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@ Ricker and Others: Anyone using PirateShip from within SixBit? We use SixBit as a third party listing tool to handle 3 platforms, Ebay, Etsy and Shopify. Other members here also use sixBit and a few WonderListers and Jay and Ryanne have recently started using InkFrog.
So currently SixBit has an interface with Endica, Express One, and using the UPS and FedEx programs Starship and World Ship.
I guess we could just print directly through Ebay and I suppose Pirateship works with Etsy and Shopify.
Just thought I would ask. I could also try calling someone at Pirateship directly [if I can get someone] and see what they say.
Thanks …
mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
Way to go Julie. Same size room we work out of. Ours is a bonus room over the double car garage. 12′ x 23′ long. We do everything up her except storage. That’s all in the double garage. We bring in coming goods, cleaning, photography, weighing, listings, shipping, box storage, shipping supplies, storage bins for listed items [in transport to storage area] laying around and office supply cabinet. It is tight but still can navigate OK. Also have two computer work stations with double monitors and at times we have 3 people up here working at the same time.
Good luck and remember to use vertical space. Shelf above shelf on top of table sort of thing.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
First things first. Make sure what you got back is what you sent. You won’t be the first seller to ship a perfectly good item to a buyer, they then keep yours and then send their old broken one back to the seller. Old school scamming back to the early days of Ebay but still happens. Check your photos and see if you have a shot of the serial number tag and make sure they match or a close up of some area that you can match up scuffs or details to. If you got his old broken one and not the one you sent, you will have a tough one on your hands to untangle because it will gravitate into your word against his. Even if you have the original one back, still will most likely be your word against his.
In some cases if you can convince Ebay then they have at times left the buyer alone but then in turn reimbursed the Seller out of Ebay’s pockets and they make you whole again. But don’t hold your breath.
Ryanne or others may have thoughts on that.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Hey IndySales: I just got a check in today from USPS for $69.37. I have had about 6 or so over the years. They have been just fine every time. I go to the USPS site and fill out their online form. It shows you everything you need.
Part of my process is when I first get the notice of damage from the customer, I have a short cut and paste blurb stating I am sorry the item did not reach it’s new home and destination undamaged and i appreciate the hpto. Then I state, in order for me to properly make an insurance claim and as a requirement for a full refund to you, I will need just a couple more photos. The USPS Claims dept. requires a shot of the item, the packaging and the outside of the box.Once I recive those I will issue you a complete refund. [This encourages them to send the extra photos thinking it is a requirement for the refund, which it really isn’t]
Every customer has complied with several extra shots.
So the other thing the USPS will require is the proof of value. All I do is go to my “Sold Items” and do a screen shot that includes the thumbnail photo of the item, the Ebay ID number, the customers, name and the dollar amount. Other times I have just downloaded the customer invoice. I have done both and they both worked.
So with all this in hand, just go to the USPS web site, find the “Make a Claim” section and fill in the blanks. You will come to the section that asks for photos and all you have to do is drag and drop and I also include the screen shot of the invoice showing the value [what customer paid] and click submit.
They usually get you a check made out to your business name in about 7 to 10 days.
It is really a quick and painless process. The key is have a couple of photos from the customer to show you did have good padding-packing inside the box and of course any exterior damage is self evident and photo of the damaged area. Youe online photos can act to show it was in good condition when you sold it.
Good luck…
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
SixBit will handle everything for Ebay, Etsy and Shopify. They have various plan levels that you subscribe to for either Ebay by itself, or choose between two platforms or all three. Also WonderLister will do Ebay and Shopify at one time and Etsy was supposed to be added by now but unsure if they finished it or not, but I see one of their pricing tiers has 3 platforms listed.
SixBit and WonderLister does complete backups automatically that includes everything in a listing plus anything you enetered into custom fields, photos, and the Notes sections along with with all customer data, name, address, email addresses, everything. You can have them back it up to your own hard drive or to an external drive, dropbox, carbonite, OneDrive or Google Drive so the database is in the cloud. I backup to multiple sources so I will hopefully never loose anything or have to re-create. A plus to offsite is that with photos attached the databases will occupy almost all of your hard drive unless you have a monster drive.
