Auctiva Blog

From Rebecca

It’s day nine in our battle for the ultimate office eBay-selling champion. Mr. Green finally put some items up for sale on eBay this week, but I was one step ahead. I prepared a dozen or so listings in advance, and saved them in Auctiva so that when the right moment came along (like when Robert listed a few products), I would strike. His listings were a bit sad, and if we weren’t in a competition, I would make him redo them so he’d have a better chance of getting a sale. Oh well, whattaya gonna do, right?

After launching several listings Thursday, I currently have 15. Did I mention I’ve already sold two items this month? What’s funny is that Robert thinks it was the fact that he listed items that first motivated me to suddenly list things this week. Hello, that’s what Auctiva is for! Make listings and use the free scheduling feature to launch them when the time is right. I’ve been doing it for years.

For now, I will bide my time, and see what “tricks” Robert supposedly has up his sleeve. I’m shaking in my sandals!

From Robert

We’re just about a week into this contest, and I’ve yet to sell a single item.

No excuses, but the holiday weekend meant I didn’t get around to posting any items to eBay until a few days ago. In all, I have about 28 clothing items now posted. They were closeout items I bought when a national high-end clothier went out of business. They’ve been sitting in my office for more than a year, and this contest finally gave me enough incentive to post them.

These 28 items comprise only about 6 different styles, but various sizes. Luckily, I have Auctiva’s Multi-Variation Listing Tool to make creating these listings a breeze. I just created a single listing per style, and quickly specified the various sizes I had for both. Not only did this save me a lot of time versus making individual listings for each item, but I’ll save on insertion fees, too.

I’m also experimenting with a number of listing formats. Many of these listings I made as 7-day fixed-priced. But I also did a few auction-style listings of various durations. My thinking was that these might give me better, quicker exposure in search, and I could utilize that exposure to bring more visitors to the rest of my items since all my listings use Auctiva’s Scrolling Gallery.

If you’re not an Auctiva user, sign up for a risk-free 30-day trial during which you’ll have complete unlimited access to the entire suite of Auctiva tools for eBay sellers.

from Rebecca

As the temperature starts heating up here in Chico, CA, so does the in-office competition for a friendly eBay sales challenge. It all started when Robert Green, our in-house “spokes model” (or communications manager, whatever you want to call him), successfully sold a few items on eBay this month. I was biding my time and hadn’t sold anything yet in June.

Mid-May to mid-June is a really busy time of year for me, with Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, graduations and several other important days all falling close together. So I rarely post eBay listings during these weeks.

But when Mr. Green started taunting me about how many sales he had already in June—a whopping four, woohoo!—I couldn’t just sit back and take his trash talk. It’s ironic how I use the word “trash,” considering what he sold: Used shoes and old phones. Hehe. He even went so far as to write the “score” on my whiteboard: “Robert 4, Rebecca 1.”

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Photo courtesy of eBayDev: Han Yuan, eBay's director of Platform Business Solutions and Mobile Engineering, discusses developing rich mobile Web sites during eBay's Developers Conference 2010. Mobile apps were one of the many topics discussed at the conference.

Last week, I attended eBay’s top meeting for its third-party developers, the eBay Developers Conference, or DevCon, as we call it. DevCon is comprised of two days of information-packed keynote speeches and technical breakout sessions.

Speakers covered an array of topics, including developing rich mobile Web sites, what’s coming for Best Match, eBay’s product roadmap, and item condition and parts compatibility. I attended the aforementioned sessions, but there were many, many more.

DevCon got underway with a welcome by the big kahuna himself, eBay CEO John Donahoe, and then a short talk by Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces. Mark Carges, eBay’s chief technical officer and senior vice president of Global Platform, presented later. And Gartner Group Vice President Gene Alvarez rounded out the keynotes. He took us all up to 60,000 feet for a broad overview of the outlook for e-commerce.

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After 10 days of frustration, anger and just plain confusion, I finally feel vindicated for a false accusation of violating eBay’s Verified Rights Owner Program.

The organization, which is supposed to protect the intellectual property rights of third parties on eBay, came knocking at my door recently and took down one of my listings without any real explanation. It simply stated that I had somehow violated its policies. I knew there was no violation. I even checked my saved listing on Auctiva and re-read every word. Nada. The wording was mine, the image was mine and I was stumped. Then out of curiosity, I checked my Sellathon stats.

