One of the nice things about the service is how they handle item descriptions. While eBay allow to include images, graphics and HTML code in item description, Amazon restricts the content of the descriptions to text only. During the export Export Your Store strips out HTML from the description on eBay and imports a clean description to Amazon.

Additionally Amazon descriptions have to be generic as other sellers can list against the same ASIN. Product details, should not include any merchant-specific information. This includes business name, pricing information, or shipping information. During the export Export Your Store review and learn the way your eBay description looks and configure their system to automatically adjust your product descriptions to fit Amazon requirements. This stage is complicated, and handled by humans. Based on the number of the listings, the export process may take few days.

There is no back end administration area or new processes to learn, Export your store recognised that sellers are busy people and so enable you to carry on handling your inventory in whichever way you currently manage it. For example, if you are an eBay seller expanding to Amazon, you can continue manage your products on eBay (Add new items, end items, change inventory quantities) and they will do the hard work automatically behind the scenes to make sure that the changes are reflected on Amazon.

Costs vary according to how many products you have but start for sellers with 50 items with one time fee of $19 for export, with ongoing inventory sync and automatic export of new products costing $19 per/month. This rises to $149 for export of 1,000 products with ongoing inventory sync and automatic export costing $29 per/month.

Actinic Online is already more than just an eCommerce shopping cart solution – it also allows you to sell on eBay, Amazon and promote your products on Facebook directly from your Actinic Online admin console as well as enabling you to retrieve and process your orders from the marketplaces you sell on. Now you can also fully automate your accounts with Sage 50 Accounts 2012.

Key features

• Transfer all orders (sales orders and invoices) directly from Actinic Online into Sage 50 Accounts 2012
• Customer and product records transfer from Sage 50 Accounts seamlessly into Actinic Online
• Retains customer discounts allocated within Sage
• Customer log-in enables unique pricing at the website and stored address details
• Reads Sage field descriptions ‘Web Description’, ‘Web Image’ and ‘Web Custom Fields’ to give control over how products appear online.

If you’re already an Actinic Online customer then this new integration makes Sage look a very attractive accounting option. If you’re a Sage customer then it’s time to take a look at Actinic Online especially if you’re in the market for a webstore solution.

I’m not sure how this one came about – a fee credit should surely preclude the possibility of the buyer opening a case? Even worse there is no option in the Resolution Centre to respond to a case with “The buyer never paid and I received my FVF credit”.

Thankfully a telephone call to Customer Support resolved the matter and our reader is resting comfortably in the knowledge that Customer Support has reviewed the case and made a final decision; “We’ve decided not to issue the buyer with a refund. You don’t need to do anything else for this case“. Even better the case won’t be counted when eBay evaluates seller performance and their seller dashboard will be updated.

I guess all’s well that ends well, but how can a buyer open a case wanting a refund when they never paid to start with?

Gary has run some rough figures based on an item selling on a mobile device every second. Mobile accounts for 10% of eBay UK sales, so that works out to around 864,000 total sales a day, or 1 sale per day for every 6.5 of eBay’s 17 million unique monthly visitors to eBay.

There are only three ways eBay can grow and the most obvious two are to increase the number of sales per user and secondly to grow the number of users.

Growing eBay UK Users

eBay have 17 million unique visitors each month, but there are only just over 60 million people in the UK. Roughly 20% of the UK population are below the age of 16 so that gives us a total available eBay user base of 48 million to work with.

There is a small but significant part of the population, like my dear mother, who simply don’t and won’t use the Internet for anything. No matter how much I offer to set her up with a free laptop and Internet connection she’s just not interested.

Many families share an eBay account and eBay can’t easily distinguish between a husband and wife logging into the same account on the same computer. I also know many families with children over the age of 16 who still use their parents eBay accounts rather than their own. You can probably divide the 48 million available users in half to get a reasonably accurate estimate of 24 million as the total potential monthly users for eBay.

Now that we’re down to about 24 million potential users, eBay’s 17 million unique visitors per month starts to look close to saturation point. There simply aren’t that many more available users in the UK to log on to eBay as 70% of the available population already do.

Growing eBay Sales

This is the one area that eBay have been focussing on for the past five years. This is the reason it was so important to stop upsetting buyers by allowing sellers to leave them negative feedback. This is the reason that eBay created Top Rated Sellers and attempted to guide buyers to sellers who provide great service.

eBay simply can’t afford to have unhappy buyers and do and must continue to ensure every sale on eBay results in a happy buying experience. This is also why they run programs to reactivate dormant buyers with mailings and discounts from time to time. There could be as many dormant eBay buyers out there then there are potential brand new buyers to the site!

