Ep 247 || A New Online Bookkeeping Application

[podcast_team]

Kevin Reeth, creator of the old Outright online bookkeeping application joins us to talk about his latest creation, Seller Ledger which continues where Outright left off. Brian and Griff answer your questions about Promoted Listing Fees for Multi Quantity listings, the image / barcode search feature in the eBay mobile app, and the 5% minimum for seller-initiated offers.

Episode Links:
New International Shipping Regulations
eBay Open 2023 Registration
Authenticity Guarantee for Sneakers Expanding to eBay Canada
Authenticity Guarantee now available for Trading Cards for eBay Canada
Canada Post introduces a New Collectibles Shipping Service
Seller Ledger
Recurring Links:
eBay for Business Podcast
eBay Seller Spotlight Podcast
eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey
eBay Seller News Announcements
eBay for Business Facebook
Community Chat with eBay Staff
eBay Seller Center
eBay Help
eBay Local Seller Events
Seller Hub
eBay Events

Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff, and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your source for the information and inspiration to help you start and manage and grow your business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 247. Brian, welcome back from Florida.

Brian: Thanks Griff. It's great to be back and in the studio.

Griff: I know you got back at 10:00 AM this morning. You're a trooper!

Brian: I got back a little bit later, had some delays and there's a bit of weather going on in that part of the country.

Griff: Well, I'm glad you made it home safe. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about your time at the three seller meetings, the meetups in a moment. Brian, do you remember an eBay connected application from years ago called Outright?

Brian: That is a very familiar name. It was one of the online bookkeeping tools just for eBay.

Griff: Yes, that's right. It was extremely popular. I used it and it went on for several years and then I can't remember when it was several years ago. Outright was purchased by GoDaddy and they kept the original outright features. They just changed the name to GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. But the program, the application itself was never changed. It was still the same. Sellers really loved it. But then in June of 2022, they announced that they were going to retire GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. So our guest this week is Kevin Reeth from Seller Ledger. Kevin was the founder of Outright and he's built a new online bookkeeping tool to help fill the void left by the retirement of GoDaddy online bookkeeping. We're gonna learn more about the new application in a few minutes when Kevin joins us here. But first, it's time for the news

Brian: And we have a few news items this week. First up, international shipping is becoming more complex as more regulations come into effect or are enforced. Sellers who are self shipping internationally are required to comply with international shipping regulations. If you are self shipping internationally, there are some updated regulatory requirements you should know about regarding harmonized system codes, product description, hazmat goods, and minimum 14 day returns.

Griff: Ooh, sounds like a lot.

Brian: That makes me want to use it. eBay International Shipping, just reading that. And there are details in the post regarding these new requirements on the eBay Announcement Board at ebay.com/announcements. So that's the news for the sellers who self ship to the European Union. But the good news is you can skip all of these requirements when you ship with eBay International Shipping with EIS , you simply ship to our domestic hub and eBay takes care of everything, including customs and returns and those new pesky EU or European regulations all for you.

Griff: Another reason why EIS is the only way to go, so we had a conversation internally about this because there's still a lot of misinformation and miscommunication and about the eBay International Shipping Program. And I think it's just disbelief on a lot of sellers parts that, wait a minute, this can't be that good. What happens in returns? And then when you tell them, when you ship an item and you're enrolled in EIS and an international buyer buys it and they want to return it, you don't have any obligation at all. eBay handles it. You don't get dinged, you don't get a mark. eBay handles it. You don't have to issue a refund, you don't have to take the item back, it's out of your hands. It's just eBay covers everything. And they look at me and, well, what happens if I get a return? I said, did you not hear me? You don't have to worry about it. They look at you and they, I don't believe

Brian: It's interesting, as you can imagine, EIS came up and one of our larger sellers who was at one of the events, he said this about eBay International shipping, he stood up and told everyone, it's completely flawless. I'm not sure we would go that far, but it was wonderful to hear a seller who's been using it since it it was launched to have that perspective. And it's a larger seller.

Griff: It is absolutely flawless. And we, well you're right. We shouldn't say that. If something does pop up, they're gonna point at us and say, you jinxed it.

Brian: It did have a flaw.

Griff: No, I think we're okay though. There is no reason for not using it. The only one I can think of is that if you are a big business that has a whole operations for international shipping in place, logistics, software, maybe you're gonna deal with it. But you know it's just going to get more onerous as the different countries. For example, the European Union start implementing a lot more legislation like for example, the German Packaging Act. There's now a 14 day return requirement in order to ship into Europe. You know, there's new restrictions on hazmat, there are product description requirements that have to be met. I don't exactly know what it is, but it's the harmonized system. Codes have to be in place. You want to really worry about all that. You're crazy. Just ship through eBay. International shipping. When the news comes out about these, you can go ho-hum, I'm just gonna read the comics or go somewhere else. Read the arts section.

