by Kathy Terrill | Sep 29, 2019 | eCommerce Selling Tips, eCommerce Tips, Selling on eBay
eBay sellers Christmas is less than 90 days away. That is less than 12 weeks. That may seem like a long time to you. It is not. So, eBay sellers that means it’s time to start preparing for a profitable Q4 right now.
Not sure exactly where to begin for a successful eBay sellers Christmas selling season?
Relax, because I’m here to help you have your best Holiday selling season ever! The first thing to remember is that there’s really no wrong way to tackle Q4, as long as you tackle it. It’s your business; you get to be in charge of how you run it.
So don’t waste time and energy comparing yourself to others.
What works best for another eBay seller may not work for you — and vice-versa. Make the best decisions for your business and your life. It’s your eBay business.
If you’re like most eBay sellers, there are probably 3 things on your eBay sellers Christmas Q4 wish list:
- More sales than last year
- Get more done in less time
- Enjoy the holidays with family and friends
My proven Q4 success strategies can help you achieve all 3 of those goals to have a great eBay sellers Christmas!.
Go to your Active Listings page in Seller Hub, and click on Current Price to sort items by what’s most expensive. Which of your items are new with tags?
You may think an item is not a gift. Remember not everyone has your lifestyle. Your family may not gift power tools, but for someone else, it’s the perfect Chrostmas gift. Think outside the box when it comes to what you think is just right for a gift. Many, many items are giftable! Christmas present are not just dolls, teddy bears and video games!
The perfect Christmas gift is more than toys!
Don’t forget that used items also sell as gifts, especially if they’re vintage and/or collectible.
Next, check your unlisted inventory, and get gift-worthy items listed ASAP.
Make a list or spreadsheet, so you can easily keep track of your Holiday listings. Then cast a critical eye at your active listings. Do any of them need their photos redone? Or maybe put into a different order? Make sure your listings are still optimized for search, too, as item specifics may have changed. This recent video Lost In eBay Search shows you how invaluable correct item specifics are.
By now you should be pretty well organized. Check your holiday inventory at the beginning or end of each week, whichever works best for you:
- What’s selling or sold?
- Do you need to run a sale?
- What needs tweaking?
Create promotional campaigns, and make a note of what works — then do more of it!
Finally, to have the ultimate eBay sellers Christmas, plan to enjoy yourself
In between all of the above tasks, take time to bask in the company of family and friends and participate in holiday events.
Build that time and those events into your Holiday plan. You’ll be making memories while your business is making money!
Break out the wassail, and let’s share a toast: Here’s to your best eBay Christmas Holiday selling season ever!
by Kathy Terrill | Jul 9, 2019 | eCommerce News, eCommerce Selling Tips, eCommerce Tips, Selling on eBay
eBay Open 2019 essential attendees guide is here!
With eBay Open 2019 less than a month away, it means it’s time for sellers to start planning. So, how will you make the most of your 3 days at this once-a-year opportunity? Get ready to get up close and personal with eBay executives, employees, and fellow eCommerce entrepreneurs!
How much you’ll get out of your time at eBay Open 2019 depends on how much effort you put into planning.
A few minutes spent planning your eBay Open 2019 day, maximizes your results!
Think now about how to best and most wisely utilize your time. Once you’re actually in Vegas, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the event. With the camaraderie of meeting up with old friends and making new ones, it’s so easy to realize on the last day that you’ve missed important workshops. And you haven’t talked with key eBay teams, and/or didn’t spend enough time in the Expo Hall.
Don’t be THAT attendee! Instead, do your planning now, and build in time for fun and spontaneity along the way.
What to bring to Las Vegas in July?
Here are some success strategies to keep in mind at eBay Open 2019, especially if you’re a first-time attendee:
- Download the eBay Open 2019 App. Typically it’s released a few days before the event. Keep an eye on your emails from eBay Open. The app will have the daily agenda, surprise events and more.
- Pack plenty of business cards. You’ll want them handy to enter vendor raffles and exchange with fellow sellers.
