Packing your goods

If you are going to run a profitable and professional eBay business, you will need to package and ship your goods professionally. No one likes to receive his or her “eBay treasure” in an old shoebox stuffed with your last week’s newspaper. This does not mean that you have to always use “new” supplies. Recycled boxes and packaging materials are fine as long as they are in good condition.

There are three costs involved in shipping:

• Shipping supplies
• Shipper charges
• Your time

Let’s look at each one.

Shipping supplies

Shipping supplies consist of boxes, newsprint or tissue, Styrofoam peanuts, bubble-pak and tape.

Why pay top dollar for shipping supplies when you can get them for free? Here is a source of free shipping supplies, boxes and packing materials. Visit your local gift shop or kitchen store. These merchants receive shipments on a daily basis of usually fragile items that require large amounts of bubble pak, Styrofoam peanuts and sturdy boxes.

Gift shops are deluged with shipping and packaging materials. Local laws often require them to recycle the materials rather than just throwing them away. This can be expensive. Believe me — they are happy to give it away.

Local shops can be a treasure trove of free shipping and packing materials. Other stores that receive large amounts of shipping and packaging materials include drug stores, electronics stores (such as Radio Shack) and small neighborhood hardware stores.

If you ship USPS Priority Mail, he U.S. Postal Service website offers free shipping supplies delivered (also free) direct to your home or office. Many eBay sellers use Priority Mail for shipping items less than five pounds.  Less than five pounds, Priority Mail usually works out less than UPS and it gets there faster.

The USPS will send you free boxes, envelopes, tape and labels direct to your home by priority mail. You can print out labels and select Delivery Confirmation at the web site. (This is a saving of 60 cents over doing it at the post office). Here is a link where you can order free shipping supplies with the eBay logo on the box.  http://ebaysupplies.usps.com/

It goes without saying that you should package your merchandise carefully to avoid damage. Why do I say this if it’s so obvious? Just last month my wife received a package from a Top Rated Seller containing a collectible (and expensive) flow blue plate she had purchased from his eBay Store. The plate was loose in the box. The seller had wrapped it with bubble pak, but hadn’t taped the bubble pak together. During shipping it had worked loose in the box. Fortunately, it wasn’t broken. Even people who know better often take short cuts that can result in an unhappy buyer and in some cases, negative feedback.

Shipping Charges:

As an occasional seller there isn’t much you can do about lowering shipping charges. If, however, you are a high volume eBay seller, you can negotiate rates with UPS, FedEx and FedEx Ground.  Call the companies and ask what their quantity points are to get a discount. If you work for a company that uses UPS or FedEx, they have programs whereby employees can piggyback on their company’s discounts. You open up an account with your own credit card, but your shipping rate is tied to your employer’s rate. Ask you employer to ask his/her shipping company sales rep if they offer such a program. It is good for you and the employer because it can raise his/her quantity to help get lower rates.

eBay also has a program for PowerSellers and Top-rated sellers where you can save up to 23% off UPS Ground Daily Rates. The more you ship, the bigger the discount. Learn more about UPS rate discounts.

Your Time:

Time is valuable. Time you spend making labels and wrapping packages could be better spent launching auctions, searching for new products, answering emails and so on.

The best way to save time is to have a permanent area for shipping. Invest in tape guns, paper rolls and so on. If you have to clear off the dining room table every time you want to wrap a package, this is a waste of time.

When our kids were younger, we used to hire them to do our shipping.  Now they are grown up, we hire our neighbor’s teenagers to help with the business. It is a much better use of my time to pay a teenager a few bucks an hour to wrap packages. Besides anything you pay them is a business expenses for tax purposes.

Calculating postage and making labels is another time consuming task. Take a look at Stamps.com. They have a great $100-off offer they made to my readers.  Using a service like Stamps.com is a great way to save time and money on shipping.  Here are some of the benefits:

• Get postage discounts on Priority Mail & Express Mail.
• Import orders from eBay, Amazon.com and more.
• Save up to 10% on package insurance.
• Hide the postage amount on your shipping labels.
• Ship worldwide with USPS First Class International.

