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Thank you buddy. Appreciate it. Will make sure she sees all these posts. I usually go down for lunch with her.
mike – MDCGFA
Well this has already been answered above. But to put it into an example of what we do all the time. Once we have our photos needed for an USPS claim we refund the customer 100%. We also say, we don’t want any of our customers to be unhappy with their purchase.
So simpley stated…. we give a 100% Refund, fill out our insurance claim and get reimbursed. That’s it. That simple. They get to keep a broken item that they can’t use and get their money back. You are out for an item you can’t resell either and you get 100% of your money back on your insurance claim.
The easiest way to look at this is to completely forget the buyer now and just keep it into your mind that you sold a broken item to the USPS for full price and they paid you and the USPS is happy and you’ll get your check in a week or so. Works for us.
Mike – MDCGFA
Thanks Jay. I showed her ya’alls good wishes and it made her smile. We have decided since she can’t climb the stairs up to the office very well and we don’t want her to fall, that I am going to start pulling out all of the art prints I have printed for other artist that I have in my portfolios plus my own work and start listing those mostly instead of hard goods for Home Decor.
Home Decor was her focus and I tagged along just to be with her. So we are going to try to do our favorite source once a month and I will start pulling and listing all the loose silkscreen limited editions that I got as partial payment from all the artists that I used to print their artwork when back in the printing company.
Then also start to list my original artwork, which can be a unlimited source since I can create what I need to sell, so sourcing outside is not needed which will keep her safe from possible Covid exposure. Certainly live auctions, garage sales and tight inside estate sales is not where she needs to be.
The good thing, it will get me back into the art studio, get me back to creating My Own Pipeline, having to list less volume and the prices will certainly be 10 times more than what we sell Home decor Hard Goods at. I should have done this years ago, but kept putting it off so I could be with her and doing what she liked to do.
Little late for an art career but at least I can create objects to sell without having to go by somebody’s else’s stuff. And while the Sales on Ebay may not be the best, it will be better over in the Etsy Shop and hopefully in our new Shopify Store.
So to clone your “Find Yourself a Pipeline” phrase, I will add to that “Create My Own Pipeline” along with the once a month hard goods acquisitions.
She said she appreciates the Good Wishes and hopes everybody keeps doing well during the crisis.
Check ‘ya later…
Mike – MDCGFAUs too. We will see how the doctor visits go and just keep praying for continued good reports.
Thanks TopNotch.. We are hoping for returning to working together again like we used to. Susan has come up to the office only twice in the past year where she used to be up here almost every day. The stairs are too much for her. Not much leg strength left due to side effects and not being able to feel her feet. She calls it “Hobbit Feet” coupled with her Arthritis on top of everything else.
She likes the replies here on SL and I am showing them to her as they come in. Makes her smile.
Thanks again,
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine ArtThanks for the feedback. Oh, I know how to do it, several ways as a matter of fact. It is that now I don’t have to do anything. except for Etsy. Now with Ebay MP I will have to do it for Ebay also.
Also I was not advocating manually doing every item. For a good P&L you only need the total dollars spent on shipping, fees, refunds, charge backs, insurance claims and gross sales all totaled up by those categories.
We used QuickBooks for years but after retirement we went to using a smaller less robust program called Quicken but works mostly the same. Stopped using spread sheets and Easy Auction tracker years ago.
Having ran a 10 million dollar company with hundreds of employees, I can certainly do it several ways, but with direct NET deposits and no way to capture the 5 or 6 categories we track directly via direct download we will just have to work on coming up with a way of grabbing that data via a one or two key stroke download.
We will figure it out but thanks for the help and insite, but I was more of making a statement that we all will have to figure something out and it will be different and a little more work reconcilling monthly.
Heck no, don’t want details on each idividual item, just the totals of those several categories.
But good thinking on your part and I assure you there will a whole lot more of suggestions and help from everyone here on SL once we all get fully switched to managed payments.
Bet this will drive Troy crazy. 🙂
Kindest Regards,
Mike – MDCGFAHey Guys… Just some personal FYI news.
Some of you know that my wife Susan was diagnosed with endometrial cancer April of last year. She has had to go through 36 weekly treatments of Chemo, 2 operations before radiation and then 36 daily treatments of Radiation and finally 3 last treatments of targeted, intense internal radiation.
Well I would like to announce she finished her complete treatment plan this Monday and graduation from the Cancer Center and got to “Ring the Graduation” bell as she left.
