on the longest article I have done since University and while reading back through the first few sections its already totalling in excess of 10,000 words. So I’m releasing this beast in more manageable parts, for both me and you.

Over the next few days and weeks, I will be exploring the possibility of Tesco launching a ‘Tesco Direct Marketplace‘, to potentially rival that of Amazon (and eBay and anywhere else for that matter). I’ll be looking at the options that Tesco have available to them and what plus points they can take from their rivals and also which pitfalls to be careful of.

Its not going to be light on concepts, as with the possibility of a new platform. I am seeing this as a chance to re-write the whole idea of a Marketplace and evolve it further than what has been done before. It comes the potential to make a success we have not really seen from a retail giant, but it also has the potential to become a mess and land the company in an awkward position publicly and possibly financially.

Introduction

2010 was a really interesting year as a by-stander, eBay has made more steps towards taking on Amazon directly (single styled listings etc), Amazon had a stab at eBay suggesting to sell granny’s unwanted lamp she had a Christmas present on Amazon (rather than eBay, amongst other smaller things), Amazon had a stab at Tesco by launching food products and Tesco responded almost immediately with a direct stab back at Amazon with a PR release that they were to be taking on Amazon with a new marketplace.

While all this has been going on Play.com have been relatively quiet and literally cleaning up, a recent satisfaction poll have them ranked right behind the two Amazon’s in third place beating the likes of John Lewis, Apple, M&S and so on…

However Play.com isn’t going to be the focus of this article, what I am going to be doing is exploring the idea of what could be done and how I would suggest its tackled, if Tesco was seriously considering launching a new marketplace to rival Amazon.

I’ll warn you now, I am expecting this article to be in the realms of thousands of words, I have even been thinking I could use this as a base for a dissertation, its bound to end up in that scale of coverage, although having never completed one and never having received any outline on how to format one, I feel I may be mocked for even suggesting this.

Note: If you have any comments I am always humbled to receive feedback, see the reply box at the bottom of the page.

Lets take a look contenders

Before we can progress we need to take a closer look at the two contenders in this fight. These are two heavy weight fighters of stellar proportions, whom both have obscenely deep pockets to dig into and a grit to make even the great Mohammed Ali run scared.

Amazon

Amazon UKAmazon is synonymous with quality, speed and trust. You slap anything on Amazon and the buyers feel extremely reassured by that Amazon logo alone. Half the time I am sure that buyers do not really know whom they are buying from, as they assumed that the vast majority of the time its directly from Amazon themselves.

With Amazon launching their fulfilment offering ‘Fulfilment By Amazon’, also known as FBA, their Amazon prime customers really do not see any difference in cost of shipping, nor really any great degree in despatch times, as its all being despatched from their own warehouses.

Lets not forget that Amazon’s original business plan in 1994 scared the daylights out of investors at the beginning of the dot-com boom, they were literally the only one that had a decade long plan, where-as everyone else was measuring in months, Amazon took the view that it takes years to bring an business idea such as theirs to fruition, just look at them now, its only just begun.

Starting in 1994 and launched on-line in 1995, Amazon for me is one of the first choices of marketplace I go to, in fact I rarely go elsewhere for my book buying addiction and since receiving an iPad  as a bonus pressy (see article here), the one click buying of books for the Amazon Kindle reader App,  has my bank account running scared.

Books and other media are a symbiont of the Amazon brand, literally if I think of a book, I think Amazon and I am not alone in this with Amazon, I believe the general Internet population are of the same line-of-thought, its almost second nature, a preprogrammed thought pattern, Book = Amazon.

I remember preparing some presentation notes on Amazon and the differences between Amazon and eBay, it was really quite a trip back, while remembering that Amazon started off with a similar start as eBay, sporting an auctions offering for merchants, but it never really caught on as eBay even then was creaming it. So Amazon launched a new fixed price marketplace called zShops, its the spin off from this, which we know today as ‘Seller Central’.

zShops was faded out, basically I believe because it was crap (interface and no way of easily creating new product), but it did work and was bundled up into what we know as Seller Central and is actually a very simple and broad system to use.

I could go off into a bender on the Amazon Seller Central platform here, but for now you need to be aware that its similar to eBay as in you are able to create new inventory records and sell on Amazon.

