Posts filed under 'Amazon'
Feedback is an issue that causes much angst to sellers both on eBay and Amazon. Many times the negative feedback left is irrelevant to the transaction especially when the buyer has not even contacted the seller. So I ask you – Is feedback even necessary in 2009? How many buyers even review a seller’s feedback? On Amazon the seller’s feedback is pretty much hidden, especially if the seller has the coveted “buy-box”. It is also extremely lopsided since so few buyers actually leave feedback on Amazon. On eBay many buyers do not understand the feedback percentages and don’t take the time to review the comments. This is obvious when you see a seller with 89% feedback, yet all their 99 cent junk auctions have bids.
So what other mechanisms could replace feedback and help reduce scam sellers? Both eBay and Amazon already have the mechanisms in place, they just don’t publish the information derived from these mechanisms to the buying community.
Continue Reading January 8th, 2009
Good morning again from Vegas. Day 3 of the conference was a whirlwind of new information and new people. Some of the presentations were very detailed, while others were more basic. I was happy to find out we had registered several new members of IMA as a result of our free seminars for ASD/AMD members on “Getting Started in E-Commerce”! Great job everyone!
The first presentation was on Market Intelligence, by Tim Williams from QL2. QL2 is a company that has helped many very large, well known retailers with market intelligence in order to increase their market share.
Market Intelligence is information relative to the markets you are trying to penetrate. This consists of information you gather inhouse as well as information gathered by third parties. We learned how and why to monitor our competitors as well as how to monitor brand perception. The very detailed information will help us be more competitive in the fast changing e-commerce world.
The second presentation of the day was “Analyze your Business Using Web Statistics” by Sagerock and Engine Ready. They gave a lot of useful information about analyzing your CPC campaigns in order to increase your conversions while decreasing your marketing budget. After hearing all that’s involved in managing your own SEO and CPC ad campaigns, I’ve decided it might be best to hire a professional to do this, unless you are a numbers person and really like working with statistics.
I missed the Endicia Presentation on the USPS changes, however I did talk to the Endicia rep for a little while and found out that the post offices just received the new, larger, flat rate box this week. So if you are interested in these boxes, check with your Post Office as they may have received them.
During lunch we attended round tables with the companies of our choice. This was an awesome opportunity to sit with a representative and ask questions specific to our businesses, as well as make valuable contacts.
The next presentation was “Amazon Best Practices for Selling Online”, which was a good, basic overview of the third party selling opportunities that Amazon offers. These include Marketplace, FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) and Webstores. Amazon stated that 26% of the total units sold on Amazon last year were by 3rd party sellers. Third party sellers are considered a significant and important part of their business.
The next presentation was Expanded Seller Protection by Paypal. I didn’t attend this but did talk to two Paypal Reps. One thing I learned, that I didn’t already know from the announcements, is that Powersellers will be protected against a fraudulent payment if they can show they shipped the item to the address on the Paypal Payment. The key word here is “shipped”. However, INR’s will still require proof of delivery.
Next up was a Q&A with eBay. Many issues were raised about feedback, Best Match and UPI from the audience. What I understand from what the eBay reps said is that all of these changes are evolving. eBay is monitoring the changes to see if they have the desired effect. If they do not, or they have unexpected undesirable effects, they will make changes to the changes.
The last presentation was given by Brian Kane of Microsoft “Microsoft Office – Interesting Elements of Office Relevant to the On-Line Merchant”.
Brian spoke about their small business website available at www.officelive.com which offers free basic websites. In addition, they now offer a program that will list both to eBay and to your officelive website. This includes a robust email marketing program as well. The presentation included many slides on the new Office 2007 products. It was interesting to see all the changes and new features now available in the 2007 version.
The last session of the day was the IMA Business Meeting hosted by Steve Grossberg, President of IMA. Steve pointed out that IMA has reached its 16 month birthday. He thanked the Events committee for all their work in making the conference a reality, as well as all committee members and Board Members. IMA has just begun, but is gaining momentum daily and every member can be proud of their Association.
The Board of Directors Election was held and 3 new board members were elected:
- Kim Wren – Wren Storage
- Cathy Aggelopoulos – Visibility Unlimited
- Cynthia (Cyn) Lizana – Texcyngoods
The meeting was adjourned and the Hospitality Suite was opened. We had a drawing for door prizes. All prizes were donated by IMA Members and most of the prizes were items we used in our TalkMarket videos, so there was a wide selection of awesome prizes given away. The Grand Prize was a complete eBay design package, worth $1600, donated by our Hospitality Suite sponsor, Frooition!
Cyn
March 5th, 2008
Congratulations to all the members of IMA who sell on Amazon. According to the Nielson ratings, Amazon had more unique visitors than Ebay for the month of December. According to an article by “The New York Times” dated January 14th, 2008: “Amazon has opened its site to independent sellers, while eBay’s auction model is running into problems with fee-fatigued sellers and buyers wary of fraud and counterfeit items.”
“Now the latest audience figures from Nielsen Online confirm that the e-commerce traffic crown has changed heads. For the month of December, for the first time, more Americans clicked over to Amazon.com (59,624,000) than eBay (59,374,000)”
To read the complete article including some very interesting comments in the NY Times.
Jennie
February 4th, 2008
I was not one of the top 200 Ebay sellers invited to the Ebay Ecommerce Summit last week where Ebay announced the changes to Fees, Search, and Feedback. I was one of the lower volume Ebay sellers on the sidelines at home waiting to hear the long awaited announcements about fee reductions. As we all know now, the fee changes will probably hurt more Ebay sellers than they help. The changes overall made me ask myself how the new CEO designate of Ebay, Mr. John Donahoe, can make changes to Ebay’s platform that blatantly copy the Amazon platform without feeling a bit unimaginative. Mr. Donahoe has been at Ebay since March 2005. If you would like to check out his salary on Forbes Mag. Is Ebay going to become Amazon Lite?
