Of course no such article would be complete today without advice on how to protect your Detailed Seller Ratings and Mark covers this as well along with how to give gold star service and handle eBay communications.

Mark has done his homework with quotes from Angus McCarey, eBay’s Retail Director, Patrick Munden, eBay Head of Communications and he’s even squeezed in a quote from TameBay.

There’s advice for everyone trading on eBay whether it be how to rack up your customer service a notch, how to get to grips with eBay search, or just how to lower your eBay fees then the article is worth perusing.

If you’re near a reputable newsagent or WHSmith then a copy will set you back a mere £5.99, but as an added bonus you’ll find a £50.00 Google adwords voucher inside (valid to 14/2/12 dropping to £35.00 until 31/3/12). That’ll pay for the magazine and more, but to be honest if you run an eBay business (or especially if you are thinking of setting up an eBay business) then this is a must read article.

You can also buy the digital version of the .net magazine with the eBay article direct from the .net website, or directly from Apple for the iPad or iPhone.

Angus McCarey, director of eBay Enterprise, said “The Fashion Outlet is our fastest growing sales channel.” Fashion sales have grown 25% in the last year. Since launch in May, sales through Fashion Outlet have generated around £4m revenue for the brands sellling through the site.

eBay’s publicity remains relentlessly about the brands. Angus again: “We know that consumers are increasingly looking for a range of high-quality high street goods at low prices, and eBay’s Fashion Outlet provides them with the ability to purchase goods from the brands they love.”

Is there any good news for smaller sellers in all this? It’s to be hoped that there is a knock-on effect from promoting eBay as a destination site for fashion shoppers. The bizarrely unusable category landing page for Clothing, Shoes and Accessories does feature items from non-outlet sellers. With 4.6 million buyers purchasing fashion items from eBay UK in the three months from May this year, at least some of them must end up in the shops of underpromoted smaller sellers. Mustn’t they?

If US sellers are anything like UK sellers this one will kick up a stink as sellers complain it’s another knock for Store owners and that the link should be kept to promote sellers who have invested in their eBay store.

Most significant is a change to the navigation bar at the top of the page. “eBay Motors” has been added, and some users are reporting seeing a “Fashion Outlet” button here as well as the normal “Outlet” one. This presumably is linking to the new fashion site for brands: contrary to what eBay told us at the time, the general Outlets tab has stayed too.

Non-outlet sellers are quite rightly asking why, when this tiny group of stores merits two links, we can’t have the old “Shops” tab back as well: there’s plenty of room left on that navigation bar.

Then there are a bunch of fiddly little changes that will doubtless cause eBay users to wonder why those things are being changed when there are Great Big Things that need fixing rather a lot more urgently. The disappearance of the underlining on forum topic titles has caused some comment, with even eBay UK’s community manager saying that “personally I’m not a fan” of the change.

For no good reason I can see, the Search button at the top of the page sometimes goes lime green. This one sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t for me. Confused? You soon will be.

There are also changes to the details shown in search results, with seller name showing in list view, and proximity in gallery view. Seller name is a nice idea: as a buyer, I like to be able to spot my favourites and avoid some other sellers easily, and for sellers, it all adds to name recognition.

Proximity though is largely-useless crud on the page – I honestly don’t care if a CD or a pair of shoes comes from Lands End or John O’Groats. If I were in the market for a big heavy bit of furniture, I’d be more than happy to do a special search by area just for that, but it’s not needed for the vast majority of eBay purchases, and is only going to lead to more buyers expecting lowered postage costs “because you’re only down the road from me” (think I’m joking? I’m so not).

Many thanks to Jon from Beatchapter for the screenshots and the heads up.

What have you seen? If you’ve spotted anything we haven’t, leave us a comment (and grab a screenshot if you can).

(And ten points to the house of your choice for the movie in the title.)

Updated to add:
Pics of the old and new versions of search supplied by the lovely Darth Baggins:

	Old version
	New version

The new version seems to make better use of screen space – and it didn’t take long for them to start shrinking the TRS badge, did it?!

