April eBay Success Meeting

Topics:
eBooks presented by Dany Byrne
Www.dbyrneassociates.com

eBay Town hall in Seattle March 15th

The group from eBay came to Seattle March 15, 2007 and invited buyers and sellers to participate in a Town Hall style meeting.

The meeting was held at the Marriot Hotel. We were treated to an excellent buffet style dinner, including a whole table full of chocolate desserts – be still my heart!

The eBay employees were very friendly and approachable. As we signed in Bill Cobb was there to shake hands and talk about baseball, or eBay, or just say “hello.”

The main event of the evening was the opportunity to ask questions of the eBay group and give them feedback about our user experience.

Among the many issues brought up were:
Customer Service and tech support issues. Sellers are experiencing frustrating replies to from tech support indicating emails are not being fully read.

Griff responded that's one of the areas the eBay staff is focusing on this year. Better communication with the community members is their goal.

Store sellers saw an increase in sales when the listings went into the natural search and are disappointed that the feature was withdrawn.

Bill Cobb responded that eBay saw a dramatic drop in the number of buyers on the site, that when polled these buyers were overwhelmed with the amount of items available and leaving the site. The bottom line was eBay was starting to see a decrease in sales. The decision was made to pull back the store inventory search availability.

Concerns were voiced about Net Neutrality
Bill Cobb addressed this issue. His feelings were expressed by the statement “Net Neutrality is harmful to business and is harmful to consumers.” He and Meg Whitman recently traveled to Washington to address the issue. He assured us that he is “not giving up on this issue.” eBay is joined with Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other net giants to fight this.

Griff reminded us that with over ¾ of a million people now making a part or full time living on eBay (according to recent nelson ratings) of the power of the eBay sellers to unite and fight this issue.
Bill added “don’t underestimate the power you guys have” While eBay sellers are busy just selling and may not consider it, eBayers are creating jobs. Not just any jobs, high tech jobs! Bill told us know how important that is to politicians. The legislators in Washington want to be able to report back to their voters that there are jobs being created. Remember, he added, we can affect the outcome and change both individually and collectively.

The question was raised about a recent quote that stated they (eBay) had “plans to remove unproductive products.” The quote has had the message boards in an uproar. What did eBay mean?
We were reassured that this was a misquote from the press and that no such plans were in the works.

The topic of excessive shipping and handling came up – it is still on the forefront of buyer and sellers minds.

Bill and staff assured us that they are addressing the issue with the new feedback 2.0, they are considering having a sort by total cost feature and other methods of dealing with this issue. Brian from the eBay staff summed it up for all of us: “excessive shipping and handing is a difficult issue.”

Another concern was about seller fees. The fees to list and sell items for $9.99 and under are excessive. To list and sell the total in fees is $2.20 – a disproportionately high percent compared to higher value items.

I didn’t hear any real response from the eBay team on this, other than they thought it was great feedback. Guess there’s no plans to change the fee schedule anytime soon. This is an issue I face daily when choosing items to sell. To have a well rounded inventory mix in my store I must keep lower value items in stock – but with the high cost of selling them, there is no profit in them. Personally I was disappointed in lack of response from the team.

Many other questions and concerns were raised during the evening, among them: slow load time on the site, adding more bulk editing capabilities, assorted requests for tweaks in search, frustrations with site changes that seem to be untested before going live, buyer confidence and branding, and many different issues concerning PayPal.

The meeting was like a mini eBay Live! Anyone who has been to an eBay Live knows only a few people get a chance to talk – this meeting was different. Everyone who had a question or comment had time to voice it to the staff.

After the main meeting the eBay group stayed to answer questions, talk more on concerns and generally get to know their sellers.

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Blogs You have one now what?

Selling on eBay is just like anywhere else. Marketing is the most important job a merchant has. Yes, listing items is important, but if buyers don’t find the listings how are you going to sell to them? You may think eBay drives the traffic to your listings so nothing more is needed. If you do, you may find yourself with fewer and fewer sales.

I’m finding I have more competition every day on eBay. If I rely solely on eBay to drive traffic to me I miss sales. I think as eBay continues to evolve and open up to sellers worldwide, especially in China, we sellers are going to see more and more products being sold at lower and lower prices. If we use only the eBay search engine to bring us buyers, we’ll find that it will be necessary to reduce margins to compete.

Having a blog is one excellent way to drive traffic to your store. I know many sellers in the Success Group have started a blog. They heard it was what they should do. Now they are wondering if anyone sees it, or if it really is an effective tool in driving traffic. I’ve been posting on my Blog relatively regularly and I am starting to see an increase in hits from the blog into my eBay Store. It hasn’t happened overnight, and I have been exploring & experimenting with different methods to draw traffic to my Blog.

Most Blogs sit in cyberspace hoping someone will stumble onto it…. And if you are hoping your Blog will be discovered this way, expect it to happen around the same time you win the 5 million dollar lottery.

Stating a Blog and posting to it regularly is only a first step. Once you have been posting to your blog for a few months and have content it’s time to start promoting it. The idea is to draw traffic to it, and then to your store. Remember, the reward for the extra work is more traffic and the 75% final value fee reduction.
These are a few of the places I have found to promote my Blog.
Ezine Articles:
http://EzineArticles.com/
Take one of the Blog articles you wrote. Rewrite a few sentences, so it is not the exact article and post it on ezinearticles.com. At the end of the article you may include a brief signature or bio and be sure to include a link to your blog. It’s a free service.

Announce your Blog in every Newsletter you send out.
Be sure to give your readers a reason why they should visit it. Tell your readers they can find product reviews, recipes, free stuff, etc at your Blog.

Add a link to your Blog in your About Me page
Links outside eBay are only legal on the About Me page, take advantage of it!

~ Technorati
www.technorati.com
Technorati is like the Google of Blogs. Be sure to list your blog there. If you know how, get a technorati button to post on your Blog. Technorati will give you ranking information as well as tell you who is linking to your Blog.

~ Blog Carnivals
http://blogcarnival.com
A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

Blog Carnival is the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and maintain carnivals.
If you can’t find one to match your Blog topic, you can create one of your own.

Contributing to the eBay Blog Carnival has really bumped up visits to my Blog. A few Blog authors have found me and linked to my Blog posts. Great for building SEO!

~ Leave comments & participate in other people’s Blogs
We’ve all read posts from the marketer who flies in, leaves their url and never returns. That’s not going to work. However, if you find one or two Blogs you enjoy reading, post a comment now and again. You can leave a link back to your Blog. These kind of links are very powerful for SEO building.

~ Exchange links with other Bloggers.
Find a blog you enjoy and respect and request a link exchange. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know!

~ Digg It!
www.digg.com
Another social networking site. Sign up for an account and put the “digg this” button at the end of all your posts. When people read the post the can “digg it” Another way to build links.

Stuff you can do with your Blog:

Find out how much your blog is worth: (mine’s worth $2,500 – gotta get busy!)
http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

If your blog is hosted on Blogspot, sign up for Adwords/ Adsense with Google. They’ll feed those small square adds onto your website and will pay you a few cents per click every time someone clicks on them.

That’s all for now. But, if you loose this handout, you’ll be able to read this article on my blog at:
http:clovercitysells.blogspot.com

See you there!

To email me for more information contact Cindy Shebley