September 3rd, 2010
admin
In a couple of days several Auctivians—including myself, Product Analyst Rebecca Miller, CEO Jeff Schlicht, Vice President Kevin Kinell, Communications Manager Robert Green and others—will all journey to the home office of our new parent company Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China.
While Jeff and Kevin visited Hangzhou during the acquisition process, the purpose of the rest of us visiting there now is twofold. First, this gives us a change to visit the headquarters operation, and meet our new colleagues who work there. In a nutshell, the trip is an orientation for us. But there is more to it than just orientation. We’re there to absorb everything we can about sourcing products so we can be of the most assistance to Auctiva’s sellers.
The second purpose for our trip is to represent Auctiva at Alibaba’s 11th annual AliFest, which is a truly global event.
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After 31 days of listing, photographing, packing and shipping, Auctiva Communications Manager Robert Green won our In-House Summer Selling Challenge, in which he went head to head against our Product Analyst Rebecca Miller. Robert had 43 transactions in July and about $1,400 in total sales.
Rebecca, a seller of more than 10 years, kept the competition close, losing by just four transactions with 39 and total sales of about $900.
“It was a lot of fun competing, and getting a glimpse into the life of a serious online seller,” Robert says. “I had previously sold on eBay very sporadically—mostly when cleaning out the garage or replacing something that I thought still had some value. Approaching selling like a business brings a lot more responsibility, stress and work!”
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Hopefully you’ve noticed some of the features we’ve added to Auctiva.com in the last six months or so. Do you know where we go for suggestions for the features we should develop? Well, many times, the answer is you, our customers.
Our Auctiva Feature Center [link requires login] makes it easier for us to see what you want, and for you to request new Auctiva features. We still scan our Community Forums for ideas about what our users would like to see us develop in the future, but our Feature Center is a more efficient way to hear from you. It’s a place where users make suggestions and vote on potential new features. You can also see what features we have “on deck” and which have already been completed.
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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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One of the ways Auctiva customers can obtain the best possible experience using Auctiva is to get off to a good start as soon as they sign up for a free trial. Auctiva is a great tool that can save you money and get you more eBay sales, but like any tool, questions do arise—and a little help in getting the most from your account can go a long way.
We’ve been working hard to help Auctiva customers get the most from Auctiva by making our site more intuitive and easy to use, by providing more and better “help text” on the site, and by providing insights into trends and best practices affecting eBay sellers via our EDU page.
We recently added another resource for our customers: We are holding weekly Webinars that give Auctiva customers the chance to ask questions and get answers about Auctiva. These “Auctiva 101″ Webinars are geared toward newer Auctiva users—in particular, users who are still in their free trial periods—to help them get the best possible start using Auctiva. But even if you’re a more experienced user, you can still benefit from these Webinars.
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“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Iowa”
“Iowa who?”
“Iowa lot of taxes on my online sales!”
Hilarious, right? I think so—unless you really do have to pay Uncle Sam a good chunk of change this tax season. No one I know enjoys paying taxes. But with every tax season comes the possibility.
As you prepared your taxes did you have a hard time gathering receipts, logging expenses and getting a profit and loss reports? Did you find yourself digging through mounds of papers? Or, if you have yet to prepare your taxes, do you know where your receipts are?
If you don’t, I understand. I’ve been there, too. But this year was the easiest for me because I made a pledge while doing my taxes last year that “this year would be different” when it came to my record keeping. This year I was going to get organized!
Back in 2000, when my online sales first began to pick up momentum, I had no idea what records I needed to keep for my income taxes. I didn’t know I could write off the cost of listing my items on eBay, or the cost of the shipping materials. I was essentially clueless about what was considered an “expense,” and what wasn’t. If only I hadn’t been so naive back then.
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You probably know Auctiva best for the products we build for sellers on eBay. Many of you have been enjoying our listings tools to boost your business and simplify your eBay work for years.
After being in the e-commerce business for more than 10 years, Auctiva has the knowledge and experience to undertake a new project for sellers. One that is going to help shape a new way to look at e-commerce for individual sellers: Auctiva Marketplace Platform.
So, what is AMP?
The Auctiva Marketplace Platform, or AMP, as we call it, is a technology framework that allows software developers to build custom marketplaces. There are lots of products that allow people to create online stores, but AMP is the first to make it easy to build online marketplaces.
What is the difference between a marketplace and an online store?
An online store offers items from a single seller. Marketplaces offer items from multiple sellers, all in one place. In the same way that a farmer’s market has much more foot traffic than a roadside fruit stand, online marketplaces bring more buyers by having inventory from multiple sellers. Marketplaces organize the inventory of multiple sellers and streamline the shopping process, creating an optimal experience for both buyers and sellers.
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We have just uploaded more than 30 new templates for your listings that are different from the templates we’ve created in the past. Until now, most of our templates had distinct themes; some are seasonal, others tie in with a category such as books, Cameras & Photos, children, and so forth. All graphical elements, fonts and colors work to achieve their seasonal or category “look.”
Auctiva has a big library of these listing templates, and sellers have been using them to help move mega-millions of gross merchandise value over the years. But recently some of our customers asked for a different type of templates—templates that look outstanding and professional, but focus buyers’ attention more on the product being sold and less on the category or seasonal theme that is so visible in our older template designs.
With this design concept in mind, our newest templates are theme and category neutral, very lean, very clean, crisp and streamlined. Our designers have selected light, unobtrusive graphical treatments, complementary fonts, and attractive but simple color schemes that will work well with products found in many different categories.
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