Spot the difference

Although this is currently a test I’d expect to see it roll out for all users in the near future. Back in November eBay removed the shops module from eBay.com, and now their testing in the UK unless some surprising results come up the shops module is pretty much history.

It’s also worth noting that for both eBay.com and eBay UK SIF listings (shop inventory format) are no longer available. When much of a sellers inventory could be hidden from the main search results there was a strong case for higher shop visibility. Today Best Match is supposed to surface the best matching listings across the entire site so driving traffic to shops appear less of a priority. Having said that some categories attract browsers who want to pick and mix from a selection from a single seller so removing matching shops could affect some more than others.

eBay say that the module is very rarely used (except by sellers) and the reason for it’s removal is to speed up page load times. I have a better idea for them though… how about removing some of the off-eBay adverts as that’d save a fair amount of bandwidth!

Removing the graphics used to build these modules will result in faster page loads and eBay say that faster page loads directly correlate to more sales. They also say that they don’t see many clicks to these two sections of the search result pages so impact should be minimal.

In the mean time many UK sellers are still sore at losing the Shops tab from the top of eBay pages. Personally I think there’s less justification for keeping that page element – On eBay UK there are no Shop Inventory Format (SIF) listings left, every item is in main search. There really is no need to direct buyers to a shops search to reveal additional items when every item is visible in the main site search. That’s not the case on eBay.com where SIF listings still exist and 10s of 1000s of items can’t be found from the main site search.

Removing shops visibility is always a touchy subject for eBay sellers, but do the modules really make a difference to sales? I’m pretty sure that there are some strong opinions out there but ultimately eBay are the only ones who see the full click through rates for the definitive answer. What’s your gut feeling though? Do the shops links make a difference to your sales on eBay?

Via Auctionbytes

What do the monthly subscriptions for “shop & template” and “image hosting” pay for?
Shop and template covers the hosting of the actual graphics which make up the design and branding inside a store and a listing template. Every time a listing or a store is viewed that means a call to our servers so that the graphics can be displayed. The fees we charge represent our costs, which with popular items and popular sellers – can be quite expensive.
Image hosting is exactly what it says – this is optional for eBay sellers. We also offer a website solution where our hosting is required.

Why did you charge for the NSE update on top of the monthly “shop & template subscription”?
We invest an incredible amount of time and money into developing our product and regularly launch free updates, which are often based on customer requests for enhancements etc. When eBay released NSE it meant a complete graphical structure change to the basic store template and in addition changed the way in which code had to be delivered. For any designer delivering advanced graphics (not basic logo and picture!) It meant a massive structural and coding re-write.

A popular misconception has been that the monthly subscription covers everything from hosting to free updates to 24/7 phone support. It would be great if we could offer all this for just £15 a month but unfortunately that is not economically viable.

Why have you started charging for support?
Frooition is committed to providing great customer service by ensuring that customers can keep selling successfully without problems. Our software is really strong and robust and now we have a great support solution, which suits all budgets. Whether urgent response times are needed or clients simply want minor changes making here and there we have a support structure to deal with it.

Can I still get support without paying?
Absolutely, we have a whole suite of video tutorials, a knowledge base, faq’s, a forum and a ticket system with a guaranteed response time. We are constantly adding to our knowledge base and video library to bring you the most up to date information, as well as hints and tips to help improve your workflow.

Do I have to pay if I find a bug/error.
Of course not, whether it’s a bug or a feature we don’t currently offer we have a facility for customers to notify us so that we can fix and perhaps include updates in future versions of our software.

Some say that Frooition have run out of cash and are now desperate to get cash off customers since the investors have left.
I am actually really pleased to say that Frooition is a profitable business and is completely self supporting. It’s true the seed investors are no longer involved in the business on a day to day basis and this is because the business has a strong and capable management team who are driving the business forward. Frooition continues to deliver great results for clients as well as the capacity to develop new exciting products and services for the future.

What do you say to users who think the Frooition NSE is not as fully implemented as the old Frooition shops – why is the design cost still the same when effectively you’re only doing one page?
NSE has meant change and there are huge pluses to the way the new store looks and feels. We have much more flexibility in terms of the style design and branding we can deliver per page within eBay’s guidelines. Listing templates are completely unaffected and there’s still loads we can do with these.

