Patrick Munden from the eBay UK and Ireland seller team presents a great 6 minute video with some great tips to help sellers increase communication DSR’s.

Seller Release: 10.3
Announced: 13th July
Actioned: Q4 September

Today eBay have officially announced Seller Release 10.3. This release will be the last Seller release of the year. Most of the features below do not come into effect until September 2010. There are a lot of features that benefit both sellers and buyers, however they will cause more work for most sellers.

We have highlighted the major changes and useful information below:

PayPal Required for .it and .es.
eBay.it and eBay.es will have PayPal as a mandatory required payment method, bringing it inline with .co.uk and .com.

Item Condition for Vehicles

Listings in vehicle categories will now support the new Item Condition values & functionality (Read Our Blog Post about item Condition). Whilst this will not be mandatory until Q1 2011 it is good practice to apply this to your listings A.S.A.P as it will not only improve your search ranking but you may actually be penalised in search for not including the new item condition functionality.

If the thought of revising each one of your listings one by one is too much trouble why not try Froo! Bulk Revision and alter thousands of listings in bulk and take away the pain!

6 Categories to become an entirely Product Based Experiences

The product based experience (PBE) allows sellers to pull in standard information and stock photos.

You search for a product or type an EAN number/barcode and eBay returns useful information such as description and technical specifications.

Example:
 

The PBE will be fully adopted for the following Categories:

• Cell Phone,
• GPS,
• MP3 Players,
• Video Games Systems,
• CDs
• DVDs

The PBE catalogue information will not be mandatory however your listings will be penalised in search for not using this functionality. The PBE makes the listing process much faster, provides lots of correct information and reduces buyer questions. Frooition will be including this in future releases of the design management tool.

eBay to offer more payment methods

eBay are opening up the accepted payment methods to include Click and Buy as well as integrating merchant credit cards such as NoChex in the eBay checkout.

Changes to shipping to domestic regions

eBay have added more detailed to regional shipping. Sellers can now exclude specific regions from bidding or buying, change prices on a state/region level and alter shipping times. For example you charge a premium to ship to Hawaii or Northern Ireland through the eBay checkout.

Standardisation of Shipping

All shipping services will include a shipping time e.g. (Royal Mail 1st Class 2-3 days). This also applies to Selller’s Standard Rate, eBay are bringing in new levels to replace standard rate which will be:
Economy (6-9 days), Standard (3-5 days) and Overnight (24 hours).

This will affect anyone using GTC or automatic relisting rules/software.

Terms and Conditions are one of the hardest parts of online selling to get right. Ignorance of the law is no defense and there are two main pieces of legislation which all sellers need to abide by – the Electronic Commerce Regulations and Distance Selling Regulations and the Sale of Goods Act.

In general these pieces of legislation are intended to protect consumers, so unsurprisingly they appear weighted against merchants, however by following their guidelines it’s possible to limit your liabilities so it’s worth spending the time to become familiar with them.

There are four main things a buyer is concerned about when considering a purchase:

What does it cost?

What will the shipping cost?

Can I return the item if it’s not what I wanted?

Is there a warranty, what happens if something goes wrong?

The first two are easily solved – the price of the product is either the BUY IT NOW price or the winning bid on an auction. Shipping costs should be clearly entered for each country that you ship to and for each delivery service that you offer at the time of listing so that the buyer knows exactly what they’ll be paying.

Returns are something that no retailer likes, but online consumers don’t have the opportunity to examine the goods prior to purchase. The Distance Selling Regulations set out their right to examine the goods in their own home and return them for any (or no) reason. As the merchant you are obliged to offer a full refund including postage costs, but you can if you wish specify that the buyer pays the return carriage costs. You can also limit the period of returns to 7 working days from receipt of the goods but only if this is specified in your Terms and Conditions.