Now it is going to be a CT scan to establish a base line, then follow up doctor visit every 90 days for another year, then every 6 months for the next two or three years.
God willing, she will make the targeted survival goal of 5 years at which time, they will make the declaration of Cancer Free. The ratio they gave her was a 75% chance of making that goal.
So we will see. The many side effects of all types has been tough for the past year and all 4 of the doctors say it will be another year before most of the side effects will subside to a point of feeling normal again.
Susan has been mostly bed ridden for the past year and not involved with the online stores at all except for a little sourcing when she was feeling up to it. I, along with our helper Lisa have been maintaining the Ebay and Etsy stores and almost completed our third store which will be our own Shopify Store.
So here is looking forward and hoping the country and heal itself along with Susan and maybe in a year or so we all will be doing much better.
Take Care all and “Keep on Truckin”
P.S. Jay and Ryanne, how about getting a recipe or formula for roasting something close to a Southern Pecan Flavor!!!
The team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Michael, Lisa, SusanWell as we all know, we all come across various YouTubers and I listen for the entertainment value more than anything and we all know that most of it is as you say just opinions without facts to back it up. But thought it was interesting that one opinion floating is that Ayden may be the culprit, and some say Apple Pay. So who knows, but one thing for certain, by the end of 2020, we all will be in managed payments up to our eye balls regardless of who said what, who is mad or not and who likes or dislikes it or not. We will all be “All In”, good, bad, or indifferent.
I have very few sales from other countries. Maybe a dozen or less per year, so over the next few weeks, I will go ahead and just start creating my early registration.
But I did find a small amount of data in Ebay’s printed material that supports my earlier post about extra work to reconcile if a seller wants to have a complete breakout of all things they pre-subtract to keep an accurate and complete P&L statement and know what percentages every expense is as part of his gross income.
Here’s that info.: Fees updates and your reconciliations. You’ll pay one final value fee for items you sell on eBay, and you won’t have to worry about third party payment processing fees. Your final value fees will be automatically deducted from your sales, and the balance paid out to your bank account.
This may require updates to your reconciliation processesSo as I posted last week, yep, if I want a full financial accounting to be in our Quicken Account register, I am still assuming, I will have to print out an Ebay statement, enter the gross amounts [Sales Deposits all totaled together of course, not line item separate like PayPal does] manually, then manually enter the expenses [fees, shipping, etc., again as a lump total amount per category] and then the final net amount should match what Ebay is depositing as their net amount is they deposited.
Ebay will deposit say $600 in my checking. That’s all that’s going to show just like Etsy now. But my example from last week: $1,000 in gross sales deposited a plus in the account, then $200 in shipping costs subtracted, then $200 in fees will equal the $600 BUT-BUT those $400 in expenses will not be shown in our checking account which links to Quicken which in turn produces our P&L. So, all our P&L will show is a $600 deposit [but broken down by several deposits depending on how often we won’t them to do a deposit].
We want to show on our P&L we had $200 in shipping cost or 20% of our Gross Sales, and Fees of 20% of our Gross Sales.
BTW one of the things a P&L is good for is to quickly see where your expenses are going to show the bznz owner where he needs to maybe cut expenses quickly to increase his bottom line profitability.
But in any cases, sellers will have to make some manual calculations to be able to separate out expenses for their online businesses. If not then all you will see is multiple deposits of small amounts that at the end of the month total up to $600 with no indication of where the other $400 went unless you make a manual entry into your Quicken program.
UNLESS Ebay will allow us to import in all of the detailed numbers into our Quicken account like PayPal does now. OR, OR … we can link up our credit card as some have said on here, and then we can import in our credit card statement into Quicken and the details can be pre-categorized there and in turn would fit just fine into the same categories in Quicken.
I know I am off topic of the Auction Professor rant on what Ebay is doing, but it does tie into, does Ebay have everything worked out yet. What categories will or will not be allowed, will they not care as Auction Professor says if they lose some portions of their business. I just don’t know, but damn the defiant, we will all be in this together in just a few weeks on down the road.
What do you bet we have a thousand questions here on SL about a ton of topics after the end of July?