Why do you not template all shop pages when other designers do?
We work really closely with eBay to ensure that our designs are compliant. EBay are retiring their old storefront on May 20th2009. Frooition customers who have upgraded to NSE are 100% safe and compliant.

Using certain versions of Internet Explorer there is a pop-up blocker when clicking on custom promo boxes and the frooflow box – can you (when will you) fix this?
Currently links from the promo boxes on the new store experience launch to a new browser window. Following feedback from clients we realize that some browser toolbars maybe blocking these links. We will be implementing a change to this to launch links within the same browser window, which we will be rolling out automatically to all of our NSE clients with the next few weeks.

Why don’t shop categories on live listings update?
Categories can be updated within the frooition software, this does change this information dynamically both within the storefront and a users listings. EBay’s change to its store front does mean that the categories are displayed differently, but frooition has added tools to its software to enable users to change categories that will also change category content within live listings.

Similarly the “more items” box doesn’t update on live listings.
The “more items” cross promotion box on listings does update dynamically, even on live listings, this information is directly collected from an users eBay account, and the information contained within a “more items” promo box is wholly dependent on the cross promotion settings within a store owner’s eBay account.

Any comment on certain people’s insistence that your templates have been breaking eBay’s rules for years. Is the Frooition NSE fully compliant with eBay regulations.
LOL– yes, Frooition are 100% compliant and continue to set the standard in leading eBay design. With over a million live listings at any one time and combined feedback of over 11 million – we work very closely with eBay, they see everything we do so of course we are compliant and more importantly so are our clients.

There are reports your hosting was down on the weekend of the 25th/26th. Was this a temporary glitch or could it happen again?
Frooition continue to invest significantly in our dedicated server farm (hosted and managed by Rackspace in Dallas) to cope with growing demand for our services, and this is exactly what the hosting and subscription fees cover. The froo infrastructure has been designed and built with best of breed hardware, software, and network products from providers including HP, Cisco, Red Hat, MySQL, Panther and High-Availability.Com.

In order to significantly bolster system capacity and performance, on we recently implemented a new high-end database cluster and seamlessly brought it online with no disruption to any of our clients.

After this most recent investment, even during peak traffic times, our infrastructure is now running at less than 10% server capacity and we have a massively scalable infrastructure that will continue to grow with us.
 
 
Frooition will be reading responses to this thread and are happy to answer any additional questions. It would be helpful if you could state in your comments if you are either a Frooition customer, work for an eBay services provider (or eBay), or if you simply have a casual interest in the topic.

Disclosure: Frooition advertise with TameBay.

A company is looking to set up their first shop on eBay and like everyone else have started out with zero feedback. They need to open a shop (minimum 10 feedback or PayPal verified) and want to make use of fixed price listings (minimum 10 feedback and PayPal verified) so the quickest way to achieve this is from buying.

Needless to say when I advised them to get a budget from their manager and go spending they had no hesitation in doing just that. A spending spree on office funds, what could be better? I suggested mundane items such as paper, ink, toner and staples but they had much better ideas. £700 for a new CCTV system? Not a problem, we’ve been meaning to get one for ages!

Two hours and well over £1000 later and they’ve already got their first two feedback from sellers that leave feedback on payment. Just another eight to go which in all likelihood will come from sellers with automatic feedback left on receipt of feedback so it might take a couple of days. They’ve bought more than 10 items to make sure they get more than the 10 feedback needed

Buying is fun though, even when it’s at third hand it’s still exciting. Most sellers spend all their time on eBay selling – if you’ve not been on a buying spree for some time then Christmas is just the excuse you need to go spending.

There’s a good business justification for buying on eBay as well – how will you know the pitfalls your buyers have to face and how search works unless you genuinely use the site yourself as well? Buying is the perfect way to spend a morning and it’s justifiable as “work”.

In view of the fee changes and possible discounts which level eBay shop should you subscribe to? eBay have a microsite which goes into the changes in depth including a cute (and useful) shop fee illustrator.