There are still a number of buyers out there who don’t buy on eBay, often consumers who buy on Amazon do so exclusively and won’t touch eBay. This is why eBay have been focussing so heavily on Outlets and Daily Deals to attract the few non-eBay customers out there to the site to make their first purchase. Once a new buyer has made their first purchase they’ll often go on to buy from other non-outlet eBay sellers but the potential numbers of new customers are still limited compared to the 17 million already using eBay.

Cross Border Trade

The final way for eBay UK to grow is to look outside the UK. Cross border trader gives access to a new pool of potential customers and this is more important to the UK than to any other eBay territory in the world.

The two biggest eBay countries – the US and Germany – still have plenty of room to grow to catch up with eBay UK’s market penetration. The UK market is saturated through so to continue growth selling overseas is the only way to increase sales.

eBay are likely to continue efforts to encourage sellers to list with overseas shipping and to display UK listings on sites like eBay.com, eBay Germany and eBay Australia. By supplying UK located products into countries where there is a shortage of inventory in certain categories they can continue to increase demand for sellers.

Switch from offline to online retail

There is still room for online retail as a whole to grow within the UK. Internet sales for January 2012 were about 11.9% of all retail sales, that’s an increase from around 8.9% of all retail sales in January 2011. The general switch by consumers from offline to online should assist eBay in growing sales, but this in itself won’t be sufficient to deliver the growth figures they and sellers need.

Technology enabling buyers to buy anywhere on any device and the blurring of online and offline commerce will grow online sales and this is why eBay are investing so heavily in solutions for the future.

How can eBay UK grow users and sales?

eBay need to hold on to every buyer they have, they need to attract the relatively small proportion of the population who don’t already use eBay and they need to increase cross border trade. eBay will grow as online commerce grows, but their aim has to be to grow faster then eCommerce as a whole.

Currently they are succeeding, but this task will become harder and harder in the future and ultimately cross border trade offers the biggest potential to keep online traders happily selling on eBay.

Disclaimer: All of the figures used in this article are best estimates unless otherwise indicated and should not be relied on for accuracy

Devin explained in the Telegraph that people are turning to the Internet for deals, and the recession has actually encouraged people to use eBay. More interesting 10% of eBay’s UK traffic is now via mobile devices. With some 17 million visitors a month that’s a lot of browsers on phones and tablets and one item per second is now purchased via a mobile device.

ChannelAdvisor say that figures for their clients mirrors eBay’s – Seamus Whittingham, ChannelAdvisor EMEA MD say that their customers have seen a 22% increase in UK sales through eBay, which supports Devin’s statement of “Double digit growth” in the UK.

Of course much of this growth can be attributed to eBay working with high street retailers, but from what I hear buyers initially attracted to a Daily Deal or purchase from an eBay Outlet tend to go on to buy more items from regular eBay sellers.

What the Telegraph also failed to mention is the explosion in cross border trade – eBay sellers are seeing ever increasing sales from overseas in Europe and across the world, even as far away as Australia.

Are you seeing your eBay business grow and are your sales increasing inline with eBay’s double digit growth? Where is the growth coming from, is it domestic sales or cross border trade?

So goes the argument some buyers are better than others, some pay fast, some pay slowly, some are good communicators and others aren’t – eBay only works with both buyers and sellers so why can’t buyers be rated?

Going back just a few years most sellers will remember being able to leave buyers negative and neutral comments as well as positive comments. eBay did away with this quite simply because when a buyer received anything other than a positive feedback their buying activity on the site plummeted (or they just never made another purchase). eBay does need both buyers and sellers, but buyers are the people who are hard to find – sellers are queuing up to compete on eBay.

The Guardian discussed buyer feedback at the time buyer negatives and neutrals were retired, and dear Sue (who was never shy about telling it like it is) was quoted as saying “Who gives a flying fuck if you can neg a buyer? Does Donald Trump/Richard Branson/Jeff Bezos neg buyers? No. Have a think about why that might be“. Upsetting buyers isn’t great business and rating them with low stars would be just as bad as leaving a big red dot on their feedback.

Now we all know that some buyers are just trouble, but the vast majority aren’t. Every time I’ve heard of people sharing their blocked bidder lists I’ve gently smiled and passed on by (especially the time a PowerSeller discovered to their dismay that they were on another PowerSeller’s blocked bidder list ). The thing is I’ve had buyers who couldn’t buy from me because they’d “upset” another seller and had received unpaid item strikes or similar. Every time a buyer has approached me and politely asked if I’d allow them to bid they’ve been the perfect customer. Just because you have a bad experience with them doesn’t mean that I will.

Not only that but there are some sellers out there who quite frankly aren’t up to the job. Some sellers always think that they are right and the customer is wrong and it’s this group of sellers which made it imperative for eBay to protect buyers and stop sellers leaving them feedback.

