Frooition’s Base platform for eBay Design (FrooitionBase) has been featured in an article on techradar.com!

FrooitionBase eBay Store and Listing Design Tool
The most successful sellers on eBay know the value of a eye-catching, user-friendly listing and shop frontage. Frooition’s new entry-level eBay store and listing design solution is just the ticket if you’re on a tight budget. Like their professional eBay design service, it deals with all aspects of your brand on eBay and simplifies the process of getting listings looking professional and working effectively without flailing around with HTML. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial and it’s £15 per month thereafter.

Mark Buckingham covers a host of essential eBay tools (eBay pulse, terapeak, just ship it….) with a little overview on each. The article is a great read, and comes highly recommended for anyone looking to improve their eBay business in both automation & turnover.

You can read the full article here: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/10-killer-apps-for-ebay-buyers-and-sellers-528505?

"Change is coming and Frooition is ready"

eBay design experts Frooiton.com have some great news for their customers relating to eBay’s new store experience which is set to roll out from Jan 2009.

Headline Summary of what it means:

“The easiest way to describe the changes is to say that eBay is rolling out a new version of its store software. Just like any piece of software goes from V1 to V2 as it develops. In turn Frooition.com have adapted their own software so that customers have the choice of upgrading to eBay’s new store or staying as they are.” Says Phillip Molloy, President, Frooition inc.

“Much of our time here at Frooition.com is spent keeping on top of the many changes and modifications which eBay make to their software. Frootion.com has a long history of keeping customers stores looking amazing as well as running smoothly. This keeps Frooition.com customers focused on selling and shields them from software issue which they don’t need to know about!” said Adrian Bausor, Head of Development, Frooition inc.

eBay’s changes mean eBay stores will no longer look and function as they do now. eBay have announced the exciting details of their new store experience on their own web site.

Advanced existing 3rd party designs will not display correctly in eBay’s current store version.

eBay’s changes will NOT affect listing template design or functionality. It will remain unchanged and look the same as it does now.

Frooition.com have a storefront solution and have worked closely with both eBay and ChannelAdvisor to ensure customers are well informed and supported throughout the change process.

More detail:

eBayers will soon be hearing from eBay about the "new store experience" which is set to roll out across all stores during Q1 2009. The new store experience represents a massive change to the current eBay store layout and functionality.

The changes affect ALL design companies who provide advanced eBay store design.

Frooition have been working around the clock for the last few months developing software to enable them to continue delivering the best eBay design solution available today.

Phillip Molloy, President said, “We have a solution that is ready to go, easy to preview and easy to install. You will be able to install and uninstall at any time”

The new store experience is set to become a permanent feature although there is no fixed deadline as yet.

In order to ensure that customers have as much information, help and support available Frooition are working closely with eBay and ChannelAdvisor to ensure that conversion to their new store solution causes as little disruption to customers businesses as is possible.

Frooition.com is the world leading eBay design company with a combined client feedback of over 10 million and over 500,000 listings daily.

To find out more and please visit www.frooition.com/new_store_experience for more information or Contact Phillip Molloy, President, Frooition inc 08703 50 51 52

Frooition release a Christmas special graphics pack for eBay sellers. Perfect to get buyers in the festive shopping mood!

Our 2008 graphics pack is suitable for every Frooition client. Whether your design is light, dark, minimalist or funky, our highly talented designers will choose the best suited graphics and install it all for you within 48 hours of payment. We’ll also revert the graphics back to normal for you whenever you’re ready.

For live examples, and to read more details simply visit: http://www.frooition.com/pages/christmas.html!

Eight Essential eBay Marketing Tips: The Basics

When it comes to selling online one of the most important area any business needs to focus upon is their online marketing.
eBay is no different. In this article we are going to go back to basics and look at some of the fundamentals of eBay marketing.
Even the most seasoned eBay business may have over looked more than one of the following points.

1) Your User ID (eBay Name):
Make your User ID relevant to what you sell. That way the buyer can see that you specialize in the product that you sell. To change your eBay name click on the following:http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/account/changing-user-id.html

2) Open an “About Me Page”:
A really simple one this but according to eBay less than 4% of users have created one.This will help you to build a brand and reassure buyers by letting them know a little about who they are dealing with. Most importantly it will help you build trust.