What this site doesn’t cover is the added benefits of shops over and above pure fee discounts, however as a start point it’s worth looking at when BINs justify a shop on their own merits. The following table shows the level eBay shop you should choose based on the number of fixed price listings you have on the site.

An anchor shop had no real advantage over a featured shop in the past, so it’s good to see real anchor shop benefits introduced. Anchor shops are still not suitable for most sellers, only those with over 7500 product lines (not listings!) will be able to justify the cost.

Feature	Basic Shop	Featured Shop	Anchor Shop
Cross Promotions
Shop Categories
Listing Frame
Markdown Manager
Holiday Settings
Minimal Page Header	-
Telephone Support	-
Sales Reports Plus	£3.00
SMP	£4.99
Scheduling*	6p/listing
Email Marketing	1000 free	2500 free	5000 free
Custom Shop Pages	5	10	15
Traffic Reports	Basic	Extended	Extended
Shop Promotion	Basic	Priority	Priority

* Free scheduling requires SMP subscription

If you already use SMP and/or wish to make use of scheduling then the benefits of a featured shop really start to stack up. Sellers with a basic shop but subscribed to SMP should upgrade to a featured shop if they have more than 160 BIN listings live on the site at any one time.

Anchor and Featured Shop subscriptions will come with telephone support, a great bonus for non-PowerSellers who would otherwise be reliant on email support.

Which ever level eBay shop you consider remember that your listing strategy is likely to change.

eBay are encouraging sellers to list just one fixed price listing for each product line. In the past you may have listed the same item on a daily or even hourly basis. When choosing your shop subscription from 24th September you should factor in a reduction in your total number of fixed price listings.

It’s worth considering auctions, even if you don’t currently have them in your listing mix. Fixed price listings will no longer be sorted with “Ending Soonest”, but auctions will. The one way to ensure visibility of your items on the first page of search results is to run auction listings.

The mix of auctions and fixed price listings on the first page of search results will vary by category. In collectible categories I’d expect to see more auctions and in commodity categories it’s likely a higher percentage of fixed price listings will be displayed. It will be worth experimenting to see if auctions attract more buyers both to bid and to drive traffic to your fixed price listings.

We are aware that the changes to shops are making it unprofitable for sellers of low cost, low sell through rate, unique items to list their inventory on eBay. Currently there is no easy solution and it’s hoped eBay will address this situation prior to the changes going live on 24th September or hundreds of thousands of products will disappear from the site.

For sellers of higher priced items the reduction in listing fees and change of listing strategy should make it economically viable to list more product lines in greater quantities.

Finally there are still some notable holes in the fee structure to take advantage of:

• Technology and Media products have lower final value fees
• Multiple quantity fixed price listings will now have lower insertion fees than Dutch Auctions
• Listing enhancements will cost up to 3 times as much for 30 day listings – consider shorter fixed price listings if you have limited stock.

over the next few weeks we’ll be testing how buyers react to different displays of Shops items on eBay UK search results pages. These tests are part of our continual efforts to optimise of how we display items to buyers on eBay.co.uk. The testing will affect a minority of buyers; sellers aren’t required to do anything different or new.

If anyone spots the new search display please let us know what’s being done, or better still grab us a screen shot.

Alun, the designer, has done a fantastic job although I still need to tidy up a couple of custom shop pages. I especially like the way he has changed my brand colours slightly making them deeper and more “mountcomp” than they were before.

One of the things I like best about standard eBay shops is the white space which helps to keep the page clean and fresh. Alun has managed to achieve this whilst injecting colour into the page but without heavy backgrounds.

The shop categories menu now works better than ever – Alun has styled it to make the categories stand out from the sub-categories to assist buyers to find the items they’re looking for.

One of my biggest dislikes of eBay shop search has been removed – I now have a search box which searches titles AND descriptions by default. It also searches my entire shop by every time, instead of just the category the buyer is in. This means if I have products matching a buyers search they’ll always be found. eBay’s standard shop search only looks in the category a buyer is currently browsing, although to be fair eBay do at least now display additional items found in all categories for null search results.

What was most important to me was that the shop looked and felt as much like a standard eBay shop as possible, whilst leveraging the advantages of Frooition technology. This has been achieved admirably retaining the eBay promotion boxes with curvy corners and carrying that theme across to the other display areas on the page.