Brian: List some more items.

Griff: Exactly. Any more news?

Brian: Well finally, Griff, this week it's time to talk about eBay Open 2023 will take place September 26th through the 29th. And you still have a chance to join us both in person and virtually our in-person eBay Open studios kickoff on Tuesday, September 26th in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Phoenix. This will be followed by three days of seller led sessions, category breakouts, inspiring keynotes, networking opportunities, and more from Wednesday, September 27th through Friday, September 29th. General registration begins August 1st, but you can sign up to get early access on July 31st and be the first in line to grab a spot for our in-person eBay Open Studios. Visit the Announcement Board for more information about eBay Open and we will include a link directly to the registration page so you can sign up for a spot.

Griff: You wanna do it now cuz those spots go quickly.

Brian: Yeah, we sold out I think of every single in-person location last year. So you'll want to pre-register.

Griff: Exactly. So Brian, do you have any update on the three seller meetings you attended there in Florida the last week?

Brian: Yeah, it was great and I mean Griff you've done a number of these and it's really wonderful to get out and see folks in person. Had the opportunity to visit a larger seller who actually gave us a tour of their facility and that's because that's where the seller meeting was hosted and that was a phenomenal experience just to walk through kind of how they process a lot of used inventory that some of the sellers even acquire. Cause three days a week they have auctions on some of the stuff and then they had this whole area caged off, which they called it their eBay cage cuz that was the stuff they cherry picked to put on the eBay site.

Griff: The wild tuff has to go in a cage.

Brian: Exactly. But it was great to see sellers talk about things like eBay, International Shipping, Promoted Listings to see kind of like the adoption and how people are using it. Also the fact that it surprised me a little bit cuz we hear it all the time cuz we're inside the company, right? So we've heard about e i s quite a bit the last few months, but still to see probably 40% of the folks unaware of EIS and every single visit. So Tampa, Orlando, Miami that I went to, there was at least one person who said they had turned off GSP, that was our global shipping program before because they had a bad return experience and when I walked through the new EIS experience where they don't have to worry about returns, they said I'm turning it on as soon as I get home. So it was exciting to see like that's such a big mover for our sellers.

Griff: Yeah, that's excellent. How many sellers do you think you saw?

Brian: So probably saw about 120 in person, but then in the last event, which was in Miami, they were also doing a livestream and there were over another a hundred plus people on the livestream as well. So it was a great way, three quick days to touch well over a hundred sellers and it's exciting to see kind of what they're doing and also hear from some sellers who came curious about eBay in Orlando. There was a young woman and she actually had a relatively decent sized business for a mid 20 year old. I mean she was a go-getter and she was looking to see what were we doing around warehousing, not so much internationally, but would we do something where she could just ship her inventory and then we would fulfill. She was looking for fulfillment opportunities. It was interesting to see the wide range of sellers. And then of course got to see some friends too, like Michael Swope and Kathy Terrell and Dan Crawford and Patty Whitlock and I'm sure I'm missing Cheryl, who hosts the Tampa and Philip who hosts Orlando. It's great to see them and the energy they put into these events. And it's infectious with the other sellers too.

Griff: Sounds like you had a good time. I'm glad you went.

Brian: Yeah, they're long days. It's funny, like somebody said, oh you're going to Florida, are you have some fun time? And I'm thinking the fun is actually the engagement with the sellers.

Griff: Brian. And thank you so much for being the trooper and getting out there. We really appreciate it. Now let's meet our guest for this week.

Griff: Those of you who have been selling on eBay for a while now may recall with some fondness. An online application for bookkeeping called Outright. Outright was very popular with eBay sellers for many years. This seller included. Outright was sold to GoDaddy a couple years back and GoDaddy kept the application and just renamed it GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. But then last year GoDaddy announced that they were gonna sunset GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping and I think they only gave us about a month's notice. Came as a kind of a shock to a lot of us sellers have been waxing this nostalgic for outright slash GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping ever since. Kevin Reeth he's the founder and CEO of Outright and of a new application called Seller Ledger is with us today to tell us about Seller Ledger and how it works. Welcome Kevin.

Kevin: Hey Griff, thanks for having me.

Griff: You've been in this field for quite some time as the founder and I assume the builder of Outright. What are the most common issues eBay sellers face then and face now when managing their bookkeeping and financial records?