Amazon is an interestingly flip to Tesco, as you’ll read shortly, Tesco have a lot of the off-line bases covered, inversely Amazon have a lot of the web bases covered, a quick brain-dump on thier channels:

  1. Amazon main and international sites
  2. Amazon Prime (listed separately as its genius)
  3. Own branded product range, named Pinzon
  4. Javari
  5. Endless.com
  6. Amazon Web Stores (AWS)
  7. A9 (believe this to be Research & Development)
  8. Fulfilment by Amazon
  9. An affiliate program of epic scale
  10. The Amazon Kindle
  11. ‘Amazon payments’ a payment processor (due to the UK in May?)
  12. And a whole host of ‘cloud’ based offerings & web services

And for sales, we’re talking billions, the figure I could find from wikipedia was $24.5bn in 2009, I could not find any quoted figures for 2010, a rough stab would be at the £30nb or more.

A side note, the Amazon logo

Amazon UK

Hey Look Amazon, A to Z!

Now I’d love to say I realised this, but it was a in a discussion with a client, notice the arrow below the A and Z, We do everything from A to Z? Makes sense now, I never spotted that.

Tesco

Tesco isn’t to be shunned at all in this fight, these are remember, the retail giant of the UK and by a massive margin too. Using the figures from wikipedia, they had a market share of 30.5% in Dec 2009, ni-on double that of ASDA with 16.9%, Sainsburys 16.3% and Morrisons at 12.3%.

tesco-market-share

In 2006 Tesco launched ‘Tesco Direct, their public strategy is quoted as:

In 2006 we launched Tesco Direct , a new online and catalogue non-food offer, with over 12,500 products available online. Next day delivery is standard for small items with a unique two-hour delivery window. We issued 11.5 million catalogues last year. The popularity of our in-store Direct desks, which are now in 231 stores, continues to increase as more customers order and collect items from their local Tesco. We plan to add clothing to our online offer later this year. To find out more visit www.tesco.com/direct

I found an interesting statement on the Tesco Plc site for the year ending 28th Feb 2009, indicating that while they made an opening loss of around £22M, they were 2% up in direct comparison to UK trading profit.

The article is here and I have included the extract below

Increased productivity and good expense control enabled us to maintain solid margins and deliver good profit growth despite these challenges, whilst also absorbing initial trading losses totalling around £22m on Tesco Direct. After these costs, UK trading profit rose 12.7% to £2,381m (last year £2,112m), with trading margins at 6.2%, including TPF, slightly up on last year. On a 52-week comparable basis, UK trading profit rose 10.7%.

If you look further around thier Plc site, then some truly stunning numbers are publicly shown, I dribbled when I read these numbers, they have a Non-food sales figure of £13.1 billion, yes billion for 2009/2010. After the Christmas we just had, this has to be closer to the £15bn mark.

tesco-non-food-sales

I could not find any published figures on the sales volume for the Tesco Direct site, an guess that the site takes about 2bn, with the majority of sales being made from their main site or the other two sub sites for clothing and entertainment.

Tesco Outlet on eBay

In 2008 in partnership with Trojan Electronics, Tesco launched on eBay as Tesco Outlet, I know this as I was the person that trained the staff and the two companies on the software they are using to launch to eBay with. As Trojan Electronics is a refurbishment house, it made great sense for Tesco to leverage the refurbishment channel and sell the goods direct (well indirectly, but its far superior and more lucrative for them this way).

In October 2010, on eBay alone, Tesco Outlet according to Terapeak, scored in the region of £370K of sales on eBay, £531K in November and £488K in December, although the sales for the first few days of the year are pitiful in comparison, I can only assume that someone forgot to launch a sale.

With the £13.1bn worth of non-food sales, then you have to expect some broken kit, most of which ends up in refurbishment houses such as Trojan, however not all ends there are can traditionally retailers such as Tesco get done-over on the pricing of kit, this was actually a shrewd move by them that year, although I am pretty sure that this was started by the asset recovery sections on the Tesco Giant, rather than being initiated at Board level; Maybe its what has given them the taste to take on Amazon?

Tesco Sales Channels

Tesco know they need to go multi-channel and have been busy, what a set of channels they have, a quick brain-dump on these are:

  1. Retail Super Stores (food)
  2. Tesco Metro/Express
  3. Tesco Extra & Homeplus
  4. Catalogues
  5. Telecommunications (Tesco Mobile)
  6. Tesco Finance
  7. Tesco Direct Site
  8. Tesco Clothing Site
  9. Tesco Entertainment
  10. Tesco Outlet on eBay
  11. Club cards (noted as a separate channel on purpose, you’ll see why later)

Note the lack of Amazon here, they could have easily ported their goods on to the platform, but never did. I wonder why? But ‘Holy Cow’, these peeps have more channels and fingers in pies that one can shake stock at. Amazon needs to be scared, if its off-line, Tesco have the ALL bases cover and soon maybe, online covered more thoroughly too.