Warranties and the goods being fit for purpose are covered by the Sale of Goods Act, and in this case buyers have up to 6 months to request repair/replacement or refund. They are also covered up to 6 years but in that case it’s the buyers obligation to prove that the goods weren’t fit for purpose, for the first 6 months it’s the sellers responsibility to prove that they were of merchandisable quality, although of course manufacturers warranties cover many items for a year or more in any case.

There is nothing more off putting to consumers than rafts of small print, so it’s worth keeping your Terms and Conditions of sale out of your main listing template. On eBay this has been made easy as eBay provide separate sections for Returns Policy, Sellers Payment Instructions, Pricing and VAT, Shipping Costs and Terms and Conditions of Sale. If you use Froo templates they provide tabbed content boxes where you can add additional information for buyers if they wish to view it.

“There is nothing more off putting to consumers than rafts of small print, so it’s worth keeping your Terms and Conditions of sale out of your main listing template.”

Although from a legal standpoint it’s important to publish your terms and conditions in general buyers are more interested in knowing that if something goes wrong you are there to help them. Make sure that your full contact details are available including your name (or business name), your address, your email address and of course your phone number. Nothing is more effective in avoiding PayPal or eBay dispute than simply giving your buyer the opportunity to communicate.

This doesn’t just stop on your eBay listings or website, whenever you ship an item include an invoice with your contact details and/or a business card. If there is a problem and your buyer has your number to hand they are much more likely to telephone and give you the opportunity to assist than to log onto eBay to open a dispute.

In general the shorter your terms and conditions the more buyer friendly they are so as well as publishing your full terms and conditions it’s worth summarising them with a link to your Terms and Conditions on a separate page.

Ultimately your terms and conditions are there to protect you legally, and to ensure that buyers are provided with the information proscribed by law. In reality there are very few buyers who will invoke their legal rights – most simply want to receive their goods or if there is an issue to have the problem resolved. This means that your Terms and Conditions are there to protect you as the seller but like insurance hopefully they are something you will never have to use.

If you think like a buyer and act towards them as you would like a company to treat you, and especially if you give your customers the ability to contact you, almost all problem can be amicably resolved resulting in a happy customer without recourse to eBay or PayPal disputes.

The emergency budget was almost certainly bad news for most of the country, and few will remain unaffected although it’s intended that those with the lowest earnings will be hit least. Reductions in child tax credits will be reduced or removed for the highest paid workers and change to income tax will also assist lower paid workers with no benefit to higher rate tax payers.

However the budget sets out a clear mandate for private businesses with measure to assist them, whilst there are no surprises that government spending in the public sector has been hit hard. There will be a two-year pay freeze for public sector workers earning more than £21,000, although the 1.7 million lower paid workers will get a flat £250 pay rise each year. Limits will be put on the salaries of the highest paid public sector workers.

The main changes that will affect online businesses are:

“The change that will affect most eBay and online traders and of course every single consumer in the country is the rise in VAT!”

VAT

Almost certainly the change that will affect most eBay and online traders and of course every single consumer in the country is the rise in VAT from 17.5% to 20% which will come into effect on 1st January 2011. There will be no changes to the current zero rate items such as food, children’s clothing and books. The reduced rate of 5% also remains unchanged.

It’s worth noting that this affects almost every purchase made in the country, including fuel where there were no duty changes. However it’s still well short of the maximum allowed by the EU which is 25% VAT.

Corporation Tax and Capital Allowances

The main rate of corporation tax will fall to 27% on 1 April 2011, with further 1% cuts in the following three years ending at 24% in 2014. The small profits rate of corporation tax will fall to 20% for 2011, rather than increasing to 22% as previously announced. This is a move which businesses will welcome and 24% corporation tax rate would be the lowest in the G7 unless other countries follow suit. The corporation tax is an indicator that the government is serious about competitiveness for the UK’s businesses.

There is a downside for investment though, capital allowances changes will reduce the rate at which businesses receive tax relief for investment in plant and machinery. However over time they will still be able to recoup cost, but over a longer period of time.