I’m able to display six key products, automatically select from those available either by price, newly listed/ending soonest, shop category, or a mix of criteria. This enables me to showcase a star item, either an item with great profit, or one that I have large quantities of, and to display a further five items which currently promotes the printers I sell. Whilst the products are chosen automatically from those available a judicious use of criteria pretty much means I can identify the exact products I’d like promoted.

There’s just one thing letting my shop down at the moment, and sad to say that’s down to me and not Frooition – my product photos just aren’t up to standard and all need reshooting and tidying up.

My next job will be to update all of my listings to a new template to match my eBay shop, and that’s where the work begins for me. Up until now Frooition have done all the hard graft. I’m looking forward to it, if they look half as good as my shop they’ll be worth the effort.

Overall I’m extremely pleased with the new design, it’s cleaner, more professional, gentle on the eye, and most important of all it retains everything that was great from a standard eBay shop template and then improves on it.

It’s so much better than my old eBay shop. Quite honestly I think it’s the best looking eBay shop I’ve ever seen.

Google Product Search is a shopping comparison engine, and one that all eBay sellers and ecommerce website owners should become familiar with. According to Scot Wingo we can expect to see a 10x increase in traffic from Google Product in the UK sometime this year, and sellers should be prepped to take advantage.

When Google Products are displayed in search results they’ll be shown as “Shopping Results” and displayed between the three sponsored links (paid adverts) and the natural search results. (In the example pictured there were no paid adverts)

There are a multitude of shopping comparison engines out there – everyone from eBay’s shopping.com to shopzilla, Ciao, Kelkoo and and Nextag. Each has a different format file which you need to create known as a “feed”, and they all have different pricing models. Some charge you on a Cost Per Click basis (CPC), others charge when a buyer makes a purchase (CPA/CPO – Cost Per Acquisition / Cost Per Order), and some like Google Product are free.

Companies such as ChannelAdvisor can manage your feeds and your budget, to list your products to multiple shopping comparison sites. They can adjust the amount you pay per click/acquisition tailoring unique offers and search terms that drive traffic and convert customers. A good feed management company will also filter out items which are not profitable from your data feed, so that you’re not paying for hits that don’t generate business.

Google Product however makes things slightly easier than other shopping comparison sites – they have Google Base Store Connector which can link eBay, Yahoo, or osCommerce shops to Google Product Search for free.

Simply download the Store Connector (software which runs on your PC), and enter in your shop web address. You’ll need to have a Google account, but if you have gmail or use another Google utility you’ll already have one. Store Connector will download all your listings and then it’s the click of a button to upload them to Google.

The downside to using Google Store Connector is that your products will only be indexed for 30 days, so you’ll need to upload your feed monthly at a minimum. To balance this it works with both eBay, and osCommerce shops. Alternatives are to upload your feed manually, set up an automated feed, or to use a third party to do the work for you. ChannelAdvisor have a free evaluation offer if you want to try a Google Product feed from your website.

It’s worth pointing out that it’s possible to generate a product feed on eBay suitable for Google, however that feed will only contain your eBay shop listings. By using the Store Connector you can post both SIF and BIN listings to Google Product Search.

One word of warning… once you’ve set up your Google Base account make sure you edit your display details prior to uploading products. I was daft enough not to and I now have several hundred products on Google Shopping with my email address instead of “Mount Road Computers” as the merchant. Doh!

Everyone selling products online should be uploading a feed to Google, it costs nothing and it should get you more traffic and more sales. Download Google Store Connector and give it a try today.

The time has come for a refresh though, and it’s down to Sue and her experiment with Frooition.

I’ve always had reservations with Frooition’s offering, along the same lines as Sue, in that anything that’s not eBay must be off-putting to buyers. That’s not proved to be the case though and with Sue reporting a 33% increase in sales I simply can’t ignore the results.

So I’ve bitten the bullet, admitted I was wrong, and am in the process of having Frootion re-design my eBay shop, and I have to say the initial design preview which the Frooition designer, Alun Widdowson, sent across yesterday is simply superb!

