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.

Not only small business people from countries around the world attend, but also global thought leaders and luminaries. In past years, former President Bill Clinton, Los Anglese Laker’s star player Kobe Bryant and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz have made keynote speeches. At this year’s AliFest, U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (aka The Governator) and eBay CEO John Donahoe will be featured speakers at the annual “Netrepreneur Summit,” an event within AliFest. To say the least, this is no small affair.

I must confess this trip is more than a little daunting to me—and I’m a pretty experienced international traveler. Just to travel from Chico to Hangzshou takes more than 13 hours over water from San Francisco to Hong Kong and then there’s another two-hour-plus flight to our final destination of Hangzhou.

This is my first time visiting China, and I’m very excited about going. I’m sure being there will seem new and exotic. Hangzhou was founded some 2,200 years ago, so this city is ancient. From the pictures I’ve seen, Hangzhou is beautiful, and much of it today appears modern and high tech. Within a few blocks of the Alibaba Group headquarters are the offices of several major international companies, including Bosch Power Tools, Manitowoc Company, Samsung, Nokia and FedEx, to name just a few.

We expect to return equipped with new tools and information about sourcing and how it can help Auctiva users make more money selling on eBay. And I expect we will also return with some good stories and a few adventures to pass along to you via this blog.

Tony Maxey
Sr. Product Manager, Auctiva.com

In the 12 years it’s operated, Auctiva has grown into the leading provider of selling tools for eBay users and other online merchants, and this new venture will help Auctiva grow even more and better serve customers, Schlicht notes.

“I see this as not the end, but a new beginning with even bigger opportunities,” he says.

The acquisition will give all Auctiva customers easy access to AliExpress, a wholesale sourcing platform from Alibaba.com, right from their Auctiva accounts. This platform contains more than 5 million products, which should help Auctiva customers increase their profit margins, as will the exclusive coupons and discounts they’ll receive for being Auctiva users.

“Our core goals will remain the same: to grow the business as we help our customers sell online, but we’ve also got some new objectives—primarily, helping eBay sellers source products to sell,” Schlicht notes. “Alibaba.com has incredible relationships with hundreds of thousands of factories and makers of products. We have relationships with hundreds of thousands of U.S. small businesses that sell on eBay. The factories earn more, eBay sellers profit more buying from the source, and consumers win by the saving passed along, as well.”

The partnership will also give Auctiva the backing of the leading e-commerce company in the world, which will help developers find new ways to help online sellers.

“I’m looking forward to the incredible opportunities we have in front of us,” Schlicht says.

For more information on the acquisition, please read our Auctiva EDU story, or check out these FAQs.

Detailed Seller Ratings, or DSRs as many of us refer to them, provide a “more complete picture of the member’s performance as a seller,” according to eBay. But I’m not sure how true this is. Recently, someone left me ones in each of the four DSR categories (item description, seller communication, shipping, and shipping and handling charges), but still left me positive feedback. How does that work?

I’ve never understood the true purpose of DSRs. I prefer the days when eBay allowed us to leave honest feedback about buyers. Today, buyers can anonymously rate sellers for things that are out of their control—shipping time, for example. Buyers don’t even seem to need a real reason to leave a low DSR score at all, so why have them?

The two DSR scores I completely disagree with are communication and shipping time. It doesn’t matter that you e-mail your buyer a thank you message when they pay, and again when you have shipped their item and want to give them the delivery confirmation number. This can be rated as “bad communication” if , for some reason, a buyer doesn’t like those two e-mails (which is especially possible since they receive similar messages from eBay and/or PayPal). Perhaps a phone call would suffice? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve purchased something and never heard from the seller once! I thought that was bad, so I try to be better, but perhaps I communicate too much?

As for shipping time, I state in my listings that I ship within one business day of receiving payment. I have kept that promise, and bend over backward to get packages to the post office before it closes. But sometimes, that’s not good enough, and my DSR get dinged for that, too.

What to do, what to do? It appears it’s a no-win situation.

If I want a “more complete picture” of a seller, I’ll look at their feedback rating, read their terms of service, check out their About Me page, etc. I’ll even ask questions if I feel it necessary. That’s the only way to get a complete picture of a seller, in my opinion. What do you think?

Rebecca Miller
Product Analyst

Call me Simon Legree, but I love receiving discounts, and I really twirl my ‘stache when I’m able to get a discount, or earn points on every purchase I make using a particular credit card or flying on a specific airline or renting a car from a specific company—because these really add up.

For example, my insurance company issued me a Visa card that accumulates “rewards dollars” on every purchase I make. Then, when I have built up an accumulation, the insurance company that issued my card lets me use my rewards dollars to pay the premium on any insurance policy that I have through the company.

My insurance agent told me about this, and it has worked really well for three years. I charge just about everything I buy to that card, every tank of gas, every dinner out, every video rental. For every dollar I charge, I’m building up reward dollars. It really adds up!

Each year, I pay all but $10 or so of my annual homeowner’s insurance premium using the reward dollars I have accumulated this way.