Income Tax

Lower paid workers will benefit from the £1000 raise to £7,475 before they start to pay Income Tax. The higher rates thresholds for tax and National Insurance will be reduced so higher paid earners won’t benefit. Employers will benefit from the employers National Insurance threshold (the point at which they pay N.I on employees earnings) rising by £21/week.

National Insurance Holiday for New Businesses

In certain parts of the country employers will not have to pay the first £5,000 of employer’s Class 1 National Insurance Contributions for the first 12 months of employment their first 10 employees. This will apply to most of the UK with the exception of London and the South East. However this does appear unfair to existing businesses that may be just about to take on their first employee as well of course those that live in the excluded areas.

Capital Gains

Basic rate taxpayers will pay Capital Gains Tax at a rate of 18% compared to 20% levels of income tax and the annual exemption of £10,100 will remain. Higher-rate taxpayers will pay Capital Gains Tax at a rate of 28% compared to levels of income tax at 40%. . Surprisingly the chancellor said that raising the higher rate above 28% would result in a fall in total revenues. This is better news that forecast as figure for Capital Gains of as much as 40% or 50% were predicted. This change lowers the incentive to extract profits from a company other than as Income, and will affect those who have built a successful business and wish to float them with a share issue or to simply sell them

However the 10% Capital gains tax rate for entrepreneurs, which currently applies to the first £2m of qualifying gains made over a lifetime, will be extended to the first £5m of lifetime gains.

Come with us on a journey behind the scenes at eBay DEVCON.

Click here to watch the video in full on eBayInc.com.

As an eBay seller it’s easy to get caught up in the everyday graft of just keeping your operation running. You might be drowning in brown tape and jiffy bags and making sure you make it to the post office in time, but remember there’s a whole world out there.

eBay is a walled garden. It’s busy and has millions of buyers out there for you. But there is more to the internet than eBay. You can boost your eBay sales by marketing online. One of the most talked about opportunities is social media. That means sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and other activities such as blogging.

Twitter has grown phenomenally in the past year or so and is now a mainstream website used by millions at home and abroad. If you’ve opened a newspaper in the past year you can’t have missed it. The same’s true of Facebook. Both Twitter and Facebook offer the best options to eBay sellers who want to have a go at social media.

Blogging is also a great opportunity. A blog is basically a website where you can write about anything you like and also publish other content such as videos and photos. Setting up a blog can be free and easy, depending on what service you choose. Open source software Wordpress comes highly recommended and is free: you just need to pay for the hosting and design.

If social media seems scary, you’re right to be cautious: time is your most valuable commodity and wasting any of that or getting behind in the essential tasks of running your business would be a bad thing. But by approaching social media with discipline and a clear idea of what you want to achieve, you can reap some benefits.

There are two key benefits of social media to an eBay seller: the first if traffic. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have a massive following with millions of visitors every day. It’s possible to get a little bit of that action and increase the number of people viewing your listings.

The second benefit, especially if you already have your own website, is a SEO (search engine optimization). Blogging, in particular, is a good way of building your site content and creating valuable inbound links to build the prominence of your site in web searches.

Here are a few ideas that you can try:

Build a Facebook fan page for your eBay sales. Even your granny is on Facebook these days so it’s a great audience to plug in to. Your easiest option is to build a Facebook fan page for your business including links to your shop and items you want to shift. One of the best ways to utilize Facebook is to offer discounts and deals exclusively to Facebook fans to tempt them.

Twitter and Tweets: Get started on Twitter and gradually build your network. Succeeding on Twitter can take time but the best way to attract attention is to provide links and information that other people find useful. That could be sharing news stories, your own content or making wry and amusing observations. You will also get a lot out of Twitter if you connect with people you admire and trust.

“And the good news is that Frooition can help as you take on social media!”