3) Keywords in Your Item Title:
The most important opportunity that exists is getting your Item Title to work for you to maximum effect as ‘well over’ 75% of users find items on eBay.co.uk by using search. Make use of ‘keywords’and recognised eBay shortcuts – not meaningless words like “l@@k” and “h@t”. You only get 55 characters for your item title –use them wisely. If you need to use more then there is always the subtitle that can be employed. Don’t make your item titles deliberately misleading –if you do you risk suspension. BIG HINT – use eBay Pulse to see what buyers are searching for

4) Item specifics
Make it easy for sellers and buyers to use standardized information to connect. Give buyers an easy, fast way to search for your item. Make the basic facts about your item clear and accessible on your listing. When you fill in the Item Specifics fields, buyers browsing your item’s category will get a handy menu to help them search for items by the values you selected.

5) eBay Features
eBay offers a range of ‘value add’ features designed to enhance your listing. Typically, they will have an uplift effect on your listing, but this effect varies by category and product. Also, features are not short cuts to success. They enhance and further improve your listing, rather than remove the need for initial effort. Items with gallery typically see a 12% uplift in final value, but in the clothing category this can be up to 78% or more

6) Which picture enhances the listing?
It’s even more important to take good pictures with rare, unique or high value items. Avoid using catalogue images, as buyers still like to see what they are actually buying –furthermore you might not have permission to use the image. Put your picture ‘above the fold’to create a good visual impact. Make sure your picture enhances rather than damages your listing. Avoid a confusing background or an out of focus shot –you will only end up making more work for yourself! Never steal someone else’s picture –and prevent ‘picture theft’by using Picture Manager to ‘watermark’your image

7) Promote Yourself with an eBay Shop
Your ‘eBay Shop’ provides a feature that allows you to populate a text box with relevant words, allowing search engines to find or ‘index’ your eBay shop within it’s own search results. This is possibly the most ‘powerful’ feature of your shop. Rather than a straight list, some users prefer to use the words in context, however search engines are only concerned with the words.

8) Design
Selling on eBay requires a buyer to trust you –therefore you are selling –and thus marketing –TRUST! Since they cannot meet you or enter your shop, often the judgement is made from your overall listing, feedback etc. Ebay design is a vital part of this.

A shamless bit of blogging this one i know but i get asked this all the time so i’d thought I’d save myself some time by putting it up there for all to see.

Enjoy and questions welcome.

How can Frooition eBay Design Help Increase eBay Sales?

The Frooition eBay design incorporates extra functionality into both your shop and listings to help increase sales and the prominence of other items you have for sale.   I’ll break this down for you by looking at each particular element:

eBay Shop

Snob Dog eBay Shop

Silver Nomad Shop

• Star item and Top 5 products for sale make the items your selling more prominent. These items can be edited so you can promote your latest lines, items you need to shift etc.
• You can incorporate custom boxes within the shop. Within these boxes you able to insert your own HTML and images. You can put text in if you want but obviously this will not be as effective.
• All subsequent pages that you create within the shop will automatically be styled in the design. Basically your eBay shop will become very similar to the look and feel of custom website

eBay Template

• The “More Items” down the right hand side of the listing are powered by your cross-sells and up-sells that you set within the eBay Shop. Rather than appearing at the bottom they appear next to the product image. If a customer clicks here they will driven to your eBay shop. This means that each listing becomes an advert for other items you have in your shop and you can taylor these products specifically for the item on sale.
• The shop categories on the left are pulled in and styled dynamically. They are not hard-coded. It will also style your sub-categories. This means that customers can view shop items from within the listing.
• Custom boxes can be incorporated in the left, right, top and middle of the template. Again you are able to insert your own HTML and images into these. For a good example of this check Silver Nomads listing template. Looking at your existing template Search by artist, view rare and limited prints could all be loaded into our custom boxes.
• The template also supports shop links to all pages and multiple pictures (maximum of 6). Basically once all of the above is incorporated a conservative estimate is that it will increase sales by an average of 20%. This is based upon a survey of average sales increase across our customer base of over 1000 clients globally. We attribute this mainly to the extra functionality within the listing (dynamic categories and “More Items”) and as a result the extra traffic it drives to the eBay shop (you should see a 30% increase on average in terms of extra shop traffic).

Opinions welcome. Please let me know what you think.

There was a collective sigh of relief around the office when we heard this one: eBay have announced that UK sellers will be given a whole months grace period if they are found to be on the wrong side of eBays seller non-performance policy.

