Red Ink Diary

Whether you are a buyer or a seller, to achieve a satisfactory conclusion to your transaction you must know and understand what you are paying for.

I hear an interminable (def.#2) amount of ‘noise’ these days about eBay. eBay is unfair, sneaky, stupid, discriminatory, dishonest, practicing ‘bait and switch’; the list, like the complaints, is endless.

Let’s get real

eBay is an inanimate object, incapable of thought, reasoning or even common sense. It is a tool or venue who’s stated objective is to bring buyers and sellers together. eBay is only what the humans who control and try to program it make it. I am not pro (def.#2) eBay management, I think they are clueless, but, so are many sellers!

For a complaint to be credible it must be provably based on fact. Unfortunately many of the seller complaints about eBay, while valid are not based on firm legal footing.

When you visit eBay, FaceBook, My Space, Bonanzle or just about any site on the internet you agree to be bound by their terms of service. Keywords = their terms. These terms of service are non-negotiable. In law, if you find them unacceptable your recourse is to not go there.

What exactly are you paying for when you list on eBay?

When you  list on eBay you are entering into a legal contract in which you agree to pay a defined fee to list an item on eBay. That’s it. Period.

• There is no guarantee that your listing will ever be seen.
• There is no guarantee that your listing will appear in a search for it unless the Title Search function is used.
• There is no guarantee that your listing will be active for the full duration you have selected and paid for.

One more

How many times have you wondered why those glitches are not announced?

The answer can be found in eBay’s outage policy, look under ‘Additional Information’

Here are the definitions of outage:

“A title search outage occurs when items are not accessible by using Title Search as a result of unscheduled system downtime.”

“A hard outage occurs when no one can bid or buy (specifically View Item pages are inaccessible and/or bidding functionality is not available) as a result of unscheduled system downtime.”

If the outage is not posted on the Announcements Board it is not an outage. If it is not an outage the very limited outage compensation does not apply. There is a financial motivation to avoid that Announcement Board. How sweet is that?

Now you know.

Is it worth it?

Gut feeling, outrage and hunches will not give you an accurate answer. Simple book keeping and meticulous accounting will. Remember to allocate a value for your time.

Y’all come back!

Fellow blogger Hillary De Piano who wrote The My Little Pony Collector’s Inventory: A Complete Checklist of All US Ponies, Playsets and Accessories from 1981 to 1992 (buy it now because it too is on it’s way to becoming a collectible) commented on my post about the exodus of collectibles sellers from eBay. This is my answer to the valid points she made.

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Dear Hillary,

First, my article was not about the boycott but about sellers “who did not boycott [but] have left the platform in the months since May 2008″, and their reasons for doing so, together with my thoughts on the potential of the “initiatives” posted on AuctionBytes. If that was not clear the fault may be mine.

Sellers of Collectibles

Both you and my friend Kevin in Australia are prime examples of sellers who are acknowledged experts in a niche populated by focused collectors. By focused I mean buyers who are not going to be distracted by a pretty teacup or a swimsuit in their search for Nelson pottery pitchers.

In your case what makes the niche even more secure is the emotional tug or memory factor as discussed by Ms Dow in Tique Talk recently. Essentially, your business is that different from that of many collectible sellers because for your buyers the item is not a frivolity, it is important.

Although there are risks associated with some niche markets which might be better categorized as fads, this does not apply to either of your or Kevin’s niches.

Collectible sellers who are falling by the wayside on eBay are those who do not specialize but offer a broad spectrum of collectibles or flea-market style goods. Those sellers do not benefit from niche focused buyers who will bookmark and check a specific dealer’s inventory repeatedly on eBay. As you said yourself “I still have a good stash of buyers who see my name and buy from me because they like how I do things”

The less niche focused sellers have to rely on eBay’s manipulated search process and are more affected by external influences such as:

• the economy, which discourages browsing as being likely to lead to spending;
• slow loading pages, which kill the impulse and allow the potential buyer to feel good because they didn’t spend on feel good but unnecessary items;
• the corresponding decrease in traffic.