EAT or Easy Auction Tracker will do Ebay only but it is a glorified spread sheet, you will have to back it up yourself and no photos just more basic info.
Sorry Timo… Just too many things flying at me right now, about all I have time for is to duck!
This topic has been discussed numerous times here on SL and is surely somewhere in the old Blog and or Forum archives. The old threads could possibly be found, or Jay could help. He is good at searching SL for us.But without paraphrasing those whole threads, in brief, things don’t just go stale. It is matter of personal preference though combined with what has been stated on Ebay by Ebay.
An Ebay employee and engineer who worked on designing and building the Cassini search engine within eBay has spoken of this. A few years back he was a speaker at the Australian Ebay Open giving a seminar which was videotaped and is still accessible, was asked how Ebay viewed listings that were posted as Good Until Cancelled and left for a long time. His answer which you can watch, is that Cassini begins to consider listings over 90 days old as getting stale, but mostly on listings that have no activity on them [traffic in other words], no Sales if they have more than one available, or views, watchers, the seller hasn’t made any tweaks and improvements to the listing, title, description, etc., etc. Ebay knows these things via Cassini.
Another question from the audience asked well what does Ebay do about it. Back then his answer was, Cassini begins to give preference to listings which have activity on them and as a result has a better chance of selling. The list it an forget listings, do eventually sell, as many of us can attest too, but could they have sold quicker if Ebay would not have abandoned giving the listings extra exposure in search results.
Now granted this is coming from a tech engineer who worked on building Cassini, so I take it that this was not some conspiracy theory. In any case after that video was shown many sellers begin ending their listings after about 90 and then relisting them. But the choice of when to do it is more of a personal analytical survey of your own store, the season, and your inventory type.
Jay says if you have a one of kind, a real one of a kind, no comps for years and years, nothing currently listed and such, well just leave it forever. Eventually it will sell. “List It and Forget It”. But if you personally as many of have, got items you have had for years and years and you listed it 4 years ago and have never visited it again to improve the SEO of the title, have abandoned any type of description, don’t care about Google and more so don’t even care if Cassini finds it or pays any attention to it or care if it never gets any more exposure then, why end and relist at all.
BUT, if that engineer on the video was telling the truth and they built Cassini to start to not dwell on listings as they get older and older and have no traffic or interest from both the buyer side and the seller side, then why do much to promote or feature this listing. Ebay has better things to put in front of the buying public. New things, contemporary things, things they can track are being searched, for, listings where the seller has made some changes to the listing to at least do their part to improve the buyer interests, then maybe Ebay might help those who try to help themselves.
The automatic renewal of a listing just takes the Ebay e-commerce ID number and “extends the expiration date”. Ebay does not unlist it and relist it when the 30, 28, 29 day is up. Then as this concept evolved some found out that if you end a listing manually and do a complete re-list that the old listing is gone and so is any Ebay tracking of that old listing, When it gets relisted, Ebay sees it as a brand new listing and sees that item as a new posting by a seller and assigns it a new e-commerce ID number. Now eBay starts to do some of it’s behind the scenes work. It shows your relisted items in newly listed promotions. Some buyers who search for new things posted on Ebay will now see this as a newly created and uploaded listing. You will get a small icon on that image which displays in your shop for a while, until it starts to get older. Catch the drift there?
So, in order to gain Ebay’s Search Engine attention again the relisting process has been a technique used by some. But it is labor intensive for many unless you can automat the process. Ebay is even now starting to place a sentence on every sellers Hub page that when you take a look at your active listings, the blurb reads, this item is over 16 months old and we suggest you maybe do something to make this listing a little more appealing. Well I would guess after 16 months they have about given up on wasting resources on doing anything special for it.
So, I fall in between both extremes. By using SixBit I can see, sort and filter all my listings on the last modified filed. SixBit keeps track of when a listing was 1st created and each time it gets edited, improved and or modified. Then if I see no buyer traffic, no searches, watches, low impressions and low click through, that tells me first my listing was pretty much way off base, Improper keywords, wrong order, wrong description phrases, maybe price but to us we price way high and work down from there through sales, offers, free shipping and promotions.