The Contenders Summary

Some 1600 words in and I’ve not even got to the juicy parts yet, but without this understanding of the two marketplaces above, we cannot compare the two together. I will not just be comparing these two either, I will be pulling in the good and bad points from other market places too to give a fuller picture.

eBay has never to my knowledge declared war on Amazon and inversely I have seen Amazon wave two fingers at eBay. I always expected for a third party such as Microsoft or Google to get in on the fight, perhaps Amazon see Tesco as easy prey, maybe now Tesco see Amazon as easy prey.

These two companies are giants in their own arena’s, it was not going to be long until the two bumped into each other and this really has the makings of something on an epic scale.

What ever happens this is going to be a battle of epic proportions and I really do not know who is going to win in the end, if either of them. But thats not the point of this article, what I am now going to explore is how Tesco can make a Marketplace to rival Amazon. Its not going to be easy.

Your Feedback

So, I’ve primed the background to these giants, one an off-line expert, one an on-line expert, who is your money on and why?

How to add icing to your competitors Christmas on eBay: Top Rated Seller Flawed?

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ebay-top-rated-sellerUntil I did the maths, I didn’t realise how high eBay had actually set the bar to become a ‘Top Rated Seller’, equally I did not realise how easy it was to potentially knock off a Top Rated Seller either.

According to their help file, here you must attain the following:

  1. Be a member of the PowerSeller programme. Learn more about how to become a PowerSeller
  2. Have at least 100 transactions and £2,000 in sales during the last 12 months with UK and Irish buyers<
  3. Meet the requirements of the seller performance standards for an eBay Top-rated seller
  4. Ensure you don’t exceed your limit on the number of buyer protection cases allowed

Now the really interesting part is in the eBay seller performance requirements, below is a screen shot of the table:

ebay-seller-performance-standardsSource: Link

A little background first, DSR’s

Just to bring the newer readers up-to-speed, eBay introduced an interesting (short for nightmare) system for rating sellers beyond just positive, neutral and negative feedback. Its called ‘Detailed Seller Ratings’ or in short DSR’s.

You can find the DSR’s for a seller on their feedback page, an example of the Bench outlet is below:

ebay-detailed-seller-ratings-dsrsNotice the stars to the right, when leaving feedback, you can leave more than just a comment, you can royally screw up the sellers business by leaving them less than 5 star ratings for the order.

I could discuss these all day on these and how the eBay Top Rated Seller status means an extra 20% minimum to the sales line, but for now, they’re pretty little stars and a pretty logo.

Both of which have added another hoop for sellers to jump through and my point of this entire post is that they could easily be abused, bringing us nicely onto the following.

So what exactly equates to 0.5%?

From the table above sellers need to achieve a better than 0.5% rate for their DSR’s. I might be wrong on this, but my maths say that 0.5% of 2000 is 10.

So for a seller with 2000 feedbacks per month, for them to have 10 bad sales rated at 1 star, would this equal 0.5% and endanger the ‘Top Rated Seller’ status?

Lets spell this out in Matt-Proof English:

If you sell a minimum of 2000 items each month on eBay, just 10 customers can make or break the Top Rated Seller Status.

Its even worse for smaller sellers, when you factor in the pretty standard ratios of troublesome (short for ‘idiot’) customers such as, 1 in 1000 utter lunatic buyer, the 1 in 500 nut-case buyer and the 1 in 250 lost item, how anyone achieves this and holds onto it is unbeknown to me.

Its edging on the unethical side, if I was to suggest ringing ten of your mates and saying, “here, spend £5 per month on eBay, from seller XYZ, I’ll pay for it, but leave 1 stars and a positive comment”, to alter the balance of the playing field in your favour it appears? Now that’s some material of nightmares!

The eBay ‘Top Rated Seller’ status is way open for abuse and extremely fragile, even when considering the customers themselves, the most demanding breed of customer there is on the Internet is an eBay buyer, sellers are in for a hard time.

My hat is lifted off to eBay for creating this fabulous system, it brings the sellers focus into dealing with the utter minority, rather than empowering sellers to deal with more customers to make more sales.