Kevin: Well, it's a great question. Back when we first built Outright some of the most confusing and time intensive parts of bookkeeping, they're a little different than what's going on today. Back then, data entry was a big part of the problem and getting data pulled in from both eBay and banks and credit cards, especially banks and credit cards. But there's actually been a lot of progress made with APIs since then. And one thing we've noticed almost immediately with eBay is that their APIs are a lot easier to work with now. And Managed Payments made it so much easier. I mean, we got up and running pretty quickly with that, so that was fantastic. And then the other problem was sales tax, which used to be a royal pain in the neck. But now that eBay and other marketplaces are remitting floor sellers, that's gotten a lot easier. What we're seeing now is a little bit different. There's the classic keeping track of your inventory and items and cost of goods sold and all of that. And that's something that really still hasn't been tackled well. And to be honest, at Outright, we never got a chance to really do it justice and we know that. So we're, we're trying to do that better.

Griff: One of the things I hear from sellers over and over is, how do I use this application? Where do I enter in my cost of goods sold? Is that something that Seller Ledger is tackling?

Kevin: It is. And in fact, right now we're live in beta and we have a number of our customers who are playing around with it. I'll explain briefly kind of what we're trying to do.

Griff: Please.

Kevin: For a lot of sellers, this may sound familiar, so Outright, all we ever tackled was the ability to categorize things as cost of goods sold. Which technically is not the proper way to do it for most sellers. If you've tracked inventory at all in your history, you're really supposed to keep track of when you buy things and then only record the cost when it gets sold. We've had support for that from the day we launched Seller Ledger. And the next level of kind of detail, and this is available right now in beta, so anybody who wants to can reach out and we can set them up with this is basically tracking inventory and cost of goods at kinda a total dollar amount. And what's involved with that is basically just count up the value of all of your inventory once a year. And you start with kind of the total value at the beginning of the year. And then you keep track of all of your purchases of inventory over the course of the year. And at the end of the year when you do your inventory count, again, you have your end of year balance. So you take your beginning balance, you add all of your purchases, you subtract your ending balance, that's your cost of goods and that's what you file for taxes. So that's the second level of detail. And then the third is the one that we've wanted to tackle for a long time. This is the one that I think our early beta testers are most excited about, which is tracking at the individual item level. And for any sellers out there who have those spreadsheets that are color coded, that have columns for what it's sold for, where it's listed, enter the cost, the fees, all of that, that's what we're gonna try and replicate. And we're pretty close to having it ready to show people right now. And the payoff for that is gonna be twofold. Number one is if you enter your inventory, when you buy items, however many you buy from a given store or vendor or source, garage sale, whatever, if you break that down into the individual items and include the SKU that you're gonna use when you list it on eBay, when that order comes down from eBay, we're automatically gonna match it. We're gonna reduce your inventory, we're gonna enter the cost of goods. You don't have to do anything. The record keeping from a tax perspective is just gonna be done for you. And then the next thing that we're gonna be able to provide, and we've already shown this to people, and I'll tell you one of the people I talked to yesterday, her only response was, hallelujah! We're gonna be able to provide a report for every order that looks exactly like the spreadsheets that a ton of customers have shown us over the years. That for every item you sell, how much money did you actually make? Because we can already tie together the shipping that you collected. If you print your labels through eBay, how much you paid for that, any fees that are associated final value or eBay ad fees, anything that's tied to an individual order, we already have that. Only thing we're missing is that cost for the item. And so if you track that in our software, we're gonna be able to tell you sale by sale exactly how much money you made, what your gross margin is, we'll be able to do lots of stuff.

Griff: Kevin, Kevin, stop talking and take my money.

Kevin: . Well your money's no good with us, Griff, but..

Griff: Oh no, it has to be, I can't get any special favors. I'm ready to go sign up. This is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for. And I know I speak for, well let's just say millions of sellers that they really want this big, big sellers sell millions of dollars. They already have their built-in systems, but it's the little guys like myself and moms and pops and single proprietors that even though they may not do the same volume, they still have the same responsibilities when it comes to recording, managing and then presenting their business figures every year to the IRS and this is just gonna make it so much easier.

Kevin: Yeah, we really hope it will. And it's funny you mentioned the small sellers and still having the same obligations. This pending change to where the government wants to drop the threshold for sending out 1099-Ks to $600 is crazy. But that's kind of another thing we've seen from a complexity of the bookkeeping is sellers have always had to report any profits they make from online sales no matter how small. We're always supposed to do that. And so it's understandable that, okay, we're gonna require everybody to report and be honest about this, but the biggest challenge for sellers nowadays is each online marketplace calculates their numbers differently when they send in their 1099 case. How does a really small seller spend the time to try and figure that out? And that's actually one of the other things that we found with connecting with the APIs. We're able to get the order level detail and we break out things like the money that's getting deposited in your payouts, how much of it came from product sales versus shipping? How much was subtracted for final value fees? How was sales tax treated? Having that level of detail also makes it that the software can do the work to break up all the individual items. So if marketplaces are sending 10 99 Ks, that just includes slightly different numbers. A seller's gonna be able to look and say, okay, yeah, for this marketplace, like eBay does not include the sales tax, but another marketplace might include the sales tax. And so a multi-channel seller doesn't have to worry about that anymore.

