This is my journey as an E-commerce Consultant
Archive for August, 2007
eBay indexing and the one day listing
I have been doing a lot of traditional ebaying recently and before you list your item after the fees section there is a little note:
Your listing will be posted on the eBay site and can be viewed in My eBay. Your listing may not be immediately searchable by keyword or category for several hours, so eBay cannot guarantee exact listing duration in search results.
I don’t list using a one day duration ever but if you list your item and you will not be indexed for ‘several hours’ leaves it up to the gods whether you get the exposure for your money. Once definition of several is ‘Being of a number more than two or three but not many: several miles away’. One day listings cost as much as the other core marketplace durations ( 3, 5, 7 and 10 days) and there have been stories of items not being indexed for 6-12 hours.
Advice to take away – even though one day listings get to at the top of the listings quickly and increase your selling velocity you could waste a lot of money due to the inefficient eBay indexing. Setting up 7 day auctions to finish at key times is a slower method to start with but once you have everything running you will get more value for your money out of your eBay fees.
Some recent key selling times on eBay:
The biggy, Sunday night. The most famous eBay selling day which is now being forced a little due to sellers choosing to finish their auctions on this evening! Any time from 6pm till 11pm. There is a trend for the prices to be pushed down on such a high traffic night due to intense competition.
Wednesday and Thursday night 7-11pm – after dinner, never anything on telly!
Monday morning – 9am to 11am, checking your wins and annoyed that you didn’t win that auction Sunday night as you went to bed before it ended. You would be surprised how many UK workers check eBay as soon as they get into work. What are we like!
Spotlight on Pink eBay Design and Colour Psychology- Hair Angels
1733 days
by Liz
in Web Mastering
I have been trying not to shop on eBay, but looking for pink hair straighteners I spotted this shop:
Hairs Angels The colour scheme is one of my favourites, pink and grey. Taking a look at this article on The Meaning of Pink it suggests:
While red stirs up passion and action, studies have shown that large amounts of pink can create physical weakness in people.
A weakness linked to my paypal account maybe? Pink is a soothing colour and grey psychologically neutral. For a website pink should not be used as the main base colour as it is too sickly sweet unless the object of the website is as such. A constant colour is essential for company branding and association. If you think of Cadbury’s Chocolate, did that dark purple colour pop into your head? That popular Dairy Milk wrapper image?
Choosing a colour theme for your website and branding is as important as a memorable logo.
Play.com – Playtrade Marketplace
1733 days
by Liz
in Auction Management
Every morning I sign for a package from play.com for one of the guys in the office. Play have taken their lead from Amazon and launched Playtrade:
PlayTrade is the new way to make money selling your DVDs, CDs, Books, Games and more to the millions of customers who shop at Play.com. As a PlayTrade seller, your products will appear for sale on the Play.com web site, giving you the benefits that only the UK’s largest entertainment online retailer can offer. We do all the advertising and merchandising, credit card processing and first-line customer care. All you need to do is decide on your price and send the products to the customers promptly.
Whether you have one or one million things to sell, listing them for sale at Play.com couldn’t be simpler. Our step-by-step guidelines will ensure that your products appear on the site within a matter of minutes, and the next time a customer comes to buy that item, they are given the option to buy it from you. We then process their order on your behalf and let you know where to send the product. Once you have sent it out, we pass the proceeds on to you.
Sifting though the news I came across the article eSellerPro plugs into PlayTrade. It seems the first third party system to do so. Go eSellerPro for being on the ball with new integrations!
What has eSellerPro got to say about themselves?
eSellerPro is a complete business management system that integrates the whole online sales process, simplifying and automating tasks such as inventory management, product listing and scheduling, sales order processing, payment and dispatch, customer communications and accounts posting, saving you time and money and leaving you free to concentrate on growing your business.
I happened on this news by chance and I fear it will be lost in the rubble as they don’t have a blog! Shame on you.
Surely you have a blog? Its 2007 Man!