The increasing complexity of the platform poses sales format questions to which there are no easy answers any more. Fixed Price, Store, or Auction? The super secret search algorithm adds a chaos factor to potential visibility which complicates the cost benefit ratio calculations beyond endurance for many, and beyond what is reasonable for most sellers.

For a seller like Kevin who is an auctioneer in real life as well as online and has a good niche in ephemera there are no worries, he goes auction every time. Less specialized sellers must balance the guaranteed visibility for a few seconds at auction end with the cost of listing a week at a time and the very real possibility of one bid, or no bids at all.

With Fixed Price vs Store listings a whole different set of calculations come into play, juggling some visibility against maybe none.

Add in the search quirks such as a search for “Boys Coat” not returning items titled “Boys Jacket” or “Parka”. Don’t forget the bizarre concept of impressions vs sales applied to ranking visibility for paid listings.

Click thumbnail to enlarge image.

Finally, just out of interest I searched eBay this afternoon. I did not specify a category just typed in “My Little Pony,” checked Top Rated Seller and “all”. That screen-shot is worth a thousand words on why buyers and sellers are not enoying the eBay experience any more.

Y’all come back!

Full disclosure, this post contains an affiliate link.

Every once in a while my Australian e-friend Kevin who sells ephemera on eBay as Found-in-Australia makes comments which are too valuable to leave in the comment section. Generally I hijack them to become a guest blog.

His comment was to my post “Do Your titles Sink Sales?” which was aimed at general internet search best practices not eBay. eBay as we all know does things differently.

Any comments I add will be in a different color.

Here you go, enjoy!

My comments are based around auctions on Ebay. These suggestions may not be appropriate for other sites or selling formats, so please use your own discretion.

Quote: “If there are two different spellings for a word use one in the title and one in the description. eg. Post Card, postcard”

Research a few years ago indicated that, from memory, about 80% to 85% of searches on Ebay are done by title only, rather than title and description. Thus as a seller you want to use the more commonly used spelling in your title, as it will be found by more searches. Secondly, if possible, use the other spelling in item specifics, as the search engine *MAY* pick it up in a title only search - it does find some item specifics but not all - Evidence: in a title only search for a Ford manual (ie: book), actual cars will now show up on the search without Manual in the title, but with Manual as an item specific. (and if selling manuals, add the type of manual into your title, such as service manual or workshop manual so that buyers who expand their search to cut out the cars will still find your service manual, etc).

In various cases the point about selecting which spelling to use in your title will not really matter, because Ebay’s search engine (and undoubtedly others) will be programmed to find both spellings (eg: catalog and catalogue). In other cases, though, the variant spellings will not have occurred to anyone and the search engine will not be programmed for both to come up. There are simple ways to test this - just do a search with each spelling and see if you get the same results. If you don’t, you may then need to determine which spelling to use (or word, where more than one word describes an item but space is limited in your title).

The way that I research to test the most effective words/spellings, and most used words/spellings, is to search in completed items. On Ebay, you have 15 days of results in completed, this gives you both a bigger sample result, and also shows the resultant prices and clearance rates. I will also sort the completed search by “high price”.

As an example if I have a figural napkin or serviette ring that I wish to list on the American site. If I go to Ebay.com, currently there are 26 completed auctions for serviette ring - the majority listed on other sites (the price is italicised), while Napkin Ring has 2,999 results. Thus it is very likely the majority of buyers searching the American site will be searching for napkin rings and will be unlikely to search for serviette rings. Following Henrietta’s advice quoted above, use Napkin Ring in the title, and Serviette Ring somewhere in the description and if possible put both terms into item specifics (as this may help in “best match” searches).

