Search engines continue to be a top resource for online shoppers. In fact, a recent study by Compete Online Shopper, a Web analytics company, found that 61 percent of online buyers use search engines when shopping around for products. The second most popular tool cited among these shoppers was coupon sites, with 35 percent of buyers saying they visit these. Retailer marketing e-mails came in third, with 29 percent of consumers reading them when deciding what to buy.
Buyer behavior does vary from niche to niche, but there’s no denying one thing: Search engines are very important to online shoppers.
This comes as no surprise to Auctiva Commerce Product Lead Chris Eckland.
“People utilize search engines, and Google Product Search in particular, to find the best deal on an item that they’re planning to buy,” he says. ”Often, this activity may be just to confirm a deal that’s available locally is in line with other offers, but in many cases a quick online search can reveal online stores with better deals or specials not available elsewhere.”
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Here at Auctiva, we work closely with eBay to make sure we stay in sync with its policies and features, while providing you with the best service we can. As part of this close relationship, eBay employees occasionally visit our Chico offices.
Anytime eBay makes the three-and-a-half-hour drive from San Jose to Chico, you can feel extra energy in the air. Usually we don’t get more than a day or two notice before our guests arrive—which doesn’t give me much time to organize my junk—I mean, inventory. I have a mountain of shoe boxes, bags of Webkinz and Club Penguin plush toys, and stacks of anything and everything in my two cubicles—all waiting to be listed.
eBay’s most recent visit was last week. Most of their time here was spent in meetings with our management team, but our visitors did find a few minutes before they left to swing by my workspace and ask me a few questions about selling. I took it as quite a compliment to be a stop on their tour of our offices. And to be perfectly honest, I was a little nervous, too.
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Last month, we told you we were working to support eBay’s multi-variation feature, and I’m happy to report that now you are able to create multi-variation listings through Auctiva!
In fact, several of our customers are already using our software to create multi-variation listings. As someone who worked on the development side of our Multi-Variation Tool, it’s very exciting to see our customers using it.
When we first decided to support multi-variations, we took a good look at eBay’s process for creating these listings. It requires multiple clicks of the mouse to add variations. Our first thought was, “How can we make this easier for our users?” After all, Auctiva is known for simplifying, and speeding, the listing process.
Our solution? To integrate multi-variations with the current listing process our users go through. We’ve given users the ability to add multi-variations to a listing right from our One-Page Lister if they choose a category that supports multi-variations. To add a variation, users simply click our link to go to our Multi-Variation Tool, where they can decide if they’ll create variations manually or with our Variation Generator. The Variation Generator was designed so that you can quickly create and edit your multi-variations. It can greatly reduce users’ workloads by producing up to 120 variations at once.
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The seasons are changing. We’ll be springing forward in no time.
And for some sellers this will mean their inventory will begin to change. So you may want to start the spring cleaning early and bring out those summer-themed items you picked up on clearance last year. Stores are already stocking their shelves with colorful outdoor decor, barbecue grills and accessories are popping up and bathing suits are hitting the racks.
Planning ahead can mean picking up seasonal inventory at deeply discounted prices and selling it for a hefty profit later on. Our Product Analyst Rebecca Miller scored some summer shoe wear last year, and will soon be putting them up for sale.
The beginning of February is a great time to stock up on seasonal items to resell later. While much of the country is still shoveling snow off of driveways and sidewalks, thoughts are already turning to the warmer days ahead.
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Now that you’ve had the chance to digest the upcoming changes on eBay, do you know how they will affect your bottom line? Have you decided how/if you need to change your selling habits?
There are, after all, several factors to consider. So how do you go about deciding how to adjust to get the maximum value out of your listings while not breaking the budget on fees? Glad you asked. While I know there are lots of variables to take into consideration, I’ve come up with a few tips to help you in your quest.
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This year, we’ll be releasing several new features. These include multi-variation, which is coming in February. Developing this feature has occupied most of our team’s time during this release cycle. It should be no surprise that this is a big project; few third-party developers have added multi-variation support. In fact, we’re going to be one of the first—certainly in our price range—to support this relatively new eBay feature.
That’s one of the reasons why Auctiva is such a good choice for eBay selling tools: We have the resources to continuously update our software, and we do this often to not only stay up-to-date with the changing world of eBay, but also to continue our long-standing tradition of doing all we can to help you list faster and more easily. It’s out of this philosophy that comes our effort to both support multi-variation listings as well as simplify the listing process for you. We’re glad to report we’ve done so by designing a tool that makes adding variations to your listings a snap.
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In the midst of hunting for her next great find, intrepid eBay PowerSeller and Auctiva Super Smarty Rebecca Miller came across a garden gnome statuette just like the one that appears in the hilarious Travelocity commercials. She’d been looking for one of these pint-sized figurines for some time, so it was quite a score.
Before long, he became quite popular in our Chico office. So we decided to make him our unofficial mascot and give him a proper tour of the city. The first stop was the office of Auctiva CEO Jeff Schlicht.
Where will our roaming gnome turn up next?
Follow us on Twitter for updates and pictures from his exciting journey.
Happy New Year!
Now, what are you going to sell this year to take your business to the next level? Are you going to change anything about how you sell? The same stuff you sold last year? Which of your items sold best in 2009?
If these seem like too many questions, I understand. But you have to admit that although the holiday selling frenzy just ended, you’ll soon have to address these topics. After all, you want to have a great selling year.
The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to look back at your previous year’s sales to get the answers to some of these questions, and to see what selling format worked best, or if details like free shipping got buyers to click on—and buy—your items.
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Auctiva Vice President Kevin Kinell answers users' questions during his Customer Support rotation.
In Auctiva’s infancy, when the company totaled a five- or six-person team, everyone regularly answered Customer Support questions, including Auctiva Founder and CEO Jeff Schlicht.
“Spending time talking with our customers really helped give us a better understanding of what customers needed, where they were having problems, and gave us insight into how we should develop features and products,” remembers Auctiva Vice President Kevin Kinell.
As the company grew, Auctiva added a full-time, well-trained Customer Support staff of 34 to handle customers’ inquiries. This allows our users to get prompt service, and gives product leads and developers more time to focus on improving Auctiva products. But as the company grows, Schlicht and Kinell don’t want Auctiva to lose touch with customers and their needs.
That’s why Auctiva utilizes a companywide Customer Support rotation scheme so all employees hear from customers. Everyone participates—be they designers, IT personnel, the communications team, product leads, developers, or administrative and executive staff —rotating in and out of support, two per week.
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If you’re like me, you probably have a number of items that you waited to sell specifically for the holidays, but they went unsold in the previous weeks. Now you’re wondering if it’s too late to relist them and get them into a buyer’s hands before Christmas.
I can tell you, it’s not too late. There’s still more than two weeks before the big day—plenty of time to list your remaining goods on eBay for those last-minute shoppers to buy!
While it certainly can be stressful listing or relisting items during the second week of December—and wondering if they’ll sell—here are a few things I do during this selling “crunch time.”
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