If a buyer is genuinely trouble then buyer blocks should soon root them out – you can easily block buyers who have more than 2 unpaid item strikes in the last 6 months, who have a negative feedback score (nigh on impossible these days unless they’ve sold rather than bought) or who have too many policy breaches. Plus these days eBay themselves weed out prolific low DSR scoring buyers and do on occasion remove their scores from seller feedback.

Overall we need buyers. The UK eBay market is the most highly penetrated in the world (17 million visit eBay at least once a month – that’s about 1 in 3 of the total UK population!). There aren’t that many new buyers out there to attract to eBay so we need to do everything we can to avoid upsetting the ones we have.

Should we be able to rate buyers? Well no! Firstly because we can’t afford to upset them but more importantly because it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference anyway. I don’t check buyer feedback before they bid or click the Buy It Now button because I can’t. I don’t know who’s about to buy from me next. If I can’t vet my buyers until they’ve already purchased there’s no point retrospectively checking their feedback to confirm I’ve found an awkward customer when I’ve already discovered they’re awkward – I’ll just deal with them to the best of my ability and move on.

Amazon’s top music rankings have been dominated today with her music with eight out of the top 10 Best Sellers in Music based on Amazon customer purchases being Whitney albums.

It’s somehow a shame that the death of a superstar instantly makes them more profitable then when they were still alive, but at the end of the day if you’ve got some Whitney memorabilia hanging around that you want to sell there’ll never be a better time than now. Sales on eBay also appear to be pretty brisk, but on both eBay and Amazon interest in Whitney is stronger in the US than the UK, so list your items on Amazon.com and eBay.com instead of European sites.

Actinic will be holding a webinar and live product demonstration on the 7th February starting at 11am which will show:

• The benefits of selling on eBay, Amazon and promoting your products on Facebook
• How to list your items on marketplaces and on the largest social media platform right from your Actinic Online admin console
• How to retrieve and process your orders

If you already use Actinic, or if you’re looking for an ecommerce website solution then register in advance to attend the webinar.

Last year’s Spring Seller Update was released in mid-March, so there’s probably a good few weeks before we find out what eBay have in store for us this year, but what would you like to see?

If you were eBay and planning changes to selling (or buying!) what are the first things you’d change and why? Would it be feedback, fees, categories and seller standards which are the main areas last year’s changes affected, or are there other things you’d like to see eBay change?

I’ve blogged previously on the problem of Illegal Business Seller Terms on eBay on a couple of occasions. In April this year while browsing as a buyer and 3 out of 5 of the outlet sellers I looked at that day had illegal seller terms and put me right off buying from them … yes the eBayAnorak bought from Amazon, not the first time.

So, how much responsibility should eBay take for its Top Rated Business Sellers who continually flout the law and the EC Distance Selling Regulations as regard returns and refunds?

As a ‘selling venue’ is eBay responsible for the Top Rated Sellers’ it promotes from front page, outlet & deal of the day etc? Should eBay check that they are compliant with the law along with the other criteria for entry?

As I type this, a very large national retailer all over the eBay front page is charging a 10% restocking fee for returned items over £25. Ultimately the retailer is responsible for their T&C’s. eBay promote the ‘good buyer experience’ how can they promote a good buying experience at the same time as promoting companies with illegal seller terms that actually give a bad buying experience.

I firmly believe that in most cases this is an education issue eBay has made it easy for the Mumpreneur, the front room/garage based business and the teenage start up to progress in the world of online retailing at low cost and so are unaware they are breaking the law. Learning about Distant Selling Regulations, EC Rulings and UK business law is usually not on the priority list.

eBay, please, what does it take to send out an email or short multiple choice button survey to all new business registered sellers to let them know that these phrases/terms are not permitted?

But, Outlet sellers’ shame on you, you should know better, some of you have been bought to book before.

Terms like:

• We are not responsible for items lost in the post (Yes you are!)
• We charge X% restocking fee (No you can’t!
• Buyer has option of shipping insurance in case of damage in transit (Seller responsible until it reaches the hands of the buyer)
• Refund less PayPal & eBay fees (fraud as they get fees back from refunds
• Refund less original P&P (Refund including original P&P)
• No returns, or no returns unless faulty (this applied to items relating to returns due to hygiene reasons; buyers have the right to change their minds)

The list goes on …

Business Sellers, give your buyers a reason to purchase from you not 10 reasons to be scared to, know the rights of your buyers and your legal obligations as a seller.

eBay, take some responsibility for those sellers you promote.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer but advise you read this OFT (Office of Fair Trading) document on the Distance Selling Regulations