Blogging: Blogging is something that rewards you the more you do it. If you start a blog, write about things that really interest you. Establish yourself as an expert in your field and as someone who people turn to for insight and interesting comment If you’re not much of a writer, try a picture blog or video blog (vlog).

What you want to avoid, whether on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, when you’re or any other social network or blogging, is mistaking not working for networking. If you’re just jabbering away to your fellow sellers, friends or people who aren’t buying from you, it’s a total waste of time. You need to approach social media as a marketing channel. It should be fun but it does have a very serious purpose: promoting you, your sales and your business.

And the good news is that Frooition can help as you take on social media. It’s essential that your eBay brand is extended to your other online profiles. A consistent look and feel makes your buyers and customers feel reassured, makes you look good and inspires trust. Frooition can help you with bespoke design, expertise and plenty of past experience. Get in touch and we can help you extend your eBay brand so it includes social media.

Lots of eBay sellers don’t even know about their About Me page. Even fewer actually take advantage of it and make sure it is working hard for them. Building a successful eBay profile is about using all the tools eBay makes available. If you’re not using your About me page, you’re missing a trick.

What IS an About me page?

It’s exactly what it says it says in the tin! A page for you to tell other eBayers about yourself, your business and the things you sell. You can make and edit your About Me page via My eBay. You don’t need any special skills but if you have some coding or design experience, so much the better.
Unusually for eBay, you can have a link on your About Me page that links to your personal website or blog but be careful. You are not allowed to link to commercial websites, promote off-eBay sales or link to items that are prohibited on eBay. You’re also not allowed to link to a search engine or site that aggregates the eBay sales of multiple sellers.  eBay have a full list of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed on the About Me policy page.

About Me Page Benefits

“There are two significant benefits to building an About Me Page. The first is SEO. The second is branding.”

There are two significant benefits to building an About Me Page. The first is SEO (search engine optimization). The vast majority of your buyers will come to you via eBay’s search but some will find you via search engines such as Google. It’s well worth remembering that anything you can do to attract more buyers from search engines is good news for the bottom line. You can also link to your About Me Page from other sites as you like, to improve the ranking of your About Me page in Google.
The second benefit is with branding. Ensuring that everything you do looks good and alike and is clearly identifiable as your business is vital when it comes to attracting repeat buyers, inspiring trust and providing a first class buying experience. Don’t forget that Frooition can help you with design and implementation of your About Me page and make sure it looks great!

Five things to include in your About Me page:

The good news for sellers is an About Me page is very flexible and can easily be personalized using HTML. eBay can help you build a basic About Me page but to get the full impact, pull out all the stops and make it a fully integrated part of your eBay brand. Here is an example of a great About Me Page.  

1. Auto-generated components: eBay allows you to display your current sales, recent Feedback and even recent bids. So use the auto-generated elements to populate your About Me page easily.
2. Pictures: You can include images and photos in your About Me page to bring it to life. You can host these images yourself, or eBay will do it for you.
3. Words: To get the full SEO benefit of your About Me page make sure you have some text talking about your sales. Cram the text full of relevant keywords that will aid your findability on Google.
4. Video: You can easily embed a video (hosted on Youtube, for instance) using HTML and that is certain to attract attention. It could be a showcase of your stock, a tour around your business or just you talking to camera about your business. It’s surprisingly easy to make a video, even with your digital camera.
5. Your philosophy: In your item listings and also other eBay pages, you’ll talk about what you’re selling and how people pay and get a refund. An About Me Page offers the chance to be a bit less formal and more personal. Talk about why you got into eBay selling, spin a yarn about why you do it and how you like to trade.

How long will an About Me Page take?

Not long. And if you’re clever and reuse content like pictures and text that you already have elsewhere you could be up and running in a matter of minutes. If you want something more professional, it will take longer.
And the good news about your About Me page is that it’s a one-off job. There’s no need to constantly tweak and tinker: once it’s up and running you can just leave it be. Of course, if you change your brand or want to make changes, you can.

eBay have introduced new values for item condition. Designed to be more descriptive and give buyers a more detailed, accurate description of the item condition. The new entries have been developed to help manage customer expectations, decrease questions and help improve DSR’s.