The other popular service that competes with Stamps.com is Endicia, but right now this special offer trumps them.

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The Complete eBay Marketing System covers issues like shipping and much more.  This is a complete printed training manual to setting up and running a profitable eBay business.

Here are some of the places where you can find reliable eBay wholesale sourcing information and where I find mine.

• Wholesale Search Engines
• Wholesale Trade Shows and Merchandise Marts
• Worldwide Brands
• Wholesale Buying System

Lets look at each of these

Wholesale Search Engines

If you look at the top of this blog and hover over the navigation tab that says Web Wholesale Search, you will see three wholesale search engines.  Although these search engines are optimized for wholesale companies, you do have to remember that they are search engines and therefore clever SEO experts can fool them.  When you do a search you will often get results that include the big dropship companies and even discount retailers who sell under the guise of being a wholesale site.

Nevertheless, by far most of the results will be legitimate wholesale suppliers, so this can be a good place to screen for companies that you may wish to contact.

One thing to remember:  When you click on a link to one of the wholesale suppliers, you will often land on a retail site.  When this happens, look around the navigation links and find a link that says partner login or wholesale or dealer information.  Clicking on those links will usually get you to the wholesale information.

Wholesale Trade Shows and Merchandise Marts

These are one of my favorite places to find wholesale sources for the simple reason that most online sellers (eBay and Amazon sellers), rarely visit these.  This means that I can often find goods to sell that are not yet being sold on eBay.

There are both wholesale trade shows and wholesale merchandise marts in all major cities.  If you live in a smaller city like Austin, TX you may not get many trade shows. So what you want to do is look for shows in nearby cities such as Dallas and Houston, or watch for shows in Las Vegas, which is the trade show capital of the US.

The same thing goes with merchandise marts.  There are about 30 cities in the US with permanent merchandise marts. These are locations where wholesale suppliers have actual showrooms that you can browse in. You can’t buy anything to carry out –instead you place orders and the goods are shipped to you.

Entrance to both wholesale trade shows and merchandise is controlled and limited to the trade only. So you will need a business tax or sales tax certificate, and often they will want you to show other proof such as a business checking account, business cards and so on.

WorldWide Brands

WorldWide Brands is one of the oldest and largest suppliers –and in my opinion the best supplier of wholesale information.  The service is not cheap –but it is a one-time, lifetime fee. For that you get access to thousands of sources and tons of training videos.  WorldWide Brands was the first place I used to find wholesale information when I started selling on eBay and I still have my membership and use it all the time.

Many companies in this business simply research and post lists of wholesale sources, but WorldWide Brands actually contacts the wholesale sources and talks to them to make sure they will deal with small eBay and Amazon sellers.  And they are constantly updating the database –usually adding anywhere from 20 to 30 new sources each month.

Wholesale Buying System

This is a product that I wrote and produce.  It is a printed wholesale training manual that comes with membership in my members-only site where I list about 1000 wholesale sources that I have personally researched.  But most importantly, the Wholesale Buying System teaches you everything you need to know about the wholesale sourcing industry and shows you how to research and find wholesale sources for thousands of products –including those hard to find ones.

One word of caution:  If you have purchased –or plan to purchase, The Complete eBay Marketing System, then you already have the wholesale buying system as that is part of the complete eBay system training manual –so don’t buy both.

Liquidation Goods

I didn’t mention this at the beginning of the article, but wholesale liquidators –companies that liquidate surplus inventory for large retailers, are another great source of name brand wholesale goods.  If you know what you are doing you can find some fabulous deals where you can buy brand new merchandise –including popular brand name goods at literally pennies on the dollar.

Notice that I said: If you know what you are doing. The problem with this market is that it is fraught with risk and danger and the novice buyer can really get screwed.  This is where a guy named Chad Maslak comes in.  I have known Chad for about 3 years and he is the absolute master of the liquidation and surplus market.