Basically what this means if you are a seller found in breach of policy you will be given 1 month to get your house in order.

Whats really signifiicant about this move is the scenario of “1 negative feedback got me thrown off eBay” should never occur because after 30 days the neg will no longer be included in the feedback and DSR and thus drop out of the calculation.

Surely everyone thinks this is great news? Opinions please

In order to run a healthy eBay Business you need to know your eBay Vitals.

In this post I’ll be covering what we refer to as an eBay Close Rate. Understanding this information, and applying it to your eBay Business will help you to achieve your optimum closing rates. Ensuring you are maximising sales whilst minimising the cost of sale (that did sound like a sales pitch, don’t be put off - it wasn’t!).

What is a Close Rate?

A close rate is the percentage of successful listings against the total volume of listings. This can be measured account wide and on an individual item basis. ie., If you successfully sell 9 out of 10 listings for an item on eBay, that equates to a 90% eBay close rate for that listing.

It’s best to have an overall account close rate AND individual item close rates. (When selling a small breadth of product, it’s very easy for 1 or 2 bad performing items to bring your overall account close rate down dramatically, resulting in higher fees and less margin. You should build a process that not only identifies these items, but also actions them to prevent/limit damage to your margin.

Is that it, is it that easy?

Each time I mention this strategy, the immediate response is normally along the lines of “Ok, so I need to have 100% close rate for all my items then?” - While this may seem great, this isn’t normally a good move. Yes, this would insure you had a good close rate, and your fees as a % of cost of sale would be healthy [providing you have common sense pricing strategy], but this also indicates you are limiting your growth, as either you are selling too cheaply, or there is more demand for your product - or both.

Logically, you would need to work out, based on your costs, is it more effective to increase your listing velocity or increase your selling price. Most clients I work with have an optimum item close rate of between 50-60%. You should be able to work out what your optimum close rate is based on the following factors:

• The cost of selling your item.
• The margin made when selling your item.
• The cost of not selling your item.

Once you have that data, you should be able to work how many times you can unsuccessfully list an item against the margin made when you successfully sell an item. Using this data, I would strongly recommend applying this close rate method to all inventory in your account. Working with historical data, you will now be able to isolate these items, and build a procedure to action them as you see fit.

A basic example:

item selling price = £29.95
Item Cost Price = £20.00

EBAY FEES
insertion fee = £0.50
gallery fee = £0.15
final value fee = £2.25

PAYPAL FEES
3.4% PayPal transaction fee = £1.02
PayPal fixed fee = £0.20

Total Fees = £4.12

If successful = £5.83
If unsuccessful = -£0.60

Based on the above assumed pricing details, we can assume that if we sell this item once, we make £5.83 profit. We can also see that if we list this item using the same strategy a total of 9 times, our fees will amount to £5.85. So, for every item we sell, we cover the fees for 9 unsuccessful listings. At this point, work out what percentage margin you would like to make on your item, and how many times you unsuccessfully list the item before eating into your margin.

This close rate ratio will give you your maximum listing volume to achieve the margin you want to achieve. This will enable you increase your listing volume to meet demand, or even decrease your listing volume to decrease your fees-to-sale percentage.

Ok, so what’s next?

Obviously what you do from that point is up to you, but I would suggest a regular ‘health check’ on each item (the frequency depends on your volume of course), and be sure to build a process that will action these items and deal with them how you see fit.

A lot of the details above are assumed, so take them with a pinch of salt. Hopefully this will help to show that there is a simple equation to calculate optimum performance.

I just want to emphasis once more that identifying this data is only the first step to improving your eBay vitals, as without a process that actions your results, this is a wasted process and nothing will change. I say this as I’ve worked with hundreds of eBay businesses and only a tiny percentage of my clients actually used this information - most of which saw results the following month.

Ok, so working in the Managed Service department at Frooition has proven to be a challenge over the last few months. Most of my clients are really trying to ramp up business early 2008 (like every other business that wants to succeed), which means more communication, new supply and more inventory. As any eBay seller knows, this creates quite a work flow for the team that actually needs to transfer all this excitement onto eBay and generate more sales.

With my work cut out, I’ve been steadily improving strategies on a daily basis for each account, and tweaking every item where necessary to improve sales. Normally the steps to improve an eBay business are relatively basic:

1. Improve Creative Branding.
2. Improve Inventory Information (item specifics, attributes and formatting all need to be clear and concise).
3. Devise / Improve listing strategies for each product group & format, based on Frooition marketplace research.
4. Streamline procedures (sales processing / status updates, etc).

