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Absolutely for both of the reasons you state. We try to look as professional as possible. We have customized the text-copy on the packing list to phrasing we like and also have customized the Packing List to include our company logo [small version of our store header] on the upper left hand corner.
We also include one of our business cards along with it that has our corporate company name, address, phone and new web site we are in the process of building, to help drive repeat traffic directly to our store rather than having them go back through Ebay, if they so desire.
Some buyers like all the “Buyer Protections” and privileges they receive by buying through Ebay. We also have a tri-fold company brochure but do not include that with every shipment [too costly for small orders]. Just larger dollar items $75 +/- on up, or if we know they are re-sellers, dealers, prop-movie masters, wedding planners, etc. mike collins at MDC Concepts, Inc, MDC Galleries and SmartParts Small Equip divs. in Atlanta
Jay.. That is the beauty of “good” complete system. That it is a “SYSTEM”. Which can easily be taught. I had hundreds of employees. Had about 25 employees in the shipping dept. I taught every one to be able to place into and pull out of our system [which I devised BTW]. So I employ a scaled down version of it for our inventory. The code I use is located in our listing. I can be out on the road and if I get an offer, my code will tell me what date I bought the item and how much we paid for it. Helps to know how low of an offer I should take. If it sells, I can also tell exactly what the item is in the inventory system and where it is located. If I needed to I could just text or call a neighbor and tell them exactly where to go in our storage area and which item to pull. They wouldn’t even need to look at it. The area location, then the bin, then the item number. They could do it blindly. Teach someone to ship for us [maybe someday] and we could do everything by remote control.
A system such as this would allow you to be on your trips, and never worry that your “new helper” could just go and pull, pack and ship your “solds”. That would keep you from having to use the “extended handling” time also. mike collins in atl.
Got ‘cha. Thanks for all the input, Cyndi. I have designed and uploaded a few web site for others before and have used meta tags in the creation of their pages. Fairly familiar. Just like the keywords only they can be multiple words or short phrases also. Sort of an alternative / alternate keywords to what is used in the title.
Glad that in theory the income projection is an acceptable “hypothesis”. At this point and time and Etsy store makes a whole lot more sense than creating a Shopify or Magento type store, using our own domain. Without a brand name recognition driving traffic to one’s own domain is a time consuming and daunting task. The shared e-commerce “marketplace” model is much better for getting quicker traffic and sales. Plus we are older and “long term” planning is not much of a consideration to us as is quicker sales and profits. The built in traffic of Ebay and Etsy is a better short term approach which will allow us to concentrate on those points for the time being. mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Hey AT .. So using a very rough exstrapolation .. 50 items = 4 per month or 8 per month for 100 listings. Then with the current 700 hundred listings we have in the Ebay store that would, very roughly, project out to about 56 items +/- a month and for fun say $10-$15 per item projects out to roughly $700 to $840 +/-. Not bad.
So sign up for an account, create Etsy store using whatever tools they have available, get logos, banners, whatever set up, and then set preferences and policies, tie in our PayPal account and preferred email addresses. Then [drum roll :-)], just click copy and paste Ebay items [photos, title and Descriptions], into the appropriate areas within Etsy? Do this by selecting one Ebay item at a time, and pasting them into Etsy and then hit save and we are good to go. Then just repeat this 699 more times? Is it really this easy? Seems like all it will really take is time. Guess Etsy doesn’t have a way to “BULK” transfer listings like Bonanza.
Then lastly just watch all sales so we can un-list them on Ebay so we don’t have an Ebay listing that could sell and we no longer have the item Do I seem to have the jist of the whole process or correct me in areas I may have missed. mike in Atl
@ AmazingTaste, Omfug and anyone else that has an Etsy Store producing Sales and Profits from the Etsy venue … On the topic of Etsy. We had 6 antique booths which we closed down months ago. It was a second income stream but a poor business model for making a larger amount of profit for the time invested. So we closed all of them, built storage shelves at our home office and pulled all 2,000 +/- items back here. So we currently have approx. 700 items listed in the Ebay store and also minus what has sold this year. The discussion with my wife and I was it would be nice to replace those booths with a second income stream. We do have a Bonanza store that was easy to set up and populate due to the easy transport and synch over of the Ebay store with Bonanza but sales are very slow there.
