Little disappointed by eBay’s lack of innovation this roll-out.  A shopping cart – think that was tried and buried with eBay Express… I’m glad that the eBay employees who used it liked it – and hope it offers buyers an easy way to pay – but from feedback I’ve received from new buyers on eBay – that’s not the problem. PayPal is the problem, with it’s difficult and confusing rules and regulations for the casual buyer.

About that clumping listings together in catalog. EBay will be more like Amazon, where individuals sellers are stripped of their unique selling propositions and the sale becomes only about price… Does it work for the small sellers? Check out how many items are a penny on Amazon. Can we afford to sell our goods for total bottom dollar (plus free shipping)? No, unless you have the buying power of Buy.com or ToysRus.

Which brings me to my point, eBay please stop playing catch up and start innovating!

Asking what I think might help? Here’s a few things that would help my business on eBay:

• How about giving sellers more ability to communicate with OUR customers? eBay seems to be going in the opposite direction – blocking us for direct communication. This is great for big sellers who don’t want to pay for the additional customer service but terrible for the micro seller who can benefit from direct one-on-one communications with customers.

Examples:

•  Provide us with coupons to our store listings.
•  Allow us sellers to set up shipping parameters that will give buyers free shipping after a certain purchase amount – determined by the individual seller.

Right now if I offer buyers FREE shipping when buyers purchase $25 or more I have to refund the shipping amount through paypal if the buyer doesn’t wait for a manual invoice – very clunky and a bookkeeping nightmare! And, with the new shopping cart – undetermined whether we can continue to send manual invoices for purchases.

• Improve the store newsletter feature – stop blocking us from selling and promoting OUR business.

 EBay grew on the power of the individual seller, give us back some of that freedom. I need to be able to use HTML to code photos and links back to eBay and provide my buyers with a professional looking newsletter/flyer/ sales tool. Right now it seems like eBay distrusts sellers so much that all but the very basic functions are blocked in the newsletter.
Lastly: – Based on tradtion eBay sellers have come to expect fee and site changes to be rolled out the first of the year. EBay added to our unease by simply not announcing until three months into the year…. sounds like they knew when they would announce these rollouts months in advance… why not share the date with sellers? We’re depending on a stable platform to sell on – not knowing what the schedule is doesn’t help. Especially nervewracking after the fairly major duplicate listing surprise during our busy season last year.

A recent study from Rice University found that using FaceBook fan pages increases sales.

The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery customers, the company’s Facebook fans:

• Made 36 percent more visits each month.
• Spent 45 percent more of their eating-out dollars at DG.
• Spent 33 percent more at DG’s stores.
• Had 14 percent higher emotional attachment to the DG brand.
• Had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward DG.
According to Dholakia, the results indicate that Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social-media marketing.

You can read the whole FaceBook article here

Once you do, please come back and talk to me about how I can help you get your FaceBook page up and running!

Here’s a video that shows you how to open an eBay Store in under 3 minutes!

NutshellMail  debuted a useful feature for page admins this week allowing them to create an automated newsletter for their fans by adding an “Email Newsletter” tab to their pages with the company’s Facebook app.

This newest addition to NutshellMail’s features allows fans to opt-in to the newsletter with featured content from a page. This is great news for marketing your business on FaceBook.

The new feature is designed to be easy to set up, use and maintain, and encourages subscribers to comment, like, share or post directly back to Facebook pages through the email newsletters.

The automated newsletter is similar to NutshellMail’s primary service, allowing users to compile social network updates from Facebook and others into a “snapshot email” which is sent to a primary email address on a schedule determined by the user —anywhere from once a week to hourly. Frequency, content and other settings for this snapshot email may be adjusted by users, who may also reply to notifications directly into Facebook and other networks via email.

If you don’t have an outside email newsletter function or way to collect newsletter subscribers using this application may be an easy, simple solution.

In an official announcement yesterday eBay confirmed that as of October 31st there will be no more eBay User Blogs.

You can read the announcement by clicking here.

If you find yourself without a blog and unsure what service to use, where to start or how to set up an outside blog to promote your business, please contact me – I’m here to help.

For a full list of services, including blog set-up please visit http://www.clovercity.com/