Chad sells a training course that teaches you everything you need to know before buying from liquidation and surplus dealers. And the course comes with his favorite sources –sources that you can rely on not to get screwed.  Some time ago I asked Chad if he would give my readers a special deal and he agreed. He only offered it for a limited time, but he has opened it up again.  So click here to get a special offer for Skip McGrath readers.  BTW – Chad’s system comes with a no-questions-asked money back guarantee so you can’t really lose.

You just enter the item number and hit Get Report.  Your report will look like this:

I pulled two reports on the same item but each item has a different title.  Notice in the top box I got 127 click throughs for a total of 0.29%.  But the second one resulted in 147 views at 0.39%.  This tells me that I should be using the second title.  One of the ways eBay rewards you with search position is the number of items that sell per impression.  You can see that neither of these has had a sale. (They are fairly new fixed price listings but I have many others that do have sales.)  So what I am doing is splitting the opportunity to get a sale between two listings.  If I run just the one listing I should get more views per impressions and of course I will save fees on the second listing.  And when I do get a sale that listing will rise higher in eBay’s search results.

So use eBay’s listing visibility tool to help optimize your listings.

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Written by an eBay Top Rated Seller who sells on eBay every day, The Complete eBay Marketing System is a complete printed training manual that teaches you everything you need to learn how to start and run a profitable eBay business.

Starting August 3, 2010, list your items for free—no Insertion Fees, regardless of the start price of your item. Just list them Auction-style with no reserve price.

• Get free Insertion Fees for up to 100 Auction-style listings—regardless of start price
• List even big ticket items—start the bidding where you want
• Pay only if your item sells

There are few catches:

eBay Store subscribers are not eligible for this promotion

If you have already sold more than ten items on eBay, your detailed seller ratings (DSRs) must be 4.5 or higher on all four criteria (Communication, Shipping Cost, Shipping Time, and Item as Described) to be eligible for this Promotional Rate. DSR rating criteria for this promotion will be based on the previous 12 months. If buyers have left you DSRs on 10 or more transactions, you’ll have access to a Seller Dashboard within My eBay where you can see your current rating

However, new sellers who don’t yet have DSR ratings are also eligible.

This promotion does not apply to the following: Sellers who have an eBay Store, Fixed Price listings, eBay Motors Passenger Vehicles, Motorcycles, Boats, Power Sports, Other Vehicles, Motors Local Market, Professional Services, Real Estate, Classified Ad listings.

Also the promotional rate does not apply to listings with a start date prior to August 3, 2010—including those listings revised during the Promotion Period. Additionally, the promotional rate will not apply to listings scheduled to start after the Promotion Period. Listings that have a reserve price are not eligible for this promotion.

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The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath is a complete eBay selling and business system delivered in a 6 pound printed manual.

]]> http://blog.skipmcgrath.com/2010/08/ebay-runs-10-cent-listing-promotion-store-subscribers-excluded/feed/ 0 http://blog.skipmcgrath.com/2010/08/internet-sales-tax-some-more-news-for-diabetic-test-strips-sellers/ http://blog.skipmcgrath.com/2010/08/internet-sales-tax-some-more-news-for-diabetic-test-strips-sellers/#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:07:27 +0000 Skip McGrath http://blog.skipmcgrath.com/?p=1506 eBay is working very hard to help stop the internet tax. Here is a message they sent out last week that everyone should read and respond to.

Internet Sales Tax

On July 1, a bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives that would impose complex sales tax collecting requirements on internet retailers and entrepreneurs, including our eBay sellers. If passed, HR 5660, the so-called, “Main Street Fairness Act,” would require small online retailers to comply with varying and regularly changing sales tax rules and rates for thousands of tax jurisdictions, and to collect and remit sales taxes from each customer. This new sales tax scheme would be extremely burdensome and costly to small online retailers like you who have set up shop on the internet. A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate as well. eBay is working very hard to stop this bill from becoming law, but we need your help.

Please join our effort to stop the passage of this anti-small business bill. In three minutes or less, you can sign this petition urging your lawmakers to protect small, online retailers by opposing new tax burdens.

Write Your Congressperson

Petitions are great, but nothing beats contacting your own congressperson.

If you know the name of your congressperson, just Google their name and you will get a link to their home page that has a form where you can email them and they also have fax numbers where you can fax them.