The new final value fees (FVFs) for Ebay stores are just slightly less than Amazon’s FVFs are now. Not allowing sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers is similar to the Amazon feedback system. The star rating system is similar to the Amazon seller rating system. Amazon already has a relevance based customer search that sounds like the “finding experience” Mr. Donahoe has been working on, and which is scheduled to be rolled out to Ebay this year. My guess is it is time for us all to examine the Amazon sellers marketplace because the new CEO-designate of Ebay seems to want the Ebay buyers experience to be just like the Amazon buyers experience, and will probably continue to imitate Amazon features.
Jennie
February 3rd, 2008
Wasn’t it just 2 years ago that eBay wanted to bring back the “vibrancy” to core by encouraging 99 cent starting bids? In 2006 they decreased the listing fee for the 99 cent starting bid while increasing the costs for eBay store listings. eBay felt the need to go back to their roots – the auction format.
So it was with shock that I read the new fee structure. eBay’s 99 cent auction sellers are no longer the darlings of eBay. They have been hit the hardest by the new fee structure. Because the traditional 99 cent auction sellers generally have a very high sell through rate, they are being hit hardest by the large increase in Final Value Fees. Although their insertion fee has decreased by 5 cents it’s nowhere large enough to make up for the 3.5% increase on the backend.
Yet Fixed Price sellers, who generally have a low sell through rate, have seen their insertion fees decrease greatly, especially the majority who use gallery. They still pay the increased FVF, but the decreased insertion fees will more than make up for the increase in FVF’s for those seller with sell through rates below 50%.
I call this the “eBay flip flop”. Just like a politician, eBay can’t make up their minds if they want to be an auction site or a fixed price site. They tried to have a separate format for fixed price, ie eBay Express, which has been such a failure that it is being discontinued in the UK.
When did eBay make this sudden turn to woo Fixed Price sellers? Was it in 2007 when they noticed Amazon’s third party marketplace suddenly grow by leaps and bounds? eBay started getting worried that they were losing market share, not auction market share, but Fixed Price market share. This seems to have come as quite a surprise to eBay management. Suddenly they realized that Fixed Price listings make up 40% of all listings. Yet sellers are flocking to sell on Amazon.
In order to compete with the Amazon Marketplace, it appears that eBay has decided to throw their true auction sellers to the wolves and woo back the Fixed Price sellers. Yet this does not seem to be a very good long-term strategy. Has eBay not noticed all of the niche auction sites? There are auction sites for baseball cards, shoes, liquidation items, etc. What are you going to do eBay? Wait for these niche auction sites to take away your true auction sellers and then do another flip flop in order to woo them back? At least one very large traditional auction seller is seriously considering either starting his own auction site, or negotiating with other auction sites to move all of his auctions and customers away from eBay. It’s been done successfully before, and it will continue to be done until eBay gets a clue and starts treating these two formats differently.
What will it take for eBay to realize that pure auctions and fixed price listings are two different animals that require different fee structures? They seem to understand now that there are buyers that prefer auctions and there are buyers that prefer Fixed Price, yet they still charge the same fees for both.
I say this because I was recently thrown into one of eBay’s search tests. My results were shown in two columns, one with Fixed Price listings and one with Auction listings. This is a good start, but does not go far enough. Different fees should be charged to recognize the differences in selling in each format. If eBay doesn’t realize this and make this needed change, they will continue to lose their large sellers. Last year they lost Fixed Price sellers, this year they will lose large auction sellers.
Why different fees? Because the needs of Fixed Price sellers are different than true Auction Sellers. Sellers with multiples of items need lower insertion fees so they can afford to list all of their items at all times. Let them pay for success – when an items sells. eBay has started to “get” this.
However, true Auction Sellers have close to 100% sell through, so why penalize them for selling by charging such a high back end fee? Charge them a higher insertion fee, since you know their item will sell, and lower back end fees. This will encourage the auction sellers to stay and to list higher value items at lower starting prices which will encourage auction buyers to stay on the site and continue bidding. The auction buyers are the backbone of eBay; by chasing away the true auction sellers, eBay chases away the auction buyers. And that is bad for every eBay seller.
Cyn
February 2nd, 2008
An odd thing happened this holiday season on Ebay. I had an buyer that decided the Amazon return policy was much better than my return policy. I have to admit that having 30 days (Amazon’s policy) to return an item is much better than 7 days (my policy), and I did refund my customers money when the item arrived 30 days after we agreed she would return the item. But the incident got me thinking.
Is Amazon setting the standard now for internet buying customer service? Other Ebay sellers have reported that buyers are asking to return items up to 60 days after a sale. Some Amazon sellers are reporting packages being returned from Amazon buyers more than 30 days after the buyer received it.
I have to admit that a year ago I would never have dreamed of asking this question. Is the Amazon return policy going to become the default policy in the internet buyers subconscious? Will buyers hesitate to purchase unless they can expect to get a 30 day return policy?
I think a year ago many Ebay sellers believed Ebay was the only place to sell, and would remain the “main” selling venue. Times have obviously changed. Now Amazon may be setting trends in internet buying that affect sellers who don’t even sell on Amazon.
If you have any stories of how Amazon has affected your sales on Ebay, please post them. I would like to know if other sellers have noticed the same trends I have.
Jennie
January 24th, 2008
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