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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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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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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Over the past few months we’ve released several enhancements. These new features are sure to make listing easier and more convenient for you.
As an active eBay seller and Auctiva user, of course, I was very excited when our team of developers, engineers and programmers decided to implement many of these features.
They will save you time—and as we all know, time is money!
The first feature I campaigned for was the ability to edit most fields in a closed listing before relisting it. Our Bulk Edit feature only allows users to edit the title, price and a few other fields in a listing. But our new Advanced Relist Editing tool lets you edit the description, category, shipping details, even the template and photos. I can’t count how many times I’ve listed something with a holiday template, and it didn’t sell. Then I wanted to it with a different template but didn’t know how. Ah, what a blessing this new feature is!
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Auctiva’s graphic design department has been busy creating new templates to give you a variety of choices for the upcoming holiday season.
Our new “Thanksgiving Dinner” is the first in a series featuring a vector-illustrated modern woman who knows how to celebrate the holidays in style. The series will include Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day and Halloween templates.
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It’s been almost a month since we’ve rolled out our new Auctiva Shipping Insurance Auto-Purchase feature, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback from our users. Now it’s your turn to vote on which one of the three most-requested rules you would like to see us release next.
The top three requests are:
1. A rule to auto-purchase insurance only if the item price reaches or exceeds a certain dollar amount you set. Currently, shipping and handling costs are calculated into the total insured value of a shipment, and many of our users don’t want to include that in the coverage. This could keep your insurance cost down, but the trade off is that you would not be reimbursed for the shipping and handling costs if a package is lost or damaged en route.
2. A rule to auto-purchase insurance for packages shipped via UPS or FedEx only if the value of the shipment exceeds $100. These carriers already offer up to $100 of protection, so sellers could set a rule to buy insurance after the first $100. For example, if you bought insurance for an item worth $150, your Auto-Purchase Rule would buy $50 of insurance since UPS and FedEx already cover the first $100.
3. A rule to auto-purchase insurance if the item is sold in a specific category. For example, if you occasionally sell fragile Depression glass items, you could set your Auto-Purchase Rules to only buy insurance for items listed in the Pottery & Glass category.
Please visit our Community Forums and let us know which option you would prefer by taking this poll. We’d love your input.
Rebecca Miller
Product Analyst
Practical Ecommerce recently featured Auctiva Commerce as its Cart of the Week. You can read the article here.
Auctiva Commerce’s product manager, Chris Eckland, discussed the software in detail, and Auctiva Commerce user Bob Heitner talked about his experience with the shopping cart.
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Getting eBay’s certification is a good thing—but it’s definitely not easy.
Last week, Product Analyst Rebecca Miller, the Quality engineers who work on Auctiva.com and I took eBay’s Certified Consultant exam. At the same time, several of our software developers took the Certified Engineer exam.
Certified Consultants must pass a proficiency exam on eBay features, policies and best practices. Certified Engineers must pass exams on eBay technology.
Our examinations are different from the Certified Business Consultant designation, which is awarded to third-party eBay educators who meet the requirements. Unlike Certified Business Consultants, we aren’t certified as eBay educators. Instead, passing our examinations is a major annual requirement for Auctiva to maintain its official status as an eBay Certified Solutions Provider.
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