So, I filter those older listings and if they are much older than 6 months +/-, I highlight all in SixBit and click Cancel these listings. That is done in a few seconds. Next SixBit shows me all those ended listings. Then I highlight all of them again and click “Go to Items for Selected Listings”. This is very important you get the correct “Go To” selection. This then puts them in a separate folder in “Sell Items, where I can then do bulk-batch edits to make changes to those ended listings. Make shifts on pricing by a percentage. A lot of times I go up on the price not down, or bulk change to free shipping, open up TerraPeak or Marmalade which can be used to search for better and higher-ranking keywords and make changes as I see fit. Then I resubmit back to Ebay, Etsy and Shopify [once I get my shopify store opened back up], and viola’ All platforms see these old listings now as brand spanking new listings, give them their new e-commerce ID number and they are now all considered fresh again and as far as Ebay knows, I just the item yesterday and just now listed it today. Fresh, new, get any attention of juice Ebay may want to throw at it, etc., etc.So Ebay’s relist does not do any type of changes to the listing. But if their new system does show every relist as new, then so will the SixBit relist with a new ID number and I make some personal choices about the listings and how I was presenting those items to the public and hope that my new changes may freshen up the whole listing by making changes in numerous sections.
Hope this helps and I am not so wrong on these points now that I am delving out ill advice so do some research and fact check me on everything including finding and watching that old Ebay Open video. If you get new updated data, please share. It may save me some work, though not too hard in SixBit
TTFN…
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine ArtHey J: Took a buyout. Owner/Partner did a divorce many years earlier and that was a large pay-off because the former wife had an equity stake in the business. Then for 10 years he kept messing around with female employees to the point where I almost quit hiring females knowing that as things in the world were changing that we were heading toward big or potential lawsuit issues.
Then the last straw was he ended up secretly eloping with a woman who was in our shipping dept. I had hired her years earlier and she had received several written warnings from me, and I was on the verge of letting her go and then, BOOM! I go over to his house one Sunday morning to go play golf, and of course she is there, and he announces to me they had gotten married earlier that week.
Over the course of the next month every kid and grand kid she had suddenly became instant employees, many of whom were not good employees. What a headache and I lost control of her kids in the workplace. She was promoted, her daughter became our office manager. then others dispersed throughout. I had enough. So, we agreed to end a 22-year relationship. I did a cash out and had to drag him into court to get even close to what I was into the business. Got a lot less than what I should have.
He continued for another 13 or so years then died. I saw the online photos of all the equipment listed at an Auction. Photos of many things I had built by hand. Same layout as I left it. The business never grew beyond what it was dollar wise, size wise or customer base wise [less what he lost].
So, then the buyout cash got slowly consumed not by any lavish living but did have to move and go elsewhere. So, from CT., I did several large company consulting jobs that took several moves. Then when all that was over and being in a dying industry, [silk screen printing] being replaced by more and more digital printing and then large format, big silk screen printing being replaced by wide format digital printing capabilities my skill sets became less in demand.
So, we came back to Georgia. I dabbled in a few other small ventures, a golf tournament business, some home building in spec homes and remodeling, a spray foam insulation company, and then lastly buying and selling used vintage items at 6 booths at antique malls. After realizing that was a dumb business model whereby the only person making any real money was the landlord renting vendors booths, I took everything online and the rest is history.
The why work so hard part comes from the fact that a bunch of the buyout cash we used to take care of aging and ailing parents, funerals and some of their medical expenses. Also, we like this new venture of buying and selling online, I was also able to start making some things back in the studio and by nature I have always been a person who worked tirelessly. I worked 12-16 hrs. a day 7 days a week for 22 years for the old partner. But now it is much more a labor of love.
But now with Susan having all her medical expenses that pretty much exhausts anything that could even be thought of having living expenses covered by not working. Susan had the first operation when she was first diagnosed with Cancer in April. Then after that operation she was scheduled for 32 weeks of cancer treatments. 8 weeks of chemo weekly, 16 weeks of radiation 5 days a week, then a final 8 weekly treatments of chemo again.