- Yes, it’s VERY hot outside but bring a sweater or hoodie as meeting rooms can be chilly.
- Wear your most comfortable shoes. There is a lot of walking from hotel rooms to the conference.
- Hydrate! Remember, you’re in the desert, so bring along your favorite reusable water bottle Bonus points for yo if it’s eBay branded,
- Take plenty of notes. Many events are taped, but it helps your memory to be a note taker.
Last but not least, have fun!
Back again this year are the super popular Biz Boosts! Want 1-1 time with an eBay Customer Service representative?! Biz Boost offer you that opportunity. Schedule a Biz Boost appointment to discuss your eBay business in detail. Get recommendations for growing and improving it. You should have received an email from eBay’s Biz Boost Appointment Team about this via (regular email, not through My Messages); click on the link in the email and follow its instructions.
The annual eBay Open Unofficial Meet & Greet is the perfect way to kick off your eBay Open conference experience.
Hosted by the Dallas Meet Up groups’s Stephanie Inge with the help of eBetsy, this year’s opener for Open takes place from 7pm-10pm on Monday, July 22, in the Skyfall Lounge, located in Mandalay Bay’s Delano Tower. No tickets are required. Just show up and enjoy mingling with your fellow eBay sellers. eBay staff have been known to attend.
Arriving early before eBay Open officially kicks off on July 23? You can register early for the conference: 12pm-5pm Monday or 8am-12pm Tuesday at the eBay Open desk in the lobby of Mandalay Bay. Regular registration starts at 3pm Tuesday. Additionally, the Expo Hall opens from 5pm-7pm for the eBay Open Welcome Registration. This is your chance to scope out the Expo Hall, so be sure to do your homework well in advance:
Go to eBayOpen.com/Sponsors to see who’s going to be there; then click to “Learn more” about each of them.
Make a note of those that interest you most. You can’t cover them all, so it’s important to pick and choose — preferably ahead of time. It’s well worth to walk the sponsor/vendor area. Vendors offer an array of services that are worth knowing about.
Day One on July 23 begins with the opening of The Expo Hall and Reception!
At the Welcome Reception, you can check with vendors regarding special offers for Open attendees or getting a demonstration of their product. Additionally, you can score T-shirts, collector pins, and other nifty swag. Not to be missed:
- BULQ, purveyors of liquidation goods by the pallet or case, will be offering you a chance to win a $500 BULQ case; just get your eBay Open attendee badge scanned by a BULQ team member and sign up for a BULQ account (if you don’t already have one).
- StreetPricer will be giving live demos of their eBay repricing tool. Repricing tools give eBay sellers an edge. StreetPricer can keep an eye on your eBay listings. It can move prices up and down maximizing your sales and profits! I use this tool and love it. I’ll be on hand (Kathy Terrill -I Love to Be Selling) with the StreetPricer team to give you expert eBay advice.
- Scotch ™/3M is a first time sponsor at eBay Open 2019. Stop by and learn all about their shipping innovation Scotch™ Flex & Seal Shipping Roll. Here is a recent blog post all about it! My YouTube shows you Scotch™ Flex & Seal Shipping roll in action!
eBay Open 2019 Wednesday and Thursday are chock-full of general sessions, workshops, and seller panels!
Before you head to Vegas, go to to eBayOpen.com/workshops to read up on the various workshops and seller panels to be offered, then prioritize them in order of their importance to you and your business. Note: Some sessions are offered more than once. Take time now to prioritize the session you don’t want to miss. Write down your questions, then check the workshop schedule to see who’s likely to have the answers for you.
Check out the speakers, too, for the general sessions as well as for the workshops and seller panels, at eBayOpen.com/speakers.
Typically the general sessions are headed by senior staff and executives. We’ll hear from eBay CEO Devin Wenig, eBay’s Chief Marking Officer Suzy Deering and more. Often after general session you’ll discover these chief executrices in the halls and reception areas of eBay Open. They are accessible to sellers, so walk up and introduce yourself.
eBay executives and staff love meeting sellers.