Item condition will help customers filter searches further and improve navigation. The new options went live on the 10th of May and will become mandatory in the majority of categories on the 27th of July 2010.

You may have difficulty relisting items in eBay if you have not specified an item condition.

How does this affect frooition customers?

Frooition have further improved the listing process within the frooition software.

We have introduced a free update that moves the item condition out of the item specifics section into its own
section and added new values to the drop down.

“Instead of choosing between New and Used you will now have new options depending upon your category”

Instead of choosing between New and Used you will now have new options depending upon your category. For example:

• New
• New with Tags
• New Other
• Manufacturer Refurbished
• Seller Refurbished
• Used
• For Parts or Not Working

How will this benefit me?

Your items now have another level of search, customers can filter between new, used, refurb and parts.

As a seller it gives you greater chances to sell relevant products to the correct customers, cuts down questions and reduces refunds due to incorrect items being ordered.
As a buyer it improves the buying experience as you won’t have to click through several pages of used and broken items when you are searching for a brand new item with tags.

Click here to read more

We’ve probably all been in the position of running out of stock and getting a supplier or competitor to ship an item direct to the customer for us. If you’ve done this then you’ve already performed what’s known in the trade as “Drop Shipping”.

Some sellers however never actually handle any of their stock, their entire eBay operation is based around drop shipping where they list products for sale, accept payment, but then place the order on a drop shipper who fulfils it shipping it direct to the customer with the seller never handling or even seeing the item.

It’s not unheard of on eBay for sellers, especially in the DVD and media categories, to use eBay’s competitors Amazon or Play.com to drop ship for them. This isn’t strictly drop shipping, but again if you’ve run out of stock and can make a margin in the middle it’s a great way of fulfilling a customer’s order.

A quick search of the Internet will reveal that there are hundreds of companies who specialise solely in drop shipping for eBay and website sellers. Many are reputable and may even be eBay certified, but do your home work before committing to a particular drop shipping and if you’re considering using them place a couple of orders to be shipped to yourself or family and friends to test out their service before launching the products on eBay.

Unlike your own website on eBay it’s buyers that will rate your service, and by using a drop shipper you lose the vital control of when the product is shipped and the method and speed of shipment. This will all affect your eBay feedback and detailer seller ratings and if a drop shipper runs out of product, back orders it from the manufacturer, or simply places you orders on hold for any reason then this will be reflected in your feedback.

“Many drop shippers allow you to pay on an order by order basis, but check if there are any up front or annual fees you need to pay, and also check payment terms.”

Many drop shippers allow you to pay on an order by order basis, but check if there are any up front or annual fees you need to pay, and also check payment terms. It’s normal to pay for each order as you place it with the drop shipper, either by credit card or today an increasing number will accept PayPal. In either case make sure you have available funds as if you are a new seller subject to PayPal 21 day holds, or if a PayPal rolling reserve is placed on your account you’ll still need to pay for orders to ensure that they’re shipped promptly.

The obvious advantages of drop shipping are that you don’t have any up-front investment in stock, and you don’t need warehousing to store your products. Also most drop shippers will have attractive delivery charges as they can negotiate with carriers based on a larger number of shipments for discount levels than you as an individual seller will be able to access.

The biggest downside of drop shipping is that you’ll be offering the same products with the same service and delivery standards as many other sellers using the same drop shipper. Unless you obtain samples to personally photograph and describe you’ll be reliant on stock images and manufacturers descriptions which again will be identical to your competitor’s listings.

With drop shipping margins maintaining decent margins is tough to achieve, as soon as two or more sellers are supplying the same products from the same drop shipper the only real differentiator is on price. Be prepared to drop product lines and introduce new ones as soon as your drop shipper offers them to beat the competition – there really is little point maintaining a drop ship line if your competitors are dropping the price and you have to cut your margins to compete.

