It’s an interesting discrepancy, because on the face of it, none of these scores should be affected by payment method. Most listings on eBay UK must now offer PayPal as a payment option, so if payment’s made by cheque, that’s by the buyer’s choice.

Frankly, I’m not surprised to see the “dispatch” DSR lower for cheque payments: buyers, often, think of “dispatch” as “the time between clicking the Buy It Now button, and receipt”; they don’t think “oh but it took me a week to put a cheque in the post”, they just think “I had to wait ten days for delivery”. No, it’s not fair – but as my old granny said, whoever told you life was going to be fair.

I can *just* about understand for the difference on the communication score too. With a cheque payment, there is so much more to go wrong. Cheques can not get posted or go astray in the post or be untraceable to a transaction or just not fit into the normal automation of business – so I can understand that communication might be more fraught, and get marked down.

But item description? How does payment method affect whether my item’s like I described it or not? Answer: it doesn’t. It can’t.

And more than anything, how can payment method push the always-worst DSR, P&P, down from a safe-ish 4.74 to a downright dangerous 4.6?

I’ve said it before and I’m going to keep saying it: eBay feedback is a farce. Specificially, the DSRs are a farce and do not do what they were designed to do.

Once upon a time, eBay talked to some buyers and what they found was that those buyers were afraid to leave negative feedback. Some buyers asked for a way to say “the P&P was a rip-off” without the seller seeing the red dot and knowing what they’d done. Others said they wanted to be able to say the P&P was a rip-off without leaving a neg when they were otherwise happy. And so the DSRs were born.

But what PayPal’s figures show is that this granular marking isn’t what buyers are doing. Someone who is annoyed that their cheque payment delayed delivery by two weeks is marking down on *all* the criteria. Someone else who’s annoyed they got a UID before they posted their payment is marking down on *all* the criteria. It’s quite clear from PayPal’s figures that buyers who pay by cheque are generally less happy – but it’s equally clear that some of the things that they’re marking sellers down for cannot possibly be related to the payment method. Buyers are using these very specific scores to reflect their feelings about the transaction in general.

Sellers should take these figures to heart. The pro-cheque argument is often made that buyers should be allowed to pay how they like: well, not at the expense of my TRS badge should be the response to that. If nothing else, cheque buyers need extra help, careful handling, nurturing through the transaction.

But eBay should take these figures to heart too. They show, quite obviously, that the feedback system is not right.

If you don’t meet Minimum Selling Standards than you’ll be barred from selling any iPads at all. Minimum Standard Sellers can list one per week, Top Rated Sellers 4 per week and Apple authorized resellers will be allowed to list up to 50 items per week. If you’re selling Apple iPad related domains or email addresses then the listing limit is 4 per week.Ap

The customer

Global Technology Resource Ltd started out as a trading group dealing with excess manufacturer product which they used to flip by selling without ever taking delivery. Once they’d found a customer the stock was shipped direct from the manufacturer but they expanded into refurbishment and selling on marketplaces. They fully clean, test and repackage computer products and have a strong green ethic of recycling everything possible including old packaging as well as making sure products are refurbished and sold where ever possible.

implementation

They initially looked at ChannelAdvisor due to growth, the number of product lines outgrew excel stock lists, launching and relisting products was unmanageable and even offering second chance offers was taking too long to achieve.

Jonny said that the initial implementation of ChannelAdvisor was a big learning curve and took weeks (months!) to fully figure out how it worked. Partly this is due to the complexity of the software and setting up sections like postage calculators didn’t always make sense until later down the implementation process when setting product weights and shipping costs on listings came into play.

Other hurdles included learning HTML to create the listing template, and more recently he’s looking at XML for the ChannelAdvisor premium store he’s signing up to.

Stock management

The result was significant growth for the company though, ChannelAdvisor allowed them to expand into new EU markets such as Germany and France and to manage one pool of stock from which listings are launched onto eBay, Amazon and Pixmania.

Jonny emphasises that they still have to monitor and manage stock though – once products are listed on a particular site if another marketplace sells out ChannelAdvisor won’t pull unsold inventory from one site and relist on another. This goes against the current eBay wisdom of listing all your inventory on one eBay listing, as the stock has to be held back with ChannelAdvisor to replenish listings on whichever eBay (or other) site sells out first.