Dealing with Failure Amazon CEO Brian McBride V’s Skype CEO Tony Bates

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Skype-delivered-purchaseThis morning, I received the email I have been looking out for, the one that was had ‘Sorry’ in it from Skype, alas, it was not the one saying ‘Sorry’ from Amazon.

To set the background to this article, I recently posted on the email received from Amazon’s CEO Brian McBride, where he could not muster an apology for the epic failure of the delivery part of Amazon during the two-or-so weeks of snow before Christmas.

It particularly annoyed me, as you (or I, specifically) would have expected the gent to realise that when you buy an item on-line, that the delivery of the order is also a key part of the order experience and if its going to let you down, then to communicate this and apologise up front.

But normal customers really don’t give a dam and want their items NOW.
Quote Reference

Where as Skype’s new CEO, Tony Bates, in a similar service delivery issue, where Skype got knocked out for a day or so, super-nodes software versions apparently, was right-upfront with a YouTube video, completely with a ‘hoody’ and apologised:

When you compare the email that Brian McBride sent to the video above, you know which one gets my vote.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

Now, here’s the spin. Amazon’s Brian McBride sent an email, which was pretty much pointless, where as Skype’s Tony Bates turned the service failure into a positive.

What do I mean by this? Simple, in the previous article I concluded this:

The inclusion of a say a £1.00 voucher would have been nice, free expedited shipping for non Amazon prime customers on an order to use in the new year would have been (here comes that bloody awful set of words) win-win for customer and company, by getting the customer to return to the site, to undo the previous possibly poor experience and get a bonus sale at the same time.

Now that is exactly what I just received from Skype!

Skype-accepted-voucherWell, a ‘buck’, but what Skype has done  is:

  1. Admitted fault and dealt with it, publicly.
  2. Bribed the consumers, with a service they can easily offset
  3. Sneaked in two coup’s, these are
    1. Buy giving a paid-for service offering away for free, this should add inventive to carry on using the paid for service
    2. As Skype made it a sign in option, then I am suspecting that there is going to be a decent percentage that will not reclaim it

Why is this there a secondary coup?

Now I’m not going to explore point A as ‘free’-as-a-service-or-product-starting-option here, essentially ‘it works’ for most, where as point B is worth exploring quickly, as Skype has leveraged the ‘offering the reward’, but made it a step the customer needs to make.

The secondary coup, is simple, it relies on the customer, I’m pretty sure there customers who not even be bothered to redeem it, but just by the emails deployment will be a win for Skype either way. Unlike Amazon with a useless email, gained nothing other than keeping the board happy.

Below is the email received, if you have not received a copy, noting I have removed the voucher code:

Skype-apology-voucher-email

My #2 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design – Blog Navigation

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Following on from early article on My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design this one gets #2 place as it drives just as bonkers as the first one.

reverbnation-blogCan you see it yet?

The owners of this blog know the issue, they have tried to combat it.

Spotted it yet?

Blog Navigation

Yep, its the home link in the top left.

Firstly lets not diss this company, their rankings were quite high for the project I am working on, although not what I was looking for, my searches landed me in their blog. This is absolutely fantastic, this company has been leveraging the use of a company blog and just so happens they also have recently released their own iPhone app. Nice.

But what gets my goat is the navigation at the top, because the blog (wordpress) is not themed in-line with their main website, see main website and their blog so when I manually hacked the URL to remove the ‘blog.’ I was a little shocked to see their main website was nothing like their blog. But a common theme is not even my point here, just being able to readily navigate is.

The blog looks like Thesis (edit: doh, it says it in the footer), which is an extremely powerful template, so they have forked out +£100 for the theme, but completely (well mostly) failed to remember that browsing readers assume that the top left is the ‘reset button’.

Now this ‘reset button’ on this blog needs two uses, one to get the blog home and one to get to the website home. So….. Label them!

Almost

If you look closely at the image above or on their blog, you will notice that they are at least aware they have an issue transferring the browser back to their main site, they’ve added some text and a link to the right, but sadly, this is not where people look for navigation and the big fat ‘reset-get-me-back-home-again’ button.

Sooooo close, yet sooooo far.

Please stamp this in your head now

I’ll leave you with this godly statement, please carry it with you always:

Customers are idiots
Do not make an idiot to try to think
Its dangerous

Do yourself a favour, Block Bad eBay Buyers

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Yep you know the type of buyer I am referring to. Since eBay took away the ability to neg these types of people, you can still block them from being able to bid and purchase future items from your eBay ID(s) using the block bidders option in eBay.