If you don’t know their name, go to the following link and type in your zip code

http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html

Once you type in your zip code (don’t worry about the +4 you can leave it blank) you will go to a page with your congressperson’s name as a hyperlink. Just click on that link and you will be taken directly to your congressperson’s home page. Now just click on the contact link to send an email.

Be polite. The emails are read by staff and they just trash any weird or angry-sounding emails. The other ones get forwarded to the congressperson.  Don’t bother your Senator with this as it hasn’t gone to the Senate yet.

News for Diabetic Test Strip Sellers

In my newsletter a few days ago I had a Musing’s item about problems with selling Diabetic Test Strips.  And I warned that eBay was suspending sellers.  Finally I have the real scoop:

It turns out that there have been some folks selling stolen strips and selling strips with Medicare or pharmacy prescription labels on them.  The other trigger is sellin strips with short expiration dates. So follow these steps to stay out of trouble:

1. If you suddenly sell a large quantity of strips you could trigger eBay’s fraud detection.  So if you have been selling small quantities and suddenly find yourself with a large supply just dribble them out slowly.
2. If someone calls you with a large supply of strips to sell –be careful. They may be stolen.
3. When buying strips be sure an check the expiration date.  Make sure there is enough time to sell all the strips before the date expires.
4. Do not buy strips with Medicare labels. It is a crime to resell these.
5. If a box has a pharmacy label you can remove it with goo gone or lighter fluid before selling it.
6. Don’t buy or sell the Johnson & Johnson Brand as they will file a Vero complaint against you.

Follow these tips and you will be fine.  If you have any other tips or questions please leave a comment so we can share this will all readers.

Skip McGrath

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eBay Business System – Learn How to Sell on eBay: The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath

• Karen was sitting in a workshop at the Amazon conference and asked if anyone knew of a research tool that would show you what goods were actually selling for on Amazon like the eBay completed search does.  Several people shouted out “Competitive Eye.”  Here is what Competitive Eye says about their service:

“We provide your competitor’s actual delivered pricing. The actual pricing that matters to you and your customers. The pricing that helps you make the most out of your marketing efforts as well as a host of online tools and reporting giving you the big picture. The big picture necessary to make the best, well informed business decisions. A complete set of tools, reporting and beneficial analysis in one easy to use package.”

• I was speaking with Stephanie Inge who is an eBay and Amazon seller and who runs the eBay Group in Dallas Tx. she turned me on to a great educational site called Wiz IQ.  Wiz IQ is a site where you can create online seminars or complete courses where people can listen in live or watch at a later time. and they have a set up where you can not only do this for free –they have a system where you can market and charge for the courses.  I plan to start using Wiz-IQ to create bonus seminars for my products.

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What is The Complete eBay Marketing System?

The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath is a complete course for selling on eBay. Look at all you get:

You get a truly impressive 300-page step-by-step workbook packed with 6 POUNDS of information you can use, today! I will ship it to you via UPS Select and you should have it in your hands within two or three business days to most of the US.

And that is not all you get:

• Access code for my Confidential Master File of Wholesale Suppliers
• My monthly Newsletter
  
• Special Bonus Report – Wholesale Sources Within 50 Miles of Your Home
• My PowerSellers Resource Report – a $67.00 Value. The report includes valuable discount coupons and free trial offers from important third-party products and service providers.
• Video on Niche Marketing
  
• Auction Timing Report – Beat the big guys. Learn how to come up Above your competitors every time.
• Online Auction Photo Secrets – Learn how anyone can take professional looking photos for eBay listings that really sell

And, you get my No-Questions-Asked, Unconditional 100% Money Back Guarantee. You can’t lose!

Order Your Complete eBay Marketing System Now and GROW Your eBay Business!

eBay announced major changes to the platform and new selling policies changes  today that will roll out in September. Most of the changes will launch between September 7 and September 13.  eBay is calling the changes Seller Release 3.

