Entries from April 2007 ↓

Since eBay Live! in Boston is right around the corner, I thought the following article was very helpful when deciding on activities during the trip. I recently returned from a job in Florida on American Airlines and found the following article on day trips around Boston. There are some great suggestions and I thought I'd share them with you. I especially like Revolutionary War history and enjoyed the trip to Concord & Lexington. I hope this article helps add to your trip. The trips start with the closest locations to Boston and get progressively farther in distance.

I've visited many of these places during trips to Boston and they are worth the effort to see. Here we go...

Continue reading →

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you were told you had $500 in your closet, how hard would you work at finding it? I'll bet you'd have it empty in no time looking for that money.

Everyone has $500 in their closet

A common question when discussing selling on eBay is, “What will I sell?” People often feel they have nothing of real value. I usually respond by telling them that nearly everyone has $500 in their closet. They just have to clean the closet and give selling a try. The items are usually right under their noses.

When I began selling on eBay, I pulled a few of my son’s clothes out of storage with a few of my wife’s nicer maternity clothes. I especially searched for name brand clothing. If I couldn’t find name brands, I’d put a lot together and sell several items at once. Putting one Tommy Hilfiger or Ralph Lauren with some lesser-known brands is a way to get everything to sell. The clothing I dug out turned into around $75 on eBay in a couple of weeks.

I also came across an old 35mm Pentax K1000 I’d bought when I moved to New York in 1983. The camera was still in good shape and had about three lenses and a few attachments. I hadn’t used it in years though, so I decided to sell it. In 1983 I paid around $250 for the camera new, in 2002 it sold on eBay for $273. My total was now up to $348.

An old cassette tape player, a few moderately interesting collectibles, and a couple of books later I was up to $500. All from boxes in a storage closet I’d moved from house to apartment to apartment and so on for several years. Just “stuff”.

You Have "Stuff" Too

Over the past few years I’ve found that most people have things they’ve gathered from their past. Many of those things are not especially sentimental items, but just things that have gotten packed away. Pack rats can do well on eBay – if they are willing to liquidate. It makes more room for packing in more things later. Rotate the inventory!

One question a new seller should avoid is “Why would anyone pay for THAT!?!” The fact is people will pay for things that seem silly to us. Just take their payment and send the item. It’s not up to us to decide why an item is desirable. Take the money.

True Story: eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar sold one of the early items on eBay; it was a broken laser pointer. I wanted to show that anything could be sold on eBay to some of my students at eBay University. While walking past eBay’s San Jose, CA headquarters one day, I spotted a run-over Oneida soup spoon laying in the street. I left the spoon there and went home to get my camera. I took a photograph of the spoon right there on the street with eBay in the background and listed the spoon as “Bent Oneida Soup Spoon found in front of eBay”. In the description I stated that it had been run over by “genuine eBay employees in luxury automobiles”. The spoon finally received 15 bids and sold for $4.95. Certainly you can find something even better in your closet.

Popularity: 3% [?]

For the past two months I've been doing an experiment. I saw other buyers selling items at low low prices with high shipping costs. It was obvious that they were avoiding eBay fees and trying to scrape a profit out of a small deal. These sellers upset people since it seems they're not playing fair. I have passed them up to find sellers with reasonable shipping prices just on principle, while I wind up paying a higher sale price and lower shipping it's a wash for me in the end.

My Experiment

I decided to see what would happen if I changed things around and listed my items at $.99 with a higher shipping price. I adjusted my shipping up to $8.45 and listed a bunch of items. My conversion rate turned around literally overnight.

How can I charge $8.45 to ship a lightweight poster? Well, postage itself is roughly $2.00 per tube, plus $.65-$1.00 for the actual tube itself. I also print my own postage through PayPal on a label printer. After all is said and done, each label costs me about $.10 to print. My wife stuffs a little tissue into the end of each tube to prevent damage to the poster as it gets handled along the way, add another $.05 for that. My wife's time is worth something too. She can pack about 25 posters in an hour. If she was making $8 per hour that adds $.32 to each poster sale. That comes up to about $3.47 for each order and that's not considering any eBay fees at all. So without considering eBay I'm in the hole $3.47 just in shipping and handling. For the sake of discussion, I'm leaving my actual cost of the poster out.