Comparison Shopping Engines / Adwords

Jonny doesn’t consider Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) or buying search keywords as suitable for the refurb market. From experience he ends up paying for clicks from customers looking for new products which isn’t cost effective. However he does use ChannelAdvisor to submit products to Google Product Search as it’s the only major CSE that is free to use.

Which type of business should consider ChannelAdvisor?

ChannelAdvisor isn’t the right solution for low turnover companies, and even at the Gold PowerSeller level of £6k/mth turnover it’s probably not suitable. It’s when a company grwos to £20-£30k/mth that it really justifies itself.

It’s a serious business tool but Jonny did say that due to the costs (ChannelAdvisor charge a percentage of turnover) although at the £5-6k/mth level it’s not necessarily worth the investment, that level is probably the best time to learn the software. If your company is growing fast and you’re projecting turnover to reach £15-20k/mth in the near future you should seriously consider a solution like ChannelAdvisor sooner rather than later.

Checkout

It’s well known that ChannelAdvisors checkout isn’t as slick as the standard eBay one page checkout, but Jonny has other issues as well.

He lists on multiple eBay sites from one eBay shop, and if a buyer makes a purchase in multiple currencies it’s a manual process to invoice them. It’s not possible to simply combine the postage, but to be fair that’s also a problem on eBay and not specific to ChannelAdvisor. However it’s on his wish list of issues for ChannelAdvisor to fix.

Invoices and shipping labels

I was surprised to learn that ChannelAdvisor isn’t able to print shipping labels, although there are add-on solutions such as Packing Partner from Aimco, and Metapack who can solve this. ChannelAdvisor only give the ability to print invoices so Jonny’s solution is to purchase integrated labels cut to his specification to produce both the invoice and the shipping label in one.

This isn’t an ideal solution for an online retailer, especially one with green credentials – Jonny would love to be able to simply email invoices and only print shipping labels as required.

Summary

Jonny is a pretty committed ChannelAdvisor customer, but he admits it has it’s frustrations and isn’t perfect. He does raise the changes he’d like introduced on the ChannelAdvisor forums but accepts that, for them to reach implementation, there needs to be a reasonable number of other ChannelAdvisor customers looking for the same features.

Once you start using ChannelAdvisor you’re not going to stop – according to Jonny it doesn’t make sense to switch to an alternative. He may have some complaints about what’s wrong, but changing to an alternative would involve another implementation and learning curve which just doesn’t make sense.

The biggest thing ChannelAdvisor has done for Jonny is time savings. Previously it was a round the clock operation scheduling listings to make sure he wasn’t competing with himself as items ended and making sure that second chance offers were issued as soon as possible once an auction had ended. Now all of that’s automated it’s given him the ability to expand his business as well as reducing the time taken on day to day repetitive listing and post sales tasks.

Jonny summed up his overall experience with ChannelAdvisor as “You’re dealing with what you’ve got but overall it’s a fantastic tool”. It’s enabled him to grow his business to a level that would be unthinkable if he didn’t have automation to assist him.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise on TameBay

There are some big differences between the percentage of TRS listings for all and for used products. In Art, an exception new/used makes almost no difference at all. In Music (CDs) there’s another anomaly where there are a bigger percentage of TRS listings for used products than for new items. At the other end of the scale in categories which are notoriously difficult to trade in such as Phones and Mobile Phones, just 1.68% of listings for used products qualify as TRS.

Across all eBay categories just 13.45% of listings for used products are from TRS sellers compared to the 21.73% for all products which gives a base point to measure your category against, to find out how hard it is to maintain the top level of standards.

It’s reasonable to expect TRS sellers to be businesses and so list in greater volumes than casual sellers who won’t qualify, but even taking this into account it definitely appears less likely that you’ll be a TRS if you trade in used goods.

It would appear reasonable to assume that buyers are likely to rate you higher and that it’s simply easier to gain TRS status in some categories than others and easier to reach high standards for new products than it is for used. The products you choose to sell could have a big impact on how your customers and ultimately eBay rate your business.