Griff: When GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping ceased operations, a lot of people started looking around at available software alternatives. And the big one that's online is QuickBooks. We love the folks at Intuit QuickBooks. Great product. How does seller ledger compare to QuickBooks?

Kevin: I would say the, the biggest difference is actually that we're missing a lot of features that QuickBooks does have. And it's by design. Just so you know, I worked it Intuit for nine years in total so I have nothing but great things to say about that company and their products. But for, especially for the really small sellers, and this is what we heard when we reached back out about what were the alternatives to GoDaddy Bookkeeping, QuickBooks can handle any type of business. We're focused really on e-commerce and especially for the small sellers, schedule C filers, people who do it with their personal income tax return. We don't have things like time tracking and invoicing and payroll and other things like that. And that helps kind of reduce the complexity for the user. So I would say from an ease of use perspective, that's probably the biggest differentiator. It also allows us, because we're built from the ground up for e-commerce, we do go and get details from the APIs that I don't believe QuickBooks actually gets. And it's just that kind of focus that allows us to be a little more tailored. And then honestly, we are cheaper. We start at $10 a month and we don't place limits on in terms of how many channels you have or how many data sources. And we don't do things based on kind of feature levels. So for example, this inventory cost of goods feature that we're about to roll out is gonna be available to everybody because like you said, even the really small sellers still have that need. Whereas I think with QuickBooks you have to upgrade to like their $80 tier to get inventory tracking. We don't think that's fair.

Griff: Wait, so back up a minute. You're, I'm still hung up on something you just said, which is this is 10 bucks a month?

Kevin: It is to start, we do have higher tiers and we base it on basically your transaction volume. So the bigger you are, the more data you're gonna produce. Well that drives some storage cost for us. But I will say one thing that we do not include in the transaction count are eBay fees. Just because we know there are a lot of small fees that will show up that if we counted them as if they were a sale for example, it would add up pretty quickly. And there are lots of small sellers who, this is just a function of how eBay charges and things like that. So we just ignore that and we really focus on the transactions that drive sales. So the more successful you are, the more data you're gonna create for us. And so that's how we map it.

Griff: Okay. I'm stuck on this though. What do I get for 10 bucks? Tell me.

Kevin: You get 250 transactions per month.

Griff: Oh, I'm the $10 guy. Yeah. So again, Kevin, keep quiet, take my money. Take my money!

Kevin: If you insist.

Griff: What about people who have multiple eBay accounts? Sometimes it's a matter of managing them for their own business because they have disparate types of product lines. Would seller ledger handle multiple accounts by one seller?

Kevin: It does. And in fact that was probably one of our first surprises that I was just silly enough, I didn't think about it right off the bat. We launched and probably within two days we had a whole bunch of people saying, this is great. How do I add my second and third and fourth eBay account? We're like, Ooh, hold on, be right back. So yeah, that was probably one of the first things we added was the ability to as many eBay accounts as you have, you can connect it and it all works and we show it. You'll see on your dashboard, each eBay account will show up in the balance and you can click in and see everything that's sold through there.

Griff: Does it work for international eBay sellers or is it only for US sellers?

Kevin: We're not planning anything around international, but curiously enough, we've had multiple people from the UK who have signed up and are using it and they love it. We had one little issue with some EU privacy stuff that we had to, we had to make a fix there. But we've even had questions around, because for example in the uk the tax year is very different and we have a workaround for that, but we haven't done anything specifically for international. But we found some international people who with our workarounds are pretty happy.

Griff: Yeah, I'm not surprised about the UK. I would've expected though that the majority of that would've come from say Canadian sellers.

Kevin: Yeah. Haven't seen as much from Canada yet, but uh, we're still early

Griff: And we're getting the word out right now. So that's important. So if I'm interested and I'm about subscribing to seller ledger, where do I go? What do I have to do?

Kevin: Just go to sellerledger.com spelled exactly as sounds, go to the homepage, sign up, it's free to sign up. We offer everybody a 30 day trial, no credit card, and we'll give you 90 days of history to play around and make sure it's right for you. And we're very honest with folks, we want you to be happy with the software before you pay us. Right? So even back in the outright days, the the best thing we ever did was really focus on the sellers and make a product that they love because then they would recommend it.