Block Bidders In eBay

ebay-block-biddersYou can block them on eBay here:
http://cgi1.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin

Adding more than one ID is simple, just separate them using commas as shown in the example above.

eBay Buyer Requirements

Its quite amusing to stumble into the a conversation where a client bitches, sorry ‘discusses’ about eBay allowing buyers to buy from countries they do not ship to and other minor things that can easily be solved by visiting the eBay ‘Buyer Requirements’ section.

ebay-buyer-requirements

You can review the buyer requirements here:
http://offer.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?BuyerBlockPreferences

There are plenty of options in this section, please note its extremely unlike that eBay will ever block zero feedback buyers, I do not believe they should, at least some community spirit should survive and we all had no feedback once…

eBay Blocked Buyer Logs

Also interestingly, eBay added a log too, so you can see who is being blocked & the reason why http://offer.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?BuyerRequirementsActivityLog

ebay-blocked-buyers-log

Enjoy these forgotten tools to help you have a better new years & sweet revenge on those that left you negatives and neutrals :)

Part 2: Leveraging more than one eBay ID

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If you’ve not read the first part, you can catch up on from this link How To: Selling on eBay with more than one eBay ID. I strongly suggest this before continuing.

Swear-Box

Response

The response I received yesterday was hilarious to the previous article, here are two quotes from my email:

“What the ***** are you doing Matt? You can’t give this **** away for free. What you doing man?”

“Mr Ogborne[This was him being sarcastic, I think], we’ve known each other a long time now, I’m not sure what you are trying to achieve on your blog, the information you have passed on, in the multiple Ebay accounts document,  is fundamental to our business, you cannot go around giving this away”

I’ve added several * to replace two words, I am sure you know what they are. I also received two phone calls and quite a funny text message. I’m sure I’ll get more, hence this article.

As I have said individually to these ‘what-were’ concerned parties, it really does not matter. It is in the application of the concept where the true skill is required and its in exactly this skill, the reason why it doesn’t matter if I let ideas like this into the wilds.

No-one is you and no-one else is me. Soundly in the knowledge of this, no-one can be me or you. We have out own DNA sets and out methods of thinking cannot be duplicated (unless you’re a sheep called Erma or something, but even then that’s not enough to duplicate thought processes). My point is we’re all unique. People can copy, but they cannot be you.

This is the reason why this site even exists, if it was not as kick up the rear by a good friend, I would not be sharing this information and storing it up, like I have done for years now.

Its in the Application of Ideas & Concepts

Exactly, it doesn’t matter that I have let loose an software salesman’s wet dream in to the wilds or what a collection of small, medium and large companies do to drive more sales. Once you run into existing application of this idea with your eyes wide open, it is then glaring apparent.

Its in knowing that you can leverage such an idea and then applying it to your own business. Its in the application of the concept where the skill of a person such as myself, really  matters.

I read recently in an article (bloody good read, see it here) about Zara, here is an extract from it relating to the non-on-line world:

Zara has opened, on average, a store a day for the last few years. Each store brings new footfall and new customers.
The strategy may be hard to execute but is simple to conceive. Footfall – a given of the physical world where rent equalsguaranteed visitors – needs to be sought and bought online. Retailers with offline brands clearly get a base level of traffic “for free” but if they don’t play in the online marketing world, they are simply leaving prospective customers for their competitors.

Can you see the logic behind this? Spelt out simply as an equation:

More Stores = More Sales

Now if you business model, franchise, whatever works, then all you are left with is scalability. Lets take some other examples McDonalds are everywhere, Coca-Cola is known world wide (and deploys product locally), Pizza Hut and so on…  Get the point?

So why would it not work on-line too? See its simple. You have proven your business model works, so why not duplicate it over and over?

Going back to my earlier concept breaker:

For the vast majority of manufactured goods, you are not the only company selling them, thus every single day, customers choose your competitors over you. There are an infinite number of reasons for this, timing, colour scheme, layout, description, title are a few factors.

Which again leads on to this pivotal statement:

So if you’re selling widgets, there are lots of other widget sellers for customers to choose from, so why not be one of the other widget sellers?

I feel its important to add here that straight business copies on eBay especially are blatantly obvious and add no value to either party. This is where the requirement for someone like myself steps in and provides the fresh thinking and the guidance on the deployment of them.