TTFN …
mike – MDCGFAAlmasty … I re-listened to one of the guys again. He didn’t name specific places, he says other platform in this one. BUT.. He does go over some interesting opinions on what his take on this is and we don’t want to go down opinionated rabbit holes or dig into personal rants but the auction professor has been around almost since Ebay opened, has large, multiple stores and his YouTube Subscribers are in the 20K range, so I have attached the link to this video. About 10 minutes in total.
He is saying it is because of ApplePay not Ayden. And as Jay says, we don’t know where his sources are but very interesting listen.
Of course we are mostly Home Goods / Hard Goods / Home Decor / Artwork.
the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cyCIvWj2yc
Take care,
mike at MDCGFA in Atlanta
I re-listened to one of the guys again. He didn’t name specific places, he says other platform in this one. BUT.. He does go over some interesting opinions on what his take on this is and we don’t want to go down opinionated rabbit holes or dig into personal rants but the auction professor has been around almost since Ebay opened, has large, multiple stores and his YouTube Subscribers are in the 20K range, so I have attached the link to this video. About 10 minutes in total.
He is saying it is because of ApplePay not Ayden. And as Jay says, we don’t know where his sources are but very interesting listen.
Of course we are mostly Home Goods / Hard Goods / Home Decor / Artwork.
the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cyCIvWj2yc
Take care,
mike at MDCGFA in Atlanta
@Almasty: I think you one of the guys did. Let me find that video and re-listen and see if he mentioned where he was moving some of his items to. The one guy I was listening too has a large store with a big variety of items. Think his store is over 10k items +/-.
I’ll get back with you later after I re-listen.
Mike at MDCGFA
Hi BrittneyMac
This is not a big disaster, rest easy. We have been selling online since 2002. We ship a whole lot of breakable items. While we use a packaging process, we call our “cocoon” method [discussed here on SL several times through the years], which has kept our breakage down to only 6 or 8 items broken in 18 years, it does happen.You did a good thing by shipping USPS Priority” because you are covered by insurance.
First, make sure you get several photos from the buyer that shows, the outside of the box, and the inside showing the type and amount of dunnage material you used to wrap the item and of course of the broken item.
Then, yes, in your seller hub, go to your sold items list, scroll down to find the item and click on more actions and do a complete refund to the buyer. This way they are made whole.
Now, get yourself a copy of the eBay Sold data from Ebay and PayPal. We do this by taking a screen shot of the Sold information. This is just to prove that you made a sale online, show the tracking number, and the Sold Dollar amount. See, you are just gathering details of the sale to prove you shipped it with them, what the amount was and also get a shot of the refund you did.
Now the easy part. Go to the USPS.com official post office web site, find the tab that says make a claim. Click and proceed through one or two tabs and you will then get to the claim form. All you have to do is fill out the form [only a one pager], write a short description of the issue, then fill in the tracking number and then you will see a section that says, Attach Photos. Attach the screen shots your customer sent you along with the shots of the business details you have taken. With the box photos, and the proof of the sale did take place and the dollar amount of the sale and submit the form.
If you missed anything, they will tell you while you are at the form. Complete it and submit.
In every case we have submitted we have gotten a check from them in about 10 business days +/-. Deposit that in your business account and then you will have been made whole also.
Actually, this sounds more complicated than it really is. It is fairly easy and aside from getting the photos from the buyer [some balk at sending you a couple more when we ask, but finally do when we explain it is for the insurance claim, not that we are questioning them]
Good luck. Also, you can read the USPS details on how to file a claim, but once you do it, you will see how easy it is.
If you sell expensive delicate items and use services other than Priority or FedEx make sure you pay the extra couple of bucks for insurance or always make sure if the cost of your item is over the $50 or $100 limit which we get on Ebay, to insure it. We sell items that at times run into the hundreds of dollars and have to stop and remind ourselves that we need to get the extra insurance to cover that dollar amount.
See, the real issue at hand for the USPS is who is the responsible party. Did they mishandle the package or did the shipper not package their item properly? As busy as they are, they don’t have time to argue the point. Add the fact that you provided several photos and the business information, I would expect a 99.99% chance you will get reimbursed.
Good luck and hope this helps you out.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in AtlantaFrom what I have gathered from the YouTubers, Coins and Money, Adult Material, automotive and things that individual countries prohibit.
I have had trouble in the past saying steak knives because the use of the word knife is prohibited and since Ayden [the managed payment company] is a foreign company [think England], they will be forcing a more strict, sensitive and respectful list of items. At least so say some of the YouTubers.