Griff: Yeah. And one of the things I loved about Outright and then with GoDaddy, they kept this, was that your history for as long as you've been using the product was there. So I could go back five years and look at categories of data, what sold, and this was back before eBay for the longest time. I'm sure you know eBay. I love you. You know I love you. We've been together for years so don't take this personally, but it was always a 90 day data cutoff.

Kevin: Yes.

Griff: And then you lost it. If you didn't keep a copy of it somewhere, you couldn't go back and look, we've extended that now a little bit. So I think now we're looking at two years. But I love that about Outright it and that's, I apparently that's the same with Seller Ledger, right? As long as you're using the product, that history is there for you to access in the future.

Kevin: It is. And in fact, one, one of the new things we did might be a little new, but when you get to the end of your 90 day trial, one option we provide is you can pay by the month or you can kind of prepay for a year. If you prepay for the year, we'll go back and get up to 15 months or so. So we'll go back to the beginning of this year and we'll even go back to the prior year. If we can get access to the data, we have the ability to do that with certain data sources, eBay included, but not necessarily with every bank and credit card because a lot of them, they do have the hard, fast rule of it's 60 days, it's 90 days and there's no way around it.

Griff: I found over the years, especially after eBay initiated its own payment system, that the data from my banks is not as important to me as it was way back when I had to keep track of all that stuff in checking accounts. Is this something that you're noticing with a lot of sellers?

Kevin: I think that's true and I agree with you that when eBay switched to Managed Payments, everything you need to see all of your sales, all of that information, the detail, it's there. And in fact we've seen with some alternatives in the space. And I think one of the reasons why people say they still hadn't found a good solution is there are alternatives that will just take the payout information and run reports based on that, but that doesn't have the breakdown of the sales and the shipping and the fees and stuff like that. We've been really impressed coming back and working with the eBay api. It's been fantastic and the Managed Payments was, it was a game changer.

Griff: Well Kevin, I am dying to get end this interview so I can go sign up for Seller Ledger. I'm really excited. I didn't realize that you also had started Outright, so this is a full circle for you.

Kevin: Yeah, it is. It was not something I expected to have happen and I've apologized profusely to a bunch of our early sellers that I didn't find out about this until the very end of last year. And it took a little bit of time to just research and see if there were alternatives, but it was pretty disappointing to hear that they cut it off mid season, right? Mid tax season.

Griff: I think it caught everyone by surprise. Why did GoDaddy end the application?

Kevin: I have to be honest, I have no idea. When we sold, I had left the company right about the time we sold it to GoDaddy. I had no role or influence or anything and wasn't really kept in the loop on anything after the acquisition. GoDaddy, you know, they managed the business the way they did. I do know having just observed it, that they acquired another company that did invoicing and they moved kind of more into that service-based business model. And I think, as I heard from sellers over the years, cuz I've stayed in touch with a number of sellers just as friends, right? Just keeping touch. Sure. And I would, I would hear updates on it and a little bit of consternation and I would just share opinions that I said, you know, I I think kind of like we were trying to do, they were straddling the fence on different types of business and it was hard to justify investing on the e-commerce side. So that's my best guess.

Griff: Wouldn't it be funny, wouldn't it be ironic if GoDaddy comes back to you and says, Hey, we want to buy Seller Ledger?

Kevin: Well I can also tell you honestly I would not be interested in that. You know, the first time around with Outright we were venture backed, which brings other challenges with it as well as, you know, the funding this time around this is completely self-funded. We are doing this at a pace that we want to, there is no pressure for growth. A lot of it just stems from, this was fun. I used to go to the eBay Radio events just to hang out with sellers and it was one of the most enjoyable times in my career.

Griff: Yeah, those were fun,

Kevin: They were great. And even now when we've launched this product early on, you know, this was really early, we'd have bugs and things like that, but people would write in and they would start customer support emails where they were basically gonna tell us a problem with our software. They would start it with first thank you for building this and bringing this back. Now let me move on to the issue I'm having. And there's just something about working with customers like that, that we love. We're not looking to grow this to sell it. This is kind of a labor of love, uh, an area of passion and, you know, feeling a little guilty that a product that people relied on got canceled

Griff: Even though it wasn't your fault.

Kevin: Well yeah, but maybe if I'd made it better the first time, it would've been worth keeping around.

Griff: Kevin, Kevin, don't beat yourself up. here, lie down on this couch and we're gonna have a little conversation about this. Okay. You're good enough, you're smart enough and doggone it sellers like you.

Kevin: Thanks Griff. I appreciate that.