Some Words of Caution

Now this is where it would be irresponsible for me not to tell you the following points.

Amazon

The first has to be Amazon. Let me spell this out, as simply as I can:

Do not mess around with Amazon. Ever

Please , I beg you soak this in, here it is again:

Do not mess around with Amazon. Ever

Are we clear?

Amazon UK

You really do not want to be pissing off Amazon, I mentioned in an earlier article, these people are not eBay. eBay is a lapse in numerous areas and can be bent to ones own needs with the right influence. Yes, Amazon can be bent too with the right know how (sorry not giving this away publicly). But its a risk not worth taking.

You can, with Amazon’s say-so have more than one Amazon account, this is only allowed if you have two separate business identities, running in two different product groups, for example an outdoor furniture company and DVD & media business. But everything else, no.

As I have tried to hammer-home above, don’t even try it. Trying to get back on Amazon is a nightmare, I’ve seen sellers booted numerous times, in almost 10 years, I’v seen maybe three get back on again, you need a golden contact list and a bloody good reason.

Software Tools

If you try and do this manually using ‘turd lister’ (thats ‘turbo lister’ to everyone else) you will quickly exhaust yourselves. I saw an elaborate system using excel once, it was pretty food too, but yep that failed as well.

You really need the use of a software product, I’m not mentioning names here (for once), but the tool has to be scalable, just like the concept I have been describing.

Recently I have come to the conclusion that one tool is not enough, when you start to factor in all the different aspects that a business requires. I have plans to elaborate on this in the future, so stopping line of thought here.

eBay Policy

eBay UK LogoI did indicate above that eBay is more lapse, they have been tightening up on the poorer deployments of this concept with policy changes to drive down the number of duplicates. Quite rightly so I hasten to add, some have been shockingly bad with no ‘unique selling angles what-so-ever’.

The USA got slapped pretty hard in the October update, see this article eBay: Doing ‘Whatever is Needed’ to Keep the Seller Entertained, while the UK got off quite lightly and at a far better time of the year.

Its because of the intrinsic flaw of the way eBay was/is designed, which allows this concept to be deployed at all. Each seller is allowed to design their own mini-page per product, so every listing is different.

Note: Yes I know about GPS etc… blah blah blah

Final Words

With the right implementation of the concept, you can tackle your niche from at least two more angles, depending on the business, it can go a lot further than just two more times.

This is really where the skill of a person like myself comes in and why clients like the ones that emailed me should not be concerned (and no longer are I hasten to add). Its the combination of your business, unique skills, a fresh, independent look on the business, my skills & experience that can readily expand the areas the business can grow into, without any new knowledge and leveraging existing information and processes.

To understand a little more why this blog even exists and where this knowledge comes from, see ‘Project Matthew Ogborne‘.

From Amazon MD Brian McBride – ‘Information about your Christmas order’

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Amazon UK

Quite a well thought out email from the MD of Amazon, Brian McBride.

Dear Customer,

Ensuring that you receive your order in time for Christmas is our number one priority.

The recent weather conditions have resulted in backlogs across the entire UK for our delivery partners, but we are in constant communication with them and are working around the clock to make sure that orders with an estimated delivery time before December 24, arrive in time for Christmas.

We are currently experiencing an increased volume of e-mails and phone calls into our customer service centre. This is causing delays to our usual speed of response but rest assured, we are working through all enquiries in order of receipt.

There are some useful self-service links that allow you to see the details of your order and its current status. You can access these by visiting Your Account.

If your order has already been dispatched via a trackable method, please use the tracking information on your confirmation e-mail or in ‘Your Account’ to track your delivery via the relevant carrier website.

If your order was dispatched via a non-trackable method, please rest assured that your item is on its way to you now.

If your order has not yet been dispatched please check ‘Your Account’ regularly where you will find the most up-to-date information regarding dispatch dates and estimated delivery dates.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

With kind regards,
Brian McBride
Managing Director, Amazon.co.uk

An Apology Needed?

Interestingly there is no apology for the delays in the contents of the mail, maybe there is no need to ‘apologise’. If someone apologises, does it make them appear at fault or perhaps just sympathetic to the customers issue? Me, I’d rather apologise, even if it is the fault of others.

A Part of the Selling Process

Ultimately the delivery and does impact the impression of Amazon and any other company that uses a third party to despatch goods to customers. When an item arrives, the speed, cost and security of the delivery are all factors that greatly impact the overall impression of the company the product was sourced from.