Calculations based on Number of TRS Listings/All Listings and Number of TRS Used Product Listings/All Used Product Listings
Items not tagged as “Used” in Item Specifics were not included in the Used TRS data
Data collected on 21st February 2010 from all eBay UK categories

There are some tricks and tips for success on Amazon though, unlike eBay where pretty much anyone can be successful if they have the right product at the right price, Amazon is a harder site to get to grips with and working out how to win the “Buy Box”

ChannelAdvisor, who are Amazon’s largest 3rd party solutions provider in terms of GMV, have released a “Best Practices & How to Win the Blue Buy Box” document which is free to download from their website. It covers the information Amazon customers need about your business, the customer service Amazon expect, what you need to know about inventory and listing techniques and how to win Amazon’s Buy Box.

If you already sell on Amazon and have some tips and tricks of your own feel free to share them in comments below.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

There are three measurements that ROI reports on:
Bids Bids & BINS that are attributed to clicks within 30 days of when the click occurred

Items Sold Total units sold as a result of your Ad. This is not the number of listings, rather the units. If you have one multi-item listing and sold 10 units as a result of an ad, 10 will show up in Items Sold

Sales Amount The total final sales value of the Items Sold

Sales/Cost The Ratio between Sales Amount and the amount of advertising spent

From experience AdCommerce doesn’t work for all types of eBay business, but if it’s working for you let us know what sort of ROI you’re getting. Are there some keywords that work exceptionally well and do you have any that you now know are underperforming?

Many thanks to Karl of Wholesale Clearance for the screen grab of AdCommerce ROI Metrics which was first published at “First look at AdCommerce ROI metrics“

I know it’s February already, but I’ve just got my hands on The Independent UK Guide to eBay 2010. The Guide has been around for a few years now – I was made aware of it when they first reviewed TameBay in the 2008 edition. It’s an odd sort of publication: it looks like a magazine, both in size and in layout, but definitely has a bookish price tag.

The Guide bills itself as “The Essential Guide to Buying and Selling | How to make SERIOUS money on eBay” (that latter seems a bit familiar, doesn’t it). And I don’t know what’s happened to it over the last 12 months, but where before it felt patchy, unfinished, almost as though it were written by someone who’d never used eBay but knew how to write a how-to book, this year it’s turned into something a lot more useful.

Mostly this is a guide for sellers, aimed probably at those who’ve sold a couple of personal items but want to sell more, or who are considering going pro. The two longest chapters are “Introductory Selling” and “Advanced Selling”, which cover all the basics, with extensive sections on what can go wrong and how to deal with it, and auction management for people who look at their ever-filling inbox and freak out. There are numerous case studies on sellers who are “already doing it” – from running an eBay business alongside your B&M shop, to (intriguingly) a seller who’s quitting online retail and advises others to do the same.

There’s more. There’s the inevitable “how to buy on eBay” chapter, which in a “how to sell” book is almost entirely pointless: I’ll forgive this one because it jumps on my own favourite bandwagon, asking why eBay has no proper shopping cart. There’s a chapter on PayPal and alternative payment methods, and another on eBay competitors which runs through the basics of selling on Amazon and PlayTrade. There’s a useful “Reviews Directory” of eBay-related software which even experienced sellers might find worth a look.

The magazine format has one huge thing to recommend it: colour pictures. And there are a lot, mainly in the form of screenshots which walk you through how to set up an eBay shop or take a decent photograph, or even how to list on Amazon marketplace.

If you’re a seller newish to eBay, this is worth getting: it pretty much covers the basics, it’s reasonably entertaining and the format is easy to dip in and out of, especially as it’s peppered with “memorable auction” boxes highlighting some of the more unusual listings in eBay’s history, and website reviews, suggesting places you can get further help and information (including – disclosure – TameBay). If you’re a seller who’s already running a full-time business and knows what they’re doing, on the other hand, there’s very little here you don’t already know – and anything you need to check, you’d be better doing online where the information is bang up to date.

And if you want to see what the IUKG2e2010 said about us, here’s their review.

Why the Amazon affiliate link, not eBay? Because the only copy listed on eBay UK at time of writing is coming from Malaysia. And because the Amazon affiliate program makes linking it, with piccie and price, so simple. EPN, are you taking note?

We regret to inform you that SpoonFeeder will cease business operations immediately. Although some parts of the system may remain operational for a very short time, we cannot guarantee how long.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience our sudden shutdown may cause.

I’m 95% certain it’s not a spoof: I’ve received it on both the email addresses I had registered with Spoonfeeder, and an awful lot of other eBay sellers have also received it. If, of course, there’s a follow-up email from another listing software provider, I might reconsider that thought.