Griff: I'm not kidding by the way, I'm gonna, I'm immediately after we stop recording, going to sign up for Seller Ledger and I think you should at least go check it out because it sounds like the kinda thing that we all loved and used is back. So why wouldn't you go check it out seller ledger.com. Thanks again Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you so much Griff.

Griff: Kevin Reeth was the founder and CEO of the company that built Outright, which you all remember outright was sold to GoDaddy. GoDaddy ended the program and now it's back with Seller Ledger. You can check it out@sellerledger.com.

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: We've got answers and we have three questions this week, Brian, but before we get to those questions, we need to issue a correction to an answer we gave to a Canadian seller named Paul G. You may remember him?

Brian: I do.

Griff: Paul asked about availability or plans for Canadian sellers when it comes to US services like eBay International Shipping, eBay standard envelope and authentication services. Paul said he was feeling left out and of course we said our answer. Alas, Paul, there's nothing in the works right now, which was partially true. But then you heard and we heard from our good friend Luke Bradley on the eBay Canada team as well as a few sellers. By the way, that authentication services for sneakers actually has been available in Canada since 2021. So shame on us.

Brian: Shame on us, but I have to give us a little credit. Right? We didn't at least bury this at the very, very end of the show.

Griff: Why would I do that?

Kevin: Exactly. Yeah, well like, you know, sometimes you see newspaper corrections and it's like on page 32 and it was a front page card.

Griff: No, not us. We, you know, we love to self flagellate ourselves in public, so that's what we're doing.

Brian: But we also want to make sure our sellers have the right information.

Griff: Last month, by the way, trading cards were also included in the authentication services for Canada. And along with that, and there's no way we would know this without reading the Canadian eBay Announcement Board Canada Post launched a service recently called Express Light and it's intended for collectibles. Now it's not the exact same thing as the eBay Standard Envelope, but it is a less expensive tracked way to ship items that are flat or like trading cards or stamps and other things. So the news for Canadian sellers, although not as good as it has been for eBay US sellers for example, there nothing in the works for an International Shipping Program that mirrors what we're doing here in the us. Although that's not to say it can't happen someday, but the news overall is not as bleak as we made it out to be. So there we are. We stand corrected.

Brian: Yes. And hopefully Paul is listening and you know, has a bit of a smile on his face. Well let's hope. Well that is good news. We should post links to both those pages in the summary overview for this episode.

Griff: And so we shall

Brian: Our next question was emailed to podcast@ebay.com. By seller Mike who writes, hi guys, enjoy the podcast. I have a question about replying to a message with an offer. I have something listed for $6 and 12 cents and a user sent me a message asking if I would accept $6.

Griff: Oh brother,

Brian: Every penny accounts. I guess.

Griff: I suppose

Brian: I said yes, but when I tried to reply to the message with an offer, I got a popup telling me the amount of my offer must be at least 5% less than the buy it now price. I attached the message I got. I'm curious as to why. I'm sure there's a reason, but shouldn't I be able to sell it for whatever amount I want? I should mention that I do not have the allow offers option turned on for my listings. I dunno if that makes a difference. Thanks. And I would love one of of those fancy new Bluetooth mugs. My username is Snickers 99.

Griff: Yeah, we'll sell you one mike for 12 cents.

Brian: Plus postage

Griff: Edition Mike. Yeah, there's a minimum discount a seller can send for an offer and it is set at 5% off the current listed price for that seller's listing. When the Send Offer Feature was constructed, the decision was made to set a minimum and they settled on 5% of the current fixed price. And that 5% minimum applies across the board to all seller initiated offers. And this minimum percentage was selected as a reasonable low as discount for the entire best offer system. Discounts below 5% aren't really all that attractive as incentives to purchase. Yeah, I suppose you can sell it for whatever price you like, but if you're going to use this particular feature, you're going to run up against the 5% minimum and it's just where it is. I want to say it is what it is, but I hate that.

Brian: You can say it. It is what it is. However… If a seller really wants to offer a discount of less than 5% for listing the seller can lower the buy it now price by the less than 5% amount and alert a buyer.

Griff: Yeah, you could just lower the price to $6 and say, Hey first person who purchases it. Although I gotta admit, if I had it on my watch list and it was 6.12 and now you've reduced it to six, I'm not sure I'd come running to purchase it, but that's just me.

Brian: But that one buyer would've,

Griff: Well I guess they would've. Yeah. And who am I to? I shouldn't be making fun of people for offering ridiculously low discounts, but there it is. Yeah. So I'm Mike, that's how it works. I wish I could give you better news but yeah, you're gonna always run up against that 5% discount. It's just what the team had to settle on because they didn't wanna leave it at zero or 1%.