Lo and behold, only three people had viewed my listing before it was ended: me, another eBay seller—who was selling the same product—and eBay, which viewed it immediately before the listing was removed.

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A few weeks back, I commented on a thread on our forums about how to spot “phishing” or “spoof” e-mails claiming to be from eBay, PayPal, Auctiva, etc.

Then over the weekend, I received a very legitimate-looking e-mail, claiming to be a message from another eBay member. The return address was member@ebay.com—which is the e-mail address you’ll see on legitimate “this member has a question for you” e-mails—and it looked exactly like the typical messages I’m so used to seeing.

But right off the bat, I knew this wasn’t a legitimate message because the title of the item in the subject line was of something I had never, ever sold. The second red flag was the fact that the e-mail was sent to “Rebecca Miller.”

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Every spring, a storm begins a-brewin’ here at Auctiva. I like to refer to it as the battle of good and evil.

I’d compare it to King Leonidas vs. Xerxes, or Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker. I’m talking, of course, about the Oakland Athletics versus the San Francisco Giants. This past weekend was one of the interleague rivalry series, which meant the Giants made their way across the Bay to play the A’s.

The A’s swept the Giants, btw—something that made me very happy as a long-time A’s fanatic.

But Giants fans, no doubt, hated the loss. You see, when it comes to Major League Baseball, Northern California, where our Chico campus is located, has long been divided into two warring camps: Giants fans and A’s fans. Sure, some prefer other teams. For instance, our Communications Manager Robert Green is a Yankees fan and has a not-so-secret man crush on Derek Jeter. But most baseball lovers in our area consider themselves either A’s or Giants fans. You can see this division here in our Chico offices, too.

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In the spring of 2009, I had the displeasure of dealing with a buyer I just describe as interesting, to be generous. A year later I’m still dealing with this person.

Every seller, sooner or later, will have to deal with one of these odd creatures. How you handle the situation is a test of patience, maturity, self-control and sanity. Did I mention sanity?

It all started with a question this buyer sent me about an item I had up for auction on eBay. The question seemed a little weird, and I was foolish enough to answer. Hey, I am a good seller after all, and I want to answer every potential buyer’s question.

Long story short, after many, many odd questions and follow-ups with this buyer (and yes, she did eventually win my auction) I thought I was finally done. Three weeks of this woman was enough! She had asked me if I would give her a discount if she bought other similar items from me in the future, told me way too much personal information about her health situation, harassed me about shipping times and more. Eventually she paid, and I shipped. Goodbye. Sayonara. Adios. Forever! …or so I thought.
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I recently made a purchase on eBay from a seller in Hong Kong, who reminded me of the very first lesson I learned in my college marketing class.

On the first day of the semester (and before introducing himself, taking roll or passing out the course syllabus), the professor asked what was the single most important thing a marketer could do to get people to act.

“Offer an incentive,” someone said.

“Make a strong value proposition,” another shouted, once it became clear the professor was looking for another answer.

“How about, tell them what you want them to do?” the professor asked. “Or better yet, how about, ask them?” he continued as he began a slideshow of poorly designed advertisements that, he pointed out, forgot to inform the audience what to do.

It seems simple: Just ask buyers to do what you want them to do. But don’t let the simplicity of the idea fool you. Making a clear and overt request can yield significantly better results than leaving it up to your buyers’ intuition or relying on an implied call to action.

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I sure didn’t get hired at Auctiva for my computer skills, and I haven’t spent a day in a college computer science class. But, when it comes to saving a few minutes here or there to make selling on eBay easier, I do know a thing or two.

One of the first projects I worked on getting implemented at Auctiva was the image deletion capability for saved listings. When I first started using Auctiva to list on eBay, there was no “easy” way to delete the images from a saved listing I was using to make a new one. Sometimes I had 20 images to delete! It seemed like a no-brainer to me to have a simple way to remove some or all of those images, without having to click the “Remove” box on each one, individually. And so it was done.

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Six Auctiva employees recently headed to San Jose to attend the iPad Dev Camp and compete in the event’s Hackathon Competition with a new seller app called Seller Dashboard.

The app would allow online merchants to manage their orders right from their iPads. Merchants could view order details at a glance, begin the shipping process, enter tracking numbers, and view payment and buyer information through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

“If you’re on the go, this app would definitely be helpful,” says Auctiva Vice President Kevin Kinell, who had the chance to step back into the role of developer for this competition. “With it, you could go out to you your warehouse and manage your orders from there if you wanted to.”

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