Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Mike and Jay: On the first point, I agree with both of you. Jay and Ryanne have proven that you don’t HAVE to be best in search to be successful (though that comes with different risks and rewards to your business. All hashed out many times.)
On the second, I’m ticked at myself for not digging in further on this issue. We were long in our session (our 15 minutes I stretched past 20), and since we don’t do GTC much, it didn’t occur to me to drive into this more.
But I will see what I can do to find out more about this.
Mike: Great question, and I feel dumb for not asking it while I had them. I will have to see what I can find out regarding that.
My guess would be that just updating the listing would not be enough to change it from stale/stagnant. My understanding was that what it is looking at are listings that convert to sales. If the listing hasn’t converted to a sale, it drops in search. If it has converted to a sale, it rises in search. This is why having multiple quantity listings as GTC make sense. If you are getting sales on that listing, it rises and gets more sales. But if it doesn’t convert, it should be ended and relisted.
I believe the long strategy session from a few years ago that we have discussed a few times was similar in it’s suggestion, and I know that I have read this from other places as well: Single quantity should be 30-Day, with multi-quantity as GTC PROVIDED that it is also converting to sales. If it doesn’t convert, then end it, tweak it, relist it.
PS – I wish Jay and Ryanne were here with us. We spent a lot of time with Tim Chapman, who advocates the lowest level inventory possible. “Blow it out!”
I would pay tickets to watch this conversation… 🙂
I love the different perspectives!!!
If a listing is selling, it stays high in search. So GTC that have sales AREN’T stale. Stale is for 60 days without a sale.
Yes, 30 Day listings are not considered stale. When we looked at our numbers with the tech group, we had very little that was stale or stagnant. Only our GTC without sales were there.
It isn’t just EBay, it’s all big corporations. I got the feeling that the people at the very top are pushing to get this going as soon as possible. In my prior work with major corporations, they sometimes set aggressive time tables just to get the ball moving. Most of the folks there were confirming this is why they’re moving ahead before having all the tools in place.
I sent a long response direct to Bob Kupbens explaining our thoughts and why we are passing at this time. Hopefully he will see that now is a bad time for sellers like us to have that many hurdles to opt in.
Possibly. It is making Veronica and I re-examine some of our listings to see if we should really make them multi quantity.
Yeah, I figured you guys would like that option!
We are primarily men’s clothing. I would agree that it from talking with others sellers, women’s clothing has a higher return rate.
For those that are interested, I posted all of the information from eBay Open on the “eBay Open 2018” thread. This included answering questions that other Trash Elves sent to us as well as information we received while we were there.
Yep, Veronica was at the session that she talked about, so we can confirm it. The eBay folks on search confirmed their side as well on special characters. So, you will get dropped in search for using any special characters except for a hyphen-.
So no slash, ampersand or even apostrophes in your title is best.
Siglini: 🙂
Thanks! I’m laughing so hard right now. That was awesome!
Stale/Stagnant Listings: We had our Biz Boost session on our store, where they look at your numbers and see where we can improve. They didn’t have any issues on our side, but they did show our Stale/Stagnant listings (none), so I asked.
They confirmed that Stale listings (over 60 days) get dropped in search, and that Stagnant Listings (over 90 days) get dropped even more. I asked if we could start getting a report or a drill down on the site to see these directly, so that sellers could manage these listings (change pricing, update title, etc) to refresh these listings. They took this information down and said that they liked the idea. We will see.
Sales Tax: This is both good and bad. Keep an eye on how things are going in different states, and what may happen at the federal level. It was interesting that even FBA sellers have to pay tax based on the states that their inventory is stored. There was a Sales Tax breakout that I attended, so when they offer this for everyone to stream later, I recommend that everyone watch.
The optimistic side was that Devin Wenig said that he plans to have eBay take this on and collect and pay for us. This still has to happen and go forward, but that is what he wants to do for us. He doesn’t want us to have to deal with this. Call me Pollyanna, but I’m going to take his word that he will commit to help us as sellers to deal with this as it progresses.
Managed Payments: Ok, so this was a big one for us since we were asked to opt in. This was not well received by a lot of the larger sellers (us included), and there was a lot of pushback on where they are. I will be surprised if many larger sellers opt in in September. Here are the main stumbling blocks:
1) ALL third party apps cannot be used. This means listing apps (SixBit, WonderLister, etc), no shipping apps (ShipRush, Stamps.com), and no accounting apps (GoDaddy). This is a large issue right now. For many of the early invitees, this is a hard stop.
2) PayPal will not be added back as a payment option until Summer of 2019. I asked if we could know how many people paid us with PayPal cash vs PayPal Credit (so I can see the amount of buyer we will lose at that point. Since that is PayPal info, eBay couldn’t tell us. This is another stumbling block, because we don’t now how much smaller our audience of buyers will be.
3) Global Shipping Program is not allowed in Managed Payments at the start. The International Payment side with Pitney Bowes I guess is still a mess, so if we opt in to Managed Payments, then we can’t ship GSP. We can ship International directly. This is another risk to deal with at the start, losing GSP protections.
4) Reporting. How we will be able to split out our revenue received (Product Revenue, Shipping Revenue, Sales Tax Collected, and Fees) will not be resolved until early 2019. One change will be that the transaction fee will not be on the transaction level, it will be paid as part of our monthly eBay fees. But not having the breakout will add accounting time to us if we start.
5) Shipping costs still have to go through PayPal. So even though we will be setting up a bank account for our daily cash deposits, we still have to use PayPal to pay for shipping labels. This is kindof wonky at this point, asking sellers to have to transfer cash from their bank account to PayPal to pay for labels. We are planning to use a credit card for these costs going forward, but just painful to ask sellers to do this to start.
6) Holds for Returns. Right now, on INAD and INR cases, PayPal puts a hold on funds. How will this be managed in the future? They don’t know.
So, will all of this on the table right now, and the fact that we would have to deal with this going into Q4, we are not planning to go this route. I would be fine to wait until a lot of this is resolved, definitely with the 3rd Party tools (SixBit and ShipRush) before we make the change.
This really will be a good thing for everyone when it is done. Easier for buyers to just use eBay like every other site (rather than have to have a PayPal account), buyers don’t have to log in to PayPal to pay for sales, Sellers don’t have to worry about buyers opening up PayPal cases against us, Apple Pay is going to be an option soon, etc.
Also, for those that worry about losing PayPal Loans, eBay has partnered with Square Capital to offer another option.
Buytikiselltiki asked: And despite having business policies turned on and managed, they just don’t tie with the the app – the app should have pull downs for the three business policy categories ( payment, return, ship ).
This was in the same conversation with the SKU. The interesting part was that the eBay team thought that people that listed from their phone didn’t use policies. They thought that phone listers were only very small sellers that wouldn’t need this. I let them know that many larger sellers use the phone as a listing tool and that they want (and use) the policies. They took this down and will take it back to the eBay teams.
Jay asked: When listing on the mobile phone, there is no way to add a sku entry to help know where the item is stored. Not including this forces sellers who use a sku system to complete the listing on the computer.
Funny on this, I thought I heard some people say that this was recently added, but I tried on my phone this week and it wasn’t there. I let the eBay folks know about this and they said they would look at that.
-
AuthorPosts