Brian: And you can imagine why there would be some sellers, I'm not saying all, but there would be a couple that would, that might abuse that.

Griff: It would not be Mike.

Brian: No it would not be Mike who would abuse it and just like, uh, do 1% offs and just irritate buyers to the point where buyers just wouldn't pay attention to the the offers that were coming.

Griff: Exactly. Well onto our next question. eBay seller Daniel sent this in and he wrote, I sell a lot of media items, CDs and DVDs and use the eBay app to look up sold comps using the barcode scanner. It looks like during an update that the camera now defaults to image search instead of barcode scanner. And now I have to switch it to barcode every time I wanna look at an item every time I wanna look an item up. I have found that image search shows some similar items but also shows a lot of items that are unrelated to what I'm looking for. Is there a way to make the barcode scanner a default setting so that I don't have to keep switching to the barcode scanner every time I want to look something up? Thank you. Also, if you have any of those new fancy mugs, I would love to have them. Daniel again, Daniel, they're 12 cents. Just send us a check. No, I'm kidding. Of course we will send you one. Brian, I was confused by this because I've used that feature in the past and I don't remember this, but I do know that if you're in the eBay app, you're in the search bar on the top and there's that little camera icon. When you click it, you get two options. One is to, it's a search by image or search by barcode. So I'm not sure what Daniel is seeing, but when I use this in my iPhone and I click the camera icon in the search bar, the option shown is always the last one I used. If my previous search was for barcodes as opposed to images, then the next time I run a search and click the camera icon, the option is still set to barcode And vice versa. If I go and do an image search and then go away and I come back and click on the camera again, it's gonna default to image. There is no actual setting to making one or the other. Always the one that shows up. It's just what you use the last time.

Brian: And you know what's interesting, I don't use the barcode one very much cuz I, I'm not normally selling media, so mine's always I think on the camera. So now I'm gonna, you know, I want to go test it.

Griff: You have an iPhone, right?

Brian: Yes.

Griff: I'm wondering if Daniel has an Android and maybe the app works differently.

Brian: Could but either way. Like if you click on the whatever image it is. Although I could see I see his point though. Like if, if he clicks on it and he has to always switch to what he wants to be, it's an extra click. We don't like extra clicks. Well and Daniel, if you're seeing something different than this, you might wanna post it to our technical issues board in community. Go to community.ebay.com, click the link for buying and selling and then select the option for report technical issues.

Griff: I need to make something clear here because we do get an email occasionally about technical issues. So we're happy to, and we love and we want your questions on general selling questions or how features work. But the eBay for Business podcast is not a really efficient channel for reporting possible technical issues because we don't get to the email necessarily in a timely fashion and we generally have to go through the same channels you'd have to go to if you just reported it yourself. When it comes to something like a potential glitch in an application, sometimes we can tell you that it's not a glitch, it's actually a design feature which we do with red faces occasionally. But if there's a potential issue that's technical, then the best way to address it's actually to go and report it on that technical issue board.

Brian: And one other thing about that technical issue board, to the very top of that board, there's a pinned post and if you open that pinned post, we list out the ones that we are aware of at that moment. You might find you actually don't need to report it, it's already been reported as a bug and that means the team's working on it. And if you scroll down that post you can see ones that have been addressed already. Good resource.

Griff: Brian. Our next and last question this week was called into our voice line at (888) 723 -4630). Let's give a listen.

Brian: Good morning eBay Yoda. I had a question about Promoted Listing not long ago. I did a multi listing, same item with multiple quantities available. A buyer purchased four of the items I got charged for the promoted listing fee on all four, which I didn't think was reasonable considering the reason they bought the other one because I did a volume discount for the other one. So technically my discount is this reason that they were sold not the promoted listing for the second, third, and fourth item. Is that something that could be taken care of. And also I noticed that the fees on that, the rates are currently high this year. Is there anything on the talks about maybe chopping down some of the processing fees for that for sellers? Cause it's really eaten into the profits. Appreciate it guys. And my name's Kevin Steel City Exchange name my eBay user ID as well. Appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoy your week.

Brian: Well Kevin, the way the Promoted Listing feature is set up when a listing is promoted and a buyer clicks on the promoted placement for that listing and the listing is multi quantity, the promoted listing fee is applied to the total amount of the purchase at checkout. Whether or not the buyer buys one or two or more. The total at checkout is the amount used to calculate the Promoted Listing fee based on the percentage you have selected for an ad rate for the campaign in which that listing is in.

Griff: Yeah, your volume pricing may have been a good incentive for them to purchase more, but the reason they clicked on your listing is because they clicked on a promoted ad placement. So that's what got them there in the first place. But that's how that works. It's always worked that way.