She finished her first 8 weeks chemo and now have found out before she proceeds with the 16 weeks of Radiation, she needs another operation in a hurry. They can’t proceed with radiation without the operation. So, we are dealing with those visit almost each day and surgery will be in a few weeks. Then she needs recovery time before she starts up again.
Lastly, even though we have Medicare and the Advantage plan supplement the costs are something else. We are seeing charges at around $7,000 to $9,000 per chemo treatment and have no idea of what the radiation amounts are going to be. It seems most is being covered, but we still have co-pays and deductible amounts every time I take her. I am guessing / figuring about $350,000 and up plus this new operation to come by early next year.
So why work so hard… well there you go. The full answer. A dumb ass partner, caring for parents, housing parents here, funerals, health issues and to TOP IT OFF car problems on both our cars AND Our house HVAC went out Thursday afternoon and had to have a new system put in yesterday.
So, what was a completely debt free situation except for our mortgage of $834 a month last year is now a situation where I will have to work 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week until I drop dead at the keyboard.But at least I like doing this, but I am tired of my phone telling me I have not been active for the last six hours and would I like to get up and take a walk. LOL 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries
@MyCottage: Agreed. No gloom and doom about it. We are business minded people. We will do what we need to. Certinly no grudge being held against E-bay. For decades I worked for the corp. structure and in turn that was for the shareholders. Had two different companies I worked for sold off and we eventually had to move and me find new jobs. At least here I don’t have to move I just have to spread out onto other online venues.
It is what it is. And if it turns out like one of your scenarios, and Walmart were to jump in and who knows then as you state Ebay could turn back into a complete used vintage platform or who knows. We will deal with everything as it comes up.
Right now we do advertise and need to figure out how the best way to promote on both Ebay and Etsy. With free shipping we are transitioning into, managed payments and promoting having changes, we look at it as an opportunity to learn, grow and expand.
The same way my old partner and I did back in the mid seventies. We took a $10,000 original start up amount and built the business into a mutli-million dollar business, we owned 7 acres of land and built our own building. Took 22 years but we got it there.
mike at MDCGFA
Yep.. That is why I switched away from WonderLister and went to SixBit last year. SixBit already had a functional Etsy interface and I knew through the grape vine that Shopify was being worked on. They came out of BETA last month and went live. Now SixBit will synch / coordinate / balance financials and inventory and storage for all 3 and add in Pirate Ship to ship from all 3 in one spot there is the 3 tier diversified model. BUT.. Shopify is a web site building and hosting, e-commerce merchant gateway app only. You have to build your own traffic and customer base which requires knowledge of SEO, active social media presence on all available outlets and content writing on blog pages. This will take a lot of time and work to SLOWLY build Sales. Your only search engine will be mostly Google and you will have to rank well and work hard to be found and seen in high page rankings on mother Google. But I know some of this already.
So SB is like our command central to keep 3 platforms co-ordinated and we will have to start building the Shopify stores brand and presence on all the social media outlets.
So our plan for balance of this year and all of next is to build as strong of a presence as we can on all 3 platforms, keep listing on all 3 stores and keep buying our used, vintage items.
If not and Ebay shuts down or shuts out old used stuff, I will just go full time into my studio and start making the heck out of my custom artwork and hand made home decor items and just focus on new handmade artist stuff and let it be what it will be.
Yep.. we all will just have to wait and see and as R. Crumb said in the late sixties.. “Keep on Truckin'”
mike at mdc galleries
Me too. Do check out the YouTube video link above. Only about 15 min. This guy is pretty good. Has passed on a ton of good tips for me.
The interesting thing is not only has this come at the start of 4th quarter BUT we are going to be moving toward Ayden as the company to handle the upcoming Managed Payment System. Talk about a whole roller coaster ride for all of us. Then add to that the Ebay board of directors having to replace Wenig and the “New Kid on the Block” coming in and trying to take up and make a mark for him or herself, control changes AND Deal with Ayden taking over and using the delayed payment system they use.