The Breakdown

eBay fees on this $.99 poster are $.20 listing fee and $.35 gallery to list, $.55 total. Then if it sells for $.99 I pay $.05 final value fee. If the buyer pays by PayPal, I pay $.35 to accept the payment, and 2.9% of the total (in this case $9.44) which would be $.27, total PayPal fees $.62.

Total for $.99 poster with $8.45 shipping:

• $3.47 Shipping and Handling Costs
• $0.60 eBay Fees
• $0.62 PayPal Fees
• $4.69 Total Cost To Sell
• Profit=$4.75 for a $.99 Poster sale

What if I flipped the price / shipping back to normal? Let's do a $9.99 poster with $3.50 S & H.

Total for $9.99 poster with $3.50 shipping:

• $3.47 Shipping and Handling Costs
• $1.30 eBay Fees
• $0.74 PayPal Fees
• $5.51 Total Cost To Sell
• Profit=$6.98 for a $9.99 Poster sale

This may be off by pennies but I'm really close so stay with me here...
It may seem like $6.98 vs. $4.75 profit is a no-brainer. Well, the real difference is conversion. My conversion rate rose dramatically for the same posters because of the $.99 price. I made sure to clearly list the shipping price in the listing, and I also make sure it shows up in search results by adding it in the SYI form. No surprises.

The fact is when I figure in the cost of unsuccessful listings, I find my profit being eaten away quickly. To list a poster at $9.99 it costs me $.40 + $.35 (gallery) = $.75 each. That's whether it sells or not. If I list 20 posters and only 5 sell, that's $34.90 in profit (using the figures above.) But once I figure in the cost of the 15 that didn't sell, my profit is $23.65. Divide that by 5 and I get $4.73 per poster. See the point?

If I list the same 20 posters at $.99 with higher shipping I would likely sell 10. My cost to list them is less so the unsuccessful items eat less of my profit. If I list 20 posters and 10 sell - at the above $.99 figures, my profit is $47.50. Now once I figure in the cost of the 10 that didn't sell, my profit is $42.00.

Other Factors

Besides the fact that the final profit is higher, there are other benefits. I offer the $.99 posters as auctions. Some people bid these up and of course that raises the profit for me and eBay as well. I also get to offer Second Chance Offers which are accepted about 60% of the time.

The low prices also draw people into my eBay Store. I sell hundreds of posters, the vast majority of which are regularly priced with regular shipping. But the low-priced auctions are what really bring in the traffic and I sell more through my Store.

Is this fee avoidance?

Some folks, as I used to do, will get on a high-horse and say, "You can't charge that much for shipping! It's cheating eBay out of their fees."

Well, consider this. I put these posters up as an auction. Anyone can bid or not bid as they choose. eBay has really pushed the auction format listings over the past year. Ask anyone in power at eBay and they'd say - Yes! We stand behind our decision. Auctions are the DNA of eBay, the best way to sell!
Ok.
I'm taking them at their word. Certainly if they are that confident they will be willing to take the risk instead of a penny-ante poster seller like me. If the auctions do well as eBay people say they will, eBay makes more.

How to Get Your Listings Pulled for Fee Avoidance

During this experiment, I did find what appears to be a trigger in the fight against fee avoidance.

I listed the items as I mentioned above for a $.99 Start Price and added a Buy It Now for around $2.50. That got my listings yanked and an email from customer service. This makes sense. One conceiveable way to determine if a person is avoiding fees is to look at shipping as a percentage of the total sale price. For example, if a seller has a set price of $.99 and shipping of $8.45 the shipping is nearly 90% of the total. Sounds bad when you put it that way huh?