However, with one account in particular, being TopUpTV (for which I actually run two separate eBay identities), the process has had to be modified due to the fact I only have 1 item to sell for each account. The process outline is much the same, but relying on eBay’s natural ability to display and expose your inventory (in the form of search results, feeds, eBay Shop pages, etc) is very difficult when you only have 1 item to sell.

Challenges:

1. Inventory breadth - Selling only a single item (with unlimited quantity).
2. Generating exposure / traffic.
3. Competing / dominating your main eBay category.

In light of the above challenges, you may be surprised to learn that this account is now the biggest seller in their category, with both TopUpTV & The_DTR_Store holding 1st and 2nd place as top sellers on eBay based on GMS (Growth Merchandise Sales) in their category. Based on my research, These two accounts are also the most healthy eBay businesses in the top 5 sellers for their category too.

In order to run a healthy eBay Business you need to know your eBay Vitals.

• What are your Close Rates (see my “Identifying and Optimising your eBay Close Rate” post)
• Low Fees
• Competitive pricing
• Good Sales Volume / GMS

In short, keeping close rates at their optimum levels, fees as a low % of selling price, have competitive pricing, and maintaining a good volume of sales, will ensure your eBay business is off to a good start.

Incase you haven’t already picked up on this, eBay are shortly set to Close eBay Express in the UK (www.ebayexpress.co.uk), and shift their main focus back onto the core site eBay.co.uk.

Based on feedback from our buyers and sellers, we’ve taken the decision to close eBay Express in the UK (www.ebayexpress.co.uk), and focus our efforts on the main eBay.co.uk site.

Many of the innovations pioneered on eBay Express have been integrated into the main site, helping us bring more buyers to our sellers and providing buyers with a better experience.

eBay Express sellers have always been required to offer excellent levels of customer service. Recent changes on the main eBay.co.uk website mean sellers with a great track record should now enjoy better visibility and traffic.

eBay struggled getting traffic to eBay Express since they first opened their doors back in early 2006. Many of my clients, whose accounts I helped to run on a daily basis, were very exited when this news first came about, but unfortunately implementing this feature into each account resulting in zero sales for a majority of clients.

I’m sure most will agree this is a positive move. eBay Express may have failed in gaining traffic > delivering paid orders, but it has played a large part in rolling out new developments and functionality - A lot of which we can now see on the main eBay site.

If you’d like to read more on this, eBay have a page dedicated to it right here: eBay’s Business Hub

So, once again Royal Mail are adjusting their rates, raising prices to:

• A First Class stamp for a standard packet weighing 101g to 250g will cost £1.45, an increase of 7p.
• A Second Class stamp for a standard packet weighing 101g to 250g will cost £1.24, an increase of 4p
• Special Delivery guaranteed next day service for items weighing between 100g and 500g will cost £5.05, a rise of 30p.

Increases aren’t exactly suprising, after all, Royal Mail like all other businesses need to adapt with inflation, but I am pleased to see some good pricing incentives put in place for large volume traders….

This plays hand-in-hand in conjunction with eBay’s latest updates on Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs). As a business seller on eBay, you have to be competative in various areas in order to survive. Sellers from every corner of the globe had clocked onto this and decide to almost ‘cheat’ buyers (and of course the marketplace software providers like eBay & ChannelAdvisor for example), by charging very low item prices, with extortionate P&P charges.

A prime example would be an item with say an RRP of £12, a BIN price of 0.95p, and a P&P price of £9.95 for Royal Mail Shipping.

This selling strategy saves on listing fees and order processing fees for various service providers (which means a happy seller), but most buyers frown on this activity and believe it is a dishonest way to trade. A high percentage of these items result in UPI disputes, as buyers simply don’t see the postage cost until after they have purchased, leaving the seller without payment, and the prospect of angry buyers just waiting to leave negative feedback.

Sellers who do exploit this loop-hole, will now begin to be punished for their actions, by having their listings blessed with “reduced search visibility”, and as a result reduced sales, reduced success, and - eBay hope - an increasingly buyer-happy marketplace.

You can find more information on Postal Prices here: Royal Mail Website
You can fond more information on eBays DSR updates here: eBay Announcement on DSR