At time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be any further information on Spoonfeeder’s website, and listings using their hosting still appear to be working. How long that might last is anyone’s guess: it’s a reminder, if we needed another one, to host your images somewhere that stays under your control.

More info if we get it.

Update: email confirmed genuine. Sorry to see Spoonfeeder go: they were a life-saver for me.

It’s one of those things that eBay think is a minor inconvenience – but sellers know can make for unhappy buyers, and can easily turn transactions which are hanging in the balance completely to the bad. Let’s hope they fix this one soon.

The service covers parcels up to 25kg in weight, up to 120cm long and total size up to 6 cubic feet with standard compensation of up to £50. Compensation can be increased up to £500 per parcel for more valuable items.

50p discount might not sound a lot, but if you multiply it by the number of parcels you send it’s worth switching your parcels for the next 10 days. You can book collections at the discounted price on the Parcel2Go website.

Disclosure: Parcel2Go advertise with TameBay

photo credit: Aa?on

As snow once again covers much of the UK, delays to postal deliveries and collections are being announced.

Royal Mail breaks down service information by region: areas currently listed as affected by the weather include Scotland, the north east and north west of England, and Devon and Cornwall.

ParcelForce has made an announcement detailing affected areas, mostly in Scotland and northern and central England:

• areas covered by the Manchester, Preston and Liverpool depots had deliveries suspended today
• in many areas ad-hoc collections were suspended today and will not be made tomorrow

DHL and UPS don’t apparently have anything on their websites yet, but anyone with a time-sensitive delivery might do well to check if a collection is coming to them, and if their buyer has any hope of getting it delivered.

Regardless of which service you use, it’s worth warning your buyers in advance that delays may happen due to the weather. Buyers in more clement parts of the country can easily think they won’t be affected – and even those who’ve received no post for a few days still blame the seller rather than the snow for their non-delivery. So – even though it seems too obvious to need saying – it’s worth adding a line or two to your dispatch or payment receipt emails.

Good til cancelled (GTC) listings are for lazy people. They’re the worst listing format for keeping control of your business and the easiest way to lose control.

The big problem is that (unless you run out of stock) your listings will never ever end. You may or may not be getting sales and you probably don’t even know if you are. The chances are that your listings are way out of date and either the price is wrong or the product itself simply isn’t desirable to buyers any more.

The most shocking fact I ever heard regarding GTC listings was that there were some GTC listings over five years old on eBay UK, that had never had a sale. These were the old Shop Inventory Format GTC listings that have now been retired and rolled over into 30 day fixed price GTC.

When researching a new product or checking prices on eBay it’s not unusual to see competitors with pricing way above the norm. Now there’s a lot to be said for not being cheapest but if the average sale price is around £25 – £30 there’s not much point having a listing at the £90 – £100 price point that the product sold for when it was released a year ago. The price might have been competitive when the listing was created, but a year or so later they’re at the bottom of Best Match and unlikely to ever attract a sale.

30 Day Fixed Price listings force you to review your listings and pricing every month. If an item ends without a sale you’re prompted to ask yourself why before you simply relist it. Is it the price? The product? Have you got the wrong desciption or wrong picture? Have you deleted the picture from your webspace? Has eBay changed the categories or Item Specifics?

There are many reasons why a product might not be selling and almost always there’s an easy way to start it selling again. GTC listings hide this vital information and leave stock sitting idle on your shelf costing time and money instead of making money for you.

There is only one advantage that GTC listings have over 30 day listings, and that’s the ability to use Mark Down Manager to hold sales. Few sellers use Mark Down Manager though and if you’ve not used it in the last three months don’t use it as an excuse to keep GTC listings running.

To regain control of your listings bite the bullet and end all of your GTC listings. Any GTC listings that have had sales in the last 30 days can be relisted as Fixed Price 30 day listings and the remaining items need a spring clean.

Go through the GTC items without sales one at a time and research why they’re not sold. Use Terapeak to check average selling prices and sell through rates. For old stock, especially if you only have one or two items remaining, liquidate the stock using auction format.

All sellers are aware what’s selling and what products are making them money. What most sellers don’t know is what’s not selling and what products are costing them money.

Ending your GTC listings and changing to fixed price 30 day listings will force you to kick start your sales on items that might not have had a sale for many months. More importantly it will give you back control of your business for the future and ensure you know what’s not selling just as well as you know what is selling.