Bear in mind as well that in addition to the general sessions and workshops, Open offers pop-up mini-events. They all sound great, but you can only be in so many places at once, so be ruthless about sticking to your priorities: eBay search? Seller Hub? Shipping? Google?
Wednesday gets off to a relatively leisurely start, with breakfast offered from 7:30am-9am. After that it’s full-tilt boogie — with breaks for lunch and a snack — until Happy Hour in the Expo Hall winds down at 6:30pm. Thursday gives you only an hour for breakfast but one additional snack break, wrapping up after a final General Session from 3pm-4pm. At some point, too, eBay will announce the winners of this year’s SHINE Awards. Voting for eBay’s SHINE award begins July 15. be sure to vote!
Then it will be time to get ready for the closing party, 6pm-10pm at Las Vegas’ House of Blues.
Between those 2 days, you could attend a total of 10 workshops/seller panels altogether: 4 on Wednesday, 6 on Thursday. But remember, you also need to allow time for talking with vendors in the Expo Hall as well as for networking with eBay team members, executives, and customer service reps!
See why you need to start planning NOW for eBay Open 2019?
by Kathy Terrill | Jun 4, 2019 | eCommerce News, eCommerce Selling Tips, eCommerce Tips, Selling on eBay
There is selling pain at times for most eBay sellers.
There is too much to do, in too little time. Your home or office is full of unlisted inventory. Furthermore, shipping takes too long. Social media is time consuming. Additionally,how do you sort out what needs to done each day? What’s a seller to do?
The pain from struggling with time management is ongoing! Even here in NYC the city that never sleeps, it can seem as if there are not enough hours in the day. So what’s a busy seller to do? What really works?
Here are my top 3 tips to remove selling pain:
First of all, figure out where your time is going. You can’t begin to manage your time until you know what you’re doing with it. For one week, track what you do with your time each day.
Grab my complimentary time trackers. I’ve developed these exclusively for you, my eBay seller friend.
Relieve eBay selling pain with complimentary time trackers, just for sellers!
Be ruthlessly honest in this initial assessment. Here are the Top Five Time Wasters eBay Sellers Face.The whole point is to figure out where you are wasting or otherwise making inefficient use of your time. Just remember that nobody works at maximum productivity every minute of every day, and you’re allowed to take breaks. So, don’t be too hard on yourself at this point! There is enough selling pain without adding to it!
Second, review your week-long timeline.
Now you can be judgmental: Is your time being spent where you’d like it to be? Is it being spent on the right things? Is your timeline aligning with your priorities?
Chances are you’ll find room for improvement. For example, could you spend 30 less minutes per day on Facebook and instead use that half-hour to take photos of items to be listed? What other bits and pieces of your day are being frittered away that could instead be devoted to getting something done?
Lost seconds add up to minutes, add up to hours, faster than you might think!
But still, don’t be too hard on yourself. Sure, we could all probably benefit from a little more self discipline; however, it’s equally likely that we could all probably benefit from scaling back what we expect of ourselves. Because when all is said and done, there are only so many hours in each day…and probably something not yet done by the end of every one of them! So, try to be realistic when you plan how to more effectively utilize your time. Additionally, streamlining choices, and getting 30 minutes back each day is a HUGE win. 30 minutes is a lot time for shipping or listing!
Third, set and write down 3 goals for your week. For instance:
- List 120 items
- Clean out storage closet
- 1 product-sourcing trip
Look at your calendar and figure out when and how you can accomplish those 3 things. Then go forth and do them!
At the end of the week (or the beginning of the next week; whichever works for you), take a few minutes to assess: Did you meet your 3 goals? Maybe 2 out of the 3? Maybe only 1? Yes or no? Again, be ruthlessly honest, but stop short of beating yourself up for any shortfalls. If you didn’t get everything done, then you just need to re-tweak your initial plan.