Ask yourself this:

Next time you receive an item from say Amazon, eBay or where-ever, try and summarise the service in a few words, just like feedback.

Now I bet you instantly thought about the delivery part of the product, the second you went to write this, the actual item and its condition, is normally always secondary.

Understanding

I do appreciate the mail, two books I ordered are outstanding, one from Amazon and another from bookdepository, I’m not that cheesed as I’ve got plenty (11 to be precise) other books to read over the Christmas period and I can also see this delay from multiple perspectives. But normal customers really don’t give a dam and want their items NOW.

So with that in mind, nice email, but its a fail & too late.

Difference

Always a question that goes through my mind when looking at anything, What would I have done different to better what I am considering? In this case, bribery is the instant reaction, coupled with an apology.

Not wanting to linger on the apology bit too much, but the delivery part is a part of the selling process and it does form part of the ‘entire’ sale. If part of the process is failing, be a man and apologise, being humble always throws the other party off.

The inclusion of a say a £1.00 voucher would have been nice, free expedited shipping for non Amazon prime customers on an order to use in the new year would have been (here comes that bloody awful set of words) win-win for customer and company, by getting the customer to return to the site, to undo the previous possibly poor experience and get a bonus sale at the same time.

How To: Selling on eBay with more than one eBay ID

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This is another article where its contents I would have kept to myself, but inline with Project Matthew Ogborne, I am going to use one word a lot in this article, its called ‘leverage’. Lets dive in and find out why you need more than one eBay ID for your business.

Underlying Principles

Before we continue, you need to understand the following basic fact of eBay and selling on-line or anywhere for that matter, which forms the base of this concept:

For the vast majority of manufactured goods, you are not the only company selling them, thus every single day, customers choose your competitors over you. There are an infinite number of reasons for this, timing, colour scheme, layout, description, title are a few factors.

Which leads on to this pivotal statement:

So if you’re selling widgets, there are lots of other widget sellers for customers to choose from, so why not be one of the other widget sellers?

Soak that up for a moment, instead of bitching about your competitors, why not be your own competitor and drive more sales to you and drive your so-called competitors nuts instead?

In a Perfect World

Say there are three sellers of a widget, working on averages alone and assuming the playing field is fair, you have a 1 in 3 chance of selling to a customer.

Now lets add a new seller identity, so there are now four sellers, but this new seller is you. That means that you have a 2 in 4 chance or a 50% chance of selling to a customer.

I like 50% odds much more than 33% odds. I am sure you do too.

Who is leveraging this?

Here is something for you to chew on. I have been doing this since I was a seller over 9 years ago, but don’t think this idea is unique one by any means, there are a lot of reasons for doing this, I’ll cover some of these shortly, but for now, here are some did-you knows:

brand-littlewoods

Did you know that LittleWoods is known also by these names?

  1. Very
  2. Marshal Ward
  3. Woolworths
  4. Additions
  5. Kays
  6. Great Universal
  7. Empire Stores
  8. Choice

brands-barratts

Did you know that Barrats Shoes are also known as these names?

  1. Love Your Shoes
  2. Discount Shoe Store
  3. Big Shoe Boutique
  4. Petit Feet
  5. Priceless Shoes

I am sure there are more identities for both companies mentioned, but these two I can rattle off the top of my head, there are more companies that leverage this idea too, there is not enough virtual ink to cover them all!

I’m not going to mention any specific eBay’s sellers in this article, I do not feel its appropriate that I do so, but let me word it this way:

While working for eSellerPro, it was not uncommon for companies to have more than one eBay ID and more than 10 eBay ID’s is not unknown off and I know of at least two companies that leverage this to amazing effect.

Stop thinking small and start thinking big.
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. T. Harv Eker

Other Reasons for Multiple eBay IDs

Not sold on the idea? Here are some more reasons why you need more than one eBay ID

Risk

This for me is the #1 reason besides market share. By having more than one eBay ID you are diluting your risks, the maths for me are simple:

(Risk / Number of eBay ID’s)
* Static Risk Modifer
= Overall Risk

Any number greater than one for eBay ID’s is a way to lower the risk in the business. Imagine if you sole eBay ID was trashed by a scurry of hundreds of negatives. You’d cry, I know I would.

Note: I added the ‘Static Risk Modifier’ to indicate that there is always risk of a certain level, its a factor of being in business.