Running out of real stories in the days before Christmas, the press has been full of advice on how to sell your Christmas presents on eBay. What journalists fail to tell you though, is that your granny is going to be seriously upset if she spots that Rudolf-design sweater up for sale the day after she gave it to you. Make sure you get away with it, with our handy guide to guilt-free gift selling.

Have a secret ID

Never, never, NEVER let your family, friends or work colleagues find out your eBay ID. You don’t want your boss to know about your penchant for Dilbert. You don’t want your trendy friends to know about your Bridget Jones pants. And there might be a million things you don’t want your mother to know about!

If by some act of carelessness on your part, your eBay ID has become known, then register a new one; you can have as many as you like, all they need is different email addresses. Believe us, this will save you grief in the long-run.

Don’t let your own home be visible in the photos

You will not be able to deny it’s Auntie Doris’s plaid pantaloons you’re selling if your living room can be seen in the background of your photograph. Photograph larger items against a plain, neutral-coloured wall. For smaller items, a light tent makes your photographs so much better, or use a plain sheet.

Have a tidy out

Bored with mince pies, sherry and TV holiday specials already? Us too. Have a tidy out. That Des O’Connor CD won’t show up nearly so badly if it’s part of a job lot of discs you no longer listen to.

Leave it til Easter

Let’s face it, by Easter, everyone’s forgotten about Christmas. Give it a few months, and no one’s going to spot your ingratitude, you undeserving traitor

But if you really think eBay’s a no-no…

Give it back to them next year

“I loved mine so much, I got you one just like it! Merry Christmas!”

Lots of eBay sellers – especially those who work on their own – shut up shop between Christmas and New Year. Royal Mail won’t be collecting until 29th, so orders won’t go anywhere – but will that matter to a rabid bargain hunter?

Will you be closing up shop, or trading through as normal? And what about buying: does your computer get switched off on Christmas Eve and not powered up again til New Year’s Day? Be part of our totally unscientific polls: two for the price of one this time…

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Via Internet Retailing.

eBay’s CEO John Donahoe said, “It’s what makes the eBay marketplace so unique, and what enables our community to do good things for causes they believe in. Your generosity this year, especially in such a tough economy, isn’t just impressive – it’s inspiring.”

For charities, online is where it’s at. A recent survey* found that online donations were increasing at 44% a year, seven times faster than offline giving. And if you needed a less philanthropic reason to run charity listings, eBay items advertising that 10% of proceeds will be given to charity is nearly 20% more likely to sell than their non-charity equivalents. Charity listings increase traffic to everything you’re selling, so it’s a winning situation for everyone.

We’d really like to hear from anyone using eBay to raise money for their favourite cause, particularly for smaller organisations who might struggle to get themselves noticed otherwise. If you’ve got a great story you’d like to share in a future post, leave us a comment, or @ us on Twitter.

Via eBay Ink.
* Blackbaud online giving trends analysis 2009

(If you’re unclear about the difference between holds and reserves, then this post has more details.)

Firstly, PayPal will never place reserves on every seller’s account. Some support staff seem to have made comments like “it’s not just you, it’s everybody”. Obviously that gives the impression that reserves are coming to all accounts, but PayPal have categorically denied it. Just because their T&Cs allow for hold on any account does not mean that holds will be applied to every account: they will not.

Reserves are for “the accounts that seem to be statistically the most dangerous”
There are a number of criteria which influence whether a reserve will be applied to your account. These include (but are not limited to):

• how long you’ve been in business,
• number of disputes/claims raised against you,
• negative feedback,
• high priced items,
• risky categories (mobile phones and tickets were mentioned specifically),
• sudden changes in selling activity such as a shift in prices or inventory.

The majority of reserves will be 10% or less, though there is no stated maximum and PayPal have confirmed that holds of 40% are possible.

21-day holds may now be applied to off-eBay transactions. Yes, you may get holds on website transactions as well as eBay ones. The release for these holds will be the same as eBay: proof of delivery or 21 days without a complaint (positive feedback won’t, obviously, be applicable to off-eBay transactions).