My shop has worked, and worked well over the years. Importantly it has been able to sell more product than I could physically pack. One of my main objectives will be to establish if a Frooition shop can deliver the same number of sales from fewer listings and save on eBay fees.

My brief to Frooition was to create a simple but professional design keeping my current colour scheme. I found it very difficult to describe what I wanted, as I was asking for less not more. I don’t want a complicated graphics heavy design, simple and to closely resemble a standard eBay shop was the main requirement.

I’m convinced that it’s not easy to design a sleek clean look, but that is what I wanted and the Frooition designers have come up trumps.

Simple, stylish but minimalist was the way I summed up the look and feel I wanted and that’s exactly what they’ve delivered.

As always I’m incredibly impressed with Frootions graphics, they’re simply superb and I love the way they’ve managed to weave my logo into them.

I’ve saved a screenshot of my old eBay shop for comparison. Now I can’t wait for my new shop design to go live!

In addition to the standard listing lengths there will be a new 30 days format BIN which can be automatically renewed. Gallery will be free on all listings from June.

At the same time new Shops will be introduced – Base, Plus and Premium, with varying insertion fees. Sellers who select the Premium Shop costing €99.95/mth will have free BIN listings until August 31st, and from then on the cost will be just €0.01.

Best Match will be introduced for fixed price listings although Auctions will still appear with ending soonest sort. In order to advantage the longer listing formats multiple item listings with the MOST sold items will appear first in search results. It becomes more important to list multiple quantity items than duplicate listings of a single item (which many sellers have done in the past to increase visibility).

There will also be a new Showcase feature, using Showcase will allow sellers to buy their way to the top of Best Match in order to gain sales, once they have sales the listings will rise to the top of Best Match on their own merit.

Seller Standards will become more important than ever on eBay Italy. Not only will sellers with poor feedback, excessive shipping, or multiple INR complaints be disadvantaged in search, they will also lose the right to open Plus or Premium eBay shops and access to virtually free listings.

Working towards free insertion fees is a stated long term aim for eBay. Italy is the first country to experiment with this and if it’s a success we can see it introduced in other eBay territories, possibly as soon as Autumn this year.

The promotion is open to business-registered sellers only, and is valid for Stores (Boutiques) listings for a 30 day duration. Good Til Cancelled (valide jusqu’Ã annulation) listings will also receive free insertion fees for each 30 day period beginning during the run of the promotion. Shop listings which don’t use pre-filled information will be charged at the normal rates.

The three point strategy to rescue the company was 1) Service, to be best of breed, 2) To differentiate themselves from the competition, and 3) To look after the customer up to and after their Red Letter Day.

One of the big messages from the talk was that an online presence could drive off line sales. Not every buyer would buy online, but an online presence coupled with off line sales pays dividends… some buyers want to talk to a human before committing to a purchase.

Red Letter Days combine SEO, Pay Per Click adveritising, affilate schemes, retail sites (such as eBay) and email marketing but importantly all sites look and feel the same. Whether it be their eBay store, their own website, or an affiliate site the Red Letter Day branding is consistent across all mediums.

eBay sellers can learn much from this strategy, as eBay has emphasised recently and backed up with incentives, customer service is essential to building a long term business. Branding is key, your eBay shop, listings, about me page, email marketing, literature (eg shipping notes) and your own website should all carry the same branding, colours, look and feel.

When a customer lands on any of your online pages your brand should instantly remind them who you are, and the service they received last time they traded with you.

Many brands and even ticket promotors have attempted to control the eBay marketplace and and yet done little or nothing to make their products and brands legitimately available on the site. Step forward Red Letter Days, they have just announced the launch of their eBay shop and part of the reason for wanting a strong presence on eBay is to protect their brand.

The MD of Red Letter Days, Bill Alexander, will be speaking at Catalyst later this month on the importance of building a strong brand and how to translate brand awareness into online traffic and sales. It will be interesting to hear more regarding their plans for eBay and how this fits into their overall brand awareness campaigns.

