Tag Archive for: eBay

SuperDryStore, eBay UK’s Largest Outlet Seller Exposed For YOU to Learn From

SuperDrySuperDryStore is eBay UK’s largest outlet store for Fashion. As we all know ‘Fashion’ really is eBay’s baby atm and they’ll bend over & drop their pants for anyone with a brand name in this arena at the moment.

Yes thats right for anyone who has they’re head in the Arctic for the past year, eBay is in a 100% all out assault on getting high street names onto eBay, literally what ever the cost is, throwing round freebies all over the shop, free listing fees, free gallery, free sub titles, free designs, free development time, year contacts for monkey nuts.

eBay UK LogoBut…. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, that’s not to be the topic of discussion, for this and the forth coming posts, what I am going to cover is what YOU can learn from them, both the good things, the things I suggest you don’t do and crucially why.

I’ve a couple of posts already lined up, but they need more work, however the time is right to start this series off. So lets get right into some numbers from Terapeak for the past 90 days:

Total Sales £1,344,390
Total Listings 36,458
Successful Listings 35,352
Total Bids 89,233
Items Offered 156,013
Items Sold 62,616
Bids per Listing 2.45
Sell-Through 96.97%

Past the headline number, £1.35M, thats £450,000 per month in sales. Amazingly this is no where near the figures turned over by the heavyweights on eBay and mere sniff on the values being chucked around by sellers on Amazon.

However they’ve[SuperDryStore] done a pretty good job, there is quite a bit we can learn from them for both what you should be doing and should not be doing. I see it as my role in the next few posts to expose these to you and I’d welcome any feedback you have.

Part 2 will be covering the ‘SuperDryStore eBay Shop‘.

18% Wasted – Your Most Important eBay Marketing Asset

ChannelAdvisor

Channel Advisor Seller Buy4Less

Thats right here is the best way to waste 18% of your most valuable asset on eBay, the Listing Title. You make your listing titles on eBay look pretty by including ‘=’ and ‘-‘ symbols.

No idea what I’m taking about? See this item: 230526814009. Here is the listing title:

THOMAS TAKE ALONG === Thomas&The Jet – Die Cast === NEW

So lets count this up there is:

  • 6 x ‘=’
  • 1 x ‘-‘
  • 3 x ‘ ‘

They’ve included these characters at the expense of the formatting and crammed ‘Thomas&The’ together to make it fit. That is 10 out 55 wasted, now thats not the best bit, wait for it, it gets better, brace yourself… Really silly question, where is the keyword ‘train’, it IS a train right ??

Lets get this straight, do not waste your most valuable marketing asset on eBay, the listing title. If it was not bad enough that you’re only given 55 characters to cram your description in, something like 80% of purchases are made by search and this search is now the ‘best match’ search which favours ‘top rated’ sellers and items with a few sales on, so your requirement to be as efficient as possible as describing your products has newer been so paramount.

About Buy4Less
Apparently they sold 3000 plus orders a day last Christmas, so crap titles can’t matter that much eh? Must have been the Amazon sales that bolstered this figure. You can read the ChannelAdvisor case study here.

eBay Buyer Message Spam @ 99%

eBay UKeBay Buyers, they really are nut cases. Following on from my previous post eBay V’s Amazon – Its a ‘Trust’ thing, Trust is undoubtedly one of the core reasons behind this non-shocker I got in my mail:

Great customer communication is important for your success, especially when preparing for the Christmas period. We have worked with sellers to analyse the most effective way to reduce buyer questions.

Did you know that in the first half of 2010 you received an average of 99 questions per 100 transactions?

Find out how to reduce the number of questions you receive.

Regards,
The eBay Team

Yes that’s 99 questions per 100 transactions, don’t believe me, check the screen shot below:

eBay Buyer Questions

eBay Buyer Questions

Yes, the product type sold heavily influences the number of questions received, however of the 14 other emails I have seen today alone, none of them were below 40%.

For those that know me personally, they’re aware that I have a strong dislike to eBay buyers. To be utterly fair, this isn’t really their fault. They are just programmed to ask questions for the most silliest of things, because at heart they are scared that ‘eBay’ (note the term ‘eBay, not the seller) is going to rip them off.