So with that being said we started discussing creating an Etsy Store and having all of our inventory listed concurrently in both stores at the same time. We have already started photographing our items with props and curating the photos in an artistic fashion. Wife does fairly well with that. So the big question is how do you see as the best way to do about getting an Etsy Store set-up to be like an Ebay Store Clone to serve as a second income stream source. BTW .. all of our items are interior decorator, vintage type of inventory. Art, glass, crystal, brass, ceramic, pottery, figurines, music boxes, mugs, etc., etc.
Sort of a “To Do” list to go about creating and setting up on a first thing to do, second thing, and so on. I know this is a big question but now being saved in this forum it would be a great guideline for me and many future members contemplating this move. Which is what I think Jay’s root interest is.
mike collins @ MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Thank you Jay for getting us back “on topic”. All the political stuff is a waste of my time. I usually bookmark hundreds of questions with tips and answers for my future use in helping me to run my businesses successfully. This forum seemed to be designed, built and used successfully, IMHO just for that. For the last several days I have not bookmarked but a few posts and deleted almost everything posted. Just a waste of space as far as the real purpose of this forum goes. Any real questions about business, taxes, inventory systems or Ebay business just got buried. Did anybody help the member who was asking what Temple or regions his rubbing came from? No, but we did get a bunch of political statements.
By the way, I don’t think he even has a rubbing, but I would need a few answers to a couple of my questions to substantiate that I think he has a block print [done and inked planographically]. I will see if I can find his question and answer him amid all this political muck.
Yes Etsy has a whole lot more interest to me than Rep. vs. Dem. Period.
Doesn’t someone want to know “how to ship a hat”? LMAO … will post an Etsy question with Amazing Taste response.
Ryanne lists the one she and Jay use in the resources tab, that is unless they have changed it. I bought the suggested Brother laser printer couple years ago. Only I got the wireless model. It sits over by my shipping station loaded with adhesive labels, 2 up on a sheet. I just click to buy my label, send to that printer and by the time I walk over there the label is sitting in the printer tray.
Ryanne also did a video on how she refilles her’s but Brother got msart and starting making it much harder to do your own efills. The plug is very hard to remove, a screw has to come out and other stuff. So, I skipped refilling after the first go and have just bought a laser toner refill on my Staples account when needed. It is also deleivered to my office door w/ free shipping.
The Brother cost me about $50 a few years back and the refile toner is about $35. I got close to 4,000 pages +/- out of that cartridge. [that’s 8,000 labels at 2 per sheet]. That’s about 1 penny per label not counting the label sheet. I wonder how much savings these Dymo printers really save since they are so expensive. But we don’t do a large volume anyway.At that low price I consider the laser printer disposable anyway but it is still working fine. I only do labels on it. We have a second all in one for our regular office documents. Since you already have a Dymo for your labels, then a cheap black only laser printer would probably do you just fine and after very case of 4-5,000 sheets, just replace with a refill. Cheap enough.
Just my opinion for what that is worth. Mike Collins at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Good luck
This is why I have used the GSP – Global Shipping Program ever since it came out. If it sells overseas, I print one regular Ebay label for the regular rate for Erlanger, KY, slap on the label and off it goes. Ebay handles everything from there.
There is no reason we could think of that would be worth skipping over this program. Only in the case that you would want to specifically ship to countries which Pitney Bowes [Ebay GSP sub-contractor partner] doesn’t ship to. But why would you risk doing that, especially for so few sales. Ebay / Pitney don’t ship to certain countries for good reasons and I am not going to buck their experience and research on the matter.Bet you already have countries you won’t ship to, so just why not rely on the GSP program and be done with it. But I do hear of the Canadian exception.
If you consider your time worth [pick a random number} $20 per hour, did you spend $40 worth of time messing with that old printer and trouble shooting it. Much less the 3 or 4 new listings you may have been able to create.
I may be totally clueless, but maybe sometimes we create our own “little kinds of stuff to deal with”.
As far as advice to “newbies”, I would tell them to participate in the GSP program. Fast, simple and easy for them and they can move on to foreign shipping on their own after they gain all the experience to do so without a hassle.
So just curious how many people here on SL opt out of the GSP program and handle all this stuff on their own. And if the answer is I ship small stuff and the cost is high. Who cares, as Jay says, it is what it is and if you want it you will pay for it. Otherwise, I would seek out larger and more expensive inventory and ship to where it easily can go to.