Account-based holds rather than transaction-based holds. Rather than looking at individual transactions, PayPal will now be looking at sellers’ overall activity. In other words, they’re looking at you, not your buyers:

good sellers who had one strange looking transaction will no longer see a hold, but sellers who have a bad run of disputes or negative feedback might start seeing holds placed on their account until things calm down.

Previously, sellers with more than 100 feedbacks, who had been registered for longer than 6 months and who had buyer dissatisfaction rates of less than 5% had been told they would never suffer a hold: now it seems that may not be so cut and dried, as a run of bad feedback or complaints could get a hold slapped on your account.

Indeed, not even eBay’s biggest sellers are immune now: White Elephant Media, one of eBay.com’s biggest media stores with a feedback score of 327,000, has recently closed down operations, due, they say, to being asked by PayPal to hold over half a million dollars in reserve:

Our PayPal/eBay account was closed November 18, 2009, after selling successfully on eBay for almost 6 years. Several weeks ago, we were asked by PayPal to give them a “deposit” so we could keep accepting PayPal payments. … At first PayPal asked for us to pay $212k into this deposit account. They expected it to be funded in about 3 months. On November 13th, … PayPal increased the amount they needed in our “deposit” account to $600k. … They closed our account after we indicated it would be impossible to come up with $600,000 in about 6 weeks during the holidays. Why they wanted more than a half a million dollars and when it would be repaid if ever was exceptionally nebulous and never explained to us. 48 hours after we were locked out of our account, there was well over $230k in the account. That is the money we use to pay for our merchandise and postage. We were denied access to it and therefore we are unable to operate.

If it could happen to White Elephant, it could happen to you.

So what can sellers do about it?

Firstly, bear in mind that it could happen. Many of the sellers I’ve talked to about this have said that their biggest problem was lack of warning. Some weren’t even aware that PayPal *could* put this kind of hold on their account.

Secondly, remember that this is about PayPal’s assessment of the riskiness of your account. Be realistic about that. Some areas *do* have the potential cause more trouble than others (mobile phones and tickets as PayPal said; I’d add software, refurbished electronics and designer clothing to that). If your courier consistently damages goods, or you’re using a less-than-reliable drop-shipper, or your customer service procedures are not keeping up with the level of your business, then you are at risk.

If you want to carry on trading on eBay, dropping PayPal is not an option. But you should (everyone should) consider if and how their business would survive without eBay and/or PayPal. Do you have an alternative? Is it *enough* of an alternative that you could ramp it up to replace eBay if you had to?

And if PayPal put a 10% hold on your turnover, could you trade through that? For those who take their buyers’ payments and use them to pay a drop-shipper, I suspect the answer is no. But – especially after this incredibly difficult year – many more retailers are cutting their cash-flow ever closer, using this week’s takings to buy next week’s stock. This is trimming it far too fine.

Look realistically at your cash flow and consider what would happen to your business if 10% of it were held for 180 days. If you couldn’t survive, then PayPal isn’t your problem – your cash flow is the problem, and you need to reassess it, and build up a cushion to protect you not only against PayPal holds but against any other unexpected thing that might be thrown at you.

eBay’s help page confirms that listings can be edited in bulk and that fixed price listings don’t need to be ended to make the VAT changes. Changing prices to take account of VAT is more time consuming as you’ll need to calculate them for each listing (unless you sell everything at the same price). Personally I won’t be editing prices, mainly because I never changed them a year ago when VAT dropped to 15%.

There are bound to be some listings sold with the wrong VAT rate unless you edit your listings at the stroke of midnight. If you use Selling Manager Pro you’ll be able to manually edit the inclusive VAT rate prior to printing invoices on the Sales Record page.

If you intend running auctions over the New Year make sure that you use the new 17.5% VAT rate when you launch your listings. Although they’ll display the wrong VAT rate for the last few days of 2009, when they end after January 1st 2010 the correct rate will be used.

Will you be changing your prices when the VAT rates change? Or like me did you not change them when the rate dropped?

One of the reasons for this is that it would result in less TRS than keeping the status quo. I can sympathise with eBay here as if they changed the rules again and took away TRS status from those who currently hold it there would be uproar. However it can only mean that those who would suffer if the rules changed have more recent low DSR scores than those that would benefit.

Leaving the status quo continues to penalise sellers who have low DSRs from before August when TRS was announced. There are only two viable options if you’ve got low ratings last summer and still have six or seven months before they drop off the radar:

1) Up your selling volume to become a volume seller – if you sell more than 400 items in a three month period you’ll be measured on the most recent three months sales only.