And the beauty of it is, I’m not buying items I wouldn’t otherwise buy, and I’m not paying any more for the items than I would if I used a different credit card or even paid cash. I’m just concentrating my purchases on one card and by doing so, I get pretty close to a free homeowners insurance policy on my house every year. Not bad, huh?

This week I saw that eBay has expanded its eBay Bucks program to all U.S. users. This program allows buyers to accumulate 2 percent on qualifying purchases made with PayPal. Now I am not a shill for eBay. The folks there aren’t giving me or Auctiva a thing—not one single thing—for telling you what I am about to tell you. But take it from me, a master accumulator of reward dollars, frequent flyer points, etc: Accumulating 2 percent on your purchases is worth taking a serious look at, because if you buy much at all, that 2 percent will add up quicker than you think.

And if you are a seller, which Auctiva users are, consider this: eBay is using part of the fees you are paying in a new effort to attract buyers onto the site to buy stuff. And, most important, it is doing so in a pretty sure-fire way to create buyer loyalty and keep those buyers coming back to build up eBay bucks.

There are rules, and not every purchase will qualify, but you can read all about it right here.

I’ll just leave you with one more thought, since Auctiva is paying me, after all. You can also get rewards on the purchases you make on eBay, Amazon and dozens of other retailers by using KickItBack. Sometimes you can get up to 20 percent back on your purchases. Just something to keep in mind. The more rewards, the better, I say.

Tony Maxey
Senior Product Manager

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!”

One of the things that surprised him the most during the contest was how much time sellers need to set aside to stay organized, have good communication with their customers and to get packages en route to their destinations. Luckily he had his Auctiva account to help, but it was still a fair amount of work. He was also surprised at the fees (final values fees, shipping costs, insurance costs, packing supplies expenses, etc.) associated with selling regularly, adding that these can take a substantial percentage of a seller’s profits.

Nonetheless, he was happy to win, although he notes that Rebecca will likely will win the war, if not this battle.

“I peaked,” Robert says of his participation in the contest. “She’ll keep doing this all the year. I probably will not.”

While Robert led in total sales and items sold going into the final weekend of the competition, Rebecca had a secret weapon for a comeback: several three-day listings that would end on Saturday, the last day of the challenge. The listings helped her inch closer, but the duration of the items may have affected their visibility, she says.

“If they all would had sold, I would have won,” Rebecca notes.

Still, she admits that it was good seeing Robert do well, she says. “It’s nice to see I’m rubbing off on people,” she says.

But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t change her strategy so she could win, if she could do the challenge all over again.

“I probably would have lined up more merchandise like Robert did, instead of relying on all the stuff I have laying around; just get a large quantity of one item, instead of the potpourri of the products that I have,” she says.

Would the two do another selling challenge?
“Yes,” Rebecca says. “Let’s shoot for Christmas once I find the hot toy, nobody can beat me.”

“Maybe,” Robert notes. “I’ve learned a lot. I think I’d be tougher competition next time.”

What did you think of the in-house selling challenge? Have you and a friend ever gone head to head in a friendly selling competition? Tell us about it.

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.

Now, I should point out that some suggested features may not be doable, perhaps because of an eBay policy, for instance. [Our developers and designers are fantastic, but they're not miracle workers]. One of my tasks here at Auctiva is to read through your suggestions and comments in our Features Center, weed out the duplicates, and decide which ideas get posted so the rest of our customers can vote on which we should build.

There’s power in numbers—so if you see a feature that has been suggested that you would like to see us develop, vote for it! If an idea is getting little or no feedback from our customers, it’s easy for it to get pushed aside to make room for features that garner more attention and interest.

When we’re getting ready to plan our next batch of enhancements, I go straight to our Feature Center to tally up the votes. A few other considerations do go into deciding which features we’ll develop: the feature’s complexity, the number of resources a project would require, the likelihood that you would use it, how many users would benefit from a feature, etc., but you’re always at the top of my list. It’s all part of our commitment to help you to list faster, save money and sell more.

Sometimes planning and developing a new feature can take months, but in the end, it’s all worth it. We add a new feature, and it may be a feature you personally requested. Give our Feature Center a try if you haven’t already. And if you see an idea you like, vote for it!

Rebecca Miller
Product Analyst

Things are looking up for Robert in our summer selling challenge. I’m not out of the game yet, though. It’s going to be a busy week and a half, but I think I can make the final score pretty close. In terms of actual items sold, I can beat Robert hands down. But in terms of total dollar amount, he may come out ahead in the end. Only time will tell… heh heh heh (evil laugh).

All this selling made me think about how much money in fees we will have paid when the dust has settled. I was able to list a lot of things in the first part of July when the free-insertion-fee promotion was going on, but I know Robert didn’t start his selling push until after that promotion ended.

A quick check on my current eBay invoice shows I’ve racked up about $50 in insertion and final value fees so far, and there’s still the PayPal fees I need to tally up. If I wanted to get real specific, I could calculate the amount I’ve had to pay on postage and shipping supplies. My bottom line is dwindling before my very eyes. I had better get a move on.