Multiple Price Points

Instead of starting your second eBay ID on a cheaper price point, make it more expensive. Why? You’ve got yourself into the mindset that you are the best seller of widgets, BS, sorry to break it to you, you are not (neither am I!!!).

You need to break your mould and realise that there are niches within niches and if you are starting with your first additional eBay ID, the rule of thumb is that you go up in price. As you grow, then you can leverage the now multiple selling ID’s to try differing price points for the same products.

Matt’ s Tip: In Excel you can use this formula to make random prices:

RANDBETWEEN(1,100)/100)

It makes a number between 1 and 100, you could do (1,49) and it would make…

Unique Selling Points

With multiple eBay ID’s you can try out different selling angles of the same products. Using Barratts above, you’ll notice two very interesting names, ‘Petit Feet’ and ‘Big Shoe Boutique’. Oversized or undersized footwear is a problem for buyers with flippers or stumps, this way Barratts, can leverage two different customer groups, rather than trying to marketing them broadly within their normal confines.

See what they’re doing? Instead of trying to be one-for-all they are helping the buyer find the product group they are looking for, as I said, niches in niches, they exist everywhere and virtually limitless.

Designs & Layouts

Ever wondered what effect a full blown creative deisgn would have on a business? Ever wondered if you wound things back to and made what I consider a ‘crap id’?

Matt what is a ‘crap id’?
That’s a great question madam, let me define this as:

An eBay ID that purposefully looks shockingly bad, you know the ones, just like your very first listing you made with colourful H1 and H2 fonts (if its bigger they’ll read it right? *cries with laughter*), but employs killer conversion tools.

With multiple eBay ID’s you can and you can very easily, leading me on to the next key point.

Time to Create Inventory is a Fraction of the Original

Think about it, you exerted a lot of effort to make the first inventory item, to prepare it for another eBay ID is only altering the elements that need to be changed to make it different. If you’re using software tools such as eSellerPro, Channel Advisor** or similar, then this is childs play.

This process as an equation would look something like this:

Original Time To Create the Record
+  (Original Time To Create the Record / Number of eBay ID’s + Time to make edits)
= Overall time to create inventory

The biggest exertion was to document the first record, all the rest are simple edits and in the right circumstances can be done in an external tool such as Excel to manipulate the data in a organised fashion.

**Channel Advisor: They solved this in a update about a year ago. Before you had to have two or more sets of inventory for the same inventory item to sell using two or more eBay ID’s. It was a joke and rendered this tool virtually un-usable for use with Multiple seller IDs. But that’s resolved now I hasten to add (Thanks for the clarification James)

Summary

There is more to be covered on this topic and I will add further articles to expand on what are concepts covered in this first section.

I hope I have opened your eyes to the fact that this is commonplace, especially in well known brands. It makes perfect sense to do this, when you consider that adding a new second, third, forth etc… business to your first business as it only requires a fraction of the original effort and as a bonus, the more you add, the smaller this fraction.

Maybe I didn’t the term ‘Leverage’ that much in this article as I expected, lets close this article with final statement.

When adding a second, third etc… eBay ID to your existing business you are leveraging existing processes and the same platform in your favour.

Now, go get busy!

A New Unique Selling Point with a Feel-Good Factor?

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Last week I was reading an interesting white paper from UKFast, a hosting provider on ‘What Customers Want’, you can read the paper for yourself here. Within the paper they quote Sir Richard Branson as saying:

“Companies that fail to change won’t have a business in 5 years time”

While I expect that businesses that don’t change will still be trading, I do suspect that businesses that promote this as a unique selling point (USP) will have an added advantage over their competitors, especially considering the governments have committed so heavily, we are bound to be battered with PR on this from all angles in the forth coming years.

green-earth

Head Start?

Jumping in early could see some early learning picked up and give yourself an edge. Thinking about it, would it be miss-leading if you promoted that parts of your business were 100% carbon neutral, using the web hosting as an example, for what is peanuts, you could claim the 100% carbon neutral card, although just not playing with a full pack.

In the paper mentioned above, they’re suggesting that 64% of UK customers prefer to purchase products that are environmentally friendly are willing to pay up to 10% more for products that are better to the environment.

Hosting is a nice simple one, there are probably unlimited other ways too, such as:

  1. Allowing staff to work from home
  2. Setting up car share schemes
  3. Using carbon neutral energy suppliers
  4. And so on…

Further Reading

You may want to see http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/ and http://online.businesslink.gov.uk/ for more information and suggestions for businesses.