Without looking at what is working and what isn’t, you’ll go in endless circles, repeating the same errors or bad choices.
Maybe you really love Facebook, and it’s a bit of a mental health break for you as well as a marketing opportunity. So give up just 15 minutes, not 30. Furthermore, scale back your listing quota for the week to 100 items instead of 120. It’s important to succeed. You get MORE done that way.
Or say you love product sourcing, but personal and/or household errands are falling by the wayside. How can you bundle errands with sourcing? Is your grocery store close to a favorite thrift store or outlet mall? You get the idea!
So there you have it. Time management can be as simple and easy as 1-2-3. It reduces selling pain!
Complimentary time trackers to end eBay selling pain!
- Honestly assess how you spend your time.
- Set goals for using your time most productively.
- Take action; then reassess; and repeat.
Just remember when you’re setting your priorities that sleep is essential, as is eating, LOL. In addition, be sure to carve out time to spend with family and friends as well as give yourself some time to pause and smell the flowers along the way.
In the long run, you’ll not only get more done, you’ll also be happier doing it.
by Kathy Terrill | May 15, 2019 | eCommerce Tips, Selling on eBay
Have your eBay sales slumped recently?
Ever wonder whether you’re the only seller experiencing a drop in eBay sales? Well, wonder no longer…because ShelfTrend’s new Recent Sales Report can help you get to the bottom of why your sales seem to be bottoming out!
There are lots of reasons for a slowdown in eBay sales.
It’s important to dive in and find out what is going on. Maybe there are just less buyers on eBay for your product right now. Maybe there was a change to eBay’s Best Match algorithm, so not as many buyers are finding your listing. Perhaps your price is too high. Or (worse yet), perhaps your product is losing its appeal.
It all adds up to lots of lost sleep while you fret and fume over the question of what’s causing eBay sales to drop.
But ShelfTrend subtracts those worries from the equation. All you have to do is search by keyword, category, competitor, or product identifier. Then ShelfTrend’s Recent Sales Report will show you the Last 7 Days, Last 30 days, and Month to Date sales for the Top 100 Listings as ranked by Best Match: number of items sold, revenue, and pricing.
ShelfTrend‘s eBay sales data is super-easy to use and understand, too.
Using ShelfTrend’s eBay data is super easy and helps you know why your eBay sales have slowed down!
ShelfTrend boils down the complexities first, doing the analysis for you and presenting you with the results. You don’t even need a spreadsheet!
The information in this report is extremely revealing. ShelfTrend’s Recent Sales Report makes it as easy as 1-2-3 for you to:
- Compare your own eBay sales to those of your competitors.
Learn how you could improve your listing, pricing, or even your product to regain lost sales.
- Identify who and what is dominating search results and sales. Detailed sales analytics for brands, products, and competitors give you an idea of emerging trends and what’s hot on eBay right now.
- Evaluate the overall market.
Use the interactive chart — which charts sales volume, sales revenue, and median price — to understand whether the market is experiencing growth, or if everyone is in the same boat with having a drop in sales.
You can search, sort, and filter — e.g., by listing format or condition — to drill down further.
This enables you to uncover critical insights that could change the way you source, price, and sell.
You can also download Recent Sales data as an Excel spreadsheet to glean even more detailed metrics, including item specifics, buyer location, and — soon — product variant. It’s an invaluable tool for assessing the performance of your products and your competitors.
But wait, there’s more! When you sign up for ShelfTrend and run the Recent Sales Report, you also get ShelfTrend’s other reports:
- Top 500 Live Listings Report
- New Listings Report
- Supply Demand Report
When you run these reports together for the same keyword search, category, or competitor, you get a wonderfully well-rounded, real-time perspective on what’s really happening on eBay — not what you guess or hear rumors is happening.
The story behind this ecommerce market data company is both interesting and inspiring.
ShelfTrend was founded by former eBay executives Anojan Abel and Lisa Wong, who worked closely with sellers. Between the 2 of them, they had nearly 20 years of experience with the platform. Their epiphany came when they were asked to figure out why one seller had seen a recent decline in sales over recent weeks, despite not changing anything about their listings.