As usual eBay is putting a positive spin on the announcement.  Here is what eBay VP Dinesh Lathi has to say about the announcement:

“Updates coming this fall will help you take full advantage of the increased holiday traffic, maximize sales, and streamline your operations. As promised, we’re continuing to consolidate changes that impact your selling into two or three releases per year with lead time to adapt. This is the third and final release for 2010.”

The changes fall into 3 main categories:

Changes to the selling platform:

• New  rules for iPod/MP3 players, GPS, and DVDs Starting mid-September, listing with the eBay catalog will be required in these subcategories (Auction-style and Fixed Price, including Good ‘Til Cancelled). Pay no Insertion Fees when you list or relist with the catalog.
• eBay Listing Analytics application gives you new insight into how your listings are performing: impressions, clicks, sales.
• Bulk-edit more fields, revise up to 500 listings at once with new functionality in the eBay bulk edit and relist flow.
• Get your unpaid items re-listed and back in front of buyers fast with auto-relist option in Unpaid Item Assistant.  Choose to exempt some customers from the automated process.

Shipping Policy Changes

• Industry-standard shipping terms —Economy, Standard, Expedited, and One-day—used to describe domestic shipping services. Shipping options displayed prominently along with estimated delivery time on the item page and in checkout.
• Shipping to Alaska and Hawaii, APO/FPO addresses, and special US areas such as Guam and Puerto Rico:  Exclude these buyers or show exact charges based on their location.
• Pass on your shipping discounts to buyers with the Shipping Calculator: Specify one domestic and one  international discount.
• Low-cost shipping insurance: Available exclusively with eBay label printing.

Buyer Communications

• Updates to reduce  and manage buyer contacts: Ask a question link moved down on item page; Automated Answers turned on for all sellers.
• Enhancements to My Messages: Use it as your central inbox for buyer email with out-of-office reply, customized email signatures, and message filtering.

eBay has created a Seller Checklist for more information about how these updates affect you.

Most of these updates are positive, but I am always leery about the automated system changes as they often launch with hidden glitches that can drive sellers crazy.  We will just have to wait and see.

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Watch this space for a new traffic building system for your website or blog. I am working with someone who is producing a complete traffic system to build quality organic traffic from search engines.

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The Complete eBay Marketing System by eBay PowerSeller Skip McGrath is the only complete printed eBay business course that teaches you how to start and run a successful and profitable eBay business.

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If the name sounds strange it is a play on the word beaucoup which means many or much. For example if you were rich someone might say: “That guy has beaucoup bucks.”

The site already has listing and bidding action. Fees are about 20% lower than eBay. This is higher than on several other alternative auction sites.  As well as charging for listings, the revenue plan for the site is to license listings by zip code to individual newspaper publishers. The idea is to license zip-codes to more than 300 newspaper publishers, such as The Boston Herald and the Pittsburgh Press.

When I went to the site and did a search, it brought up listings that were geographically close to me first. The interface is clean and works well and the site will act familiar to those who have used eBay.

eBay is vulnerable to competitors in the auction category as they are focusing more and more on fixed price as they try to be more like Amazon.

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The Complete eBay Marketing System is a printed instruction manual that will teach you all aspects of selling on eBay and running a full-time eBay business.

This particular seller shipped an item to a buyer who claimed they did not receive it even though the seller’s tracking info showed it had been delivered. The seller then sent the person a second item at his own expense. It was also delivered.  Then the buyer left the seller negative feedback. (Don’t you just love those kind of people?)

So our intrepid seller reaches out to PowerSeller Support for help. And gets the following reply from the support rep who also seemed to be surprised by eBay’s policy. Here is what the support rep sent to the seller:

“Unfortunately I was not aware of this but they just had a policy change
in the last couple weeks that holds the seller 100% responsible for
making sure that the buyer receives their item. Although the tracking
shows that the item was delivered, because the buyer says they didn’t
receive it, it’s the seller fault. So essentially if someone steals that
package from the porch or something, they are still holding the seller
responsible.”

So we are also now responsible for theft. But if you really want to build up your negative feedback, just try requiring a signature.  When people get home from work and find a card on their door telling them to contact UPS to arrange for delivery, they get even more upset.

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