2) Open a new eBay account and scrap your old one – If you have a buying account more than two months old you can qualify as a PowerSeller and TRS within a month. Simply sell more than £2250, at least twelve items and get 100 feedback and you’re there. If you don’t have an existing eBay account opened at least two months ago then it’ll take you three months to qualify as a TRS.

Compared to waiting until the middle of next year to be a TRS on your existing account, option 2 above is the most attractive course of action. Don’t forget that if you start selling on an existing buying account today you could qualify for discounts as a TRS in January. If you stick with your existing selling ID then your discounts will be slashed by 15% or more in the new year compared to those that qualify as a TRS.

Why eBay would be happy for you to abandon your existing account transfer your listings to a new selling account and qualify for TRS but won’t let you qualify on your current selling ID is beyond me. If you want to be TRS open a new selling account today, it’s easier than reviving your existing selling ID and if you don’t eBay will financially penalise you with the drastically lower discounts.

Finally if you don’t have a spare eBay ID that you’ve been using as a buying account go and open a couple of new eBay accounts today. Sell a few items on them and then continue to use them as buying accounts – you never know when the next eBay rule change will trash your selling account and you’ll need an emergency selling account already set up and ready to go.

The Q&A after the official content is well worth listening too as there’s information on the likes of how best to work with Best Match when selling one off unique items (and the answer wasn’t just to use auctions ) and also the promise of a tool in the near future to help you understand how your impressions, item clicks and sales are performing.

Disclosure – ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

Last year Monday 8th December was the busiest online shopping day of the 2008, so Simon is betting on Monday 7th December being the top shopping day in 2009 for Internet businesses. Starting auctions on Friday this week will ensure that they’re ending and at the top of search on the 8th to take full advantage of the predicted influx of buyers.

Regardless whether or not Simon’s prediction is spot on, there’s no doubt that next week buyers will be busily spending their last pay cheque before Christmas, so here are our top tips for making the most of the holiday selling season:

Tips for making the most of Christmas

1. Increase the number of auctions you run concurrently on eBay. Auctions are the one way to guarantee you get to the top of the search results page.

2. Add “Buy It Now” feature to eBay auction listings.
3. Schedule eBay listings in advance to ensure they’ll finish at the best time on the busiest days.
4. Top up inventory on fixed price listings and your website – Don’t run out of stock and lose your position in eBay Best Match.
5. Add Best Offer to your fixed price eBay listings. Consider automating accept/decline on Best Offers if you don’t already.
6. Use Markdown Manager on eBay and discounts on your website to attract buyers with discounts.
7. Use Featured First for products for which you have deep inventory.
8. Review shipping options, offer customers guaranteed fast shipping options such as Royal Mail Special Delivery or 24 hour courier.
9. Use email marketing to promote season goods and special offers to your website mailing list and eBay shop subscribers.
10. Send out discount vouchers for your website valid from January 1st with all orders. Offer incentives to keep customers buying from you after the holidays.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

Aside from those 180m new potential new buyers, eBay have made it easier to trade overseas recently. TRS status is dependent on domestic DSRs only, so there’s less danger of slower international deliveries bringing your average down. There’s now the potential to control which countries you ship to more closely than ever before, so if there’s a particular European country you don’t want to ship to, you don’t have to cut off the rest of Europe in order to avoid them.

Apart from eBay, the very weakness of the pound makes British shopping incredibly attractive on the continent: when £1 is more or less €1, it’s often cheaper to buy from the UK and have it shipped over, than it is to buy in domestic markets. If you’re restricting your sales to the cash-strapped British, you might be doing yourself a disfavour.

So here, with my buyer’s hat on, are my top tips for selling to non-UK buyers:

Know what the postal options are, and what they mean
If you’re going to list items as available outside the UK, you need to be able to advise your buyers what shipping is likely to cost. For most sellers, that will mean airmail small packets: Royal Mail rates are here. There are two tariffs, Europe, and the rest of the world (here’s a list of what’s included in Europe). Airmail reaches most countries within 5 days.

Surface mail is cheaper but is much, much slower than airmail, e.g. RM estimate up to six weeks to North America. Unless you really like PayPal chargebacks, this is a false economy.