Those same YouTubers are posting that they are already moving those category items to other platforms in anticipation of the transition to managed payment issues on Ebay.
mike at MDCGFA
Etsy has had managed payments for a while now. The biggest problem we have with it is the ability to easily download all the data we need for our accounting system and to produce an accurate P&L statement.
Etsy only deposits the “Net” amount left over after everything is deducted from the “Gross”. Well to keep an accurate P&L statement which we categorize each and every “Debit and Credit” in our account, having just the net figures throws it off.
i.e. … We sell $1,000 of items [Gross], then let’s say Etsy Takes 20% [$200], Shipping Takes 20% [$200], Promoted Listing and Special Advertising takes 20% [$200] leaving a balance of $400 Net. Then Etsy deposits that $400 into your bank account.
Great except we like to see the $1,000 Credited to our account, then show those 3 expenses as a percentage and then the $400 net. It all comes out the same except our P&L only shows $400 worth of Deposits and not record of the expenses. Which will also throw off the year-end total when you file taxes and there is the “GROSS EARNINGS” box to fill in.
With PayPal we don’t worry about it because every debit and credit are listed, and we have all of those categorized and are automatically recorded. BUT with our Etsy account we have to manually make adjustments in our accounting software to show all the debits and credits because the only place all those show up is on the Etsy monthly statement.
We print out the Etsy statement, then manually add in all the GROSS RECEIPTS, then the debits as a lump sum, such as $65 refunds to customers, the total for shipping labels, the Etsy listing and final value fees., etc. We just do it the first of each month. Then when we do our company P&L, we see the correct amounts and their percentage of the Gross Sales they represent which in turn provides us with a correct P&L.
To put this into a simpler example… At a regular job, when you get your paycheck, it shows the gross amount you earned, then the amount subtracted for Fed. Taxes, State Taxes, Social Security, State Unemployment, any 401k and any portion of health insurance, THEN it SHOWS your NET EARNINGS and that is what is deposited to your bank account.
With Etsy and I guess it will be the same with Ebay Managed Payments, we will only see the final NET Deposited. That is what we only see with Etsy currently. So we have to print out an Etsy Monthly statement manually enter the gross sales in our business register, then manually subtract the deductions and then the NET Figures are the ones Etsy deposited into the account and are the only ones we don’t have to enter.
So does anyone on here that has an Etsy account do what we do or do you have a way to capture all the transactions both Debit and Credit and does anyone know if Ebay is going to be any better or the same?
The best case scenario would be for Etsy and Ebay both the allow a direct link between their accounting system and our bank whereby we can use our own banks “direct linking system” to Ebay and Etsy and to be able to download every + or – minus transaction and then we in turn “classify and or categorize” those transaction into the proper American Accountings Standard classifications and we would have a great automatic P&L statement.
From what we see over at our Etsy store, there is a whole lot more manual work to do to keep things straight then just what the cost is for doing this.
You will know this data by reading your statement, but how is Ebay going to get all the transaction to us in a way we can get that data into our accounting programs. Refunds, fees, FedEx extra charges, returns, all constitute a part of the GROSS being turned into a NET number and those that track their stores as a real financial business want to know what percentage of GROSS all these individual items constitute.
Sorry to throw a twist into the Ebay Managed Payment thing, but the accurate accounting needs to be addressed and we haven’t been able to find any data yet as to what will and will not be included in the Ebay statement, if it is directly down loadable like PayPal is [or was] and will their new system create a whole bunch of monthly manual calculations for all of us.
So much for messing my mind up this morning… Now back to listing
mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment PartsHey Amantino: Something just crossed my mind so I did a quick search.
ZipLock Bags are owned by SC Johnson. So here are the other products they own. Makes me wonder if they guard their other products as closely as they do ZipLock Bags and if so, then here are products I guess we all would have to take a gamble own if we use them in our listings.
This would probably go for Proctor & Gamble and other large corps. that may be on the list.
SC Johnson brands include Glade®, Kiwi®, OFF! ®, Pledge®, Mr Muscle®, Duck®, Baygon® and Raid®. Other brands include Ziploc®, Scrubbing Bubbles®, Windex®, Autan®, Bama®, Shout®, Mrs Meyers®, Babyganics®, Method® and Ecover®.
But I think everybody just uses what they think are the best keywords and takes a chance on not being caught and if they are, then just deal with it when it happens.
mike at MDCGFA