Just my opinion while waiting on an computer update to finish.
mike collins in Atlanta
Hey Retro Treasures WV – I do have some information for you but first I would like to use this reply as an example of why I think the “NEW FORUM” format will be such a great thing. For years I have flagged and color coded many of the SL posts. Blue for questions, yellow for answers and green for very note worthy.. I then have saved all of them in my MS Outlook program which is where I have all of my RSS Feeds directed to that come from SL. This way they are all searchable for my use. I have thousands of topics and replies flagged. Then whenever I need to research something that has been said here on SL I use the MS Search function and bingo up pops the information from past SL episodes and posts.
The topic of a “Forum” has been touched on for a long while and now thanks to J&R it is a reality. No longer will I have to flag thousands of things I find important just to be able to search for them
But here is the short comings for just the short term near future. We don’t have a large volume of data posted in the new forum format. So I still will keep my searchable folders just to be able to answer question such as this. The problem is I can tell you the Episode and date but the whole thread and discussions are on my rig. So you will have to go and search here at SL for the dates below and find the replies in those Episodes Comments.Hope you can get to the information easily and quickly. If not, let me know and I can open up those episodes in a heart beat, copy and paste the discussions and threads back to here.
mike at MDC Galleries in AtlantaThis is what popped up when I entered “ozone” as a search term. These are just the headings shown in my Outlook, but if I click on any one of them, I get the full conversation about removing smells from inventory items.
From Subject Received Size Categories In Folder
Mark S Well, you know my answer for this: Ozone generator… 10/25/2015 9 KB Scavengerlife Saved Tips
Mark S Wayne: It might work with books, but you would hav… 7/18/2015 10 KB Scavengerlife Saved Tips
Kate Here’s some more government information about … 7/18/2015 10 KB Scavengerlife Saved Tips
Kate The EPA notes that ozone reacts with (and gets rid… 7/18/2015 9 KB Scavengerlife Saved Tips
Mark S My link didn’t work. It is http://www.forevero… 7/17/2015 8 KB Scavengerlife Saved TipsFollow up on your test suggestion of the topic of no new SL emails [posts] coming through.. Results, No go Jay… I haven’t had an email come in with an update since Sat. [yesterday] at 6:38 PM but I know there have been posts since then. So, I read your links and they just explain the basic premise of selecting to subscribe and Favorite a “Topic”.
So I tried an experiment. I “Unsubscribed” to everything. Logged out and closed SL in browser. Then I re-opened SL, signed and went to Forums. The registered again for Forums. Then I went to each of the 15 Main Categories, clicked on each of them and clicked “Subscribe”. Now that should have done it. That should have subscribed me to each and all “Topics” within that Main Category. But nope. That was early this morning and still no new emails sent to my email account since last night at 6:38 PM.
So now the next experiment I was going to try was to click on the “Main Category”, then click on each “Topic” and subscribe. But I added up all of the “Topics” that are contained in those 15 MAIN CATEGORIES and there are 157 seven of them. So decided not to proceed because of the time it would take.
So do you think that maybe it would be best to just delete my whole account from SL and start completely over, new avatar, new account name, new nick name, the whole works? I don’t know?? Mike in Atlanta
We were off line most of the evening and when I opened up our email I saw we had gotten the email from Ebay saying they had also undercharged our account in Oct. It said we didn’t need to do anything, they would just add the missed charges into our Nov. bill
I was working on reconciling our PayPal account today and couldn’t get it to balance either. Will work on the PayPal statement more tomorrow and wait and see what the Nov. Ebay invoice looks like. mike in Atl.Good Morning: Ok I’ll try that a little later after we get our morning shipment completed.
Will I have to go back and “Unsubscribe” to all of the Categories for the first User name? I don’t want to wind up getting duplicates of everything.
Check back later with update after we get it done.
thanks mike in atl.
One other thing Jay.. I don’t get any of my replies or posts emailed to me. Others replies yes, but my original posts or my replies, no. How about you? Do you get your posts? .. mc
Firefox but I also have Chrome and tested it earlier. Same results on Both. Subscribed to Doing Taxes on both, Had to manually subscribe to COGS topic on both, then the other two when I click on them both say Subscribe. Would think that if Subscribed to main “Doing Taxes” then all three topics would automatically be subscribed and all answers and posts under all 3 would be automatic.
Can’t figure out anything else. mike in atl