It’s refreshing to see a company building their brand and approaching the eBay marketplace in a positive manner, rather than just rushing to fill out VeRO forms. eBay is now maturing as a marketplace and brands that embrace eBay can expose themselves to the 14 million plus active users in the UK. That’s got to be a better strategy than simply attempting to prohibit others from selling your products on the site.

A new offering from daily.co.uk aims to make the choice simple with their eShop package designed specifically for users wanting their own ecommerce enabled website. What makes it unique is that it’s an off the shelf package which fully supports launching eBay listings from within the management console.

Setting up a daily.co.uk eShop is simple using a WYSIWYG editor with a choice of 100 different templates allowing you to personalise your eShop to your business. Once you’ve created your products, the integrated shopping basket and choice of payment methods (including PayPal, Google and card payments), you’re ready to launch your first ecommerce website.

eShop is set up to supply feeds to Shopping Comparison Engines such as Ciao, Google Base, Kelkoo and Shopping.com. It’s also simple to register with Google so that your shop products will be indexed for search.

The part I like most about daily.co.uk’s eShop is the eBay integration. Once you’ve listed a product in your eShop it’s just a few simple clicks to list the same item on eBay.

If there’s one complaint it’s that I don’t like the templates supplied for eBay listings. There are 100 eShop templates to choose from, but only three eBay templates (with a colour choice). That said they’ve built in the tools to allow you to customise existing templates or to build your own template with shortcuts to drag the product pictures and descriptions from your eShop product profiles.

If you’re looking for an ecommerce enabled web site with eBay integration then a daily.co.uk eShop is well worth considering. They offer three different packages tailored for sellers of all sizes. Costs start from just £8.99 per month, and that includes hosting charges. You can also try before you buy with a 14 day free trial of an eShop.

The design work includes the one item eBay sellers often ask about where to source – a high quality logo. There are three different packages on offer from £375 for a custom listing template and logo (Saver), add in an eBay shop front design for £475 (Silver) or the top package which includes flash animation in the design for £675 (Gold).

If you’re looking to update your eBay image with a professionally designed new look check out Just Template It and don’t forget to mention TameBay for a 20% discount.

I wondered too, so I looked at the top UK sellers to see what they were using. From the Nortica eBay 500 list from December 2007 I selected the top UK eBay sellers by number of feedback received. Out of the top 500 sellers worldwide, this gave me 32 UK sellers of which four were excluded – three are NARU (no longer registered users) and one has private feedback.

The top sellers are based on total lifetime feedback, the data is not necessarily reflective of the current top sellers on eBay. It excludes sellers such as aceelectronics_uk who have accrued 56130 feedback in the last year but still just outside the top 500 worldwide. However I believe it does reveal some interesting trends.

Top Seller Feedback

First of all feedback, with DSRs affecting search placement how are the top 28 UK sellers stacking up? The average feedback rating is 99.3% ranging from a low of 98.1, to two sellers with an astounding 100% record. More interesting some of the sellers with the highest feedback percentage have the lowest number of withdrawn feedbacks. The average feedback withdrawals per seller is 207, with the highest withdrawn feedback for a single seller being 1079.

Average DSR scores for the top currently trading 28 sellers are:

These figures put the average top UK seller into the average/bottom 25% of all sellers for DSRs based on latest eBay information.

Shops

I was interested to find out if the top UK sellers all used the same listing tools and how they used their eBay shops and listings. The first and unsurprising discovery is that all 28 have an eBay shop. What was somewhat surprising is most appear to have a basic eBay shop with no frills or customisation. Just five users had a Frooition shop template, four had customised their shop or had a custom shop landing page. 19 out of 28 of the top UK sellers have no customisation at all although four have inserted a shop header.

One thing I find off putting is landing on an eBay shop where the products aren’t the first thing I see. If I want to know a sellers terms and conditions or more about them I’ll visit their about me page. Four of the top sellers however have shop landing pages that don’t display products.

Listings

I expected to find custom templates designed for the top sellers, and in most cases I wasn’t disappointed. Top UK sellers had complex HTML designs with the one common theme being links to their other listings and eBay shops. Just two sellers appear to have used Frooition templates (five have Frooition shops). What was surprising was that five of the top 28 sellers (17%) have no template and use simple text based eBay listings. Even one seller who has invested in a Frootion shop has simple text based eBay listings. It would appear that it is possible to be a prolific seller without complex HTML skills.