Drop shipping is something that only experienced eBay sellers should consider as their sole or primary source of supply. Whilst the advantages of no initial stock purchase, no storage costs or shipping are attractive the lack of control and ease with which competitors can enter the market make drop shipping a difficult proposition to get right.

For experienced sellers who want to supplement or grow their businesses drop shipping can make a significant difference to their turnover and profitability, but the management of a drop shipping operation and the risks to your eBay feedback if something goes wrong shouldn’t be underestimated.

Branding is possibly the single most important thing that you can do for your online business. Apart from price and availability of product there is little else to distinguish you from any other online merchant but strong branding make the difference between getting the sale or not. Service only comes into play once the buyer has made a purchase, and until that point the only way to set yourself apart from other sellers is with a strong brand.

Your own brand tells customers that they are looking at one of your eBay auctions or your online shop. A memorable brand and colour scheme sets you apart from your competitors. Your brand will help customers remember the great service they received from you in the past and give them the confidence to shop again.

If you look at many experienced eBay sellers shops you’ll see that they tend to have very individual colour schemes, undoubtedly they’ll have a logo, but importantly the same colour scheme or “branding” carries through from their eBay auctions to their shop home page, their About Me page, their custom shop pages and even on their email marketing and end of auction emails.

Branding shouldn’t stop at your eBay shop though, if you have a website or sell on venues other than eBay your branding should carry across so that buyers who have made one purchase from you recognise you wherever they find your products for sale. Your branding should carry across all the sites you trade on as well as your flyers, packing slips, thank you notes, business cards, invoices.

“A professional logo not only tells your customers that you’re serious about your business, but also acts as the basis for all your other branding”

The easiest place to start your branding is when you create your logo. A professional logo not only tells your customers that you’re serious about your business, but also acts as the basis for all your other branding. Whilst it’s easy to create your own logo either in a graphics program or using software such as http://www.aaa-logo.com/, it’s worth investing the money to get a professional designer to create it for you. There are many companies on eBay who will design you a logo, or a company such as Frooition will design your logo in conjunction with branding your eBay listings, eBay shop or your own website.

Once you have a logo choose your eBay shop or website colours to complement it. On eBay this is fairly easy as in the shop designer you can customise the colours to match your logo – you don’t even need to know any HTML to do so. Choose colours, logos and symbols that reflect what you sell to make your eBay shop unique and create your own brand.

Unless you’re an HTML expert you’ll probably want someone to create and brand your website for you. Most ecommerce packages will allow you a certain amount of customisation, but this is normally restricted to selecting a set theme from a restricted set of options. Almost all ecommerce packages can be fully customised using HTML Style Sheets by a professional designer and if you want strong branding it’s worth investing in your business.

Your branding needn’t stop at your eBay listings, shop or website, it’s possible to extend your branding into eBay search results and even onto Google Product Search and other shopping comparison sites by branding your images. Consider putting a border on your eBay gallery pictures using your brands colours, or if your logo can be reduced in size include your logo in each image and it’ll appear on the thumbnails that eBay display in search. Equally on product comparison sites your branded images will let buyers know that it’s your product that they’re looking at.

When considering branding think about large companies such as Nike or Vodafone. As soon as you see the Nike slash you instantly know it’s a Nike product or website even if you don’t see their name. Vodafone is equally recognisable from their red quotation mark logo in a circle. If you can create an icon from your logo which is as instantly recognisable you’re well on your way to creating your brand.

Once you or your designer has created your brand you can build a consistent appearance across all the channels you sell on. Your brand will become more important over time in building customer confidence and help with faster customer acquisition and retention.  Branding delivers customer awareness and loyalty and plays a vital role in the speed that a company grows. Once you have built your brand make sure that it’s used in every contact with a customer, whether it be on eBay and your website or in any email or mail communications that you send.