The seller suspected that the drop in sales might be due to a change in eBay’s Best Match search algorithm.
If your eBay sales have slowed, do you know why?
But a closer analysis of sales data revealed that in fact, a competitor had snuck in and begun listing similar products at lower prices. Because the seller had no easy way to spot this change in the marketplace, they missed critical activity within their category. The result? A huge disruption of their business!
Realizing that even the most seasoned sellers could be caught off-guard when they’re flying blind, Anojan and Lisa created ShelfTrend to help sellers stay on top of their sales.
They’ve got live marketplace data for more than a billion listings in thousands of categories from over 20 eBay countries. Their goal is to arm sellers with the analytics they need to make data-driven decisions about listing and selling on eBay — and to help them stay ahead of their competition.
Now, thanks to ShelfTrend’s suite of marketplace reports, you can identify, research, and monitor your competitors and their selling activity.
You can also analyze market movements to uncover emerging new products and competitors or gauge shifts in demand.
In addition, ShelfTrend lets you benchmark your business. You’ll know where you stand among sellers of similar products, and you can look for opportunities to improve your search ranking, drops in listings, or price changes.
Furthermore, ShelfTrend helps you find profitable niches by highlighting supply gaps vs. buyer demand.
ShelfTrend quickly identifies what IS selling on eBay!
Look at it this way: You can spend hours on eBay marketplace research and not be able to see the forest for the trees. Or you can let ShelfTrend do the work for you and get actionable results, including their new Recent Sales Report. Try ShelfTrend’s Basic Plan for free at ShelfTrend.com.
Take action with ShelfTrend to reignite your eBay sales!
by Kathy Terrill | Apr 12, 2019 | eCommerce Tips, Pinterest Tips for online sellers!, Social Media Tips
eBay sellers turn to Pinterest for it’s sales power.
It is a fruitful and profitable social media platform for eBay sellers. That is because your Pinterest pins live on for a very long time. This means that the time and effort you spend posting there will pay sales dividends for weeks, months, even years to come. Your pins done correctly will continue to direct buyers to your online products for a long, long time. So, your time spent pinning what you sell, is time well spent.
According to digital marketing agency Omnicore , there are more than 250 million Pinterest users worldwide.
There are 250 million pinners worldwide!
Half of them live in the USA, and 2 million of them save shopping pins every day. So, that’s a lot of prospective buyers!
But there’s recently been a big change in how pins work.
Seller used to be able to edit the address (URL) of their pins to direct traffic to a category in their eBay store, or to a search within their eBay store, once a one-off item sold. This was very helpful for sellers of unique items.
But that’s no longer the case.
When you pin to Pinterest with either Pinterest’s browser extension or eBay’s Share button, the address leading to the exact item is displayed to shoppers. That’s great if you’re selling multiple quantities of something, but not so great for sellers who have only one of an item. Here’s why: Once your item sells out, if a Pinterest user clicks on your pin, eBay will redirect them to similar items. For example, if your pin was for a red shirt, eBay shows them other red shirts.
But eBay doesn’t necessarily redirect the Pinterest user to your items; they direct them where eBay thinks best for eBay!
I explain how this works in my video, “What Happened To Pinterest?”
You’ve done the work, but you don’t reap the sales ad traffic benefits.
So what to do? First, build a pin . It takes about 5-10 minutes to learn how to do so; once you get the hang of it, it’s a snap. Basically, you upload your photo, then write a title and description. But for the URL, instead of the listing’s web address, put your nearest eBay store category’s URL or the link to a search in your store. If you don’t have an eBay store, then your best bet is to use the URL for your seller ID.
I give all the details and show you how to do this in my above YouTube video “What Happened to Pinterest? HUGE Impact for Sellers!”
Sellers, you deserve the sales from your social media work. Check out my YouTube, so you don’t lose sales because of this new change to Pinterest. Then get busy pinning!