Sadly out of 28 top sellers three have HTML scripts classed as site interference risking their listings being cancelled.

Tools

Eight of the top sellers use ChannelAdvisor to power their eBay listings. Fifteen use eBay Tools (either TurboLister or Selling Manager Pro). Four sellers use Auctiva/Sellathon with just one using Vendio. It would be interesting to know if there’s a correlation between the sellers using ChannelAdvisor and those that also sell on Amazon or their own websites.

Summary

The most noticeable feature of feedback is that the sellers with the highest feedback percentages have some of the lowest numbers of withdrawn feedback. Conversely sellers with the highest numbers of withdrawn feedback have some of the lowest feedback percentages.

The top UK sellers don’t all have complex shop designs, a basic eBay shop works just fine. Although links to sellers other listings and eBay shops are favoured you can be successful with a basic text based auction. Many top sellers rely on simple eBay tools such as TurboLister, Selling Manager Pro and even the Sell Your Item form. If a third party tool is used ChannelAdvisor is the favoured choice.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from the top UK sellers it’s to include more links to other products in my auctions. I’m not going to run out and pay for auction management services or expensive listing templates, if the top sellers don’t need them then neither do I.

In November eBay confirmed that sponsored links were here to stay but the placement was still under review. If they negatively impacted eBay sales they said they would “react quickly should we detect negative trends” and it appears that they have done.

The important part of the statement is “We have analysed the latest data and have come to the same conclusion as many of you: sponsored links should not appear above Shop Inventory Format (SIF) items. (As a reminder, SIF listings currently appear in core search results when there are 50 or fewer core results returned.) So from now on whenever any eBay listings are available in response to a user’s search (be it core auction or BIN listings, SIF listings, or listings from international sellers) these will be shown first. Sponsored links will appear only underneath eBay listings.”

Another bit of news gleaned from the statement is that SIF listings will appear below core search results if fewer than 50 items are returned. In the past SIF listings appear to have been displayed if only 30 core listings were displayed in search results. From now on sellers should notice more sales from shop listings from the increased visibility.

The other change that will be added is the ability for sale items to be searched for by buyers. In a drop down, in the left navigation bar under buying options, buyers will be able to specifically look for reduced cost products. Whether this will come to the UK site remains to be seen. There are still significant differences between Markdown Manager in the US and UK, such as the ability to add Buy It Now listings to sales in the US. In the UK only Shop Inventory Format listings that have been live on the site for over 28 days are eligible to be included as sale items.

Making it easy for sellers to send email marketing and giving buyers the ability to search for items on sale makes perfect sense though. It can only encourage more sellers to use Markdown Manager to attract business.

I still think that eBay are sadly under-utilising the power of eBay Shops (Stores in the US, Boutiques in France and so on), but these little tweaks they are making in the way that Shops’ search results are presented do at least make them easier to use once you have the buyer in the door.

In line with Germany eBay.com are cutting the price of Anchor Shops by 40% to $299.95. For both Anchor and Premium shops the number of email marketing that can be sent free is to increase and MarketPlace Research will be included in the price.

Of significantly more value all Premium Shops (in the US only) will gain access to eBay telephone support around the clock. If anyone’s ever wondered if it’s worth paying extra for a Featured shop 24/7 phone support has to be a compelling reason to upgrade!

It’ll be interesting to see how this translates to the UK. I’m guessing we’ll get a reduction in price of Anchor shops and MarketPlace Research included in the price, but I can’t see all eBay shops users getting telephone support just yet…. Maybe next year?

eBay announced at the beginning of the month that they’d be testing some new ways of displaying search results. One of the lucky 5% of members selected to see the new version was Martin from The Whirlpool Bath Shop, who was searching for his own items on eBay, and got taken to this page automatically. Conspicuous by its absence from the left hand side bar is the block of four featured shops.

As there is a huge white space just begging for a bit of content, it would be nice to know that this is just an oversight during the development process, and that in the final version, whatever it may be, the links will be restored.