Brian: It also sounds like you might be using the automated ad rate feature to set your ad rate. A seller can always manually set or adjust the campaign ad rates at any time. If you believe the current ad rate for a campaign is too high, you can edit the rate for that campaign to a lower percentage.

Griff: Yeah, there's always that option. You have two ways to go here. So a lot of people use the automated campaign because they don't want to keep checking it. But the automated campaign, and we've talked about this in the past, is based on many things. But one of the factors is how many people are using that particular type of campaign. And it is kind of a supply and demand. The more people that are using it in, in indicating a certain percentage, then that percentage is gonna go up. We're not going to "chop" it down because it is set by the market. But you as a seller don't have to have an automated rate campaign set. You can go in and change it to manual and set it for whatever percentage that your budget allows so that you can better control your prices based on the profit margin that you're getting. Factors like if you're figuring in volume pricing so that you're in control of that, you can just opt out of the automated ad rate and put in your own manual percentage.

Brian: Right? Although that manual percentage will still apply to the total if someone buys four items. Versus one. It's always gonna apply. So I think it's good for all of our listeners to understand that if you're using multiple marketing levers, oftentimes they'll be additive. And so take that into consideration when you're setting up your campaigns. Well

Griff: Brian, that's all the questions for this week. We have a lot more in the queue for next week, but we still love to get your questions.

Brian: We do. So if you have a question about selling on eBay, maybe we can answer them. Call us with your question at (888) 723- 4630.

Griff: That's (888) 723-4630. And if we can answer them or we answer them incorrectly, we'll issue a correction. Call that hotline any time of the day, any day of the week. And you can leave a question or comment and if it's appropriate, we just might put it on the air.

Brian: What's that? You say? Me? You're not a call on the phone person.

Griff: I'm not.

Brian: You're a bit shy, Griff?

Griff: I am.

Brian: No worries. You always can email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: That's for those shy people or people who love communicating by email. Remember dial phones?

Brian: Oh my gosh. .

Griff: Do you ever watch those videos where they present a young person with a rotary phone and say, how do, and they don't know how to use it. They're going, how does this work?

Brian: They'll put your finger in a thing and turn it.

Griff: Exactly right. Anyway, it's time for that part of the show that so many people hang on for the entire 40 minutes of this podcast so they can hear it. Your three-point checklist.

Brian: Check the Announcement Board at ebay.com/announcements for UpToDate Seller News every day.

Griff: Lots of sellers are using Promoted Listings to boost their sales and that's great, but as always, we urge all sellers to understand a product or service fully in order to utilize it effectively. Read up on how all three promoted listing services work at the eBay Seller Center. Go to eBay Seller Center, that's ebay.com/sellercenter, then find the Promoted Listings overview page there under the Growth Tab.

Brian: Need to review anything in this episode. It's easy. Check the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to find the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: And on our next episode, we're going to be talking about the importance of customer feedback in keeping your business healthy. And we're gonna talk with an eBay seller who has a lot to say about this particular topic. His name is Sean Mohey.

Brian: We'd like to again thank our guest this week. Kevin Reeth, CEO of Seller Ledger.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed in part by Libsyn and podCast411.

[bluewate-61]

Thank you all very much . This is a must for all sellers to keep accurate records and to not be overwhelmed when tax time rolls around. As neat and precise as one may think they are with record keeping, I believe it is always wise to let the professionals handle the fine details. Have a wonderful summer. 

[bellablakeclothing-vintagebooksuniqueitems]

Brian, Griff and Kevin:  Thanks for the information regarding sellerledger.com .  Is there a customer service number to call? I went to the website and did not see any.  Questions:  Does this program upload all the sales, refunds, and inventory from eBay? I currently use an Excel spreadsheet system that I started January 01, 2021, that lists inventory, sales, cost, fees and profit for each item.  Thanks! Shirleen

[stuff-for-sell2]

I'm a Seller Ledger customer and I love this application! It has been a lifesaver. I tried other solutions after GoDaddy but they were not for me. There was nothing wrong with the products but they were not a good fit for me. Seller Ledger is a perfect fit, it  does exactly what I need it to do. I don't feel overwhelmed or lost when I'm using it. Kevin has been great in communicating and very receptive to feedback to include incorporation.   

[thebookkiosk]

Excited to learn more about Seller Ledger, I used Outright years ago. This is so needed. 

great interview, thanks 

[jessilee001]

I learned about Seller Ledger from this blog and I've got to say. This is 100% exactly what I've been looking for for over a year now. Perfect. I just wished the free trial. Would date back a little further. But if paying is WHat I've got to do then I'm in because my search will be over. Thanks everyone