As Betty Davis said, “Fasten your Seat Belts, it’s Going to be a Bumpy Night” or in our case maybe 4th Quarter or Year would be better used to replace “night” in that phrase. LOL 🙂
Mike at MDCGFA in Atl
Yep.. All over the youTube Ebay guru sites I subscribe too. Several know Wenig personally and have a lot to say about what things he brought to Ebay and most just increased Ebay profits at Sellers expense but very little to make things better for the Sellers. They are hopeing the Vice President may get the job because he is very pro Seller.
Here is a guy who has been mentioned here on SL before and I subscribe to his Video-casts. Many are long and tedious and not for many vintage sellers but this one is short and he covers some points about Wenig being at Ebay and some good points about where he thinks [his opinion] Ebay should place it’s focus. In my opinion, all good points.
from Daily Refinements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0bqDmE0tbY&t=1055s
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Thanks for the link and info Julie B. I currently have a Brother Laser printer like what Ryanne used to use. It has been a while since I bought a toner cartridge, but when this one gets depleted I will switch to a label printer instead of buying another Toner cartridge for the Brother at about $40 to $50 bucks.
I have bookmarked your link and will check it out when times comes.
thanks
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta [Dacula, GA actually]Here is a link we often use to see where Ebay is having problems.
https://downdetector.com/status/ebay/map
It is called “DownDetector”. The above link takes you to the Ebay world map. Use the zoom in feature in the upper right corner. You can zoom in and scroll to see your part of the USA and even zoom into your city, keep zooming and it will show you what part of your city, down to even an small area or neighborhood where the Ebay outages or problems are. The problems are color coded to show the severity of the problem
Example the Atlanta area right now from zoomed far out shows a yellow and red glow, zoom way in tight and it shows the red area to be over in Athens, GA about 35 miles east of Atlanta. That is where the University of Georgia is located. So maybe campus related.
BTW.. Georgia ranked 3rd in Nation plays Notre Dame tomorrow and seats are at $611 each, an all time high.
When things are working I first and quickly hit this site. When the whole East Coast is covered in red, then all of us are usually experiencing some issues and we hear about it here in the SL forum.
mike at MDCGFA
@D&C: I am with you and also one of several reasons why I am also going to Free Shipping on most of the items in our shops.
From a few things we have been watching, like amount of questions, especially about shipping costs, a greater number of offers, amount of low ball [more than 50%] and normal offers [most being an offer that is almost exactly the same as the Cal. Shipping cost would be.
We are of the opinion that as many video posters state that many people see it, want to buy it, and don’t want to spend the time or don’t know how to make offers, wait on our responses, play around with bouncing back and forth with possible counter offers from us, etc., etc.
They see it, want it and just want to pay for it. Too much trouble or time consuming to have to add things together like item cost and shipping or they don’t even know about the shipping tab and entering their zip codes to discover what shipping will be, and god forbid have to add those two numbers together. Ebay says a lot of abandoned carts are due to the buyer actually seeing the cost of shipping for the first time because they didn’t take the time to “see” the shipping on the listing, get freaked out and then abandon the cart.
So to D&C point: PL doesn’t cost a thing unless it sells, the promoted fee I have at 3% across the board is less than having to take offers lower than 30% OFF ++ or speeds up the process to a point of “See it, Want it, Buy It, Right now and Ship it Fast as you ca” syndrome of what, in our opinion, is becoming the way, we feel most buyers want to buy.
Too many people in this world seem to be too busy to deal with a yard full of details, the “WEEDS” as Jay calls it. They are sitting in their car waiting to pick up the kids at school, in a parking lot waiting to go into work, getting off work, buying at work [yep] and just want to see one photo, decide if it’s “cute”, click buy it and be done with it.
We feel that newer items that are not “old and stale” instead of the “list and forget” method is now a better way to go [end listings and relist automatically [with SixBit], cross post, run a small promoted listing on all, always have some sort of flash sale going and ending, build up our own domain website, social media promotion to drive traffic to all sites and eventually wean buyers over to just our store, then use Google ads to replace platform promotions [because all that does is drive traffic to Ebay and Etsy and not specifically to our store and specific item.