If you sell anything that could be time-sensitive – e.g. car parts or computer spares – know what an overnight courier would cost, and if you could make that available.

Insure appropriately
If insurance is needed, you can add International Signed For to any Airmail or Surface price for £3.70. Some sellers add this to every £5 t-shirt or 99p CD they sell. This is offputting not only because of the expense, but because it tends to read as “I don’t trust you, I don’t really want non-UK buyers”. If you wouldn’t send it special delivery in the UK, it doesn’t need to go ISF.

Tell us what postal service we’re paying for
If you’re going to charge me £7 to post a t-shirt or £25 to post a pair of shoes (both real examples), let me know what postal service I’m paying for. If you send everything by courier or ISF, I want to know; if I’m paying five times stamp price because you want to “put foreign buyers off”, I want to know about that too.

Communicate about delivery times
Either alter your standard dispatch email to take account of overseas deliveries, or send an extra email to foreign buyers. Under-promise. A buyer who’s been told delivery could take 1-2 weeks will be delighted if their parcel arrives in 4-5 days. A buyer who’s just had your standard domestic dispatch email telling them the parcel will probably arrive tomorrow is going to be disappointed.

They’re all about duty (and customs)
If you’re shipping within the EU, you won’t normally need customs documentation.

Outside the EU, you’ll need a CN22 form for goods up to £270 in value, and the more complex CN23 for more valuable parcels. These can be picked up from post offices, or downloaded from RM. The following EU destinations *do* need a CN22/CN23: Channel Islands, Andorra, Canary Islands, Gibraltar, San Marino, Vatican City State.

Royal Mail has more advice about customs documention.

If you ship by courier, they will advise you exactly what paperwork they need from you (there’s normally a lot more than if you just ship by post!).

Buyers outside the EU whose countries have low import thresholds will often ask you to falsify customs paperwork to help them avoid import duties. Don’t. If you’re caught, it’s you that’s made the false declaration, so it’s you that takes the rap. Remember to include a note that buyers may be charged import duties on your listings in line with eBay’s policy; that way if you receive non-positive feedback over customs issues, it can be removed. If you do this, it’s also worth saying even more prominently that EU buyers won’t be charged customs.

PayPal n’est pas mon ami
Though eBay likes to think that PayPal is the one size that fits all, different countries have their own preferences for payment, based on the quirks of their banking systems. The French like cheques. German, Belgian and Dutch buyers like bank transfers. You might think you can’t help, but check with your bank whether you can accept these payments, and what it would cost you.

If your bank won’t cash non-sterling cheques, then Auctionchex will.

If you shout loud enough…
Be prepared for some ASQs in other languages; Google Translate will help you turn them into English. If your listing is in English, it’s okay to reply in English too. It’s always easier to translate *into* your native tongue, so let your buyers do that rather than sending them Babelfish-mangled communications in their own language. Learn “sorry I don’t speak…” in a few languages, and send the translate link with your message. Keep responses to short, simple sentences and your potential buyer should be able to translate them easily enough.

Be clear
If you’re excluding countries from shipping, say so. On eBay (or your website), block purchases from countries you don’t ship to. Don’t let people buy and then refund them with insulting messages about their postal services (yes, it happens). And finally…

No one thinks of themselves as foreign
Don’t refer to “overseas” buyers on your listings. I learned this one the hard way:

US buyer: … and I’ll be sending you a personal check.
Me: Ah, no, my listing says overseas buyers have to pay with PayPal.
Her: But I’m not overseas!

Spell it out: US/Canadian buyers, European buyers, and so on. The more clearly you can communicate, the more you make it look as though you’re used to dealing with buyers from all over the world, the more attractive your listings will be to those buyers.

Billed as “Making Best Match Work For You“, the webinar will be hosted by ChannelAdvisor and eBay with Susanne Kaden, Manager Best Match Europe for eBay on hand to answer your questions and give tips on how you can improve your listings visibility.

This is one event not to miss, the opportunity to put your Best Match questions to the experts. There’s been a lot of interest in Best Match since the articles appeared, even as far away as Australia. Yesterday I was invited onto the Oz Round Table forum to talk about Best Match strategies and found that the Aussies have pretty much the same questions as us in the UK. If you’ve still got Best Match questions there’s no one better placed than Susanne to answer them.

Sign up early for the Best Match webinar as places are limited.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay