ers tosubmit feedback while they are in the process of making purchases. You can list yourown store in BizRate’s database and invite your own shoppers to submit feedback.It’s free to register, and you can find out more at http://www.bizrate.com/interstitial/btob.html.
Offer a WarrantyOne of the best ways to get customers to trust you is to have a liberal return policy.If you make a statement on your website or in your profile page, you’ll be sure toinspire trust. Consider a statement like the following:
All merchandise purchased from Greg’s Great Buys carries a seven-day,money-back return policy. If for any reason you are dissatisﬁed with
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your item, you can send it back for a full refund (as long as you payshipping). If we make a mistake in the description or in the shippingprocess, we will refund both the purchase price and shipping cost. Wealso offer a ninety-day warranty on all items. We are committed to yoursatisfaction and we thank you for your business.
Also pay attention to any manufacturers’ warranties. If you sell merchandise thatis under warranty, be sure to include the warranty information in the body of thesales description and invite customers to e-mail you if they have any questions.
Provide Lots of Shipping DetailsAs you already know, fast and careful shipping is critical to customer satisfaction.The moment a buyer hands over his or her money, that person is wondering whenthe item purchased will actually arrive. Although eBay has affiliations with UnitedParcel Service (UPS) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), other auction and salesvenues do not. It’s even more important, when selling outside of eBay, to assurecustomers that you will pack and ship their merchandise in a timely manner. Trylisting the following shipping information on your site:
We are committed to fast and careful shipping. Instant paymentsthrough PayPal will be processed within twenty-four hours of payment.Personal checks and money orders require seven days to clear. But yourorder will be shipped Priority Mail with free delivery conﬁrmation.Other shipping options are available; please contact us at info@gregsshoestore.com for more information.
It might seem obvious to you, but telling people how you pack your items, whatsort of shipping method you use, and how long it typically takes for delivery makesyou look more organized and professional.
Relist Unsold eBay Auction Items
When you’re making a transition to move to another auction site, one question youneed to answer has to do with your merchandise. Are you going to sell exactly the
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same sorts of things you offer on eBay? Are you going to offer a different productline? One option for coming up with products to sell on eBay is to gather up thosethings that have not sold and relist them on other sites.
A logical place for relisting unsold items is iOffer, a site where sellers can makemerchandise available either for a fixed price or on a best offer basis. A prospectivebuyer makes an offer, and the seller can either accept the offer or make a counter-offer. It makes sense to take merchandise that didn’t sell for your original price oneBay and see what the market will bear for these items on iOffer or another websitewhere bargaining and haggling is encouraged. (See Chapter 5 for more informationon websites that encourage the fine art of bargaining.)
Grab Your Feedback and Sales with Mr. GrabberMr. Grabber is a sales tool that is made available to iOffer members. It enables youto import your feedback rating from the following auction sites:
eBay (http://www.ebay.com)
•• Yahoo! Auctions (http://auctions.yahoo.com)•• Overstock.com (http://www.overstock.com)•
Bidville (http://www.bidville.com)
Sell.com (http://www.sell.com)
Besides bringing over feedback, you can also import items that have not sold.You can bring them over to iOffer with a few mouse clicks and put them up for saleagain. Mr. Grabber is easy to use. Once you’ve registered for an account with iOffer,go to the Mr. Grabber home page (http://www.ioffer.com/mrgrabber) and click thelink HERE in the heading Click Here to start using Mr. Grabber. Then follow thesesteps:
1. When the login page appears, enter your iOffer user ID or e-mail address and
your password, and click LOGIN.
2. On the next page, you are asked to choose the site from which you want toimport your data, and your username on that site. You can then choosewhether to import your feedback rating, your unsold items, or both.
3. A page appears notifying you that ‘‘item duplication’’ will take several hoursand when the process is completed, you’ll find your items in your PendingItems area on iOffer.
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4. When several hours have passed, check your Pending Items area. You canthen activate which items you want to sell. Click the IMPORT-ITEMS FROM EBAYlink (or Yahoo!, or Overstock.com, or another site, if you have imported list-ings from there).
If you want to put all the items up for sale on iOffer, you only have to clickthe BULK UPLOAD YOUR ITEMS link. But it’s important to review the items thathave been imported. In my case, no fewer than 123 active listings and unsolditems were brought over from eBay’s database, and I had to carefully selectthe ones to sell. Some were items that were already up for sale in my eBayStore, and I didn’t want them to be sold elsewhere at the same time. At leasttwo were items that were listed as ‘‘unsold’’ on eBay at one time but that wereactually sold after relisting.
Note: There is no restriction on whether you can have an item for saleon eBay and iOffer at the same time. But if you have an item for auctionon eBay and it sells on iOffer, you have to end the sale immediately oneBay, which might cause disgruntled bidders to leave you negative feed-back. Conversely, if something sells on eBay, you then have to rememberto terminate the sale on iOffer. You don’t want to run the risk of sellingone item twice. In my opinion, it’s safer to sell something in one venue ata time.
5. Uncheck any items you don’t want to sell immediately on iOffer from the list
of your active listings and unsold items. (See Figure 4-3.)
6. When you’re absolutely certain you’ve checked the items you want to bringover to iOffer and unchecked the rest, click the ACTIVATE CHECKED button atthe bottom of the list.
After you have activated the listings you want to sell on iOffer, the list refreshesand all the items are checked once more. Notice at the top of the list that your iOfferuser ID now carries your eBay or other feedback rating next to it.
In the blue shaded box at the upper right-hand corner of the screen, click MYIOFFER. Click CURRENT ITEMS in the left-hand column to view the sales you justcarried over to iOffer. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my entire eBay descrip-tion—including all the photos I had uploaded and the formatting I had used—werecarried over to iOffer. (See Figure 4-4.)
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Figure 4-3. Mr. Grabber imports feedback and sales listings from other sites to iOffer.
(cid:2) Offer Inc.
Note: Mr. Grabber gives you a convenient way to duplicate items youhad for sale on other sites. But it doesn’t actually make those items anymore desirable. If your items failed to sell because they were run-of-the-mill and there was nothing attractive about them, there is a good chanceiOffer’s buyers will react the same way. (For more information aboutiOffer, see Chapter 5.)
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Figure 4-4. When you carry sales over to iOffer, you get any formatting and photos you originallycreated.
(cid:2) Offer Inc.
Clear Out Your Excess Inventory
When you’re moving from eBay to other venues, how do you divide up your inven-tory? Having multiple sales venues gives you new options. You can target specificbuyers via specialty sites like those described in Chapter 9. Or, if you have excessinventory that didn’t sell originally on eBay, you can use sites like iOffer or Overstock.com as places to sell your leftovers at bargain prices. Some approaches are describedin the sections that follow.
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The Loss Leader ApproachLoss leaders are items that are put up for sale at bargain prices. The prices are solow, in fact, that you might not make any profit on them at all. You might take a losson an individual sale. Why do this? You expand your customer base, build trust, anduse the loss leader sales to drive customers to other, higher priced merchandise thatbrings you better profit margins.
The Main Destination ApproachAnother way in which sellers integrate their eBay sales with sales on other sites is touse eBay primarily for customer acquisition. After all, eBay brings more potentialshoppers than any of its competitors. These sellers maintain a limited presence oneBay and do everything they can to point shoppers to their websites or to other placeswhere they sell.
The Get Out of ‘‘FeeBay’’ Approach‘‘FeeBay’’ is one of several nicknames given to eBay by those who object to its manysellers’ fees. Their primary goal is to abandon the site altogether and make betterprofits by selling on lower priced venues, or by selling on their own websites and nothaving to pay any fees to a third party. In a few cases, sellers who are especiallyunhappy with eBay will simply close up shop and immediate devote all their energiesto selling elsewhere. In most cases, sellers cut down gradually on their eBay salesover a period of months. Then, when they have a steady flow of business on othersites, they say good-bye to eBay.
The approach you choose is up to you. The important thing to remember is thatyou have options. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn how to exercise one of those options andsell in a new yet old-fashioned way—by bargaining with your customers.
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C H A P T E R (cid:3)5
Accurately Valuing YourMerchandise
People often think of eBay and other auction sites as nothing more than big virtualgarage sales. But at garage sales, haggling over merchandise is a time-honored tradi-tion. On eBay, you can offer something at a best offer price, but this feature isn’twidely used, as far as I can tell. Most other sites, like Yahoo! Auctions and Amazon.com auctions, give sellers the option to sell something at a fixed price or at auction.Those who miss the time-honored give-and-take that left both buyer and seller feelingthat they ‘‘got something’’ for their negotiations are left with no options.
Unless they turn to a few auction sites that encourage their customers to strikean agreed-upon price for what they have to sell, that is. In this chapter, you’ll learnthe ins and outs of haggling and bargaining online with prospective buyers. Althoughthe sites described in this chapter streamline the process of settling on a price foryour merchandise, you have to be careful. When you haggle, you always have to keepyour bottom line in mind, because it doesn’t do any good to sell something at a lossor at a profit that doesn’t cover the time and trouble you took to put the item up forsale in the first place.
The key is to start with an accurate price so that, when haggling occurs, you’restill going to make a reasonable profit. Accordingly, this chapter examines how toresearch items before you sell them, so you know what they’re worth in the market-place. That way, you’ll be able to keep in mind a minimum price that you don’t gobelow. You’ll also learn the pros and cons of the online marketplaces that turn hag-gling into a system, so you can sell more, keep your customers satisfied, and maintainyour bottom line as well.
Researching the Value of What You Have to Sell
In order to bargain with your customers, you have to set boundaries. You have toestablish a reasonable starting price, and you have to have at least a fairly good idea
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of what the item is worth in the marketplace so that you don’t overhaggle and endup with a net loss in the deal. This section points you to some useful resources fordetermining the value of merchandise online. Antique and collectible price guides aregood for specialized items, but for electronics and household goods, you can get up-to-date prices at these locations with just a few mouse clicks.
Comparing Prices with FroogleFroogle (http://froogle.google.com) is the shopping search utility provided by thepopular online search service Google. You enter the item you’re looking for in theFroogle search box, and the service gives you a list of products that match yourdescription, what stores were searched, and comparative prices. This is an extremelyquick way to discover current prices for common household items that are new orrelatively new, such as vacuum cleaners and stereo speakers. When using Froogle forprice comparison, make sure that you’re correctly matching the model, year, andcondition of your item to the one you see listed in the search results.
I have to admit that, initially, I didn’t think Froogle was a good place to researchprices on antiques and collectibles. I considered eBay or Terapeak (see Chapter 14)to be good places to look up prices on eBay completed auctions, which at leastindicate the value of an item at the time the sale was held. My mother gave me aPepsi Cola thermometer to sell on consignment on eBay, and we had no idea what itwas worth. Just for fun, I entered the terms ‘‘Pepsi Cola thermometer’’ in the Frooglesearch box and clicked the SEARCH FROOGLE button. To my surprise, I realized thatFroogle also searches eBay Store contents, and those stores include auction offeringsas well as fixed-price sales. Not only that, but Froogle returns other resources suchas antique price guides that are related to the item in question. The results of mysearch included:
•
Two Pepsi Cola thermometers currently offered for a $65 Buy It Now pricein two separate eBay Stores
• A 1960s restaurant equipment supply catalog that includes a listing for these
thermometers
• A collectible soda pop price guide book offered for sale for $20 on eBay• A new book entitled Advertising Thermometers (there’s a guidebook for every-
thing, apparently!) offered on the Booksamillion.com website
While a search of eBay’s completed auctions is a good idea when you’re doingresearch, don’t overlook Froogle for researching those unusual or one-of-a-kind col-lectibles you are preparing to sell, too.
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Tip: Froogle descriptions are also a good source for speciﬁcationsand product descriptions that can help you when you’re writing saleslistings on auction sites. Be careful not to cut and paste the descrip-tions word for word, because all content on the Internet is protectedby copyright whether a copyright notice is present or not. However,you may ﬁnd it useful to use some of the product data in your owndescriptions, as long as you use your own words to prepare them.
Searching for Collectibles with Kovels.comKovels is the most trusted name for pricing antiques and collectibles, and fortunatelyfor you, they have an excellent website (http://www.kovels.com). This site has all ofthe well-known antiques and collectible price guides written by Ralph and TerryKovel and available for purchase, which might serve you well if you find yourselfmostly pricing the same kind of item. There’s a yellow pages of antiques, where youcan search for appraisers, auctions, and conservators. Best of all, there’s a price guide.You have to register for a free account to get access to the prices listed on thewebsite, but then you get to search an enormous database of specific items to matchyour price to their standard. The database is easy to use and broken down into amultitude of individual categories, which incidentally help you draft your listing inthe terms with which collectors are familiar. If you mention in your listing that yourprice came from the Kovels’ books or website, you will hear little argument frompotential buyers about the item’s worth.
Using the Kelley Blue BookThe sale of vehicles online is steadily becoming more of an everyday, routine eventrather than a novelty. Sites like eBay Motors have well-developed systems for obtain-ing vehicle inspections and working out details with vehicle shipping services so buy-ers will be willing to place bids. Other sites let you sell your car online, too; whereveryou sell, however, you have to set an accurate starting price or reserve bid for yoursale. The price has to be accurate because prospective buyers have access to a widevariety of online utilities for determining the data of different vehicles.
The Kelley Blue Book is the most recognized name in assessing the value of usedvehicles. The organization’s website (http://www.kbb.com) reflects its expertise. Thesite is extremely user-friendly, comprehensive, and best of all, tailored to your localarea. This is a site to use not just when you’re researching prices for your items, butalso when you’re considering a purchase. Every make, model, and year is included in
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the database, and you can search for the trade-in price with a dealer, the suggestedretail price, or the private party price, which will probably be your most commontransaction. Bluebook also lets you add your car to its listings and reach additionalbuyers. All in all, this site is a premier resource.
(cid:3)
Driving Home the Deal on Your Own Vehicle
Several websites other than eBay Motors focus solely on buying and selling motorvehicles. At CarsDirect (http://www.carsdirect.com), a vehicle listing costs a ﬂat $25.Your ad stays online for up to thirty days or until the vehicle is sold. At AutoTrader.com(http://www.autotrader.com), you can sell your vehicle either on the AutoTrader web-site or on the printed version. Prices range from a ﬂat $29 to $49 for each listing. AtCars.com, listings cost about the same: $25 to $50. All of the aforementioned sitesinclude utilities for researching the value of your car, truck, motorcycle, or othervehicles, too.
Visit CARFAX (http://www.carfax.com) to order a vehicle history report you caninclude with your sales description. The report tells prospective buyers whether or notthe car has been rebuilt, ﬂooded, salvaged, stolen, or had other major problems.
When your vehicle is sold, you should prepare a bill of sale that conforms to yourstate’s motor vehicle requirements. AutoTrader.com maintains a page full of links tostate motor vehicle websites at http://www.autotrader.com/research/shared/article.jsp?article_id(cid:4)13236.
Researching Prices at BizRateBizRate (http://www.bizrate.com) is a free comparison shopping site and seller rat-ings service. In Chapter 4, BizRate was listed as a resource for merchants who wantto add their business descriptions to the site’s database. But BizRate is known primar-ily as a site where shoppers (and sellers) can research prices of household and every-day merchandise.
Note: BizRate is useful for shopping for new or almost-new consumermerchandise. When I attempted to research my antique Pepsi Cola ther-mometer, BizRate deleted the brand name ‘‘Pepsi’’ and turned the searchterms into ‘‘cola thermometer.’’ A handful of new Coca-Cola (not PepsiCola) thermometers were returned; they were all listed in one onlinestore.
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BizRate works much like Froogle: You enter what you are looking for, and itsearches the inventories of other stores and presents you with an array of options.What makes BizRate worth using? For one thing, you receive more information froma search than with Froogle. Bizrate tells you the number of items available at a store,the price, and gives you a link to reviews rating the store’s quality and speed. Thefollowing example is for a popular digital camera, the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P200:
••
Price range: $299 to $430 at a whopping sixty-two different online storesProduct rating: Five stars out of five; you can read the reviews on the BizRatesite by clicking one of the stars included in the description7.2 Megapixels
•• Zoom: 3X Optical, 6X Digital
Not only that, but you can read more reviews on each of the online stores that carrythe item in question; links to each store’s description are included with BizRate’sdescription.
Knowing how many examples of a particular item are already available onlinecan be important when you’re trying to set your own price, because you can set ahigher price if items are unusual or uncommon. And knowing what a later model isselling for can help you estimate a reasonable price for an earlier model of the sameitem. Bizrate helps with online searches, and it will pick the best-rated or lowest-priced item price from among your search results for you.
Using Andale Price FinderAndale (http://www.andale.com) will sell you software that will do everything for youthat this book has just been showing you how to do yourself. This site sells prettymuch everything that has to do with operating an online business, from image soft-ware, counters to calculate how often an item is viewed, gallery space, and web host-ing for an online store. You can take or leave as many of these aids as you want, butfor our purposes, we want to consider their research tools.
Andale has two software packages that you pay a monthly fee to access: Researchand What’s Hot. What’s Hot can tell you what is selling well at the moment on eBay.Research will search all the sites we’ve listed previously and more to present you witha picture of your item’s value. The advantage of the Research software is that it willsave you time. The What’s Hot software could affect what you choose to buy thatmonth, as well as what you choose to list first, presumably increasing the speed ofyour sales for only $4 a month.
Should you use any of Andale’s online auction tools? At $12 a month for both
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programs, it’s a fairly cheap decision either way, but running a successful onlinebusiness requires watching every nickel and dime. In general, you can do your ownresearch and pricing, and knowing what’s hot on eBay will only be useful if you havea large backlog of items you haven’t yet posted online. You might try these servicesfor a month and clock how much time they save you.
Note: Chapter 14 describes Andale’s services in greater detail, and men-tions Terapeak, another auction-pricing research service.
Bargaining with Buyers: iOffer
Suppose you really want to sell something, but despite all your research, you don’thave a firm idea of how much the item is really worth. You have found descriptionsand completed sales prices for similar objects. You know what you’d like to get foran item, but you hate the idea of having to pay a listing fee just to find out if youreducated guess matches what someone is willing to pay. And you’re actually open toaccepting somewhat less than your ideal price.
Sounds like an ideal situation for using an online marketplace called iOffer tomake your items available to prospective buyers. In the How to Sell section of itssite, iOffer boasts that if you don’t know what an item is worth, you can let the buyermake an offer. You pay nothing to create a listing. You either set a starting price andwait for a buyer to either accept that price or make a counteroffer, or simply list theitem with the notice ‘‘Make an Offer.’’ In the latter case, you leave it up to the buyerto suggest what a reasonable price might be; you can either accept that price or makea counteroffer of your own. Offers go back and forth until a price is agreed upon.
The iOffer site comes in two versions: the regular version and a version callediOffer Lite. The Lite version is intended for items that have a starting price of $4.99or less. This area of iOffer gives you a chance to sell low-priced merchandise withoutincurring hefty fees—in fact, there is no Final Value Fee for transactions on iOfferLite, at this writing. An area called Want Ads enables you to do some ‘‘fishing’’ foritems that buyers want—though many of the ads are from sellers looking for wholesaleitems they can buy in bulk and resell. On the first How to Sell page shown in Figure5-1, you are given the choice of creating a sales description for your item or searchingthe iOffer Want Ads to find notices that have already been left. You might be able tofind a buyer without taking the time to write a description at all.
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Figure 5-1. iOffer lets you choose between creating sales descriptions and searching classified adsfrom buyers—or both.
(cid:2) iOffer.
Another feature, Snag a Sale, lets you search the site for transactions that areunder way but not completed. The idea is that if a buyer and seller cannot agree ona price, you can ‘‘jump in’’ and offer your own item, if you have one, at a competitiveprice.
The fees charged by iOffer are shown in Table 5-1.It’s also worth noting that items that tend to have particularly high price tags,such as aircraft, boats, cars, trucks, and real estate, have no Final Value Fee assessed:you can list them for free and sell them for free.
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Table 5-1. iOffer final value fees.
Final Transaction Price
$4.99 or less (on iOffer rather than iOffer Lite)
$5.00 to $9.99
$10.00 to $24.99
$25.00 to $99.99
$100.00 to $1499.99
$1,500.00 and over
Final Value Fee
$.50
$.75
$1.25
5 percent of transaction price
$5.00 plus 2.5 percent of transaction price
$40.00 plus 1.5 percent of transaction price
Tip: An eBay friend of mine, Lu Paletta, wrote a column on Auction-Bytes in which she described her own experience with iOffer and gaveit a positive review. Read her comments at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y204/m11/abu0131/s03.
Researching iOffer BuyersIt’s true in almost all cases, whether you sell at auction or not, that you don’t knowwhat an item is really worth until someone decides how much he or she wants to payfor it. Guidebooks, online search utilities, and price guides can take you only so far.However, can you really expect a buyer to make a reasonable offer for something?Odds are buyers are trying, like everyone else online, to pay as little as possible formerchandise offered on iOffer, just as on other online auction sites. Luckily, iOffergives you a rating system to research buyers to see if they are really trustworthy. Aftera transaction has been completed, a positive comment is left for another member,and that person’s rating goes up one point; for any negative comments, the ratinggoes down by one point. Neutral ratings are also available, just as on eBay.
Buyers and sellers who register on iOffer can take an advantage of another featureyou won’t find on eBay (not at this writing, at least): an online journal called a Weblog or blog. Once you register on the site, go to your My iOffer page to begin addingcomments to your blog. Your blog can serve as a good public relations tool whereyou can talk about your experiences on other auction sites and with buyers andsellers.
Note: Any ratings you obtain through your iOffer transaction are addedto your feedback comments that have been brought over to iOffer from
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eBay, using an innovative tool called Mr. Grabber. See Chapter 4 formore information about this utility.
Obtaining Wholesale Merchandise on iOfferThe site iOf