From Robert
This week, two things happened that have substantially changed my eBay selling activities. One, I’ve had a lot of unrelated responsibilities competing for my time. Two, as opposed to spending my time looking for inventory or listing products, this week has been all about order fulfillment.

I made more than 20 sales last week. Now I need to ensure products are shipped on time and reach their destinations in a timely manner. This requires time, some expense, organization and keen attention to detail.

As for the contest, I’m cautiously comfortable with a substantial lead over my counterpart, both in terms of total items sold and total value. But, like I say, I’m cautious.

Rebecca seems all too comfortable, and I don’t think she’s the giving-up type. I’m inclined to think she might have an ace up her sleeve. Whether that means she has several listings in her Auctiva account scheduled to hit in the 11th hour, or that she has one highly valuable item that she’ll post in the last days of this contest, I’m not sure. But I think something’s coming.

As for any tricks up my own sleeve, I have a handful of moderately priced items I recently purchased for the purpose of resale. After doing some research, I think there’s a good likelihood they’ll sell for a relatively substantial profit.

As we get further into this contest, I’ve noticed that selling has been very cyclical for me. At first, I was just focusing on getting sales; now I’m focusing on shipping and order fulfillment. Are these cycles typical? Or do you concurrently juggle sourcing, listing, packaging, fulfillment, etc.? Do you have any tricks to share on how you do it? I’d love to hear them, and so would your fellow online sellers.

I politely offered to send my buyer an identical replacement ASAP, no questions asked. It would eat any profit I had made on the sale of the first item, but I wanted to do my best to make him happy, and to do what I could to prevent negative feedback. Maybe I should have asked him to return the item first, but I didn’t really see the point for this rather inexpensive item.

But part of me wondered if he was just looking for a refund to his PayPal account. Call me untrusting if you want, but after selling online for more than 10 years, I’ve come across a quite a few buyers who are just out to get something for free. 

As I always do when I come across a questionable buyer, I checked his feedback. You know that red flag that goes off in your mind when you sense something isn’t quite right? Well, his feedback for sellers was not good: mostly negatives and neutrals. Great! So this is what I should expect from this buyer.

Just for fun, I called eBay and spoke with a very nice woman (yes, an actual human!) named Louise in eBay’s customer service department. I told her that I wasn’t sure if this buyer had a genuine complaint, or was just looking to shake me down. After viewing his feedback left for sellers, she agreed that he did seem to fit the description of a problem buyer. I asked if she had any suggestions for handling this situation.

She said that if a buyer had a habit of making this type of claim against sellers, he or she could be banned under eBay’s “transaction interference” policy. I’m not sure how often this is done, and she couldn’t tell me if my buyer was under investigation. But she did tell me that if this buyer was banned, the negative feedback he has left other sellers—and could leave me—would also be removed.

I was already aware of this, but hearing it from her made me feel a little bit better until I saw a recent letter to the editor on AuctionBytes.com. After seeing what one buyer had been allowed to get away with on eBay, I was still a little worried about how my situation would play out. Check out this bad buyer who was posted on toolhaus.org. (You may want to add them to your blocked bidder list ASAP). And I thought my buyer was questionable!

However, everything turned out all right for me. My buyer ended up giving positive feedback. (I nearly fell on the floor when I saw that), so maybe my willingness to work with him swayed him. I’m not sure.

Have you ever had a similar experience? How did you handle the situation? Did your problem buyer eventually get banned? Or did it all work out in the end? Let us know.
Rebecca Miller
Product Analyst

Well, it seems Mr. Green did have a card up his sleeve! It’s not over yet, though. There may still be a chance for me to win this thing.

I’m so confident that I’m not even going to list anything this weekend. We’ll see how this all pans out at the end of the month.

Maybe this 109-degree heat is making me think crazy thoughts!

From Robert

So, as Rebecca alluded to, the figures (in terms of both total number and value of sales) have swung my way this week. I took advantage of a spike in demand for a particular product (wouldn’t you love to know?), and a connection I had, and started listing like crazy.

This busy week left me with two points I’d like to share:

First, listing format and timing are huge. I sold several of essentially the same items this week. Because of listing format (and probably others factors that affected visibility in search results) and timing, I saw $40 fixed-price listings close without a sale, while an auction with a $20 starting price for the same item went for more than $60. I’ve learned a lot this week about attracting shopper traffic. It’s clear this is as important as any other element in the successful online selling formula.

Finally, it’s a lot of work communicating with buyers, tracking who has paid and who hasn’t, packaging, shipping, leaving feedback, fielding questions, managing active listings, and all of the rest an active eBay seller has to do. I truly appreciate what Rebecca and other successful (serious) sellers do. It’s easy to hear about a great find that was turned around for a tidy profit, and take for granted all the work in between (not to mention those transactions that took more time and effort than the profit—if any—justified). It’s also easy to forget about the insertion fees, shipping fees, listing enhancement fees, final value fees, payment processing fees, and myriad other costs that a seller has to incur.

I’m tired, but maybe that’s the same 109-degree heat talking. Have a great weekend!

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.