It is also possible to use both spelling variations in your title like this “Vintage Post Card Sheep Dog Lamb Ewes Shepherd Postcard”

However, if both terms have a similar number of items, it may not be instantly obvious which term to use in your title. This is where the completed search and search by high price can become important. Conveniently for research, Ebay has colour coded completed auction search results, those auction items that sold have the price written in green, while those that were “reserve not met” or did not attract bids are now in black (previously unsold item prices were red for a while). Simply scrolling down two similar sized pages of search results may show that one has a much higher clearance rate than the other. Secondly if sorted by price it may become clear that one term or spelling is receiving much higher competitive bidding, indicating either that the serious bidders for that type of item are searching that term, or that the best quality items are being listed with that term - either way, that will be the term you will most likely want to use in your own title.

If you list on more than one Ebay site, go through this process on each site that you are using, as locals may use a different spelling or a different term in that country. Also note that not all of the English speaking Ebay sites use the same search software or programming. I was recently surprised to discover, while doing a comparison, that while the American site used two variants of a word on the same search, that on the Australian site those variants did not form a combined search. Thus on the Australian site it was important to use the more commonly used variant in the title, while on the American site either would be found by anyone searching either variation.

I hope that this can be of assistance to somebody out there.
Kind Regards, Kevin

On eBay I was a micro seller, sub $1K a month. This was primarily because of geographic limitations. I have to pay to ship stock to the island in the middle of the Pacific on which I live. My choices of items to sell are limited by shipping cost which raises overhead and correspondingly lowers profit.

My ASP (average sale price) was $2.47 in 2006 which was the last year I sold in volume on eBay. Profitability is only achieved at my price point by meticulous attention to cost, for example, templates to enable exact measurement of the length of tape used to put labels on packages saved 30% in tape cost per month.

Do the math, it takes a lot of $1.25 note cards to gross $1000. By today’s rules I would have been a PowerSeller by volume, back then you had to sell $1000 a month for three months to become a PowerSeller, no matter how much volume you did. Bill Cobb’s implementation of Search in Stores pushed my volume up enough that my goal was in sight. Then stores were taken out of search and sales dropped by a stunning 80%. It was like crashing into a brick wall at 60 mph. I survived but it was a fairly bloody experience.

What does this have to do with a Manx Cat?

A Manx cat has no tail, they are born that way. They are a relatively rare breed, most cats have long tails. Once upon a time eBay had a long tail too.

The marketing consultants have a great liking for acronyms, collections of initials that are essentially meaningless unless you are one of the ‘in’ crowd. They use them to dazzle prospective pigeons ripe for plucking, erm, clients. I have noticed how hard it can be to get an explanation, the attitude is that potential clients should not bother their dear little brains about all this, leave it to an expert. An excellent example is the BaySpeak term “simplification” which means workers got fired and executives will get nice bonuses. Auntie May would say “Look before you leap” and probably something about fools rushing in, but what does she know?

The clearest explanation of “long tail” I have found to date is in The Niche Book the concept is stunningly simple, at first glance. If you sell books the long tail might include bookmarks, bookshelves, computer programs to inventory your library, and so on. Think Harry Potter, wands, spell books, costumes, movies, tee shirts…

To be a true long tail a large part of the value of the total sales volume is in the tail - as opposed to sales volume of the original item. How large a part?

That is a “How long is a piece of string question”. I have seen estimates as high as 89.4%, it all depends on what number of top terms you are setting as the ‘head’ or ‘body’ of the cat in the first place. The percentage of sales volume in the tail has a direct ratio to the number of search terms used at the beginning. Here is a good article by Bill Tancer with some (to me) stunning figures.

So what does this have to do with eBay?

The key words are in the paragraph above; search terms used. When a venue is focused on cheap, (note I do not say good value) brand new and fad items; when search, or to use BaySpeak ‘finding’ is manipulated towards sellers who have ‘depth’ (translation high volume listings, not necessarily sales) the effect is to warp or distort search.

When search takes buyers away from what they are looking for to what eBay wants them to see or thinks they should be looking for, and actively prevents or distracts those same buyers from seeing what is listed; sales drop. Some buyers will persist and learn how to work the system, most get frustrated and go do something else. The tail is going, going, gone. eBay is turning into a Manx cat.

What do you think?

Y’all come back!

Another article you may find of interest Ms Dow Antiques