Then we will see where we go from there.
So rather than worry about the “weeds” of whether Ebay is showing 1, 2, both or none is too time consuming for us now and we need to focus on building the business, infrastructure and our own traffic. Use PL at a low rate and let it ride. You only pay if they buy and 3% of the Sale is peanuts compared to the fact we run Sales with as much as 25% to 30% off at times or cave in to low ball offers that add up to about the same percentage off. And we are hopinh to get instant sales instead of potential sales we have to have a conversation about.
We have settled on “See it, like it, buy it… an Ya’ll please do come again!” approach.
And as always, just our team’s opinion [their are 6 of us now] and that and $1.00 will get you a third of a cup of coffee! LOL 🙂
The team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment
Capitol Atlantic Properties, LLC
and now JR SprayFoam, LLC [yep back to the spray foam business partially]Susan, Lisa, Jean, Karen, Michael, George
Mark: Are you running the the “Duo” version of SixBit? For 500 items it is very beneficial to be using the Duo version so, as Troy says, that SixBit will handle everything in the background.
The biggest problem trying to do it manually is that you have to have access to your computer every minute of the day or night. If you sell one thing on Etsy then a customer looks for another item because they want two of them, then they buy the one they see on Ebay and it turns out it is your same item, you get burned by selling two of something you only have one of.
But by letting SB handle it in the Duo version, after you upload to both Ebay and Etsy, you can sit back and relax and SB will keep both stores in synch, sort of like Bonanza used to, or was supposed to but didn’t at times. 🙂
Also SB will keep your reports showing Sales to both platforms separate. Like Troy said doing it manually and you will miss something and have items still listed that you sold, even weeks or months ago, so it is worth the extra cost to pay for the Enterprise Duo version. $99.99 per month.
The process inside of SixBit is fairly easy. With the Duo version every time you go to create a new item listing, you will select one of your templates and input the data just as you would any other time or just as you would on the Ebay App itself. Title, price you paid, item specifics, weights, colors, your own SKU number and other items that Ebay doesn’t offer. Now once done, you are ready for an Ebay upload, but wait, you want that to also be posted on Etsy. If so, you will see an Etsy Tab right beside the Ebay tab. Click on that and then click on the “Propagate from Ebay” and SixBit automatically copies all of the data you put into the Ebay fields over to the Etsy fields, if they are mapped the same. Etsy uses a few less fields.
Then as troy has mentioned in the past, there are a couple of blank fields you fill in to complete the Etsy form.
Now it is time for you to select “Submit” and there is a pop up window that says Ebay or Etsy. I select Ebay first. Up it goes, then I come back and click submit again and choose Etsy and hit Submit and it goes to Etsy. Then it is residing on both platforms.
Now I will say, that I made this short and more of a quick over view. There are a few more details you will have to learn and how to set up an allocation plan and make sure it is set on both tabs before submitting and a few other things. But those can be learned from the tutorial videos, the technical guide book and also when you upgrade to the Duo version, one of the tech guys can jump on and do a remote in session and set it up for you.
Then all you do is first test doing 2 at a time to get the feel of it. Then dare to do 4 at a time. Once comfortable, you can highlight all of the listings, select submit, choose Etsy and walk away. With 500 hundred listings it will take a few hours to upload all the hptos and populate all the Etsy fields.
But you need to learn how to make the descriptions, create a standard wrapper you want to use for a template in your description area and things like that. Everything is in the manual [kind of +/-] or you can ask the tech team. As has been said before, SB and WL does have it’s learning curves and one doesn’t just walk away in a day or two and have it all down. I am still struggling somewhat with the “Batch editing” process. Not that it is bad, but SB can just do so much, and can handle so many various sorts, filters and customizable screens, it gets somewhat overwhelming unless you know coding like Troy and can make SB do what you want the way you want.
I have spent a few weeks getting SB set-up to make the transitions we wnat for the 4th quarter. It does take time.
Troy is better at it than I am and he has helped me understand some of SB. The team can take a while to get questions answered with them, but they have been great. Steve Leah, Dustin, J. Ryan, and a few others.
Good luck with it..
mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
