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

At Frooition we are lucky enough to design with such concepts as the Pirate Party Store. With a swashbuckling theme tune to the website and a matching pirate eBay shop design, it is a delight to see these designs come together. I am sure they have recruited plenty of shipmates since the design was installed!

There products include games, activities, chocolates, decorations and even beach party accessories!

Link to a full screen shot of the Pirate Party Store eBay Shop Design

Continuing in the series we can now take a look at red as a colour to use in your eBay design.

Red says passion, strength, energy, fire and love. On its own can induce feelings of anger or danger but combined with neutral and calming colours like white and grey can project a very corporate image and can be a very safe combination. Red is a lucky colour in China, but too much red should be avoided.

Corporate example: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Littlewoods-Clearance

Some eBay shops want to give that slight sense of danger, so use a sprinkling of red to add the hint: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Chris-Astley-Motorsport-01257262565

Putting the passion into red for a more elegant theme: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Innovative-Fashions

Flash or natural?

Lighting is a photographer’s biggest friend and enemy. Too much or not enough? How to get it just right. When shooting at faster shutter speeds to reduce “wobble” the lighting will need to be improved.

Your flash on your camera will be too harsh when shooting close up image in macro mode so you need to find a diffused light source. One of the easiest things to do is to shoot your products outside on an overcast day and set your cameras white balance to cloudy to get a nice diffused light. However as we are not in a perfect world this may not always be possible. So we need an alternative . . . there are three levels of solution:

1, Buy a light box/tent and lighting rig: (prices vary) see: http://photography.search.ebay.co.uk/light-box_Studio-Equipment-Lighting

2, Buy a flash diffuser that fits your after market flash: (VERY EXPENSIVE!!) See: http://photography.search.ebay.co.uk/light-box_Studio-Equipment-Lighting

3, Buy a tub of Pringles, eat them then cut the lid to fit over your cameras flash then tape it in place: (£1.20 + free crisps!!) This really works . . . honestly!

Here at Frooition we are committed to getting the best out of our clients and making them look as professional as possible through excellent design services (such as http://www.frooition.com ) Professional design will improve eBay custom significantly enabling you to achieve not only more traffic but also higher prices for your products due to increased traffic.
However one of the most important factors of looking professional is to have high quality images in your listings. We have set out a number of tips and tricks to enable you to take perfect pictures every time.
We suggest you use a good quality digital camera that will take a 2 to 3 Mega Pixel photograph.
Macro?
If you are selling small to medium sized images (e.g. jewellery up to television size) we would recommend that the camera has a macro mode or even super macro mode so that the camera can focus on close up details.