Identification Number (ASIN), a number assigned by
Amazon.com itself
• European Article Number (EAN)
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You can take the number from the product packaging, or search for the item onAmazon.com to retrieve the number there. If you don’t have Excel or are simplyresistant to working with spreadsheets, you’ll have to add each item to the Market-place individually as described earlier in this chapter.
Tip: To access the Inventory Loader or ﬁnd out more about it, per-form the following steps:
1. Click HELP2. Click SELLING AT AMAZON.COM3. Click EXPERIENCED AND VOLUME SELLING4. Click VOLUME SELLING TOOLS5. Click INVENTORY LOADER
See Chapter 14 for descriptions of third-party selling tools, such asMonsoon and ScoutPal, that help sellers manage their listings onAmazon.
Tracking Your InventoryIf you sell on eBay, you’re probably used to going to the My eBay page or youraccount page for a sales management tool such as Seller’s Assistant. With a fewclicks, you can check what is for sale at any particular time. Things work in a similarway on Amazon.com. Amazon allows not only Pro Merchant subscribers but zShopsowners or regular Amazon Marketplace sellers to download their current inventoryinformation for the previous fifteen, thirty, or sixty days. But you can also view theinformation online. You go to your Seller Account page (click the YOUR ACCOUNTlink that appears at the top of nearly every page on the Amazon.com website, thenclick the link YOUR SELLER ACCOUNT) and click the link that applies to the actionyou want to perform.
If you are a Pro Merchant and have a product to sell that is not listed with aproduct detail page in Amazon.com’s current inventory, you can create your ownproduct detail page for that item. The page you create becomes a permanent partof Amazon.com’s catalog. At this writing, items must be in one of the followingcategories:
Books
•• Camera and photo• Electronics
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• Kitchen• Home and garden• Music• Musical instruments•••• Video & DVD• Everything else
Pet suppliesSporting goodsTools and hardware
Before you start taking photographs, looking up the applicable ISBN or UPCnumbers, searching for categories, looking up publishers, and all the steps requiredto create a product page on Amazon, keep in mind that you could do the same onyour own website and not have to pay Amazon.com’s sales commissions and monthlyPro Merchant fees. If you become big enough and successful enough that Amazon.com is a regular source of income, you may want to consider branching out to yourown e-commerce website to maximize profits even further. The product detail pagewill be used not only by you but by other sellers who want to offer similar items inthe Marketplace. In other words, you’re creating a product detail page so you can sellan item and give competitors a chance to sell the same item. Before you go throughthe work, ask yourself: Do you want to help your competitors in this way? If theanswer is yes, you can follow the online walk-through that explains how to create aProduct Detail page: click HELP, click SELLING AT AMAZON.COM, click CREATE APRODUCT DETAIL PAGE, and finally click CLASSIFY A PRODUCT.
Tip: At this writing, Amazon.com was offering a reduced monthly feeof $19.99 to new Pro Merchant subscribers. To ﬁnd out more aboutselling on Amazon.com as a Pro Merchant, go to http://www.amazon.com/promerchant or click HELP, click SELLING ON AMAZON.COM,and then click EXPERIENCED AND VOLUME SELLING.
Selling at Amazon.com Auctions
I’ve spent a good deal of time discussing how to add your books, CDs, and otherhousehold merchandise to Amazon.com’s existing Marketplace because I think it’s
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the most practical way to expand your sales beyond eBay. By selling in the Market-place, you gain access to the millions of shoppers who visit Amazon.com every day.With Amazon.com Auctions, things are different. The auction site is a separate entityfrom the main Amazon.com marketplace. In other words, if Amazon.com has a bookfor sale in the Marketplace, you may find a variety of sellers offering new, used, andcollectible examples of that same item in the Marketplace. But if you offer the sameitem at auction on Amazon.com, a link to the auction won’t appear on the ProductDetail page.
To reach Amazon.com Auctions, you either click Auctions on the home page orgo to http://auctions.amazon.com. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious how to get started,because you don’t see a link like SELL YOUR STUFF, which appears on the Amazon.com homepage. After some hunting around, I found two pages that serve as goodgateways to auction selling on the site:
1. The Auctions Help page. The URL is too long to reproduce here, but click
HELP, click SELLING AT AMAZON.COM, and then click AUCTIONS.
2. The Sell an Item form (http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/auction-new). This
is the form you fill out to create an auction listing on the site.
Once you find your way into the Sell an Item form, you’ll find it easy to use,especially if you are familiar with eBay’s Sell Your Item form. You write a title, adescription, and you upload photos you have taken of the item—if you need to, thatis. You might not need to if you are selling books or other products that are beingsold in the Amazon.com Marketplace. If you enter the product number of such items,Amazon adds the images for you. One difference between Amazon.com auctions andthose on eBay is that you have the option to list your sales for a full fourteen days,which is four days longer than the maximum time allowed on eBay.
Creating a Member ProfileAmazon.com, like eBay, lets sellers in its auctions or zShops areas create a type ofAbout Me page. In this case, it’s called a Member Profile. To create this page, go tothe Auctions homepage (http://auctions.amazon.com), click SELLER ACCOUNT, andclick CREATE or EDIT YOUR AUCTIONS/ZSHOPS MEMBER PROFILE. Your browser con-nects to the form shown in Figure 12-6, which you fill out to create the page.
Amazon’s Member Profile form doesn’t provide you with a choice of layouts; yousimply fill out the form with your contact information, presumably so prospective orcurrent buyers can look you up. You have the option of making a link to your home-page and including a single image, as well. It’s difficult to make your store, or your
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Figure 12-6. Be sure to fill out the member profile form so prospective buyers know you’re ‘‘legit.’’
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
company, stand out from the crowd on Amazon.com. You won’t find the equivalentof an eBay Stores page—a place where you can see all the seller storefronts in onelocation. For many big-time sellers, that’s probably just fine as long as they continueto be profitable on Amazon.com.
(cid:3)
Former eBay PowerSeller Finds Success on Amazon.com
Tom Hawksley was once a prominent PowerSeller on eBay. He was, and still is, amember of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance. But he no longer sells in greatquantity on eBay because he was unhappy with eBay’s fees and the number of nonpay-ing bidders he encountered there, and because he is so satisﬁed with his level ofsuccess with his company Global Media Direct on Amazon.com. He also sells on hisGlobal Media Direct website (http://www.globalmediadirect.com, shown in Figure 12-7).
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Figure 12-7. This seller offers tens of thousands of items for sale through Amazon.com.
(cid:2) Thomas W. Hawksley, owner of Global Media Direct.
Q. What made you decide to set up a storefront there rather than Overstock or
Yahoo!?
A. I have been on Amazon for about a year and half. With the help of Sam Wheelerand a few others at Amazon, I have grown my business to be very proﬁtableand much more enjoyable than other venues. Their philosophy of letting melist and then pay the fee when and only when the item sells made a world ofdifference.
Q. What advantages does Amazon provide for you as a merchant?A. More money, more money, more money! With my software/management pro-gram AMAN, I can sell, process, and pack several hundred items a day and bedone in only a few hours. The customer base is better than eBay and customerservice is second to none. Average selling prices are signiﬁcantly higher than
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other sites and payment is guaranteed with commission not being due unlessand until the item sells.
Q. What do you sell on Amazon?A. I specialize in media products—things like CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, and books. Ialso have a Seller Central Account with Amazon that I have started and will beselling over thirty-ﬁve hundred SKUs of video games. (This is exciting as theyhave greatly reduced the number of sellers approved to sell video games ontheir site.) I also have an Amazon.UK [United Kingdom] account. My computerguy has just now implemented a tool that will let me list all my items on bothsites and when it sells on one site it is removed from the other. I expect thisto signiﬁcantly increase my sales volumes.
Q. How many items, approximately, do you have there at any one time?A. I just did an Amazon search and I have about thirty thousand unique itemscurrently listed. I have about ﬁfty thousand that are literally sitting in a ware-house that I am entering in as time allows. By the end of the year, I hope tohave in excess of a hundred thousand unique items listed at any given time.
Q. Are there kinds of merchandise that sell especially well for you on Amazon?A. I had a unique opportunity last year to purchase over ﬁfty thousand ColumbiaHouse tapes of old television shows. eBay was the only sales market for thoseas these items were not in the database at Amazon. Their category manage-ment team was very helpful in getting the items on the site and when they didmy $5 Average Sale Price (ASP) on eBay, it turned into $25 to $40 ASP with ahigher sell through rate than on eBay. This one deal turned my business aroundfrom a job to a career. I will owe my start to eBay but I will credit my ﬁrstmillion to Amazon. I now ﬁnd great success in rare and hard-to-ﬁnd CDs andother media products.
Q. What advantages does Amazon provide for you as a merchant?A. With Amazon, I can list an unlimited number of items and not pay a cent forcommission until it sells. This allows me to list items that I would not otherwisebe able to do with eBay’s weekly fee.
Q. When you moved from eBay to another venue like Amazon, were you able to build
on your reputation as an eBay PowerSeller?
A. I had a huge following on eBay and my screen name had much familiarity. I
also had many thousands of customer’s e-mails so I e-mailed them all to tellthem I was now on Amazon. I also mention in my comments section that I wasa major PowerSeller on eBay. By sending out newsletters to my customers aswell as thank-you notices and follow-up notices (each with a sales pitch and alink) I tend to retain more customers than most sellers.
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Opening a zShop
As eBay Stores are to eBay, zShops are to Amazon.com—with one significant differ-ence. The difference is that zShops are hardly as well known and not nearly as widelyused as eBay Stores. In theory, sellers can offer anything from computer equipment,food, collectibles, and many other types of merchandise on the site—anything thatdoesn’t fit in the Marketplace. In practice, most sellers stick with the Marketplace orauctions when they want to offer something unusual.
Becoming an Amazon.com Associate
In the language of e-commerce, an affiliate is someone whose website acts as a referralservice for another website. The site that receives the referral pays a fee to the referrerif the referral produces a purchase or another specified type of activity, such as aregistration. Amazon.com has one of the best-known affiliate programs on the In-ternet. You can create links to specific books or CDs on Amazon’s site on your ownwebsite and refer your visitors to Amazon by clicking on those links.
Amazon calls its referrers associates. To join the Associates program, click thelink ASSOCIATES on the left-hand side of the site’s home page. When the next pageappears, click JOIN NOW. You’ll be asked to register for the program by filling outforms; you’ll have to decide whether you want to receive a deposit into a checkingaccount or a paper check when you receive a referral fee. You go to a page calledAssociates Central, where you have the choice of making several kinds of links toAmazon: you can make a link to a CD, book, or DVD you like, a product youwant to recommend, a text link, or you can even post an Amazon.com searchbox on your site. If someone makes a purchase after clicking a link or making asearch, you receive a referral fee of 4 to 5 percent of the value of the items thatare sold.
Amazon.com is perhaps the single biggest marketplace on the Internet after eBayitself. Another marketplace that is often mentioned in the same breath as a prominentalternative to eBay is Overstock.com, which also offers various sales opportunitiesfor sellers. It is described in Chapter 13.
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C H A P T E R (cid:3)13
Overstock.com
As I write this, the online auction site with the highest profile in terms of televisionadvertising is not eBay, Yahoo!, or Amazon.com, but Overstock.com. ‘‘It’s all aboutthe O,’’ the woman in the advertisements says—though what the letter O has to dowith selling my excess inventory at a profit isn’t clear to me. On its website, Over-stock’s CEO Patrick Byrne says the company also prepared a series of ads that bla-tantly encourages sellers to consider them as an alternative to eBay. However, henotes with more than a little frustration that the big commercial networks refuse toair the ads.
For individual sellers who are eager to reach out to new buyers beyond the con-fines of eBay, Overstock.com offers an attractive alternative. If you have large quanti-ties of business supplies or merchandise that you can’t sell, Overstock gives you away to liquidate them at a bargain. Shoppers, in fact, come to the marketplace expect-ing to find cut-rate inventory that businesses have to clear out. If you can’t sell itemson eBay, you can offer them here. Overstock.com, for its part, almost certainly wantsto present itself as a marketplace of first choice for sellers who have current consumergoods or merchandise. Whether you’re turning to Overstock as a first choice or as analternative to eBay, you’ll find a well-established and easy-to-use sales system.
Understanding the Female Factor
Identifying your ideal customers and targeting them in the places where they shoponline is one of the primary strategies to follow when moving beyond eBay. The needto reach your targeted market is one of the reasons for expanding your sales to othermarketplaces in the first place. When it comes to eBay, the site reportedly attractsabout the same number of male as female customers: 55 percent male to 45 percentfemale.
If you deal in women’s clothing or accessories, however, it’s worth taking a look
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at Overstock.com. ‘‘We skew a little more female than eBay does,’’ says Holly Mac-Donald-Korth, Overstock’s senior vice president for auctions. ‘‘In fact, Overstockis fully two-thirds female.’’ According to Korth, Overstock.com’s best-selling itemsinclude:
• Women’s shoes and handbags•Fashion jewelry•Small electronics• Cell phone accessories
The Jewelry & Watches home page, shown in Figure 13-1, presents prospective
buyers with plenty of categories, subcategories, and options for shopping.
Two links near the upper right-hand corner of the page shown in Figure 13-1 (andother category pages on Overstock) provide both buyers and sellers with specialized
Figure 13-1. If you sell jewelry or other accessories for women, Overstock.com may be a good choice.
(cid:2) Overstock.com.
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options. The link LIQUIDATION BINS enables businesses that have large quantities ofitems (such as a bin full of towels, or a set of watches that have been discontinued)to put them up for sale at cut-rate prices. The CLEARANCE BIN link takes buyers toitems that have been offered by sellers at ‘‘deep discount.’’
Getting Started with Overstock.com
The moment you want to do anything other than casually browsing for items topurchase on Overstock, you are required to set up an account. After you click theHOW TO SELL link, you are prompted to enter your e-mail address and password. Clickthe link NEED AN ACCOUNT to set up the information necessary to put up itemsfor sale.
Using the Sell Item FormOnce you have an account and have logged in, you go to the Sell Item form. If youhave sold anything on eBay, you’ll recognize all of the information requested on theform. First, you choose a main sales category; the categories are similar to eBay’s.Selecting a second category doubles your listing fees. However, Overstock.com doesnot charge an additional fee for a subtitle. (Remember, eBay charges a sizeable $.50for a subtitle.)
The rest of the form is similar to eBay’s own Sell Your Item form. One nicefeature is that as you specify a starting price, the fee associated with it appears nextto the figure you enter.
Adding ImagesAdding images to Overstock.com isn’t as straightforward a process as it is on eBay,which gives you the option of either using its Picture Services to host your imagesonline or uploading your images to your own Web server space and linking to themin your auction descriptions. The Sell Item form doesn’t immediately present youwith the option to host your own images. Instead, you click an Upload Images buttonand locate the image you want to display on your own computer. An OverstockAuctions Images preview page appears with your images displayed (see Figure 13-2).You choose one small and one larger version of your image—click SAVE SELEC-TION, and the image is added to your description. That first image is free; each addi-tional image you want to show is $.10. In order to add additional images, you needto make links to them from the body of your description. Click the YOUR OWN HTMLtab, and enter the links in the following format:
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Figure 13-2. Overstock.com lets you upload one image for free; subsequent images cost $.10 each.
(cid:2) Overstock.com.
Format as Code:
(cid:4)P(cid:3)(cid:4)A href(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-02.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)Imgsrc(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-02.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)/A(cid:3)(cid:4)/P(cid:3)(cid:4)P(cid:3)A href(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-03.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)/A(cid:3)(cid:4)img src(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-03.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)/P(cid:3)(cid:4)P(cid:3)(cid:4)A href(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-04.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)/A(cid:3)(cid:4)Img src(cid:4)‘‘http://www.gregholden.com/ebay/22/22-12-02.jpg’’(cid:3)(cid:4)/P(cid:3)
End Code
This causes your subsequent images to be displayed in a single column underyour description, just as on eBay. The difference is that you have to enter the links
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using the HTML (cid:4)A(cid:3)(cid:4)/A(cid:3) anchor tag; there is no user-friendly way of adding thelinks without having to type the code—unless you use Overstock’s automated listingtool, O Lister, which is described later in this chapter. The HTML code as shown inthe Sell Item form is shown in Figure 13-3.
When you’re done, click the PREVIEW YOUR LISTING button. Check your listingcarefully: even though I specified a flat shipping rate for the shoes I put up for sale,the shipping fee came up as $0 when I did the preview. I had to add the shipping fee
Figure 13-3. If you want to post more than one image, you have to make links to them using HTML.
(cid:2) Overstock.com.
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to the item’s description; I’m not sure why. When you’re done, click NEXT; thenreview the listing fees and click AGREE AND SUBMIT ITEM to get your sale online. Mysales description is shown in Figure 13-4.
Note: Your sale starts the moment you upload the listing from the SellItem form; there is no option in this form to schedule your sale for adifferent starting time. If you use Overstock’s O Lister software, you canschedule your sale to begin at a later date and time.
Figure 13-4. Make sure your shipping rates and other essentials appear in your description before itgoes online.
(cid:2) Overstock.com.
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Understanding Overstock.com’s FeesWhen you are preparing your sales description, it pays to know how much featureslike reserve prices and bold highlighting cost. You can see from the comparison inTable 13-1 that Overstock.com is making an effort to keep its fees about 30 percentless than eBay’s.
Two things are worth noting in Table 13-1: Overstock.com’s fees are the same ifyou want to upgrade your sales description by highlighting it in a graphical way.However, Overstock.com charges no fees for fixed-price sales. If you want to sell your
Table 13-1. Selling fees for eBay and Overstock.com.
Fee
Insertion Fee ($.01–$.99)
Insertion Fee ($1.00–$9.99)
Insertion Fee($10.00–$24.99)
Insertion Fee($25.00–$49.99)
Insertion Fee($50.00–$199.99)
Buy It Now Fee ($.01–$9.99)
Buy It Now Fee($10.00–$24.99)
Upgrade: Bold
Highlight
Featured
Additional images after firstfree image
Reserve Price ($.01–$49.99)
Reserve Price($50.00–$199.99)
Transaction Closing Fee(Sale Price $.01–$25)
Transaction Closing Fee(Sale Price $25.01–$1,000
eBay
$.25
$.35
$.60
$1.20
$2.40
$.05
$.10
$1.00
$5.00
$19.99
$.15 each
$1.00
$2.00
Overstock.com
$.17
$.23
$.40
$.79
$1.58
N/A
N/A
$1.00
$5.00
$13.17
$.10 each
$.66
$1.40
5.25% of sale price
3.25% of sale price
5.25% of initial $25($1.31), plus 2.75% ofremaining balance
3.25% of initial $25($.81), plus 2% ofremaining balance
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items at a fixed price rather than inviting auction bids, you’ll save on fees by movingto Overstock.
Note: You are immediately prompted when you register to put a creditcard number and billing information on file. You don’t have to do soimmediately, but you’ll be prompted to enter it when you put an item upfor sale or create your home page on Overstock.com.
Using O ListerOverstock.com has a software tool that enables you to design listings, upload salesdescriptions in bulk, and schedule sales to start at the same time, much like eBay’sTurbo Lister. Called O Lister, this tool is freely available for download at http://auctions.overstock.com/cgi-bin/auctions.cgi?PAGE(cid:4)STATIC&PAGENUM(cid:4)601.
Note: O Lister works with Microsoft Windows 98 or later and requiresInternet Explorer 5.01 or later. The Mac OS is not supported.
Using Overstock to Find MerchandiseThe whole idea behind Overstock.com is that it serves as a place where businessescan liquidate excess merchandise at a low price. But it’s hard to find merchandiseon Overstock.com that you can then resell on Overstock.com, or on eBay. You’llhave better luck if you search for big lots of wholesale merchandise on a separatesite that’s run by Overstock: Overstock Unlimited Closeouts (http://www.overstockunlimitedcloseouts.com). You have to be very selective and knowledgeable aboutwhat you buy on this site. You might have the opportunity to buy 12,528 child safetyscissors for $.76 each, for instance (a deal I saw advertised at the time I was writingthis chapter), but you need to make sure you’ll be able to sell them for a profit, oryour investment of nearly $10,000 will turn out to be unwise.
(cid:3)
Becoming a Trusted Merchant
Trust is a problem for sellers, no matter which auction site you use. Those sellers whofail to deliver on merchandise that has been purchased reduce the trust level for
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everyone. A 2004 report by the National Fraud Information Center, in fact, reportedthat a full 51 percent of the complaints it received were related to auction goods thatwere purchased but never delivered. Overstock.com has partnered with the auctionbonding service buySAFE to create a Trusted Merchant program for Overstock sellers.Buyers on the site are able to check a box on the search form (shown in Figure 13-5)so they can only search for sellers that have been bonded by buySAFE.
In order to become a Trusted Merchant, you must have buySAFE verify your identityand your ﬁnancial stability. The company does an extensive review of your backgroundas a seller so it can give you the Trusted Merchant seal of approval. It also reviews thefollowing:
• Your payment history on Overstock.com: how reliably you pay for items you
purchase, and how you pay your Overstock.com fees.
Figure 13-5. If you sell on Overstock.com, you should strongly consider becoming one of its TrustedMerchants.
(cid:2) Overstock.com.
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• The number of Overstock.com auction transactions you have conducted. You
must have completed multiple billing cycles on Overstock.com.
• Your sell-through rate: the number of items you put up for sale compared with
the number of items you actually sell.
• Your seller rating