I’ve sworn blind for years that 90% of all questions pre-sale are checking the sellers authenticity because they’re plain paranoid on eBay.

Here are the four suggestions eBay have given:

  1. Customise Automated Answers
  2. Block buyers from countries you don’t dispatch to
  3. Clearly structure item description (e.g. in bullet points)
  4. Use high quality photos and multiple pictures with different angles and close-ups

[sarcastic tone] Wow thanks lads [/sarcastic tone]

eBay has definitely got its sense of humour hat on today, at one hand they’re saying block buyers, in the very same email ‘sell internationally’. Irony?

eBay has expanded its international markets to include Finland, Hungary and Portugal, increasing your potential number of buyers to up to 25 million.

In comparison, number of questions from Amazon buyers this morning: 2.

Oh how I <3 Amazon even at your 15% fees.

eBay V’s Amazon – Its a ‘Trust’ thing

Well after another quick read of the feed reader, there is an announcement that eBay is to spend a huge wedge of cash sending out some postcards, no not to promote products or sellers found on the site, but ‘Trust’.

eBay really cannot shrug that carboot sales & miss-trust thing they  have got in-ground. Its  major difference between them[eBay] and Amazon. Amazon is thier marketplace and ‘allow’ other sellers to sell on thier marketplace, not a marketplace where the party[eBay] are the facilitators of the marketplace.

So when you buy from Amazon, there is a single point of trust, the Amazon logo, but for eBay, it means nothing, the buyer has to check lots of things about the listing, who are they, where they from, how much, how much shipping, when really they should only be asking ‘is this the right item for me’.

When will eBay take a leaf out of Amazon’s book and start slapping the daylights of the under performers. Amazon really does not take any crap from their sellers, you piss off one of their buyers, wow do you pay, its one of their customers, not a ‘member’ or ‘community member’, one of their customers. You see the fundamental difference between the market places yet?

Here is the homepage for the .com site, nothing up on the UK site, hey we don’t have any ‘trust’ issues here, just a complete Island (Ireland) to deal with the UK & Europe.

eBay Buyer Protection on eBay.com

eBay Buyer Protection on eBay.com

AuctionBytes, such a fab source of the latest news, its unreal, if you’re not signed up for them, you really should be. The article I’m referencing can be found here.

eBay Conspiracy Theory Overview : Part 1

Here are a few things for you to chew over, I’m not saying these are true, they’re probably utter rubbish, but… they do have enough in them to at least be partly true, right?

Here are my eBay conspiracy theories, don’t expect too much detail yet, I’ll beef these out in further posts over the next few days:

  1. eBay does whatever it can to keep the seller ‘entertained’ on the eBay marketplace, so that they are too busy to sell on other marketplaces.
  2. Using best match, eBay throttles a sellers performance, so that their number of sales stay with a 25% or so window of an on going average.
  3. eBay is turning into Amazon.
  4. The ‘Free Shipping’ promotions are nothing but a marketing ploy, to gain more fees for eBay.

I’m look forward to putting forward my flakey cases on each one of these in the next few days. I’d really value your comments and suggestions on these, the comment box is below awaiting your brain spam to join mine.

Oh dear, They Really Shouldn’t

eBay Selects Joomla to Launch Employee Collaboration Tool

eBay Selects Joomla to Launch Employee Collaboration Tool

Well been hovering thinking of all the cool topics I should blog about, then out of the blue from the AuctionBytes site and chestnut appears.

It reads ‘eBay Selects Joomla to Launch Employee Collaboration Tool‘. Oh dear god no!!! I’ve been through most open source CMS systems and Joomla is the most hacked to pieces one of them all. I’m not posting the site I use to check the latest  vulnerability list on, but I assure you, Joomla has the longest list of holes of them all.

Yea its easily worked with and I have seen some fab looking sites, although the shopping cart system you can add is the worst ever in the wrong hands (I’ll post my email to a site owner in a later post, honestly I have never been through such a worst cart system end to end). BUT they have to be safe and sorry to all the devs of Joomla, Joomla would just not been on any recontamination list of mine.

Here’s hoping they keep it in a VPN envrioment, if not lets keep an eye out for leaks!