1734 days
by Liz
in Social Shopping
I read though the daily links to blog posts on The 10K Marshmallows Marketing Blog and this one caught my eye
Are internet marketers lazy? Is that why they aren’t blogging? and it rings true on so many levels. I am always surprised how many UK firms just have not subscribed to the power of the blog and most say its a fad. I always suggest blogging to my customers as they are product based and they know their industry. When it comes to buying say sports footwear on-line, a blog latched on the side of your website can make sure your customers can choose the right footwear for the task at hand and make sure all the new technologies and fashions are covered.
In this post they illustrate some points to tell you WHY you should be business blogging:
1. You competitors are
2. Gives the company a voice
3. Shows depth of knowledge – this for me is the most important point as it can sort out the duffs from the good’uns
Factors that stop a business blogging:
1. Too busy. Blogging takes time, but you can get your company involved.
2. Fearful. Giving away your knowledge especially if you like people to pay for it. Companies might worry they have nothing to contribute to the blogosphere.
3. Freedom. A blog does hold your company reputation so keeping a close eye or verifying the content is essential.
There is so much content on the web sometimes it is hard to filter out the garbage. As an e-commerce consultant I refer to an ever growing list of blogs to keep myself updated with the industry, internet trends, new sites and techniques. I also love opinions from my fellows in the same industry on eBay and Paypal (which are usually the most interesting to read as they are so controversial)
As an addicted internet shopper I look to blogs for fashion finds and what to avoid. I remember back in the day when I first started wearing steel boned corsets, before blogging has really started out it was a website buying guide that made sure I ordered the right size. This site had load of buying links too (I hope they were an affiliate) and I used eBay so start my passion. Soon as the new wave of internet mobile phones dip below £100 in the UK, Google is going to be with me everywhere. Doing the crossword will never be the same, I will never have to rack your brains for the name of that guy who played whatsit in that film. I will also be able to shop on the fly.
Taking Advantage of a Niche….Its all about the little guys..
1735 days
Most of my business ideas, customers and favourite clients at my main work place have been targeting niche markets. Reading this post from eTailology gave up a few nice reads about marketing successfully to a niche.
This article by Volusion – Increase Your Online Sales by Marketing to a Niche gives up three things to make you ‘go niche’
1. You can attract more customers to your site by specializing your marketing campaigns. By having such a very specialized site, you can focus any ads you create for a specific sector of people. You’re also more likely to have a specific set of keywords that will indicate to search engines exactly what is on your site. This can help you achieve a higher page rank.
2. You can gear both the content and the design of the site to better close your sale. Rather than combing through all sorts of different types of products, the content on your site will better match what the consumer was looking for in the first place. You can even design the site better because your niche has a common interest for you to base it on.
3. You can spend less money on marketing because you have fewer competitors. Rather than working harder and competing with an already saturated market, work smarter to gain loyal customers who have a specific need or interest.
With my Hairfreax site I found point one to be very true. Once I got going and selected around 10 keywords to use the search engine optimisation was easy to achieve for my niche market. With point two, its still mainly in progress, the design that is. I am planning heavy payment integrations and streamlining the product range over the Christmas period, and design will come last. But with the launch of Gothfreax, I am doing just that! I spend less that £20 a month of advertising, and my biggest sales month to date was without advertising.
Pure optimisation fall out paid for my holiday.
Another good article is from Etail Dtail – an introduction to online marketing for new online sellers. covering affiliate marketing, SEO, pay per click on both search engines and shopping comparison, banner exchanges and promotional discounts. I would recommend reading this post if you are new to marketing your e-commerce store online.
The website I am currently working on is a very niche market, in fact I have two projects running one off my own back for a small business in Birmingham and one within work for an existing client. I imagine I will blog about the trials and tribulations of niche SEO, and report of the results achieved by various techniques.
I should write an article ‘An E-commerce Store from Start to SEO‘ as a guide for new etailers, as its something I seem to be doing and refining everyday. Consider it a working title.
The man behind eTailology has this website ‘Better Coffee‘ which I will show to my colleges at work (think J-pod by Douglas Coupland) as the amount of fresh filtered coffee brewed in our office is suicidal.