With an auction however, it's really impossible to make that calculation, since you never know where an auction will wind up. So if you're going to use the low sale-price, high shipping cost formula you will have to use the auction style format.

Experiment Over

The experiment is over and I intend to keep at least some of my listings at the $.99 level with shipping and handling to realistically cover my costs. If people don't want to pay they don't have to buy. And although I appreciate their sincere concern for eBay's financial well-being I have found a way to make money on eBay and still pay a hefty bill each month to keep them going.

Popularity: 4% [?]

This article was written by my friend Mikal Belicove and I thought it would be helpful to my readers as well. Especially when considering promoting your RSS feed from your eBay Store. - Steve

Simple Exposure through RSS: Letting Customers Subscribe to Your Site
by Mikal E. Belicove, Director of Community & Education at Doba

As a business owner, you probably spend a good deal of time contemplating how to entice customers and, more importantly, keep them coming back for more. Add to the mix the fact that your business calls its home the Net and you have a bit of a quandary on your hands: How do you market your business and keep your customers informed of your latest products and services when your clients are worldwide and your budget isn't so vast? Sure, you can go the conventional route and send out mass eNewsletters every so often, but that option poses a few hassles:

• Your email may get lost in the abyss that is so many people's inbox.
• You actually have to find the time to compose, create, and send out the newsletter (or pay someone else to do it).
• You miss out on potential business because some people may not sign up for your e-list, most people these days are already buried in email and don't want to dig a deeper grave.
• Your email may get automatically filtered straight to a person's Junk folder.
• Emails simply aren't as easy to navigate as a Web page is—no clicks of buttons to send your customers straight to their destination.

Thankfully, some fellow email-laden computer buff created a solution for the big dilemma: Enter RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication.

Defining RSS

Simply put, RSS is the information junkie's prized means to an end. Just as syndication allows a professional writer to deliver an article to countless newspapers for print, it allows a website manager to deliver content to countless people in a very simple, streamlined manner. Here's how it works:

1. You create an RSS button on your website, linking to your feed.

A feed is essentially any content that you supply as a regular deliverable to readers. For example, if you're an artist who sells online, you could set up a feed link on your "Paintings" page to notify subscribers every time you update that page. Or, if you run an online clothing store, you can create a feed to send updates to readers whenever you add items to women's dresses (or any other line, for example). See the next section for more ideas for using RSS.

2. When customers browse your site, they click the RSS button to subscribe to your feed.This step is simple and self-explanatory; if you want to see what happens when you subscribe to a feed, subscribe to one such as Amazon.com's Gold Box/Deal of the Day.
3. As you create updates to the part of your site that links to the feed, a summary of the new content is automatically delivered to the "feed readers" of all your subscribers.Depending on how the feed is set up, customers may be able to choose how often their feed reader should search for new content. If that option isn't available, readers simply receive updates as they're made.In order to read content from an RSS feed, a customer needs an RSS feed reader—these tools are available for free download online, and Internet Explorer 7.0 has a feed reader in the Favorites section to quickly and easily manage feeds. A couple of free downloadable feed readers include Feedreader, a freeware Windows-based application, and Google Reader. In addition, consumers can have feeds delivered right to their MyYahoo or personalized Google Web page.

Seeing How Retail Businesses Are Using RSS

RSS is a fairly new tool, so progressive online retailers are still refining its use, in fact, the first reported use of RSS for online retail was in 2004. Corporations have been implementing the tool over the past few years in various ways, and small businesses are beginning to follow the trend. Following are a few places businesses can and do implement RSS to grow their business:

• Blogs and news feeds: This area comprises the most popular use for RSS, think daily headlines or blog entries delivered right to your virtual feed mailbox. If you use a blog to cross-promote your online business, which we explain and recommend in our series "Blogging to Boost Your Business," you can include an RSS icon on your blog's home page so shoppers receive regular blog updates from you. When the feed is sent to readers, they read the feed summary, which includes a link to your website, if they decide from the summary that they want to see the whole feed, they simply click the link and are redirected to your site. The result: More visits to your site and the potential for more business.
• Product alerts: If you do not manage a blog, perhaps the most practical use of RSS for you is to send out product alerts. With this setup, your site features RSS icons near the products you're selling, with a message offering regular updates on those products. So, for example, if a customer is interested in the 10-piece HealthSmart Cookware Set you're selling, he could click on the RSS icon next to it to subscribe to your product alerts. Whenever you update your inventory of the cookware, he receives an alert delivered right to his feed reader at no expense, whether time or otherwise, to either of you.
• Concept-related information: In addition to blog feeds and product alerts, RSS is also handy for delivering concept-related information to your customers. For example, say some of your products pertain to a particular topic, such as home maintenance, wedding planning, clearance items, or daily deals. You can set up a feed to deliver all product alerts related to those categories to subscribers. This approach is particularly useful if you have general categories of items that will spark the interest of hobbyists or other folks in common situations (for example, when planning anything, from vacations to weddings to the first year of college).

RSS Is for eBay Too!

If you have an eBay business, check out eBay's feed generator. Although it doesn't enable you to set up RSS icons on your seller site, it does allow consumers to create their own feeds to which they subscribe. It requires a bit of explanation on your part, but you may find the time spent well worth the effort, so encourage your customers to create and subscribe to a feed that pulls directly from your eBay store.

eBay does a nice job taking customers through the step-by-step process of feed creation, but your customers will appreciate a general explanation from you of how the feed generator works. To see for yourself, wander through eBay's explanation at http://pages.ebay.com/affiliates/tools/rssgenerator/index.html.

Implementing RSS on Your Site

Setting up RSS feeds and placing the icons isn't as daunting a task as, say, creating the website on which they'll go, but if you're not skilled in HTML, we advise that you consult a Web designer or your site administrator to do the job. Prior to forging ahead with RSS implementation, consider the following:

• How many feeds do you want, and what do you want them to include?
• Where on your site do you want the feeds to be located?
• How do you want the feed subscription to work? For example, do you want customers to be able to select timed updates, such as daily or weekly, or do you want simple, standard updates that broadcast each time you update the affected item/category/blog/etc.?

As you get your ideas in order, keep in mind that not only is RSS useful for delivering text content, but it also can deliver images, audio, and video. Because RSS is so new, your creativity can deem you a pacesetter, you may want to brainstorm ways to incorporate these other media into your feeds to expand your influence.

Getting Customers to Subscribe to Your RSS Feed

The most obvious method of gaining customer subscriptions to your feed(s) is to simply put the icons on your site and direct customers' attention to them. In these early days of RSS, though, consumers are generally a bit behind on the technology, so you'll need to convince them that your RSS feeds are helpful and simple to use and won't clutter their lives like eNewsletters so often do. Be sure to incorporate a solid, clear explanation of RSS into your site, keeping it as particular to your site as possible. Also, direct readers to places from which they can download feed readers. As you well know, customer service and ingenuity are the crux of the business machine, so keep your customers in mind as you implement this tool, making sure your feeds are optimally user-friendly.

Also consider listing your feed in directories, which are essentially libraries of websites organized into various categories and subcategories. Listings are free, and as RSS gains more publicity in the mass market, directories will improve with their effectiveness. To see a thorough list of major feed directories, head to http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm.

If you do decide to take advantage of the marketing opportunity that RSS feeds offer, remember to be patient as RSS continues to grow in popularity. Although still young, RSS is definitely an easy means of promoting your retail business and, as with all great technological advances, consumers will eventually come around.

---------------------
About the Author: Mikal E. Belicove is an expert at building and supporting online communities of practice and Business-to-Business-related social networks. As Doba's Director of Community & Education, Mikal oversees the company's efforts to educate retail business owners and connect customers with one another. Mikal is the author of 2007 Edition of the Internet Yellow Pages (Que Publishing/ Pearson, 10/06), co-authored with Joe Kraynak.

Popularity: 4% [?]