Episode 28 || Driving Efficiencies with Erik Simon, Jason Harra, Alyssa Cutright and Shefali Singla

[doug@ebay]

Our theme this week is Driving Efficiencies. In our Main Story we explore how third party listing tools can help with your business operations with Erik Simon, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Solid Commerce and Jason Harra, CEO and Founder of SellerActive. On Inside eBay, Alyssa Cutright, VP Global Payments outlines how Managed Payments will help sellers save time and money, and eBay’s Shefali Singla tells us how we can use Promoted Listings more efficiently. We also have The Buzz with Doug Smith. To have your questions answered on Selling on eBay, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at sellingonebay@ebay.com.

Selling On eBay - Episode 28 – Driving Efficiencies with Erik Simon, Jason Harra, Alyssa Cutright, Shefali Singla, and The Buzz

Our theme this week is Driving Efficiencies. In our Main Story we explore how third party listing tools can help with your business operations with Erik Simon, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Solid Commerce and Jason Harra, CEO and Founder of SellerActive. On Inside eBay, Alyssa Cutright, VP Global Payments outlines how Managed Payments will help sellers save time and money, and eBay’s Shefali Singla tells us how we can use Promoted Listings more efficiently. We also have The Buzz with Doug Smith. To have your questions answered on Selling on eBay, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at sellingonebay@ebay.com.

Links

ebay.com/sellingonebay
ebay.com/meetups
ebay.com/community
ebay.com/sellercenter
Third party listing tools 
applications.ebay.com
Solid Commerce free trial
SellerActive 

Hosts

Griff, Audrey Tracy, Doug Smith

Guests

Erik Simon (Solid Commerce), Jason Harra (SellerActive), Alyssa Cutright (eBay Staff), Shefali Singla (eBay Staff)

Transcript

I'm Audrey Tracy

And I'm Griff and this is Selling On eBay. Your weekly source for the information and inspiration you need to start run and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is Episode 28 for those keeping track and as we do every week, this episode has a theme, Right, Audrey?

Right. The theme for this week is driving efficiencies.

Because inefficiencies equal lower profits and what self-respecting seller wants that?

None. Exactly. Okay. On Inside eBay we talked to Alyssa Cutright. She's from the Payments Team and she'll outline how the Payments Program will help make payments more efficient for eBay sellers.

Okay. All right, great. I love it. And The Main Story this week we'll explore how third party listing tools can help drive efficiencies in your business on eBay.

All that plus The Buzz. What an efficient episode we have for you this week.

Yes, indeed. So as Audrey says, coming up first The Buzz with Doug Smith.

Joining us now with The Buzz is Doug Smith dialing in remote from Temecula.

Hey Audrey. It's been rainy here in southern California. I've even had to wear a hoodie.

By the way, I'm back!

Thank God.

Audrey it's been, um, uh, well ...

What was that Griff?

Nothing. Audrey, welcome back. How was the spa?

That was last time. This time I took a comedy podcast script writing class.

That's very specific Audrey. What did you learn?

You'll see when I write you out of the script. eBay.

Oooh.

But um. all right you two. wait and wait? Is Allen back by the way?

No, he's, he's out for a bit. That's why you have me for a couple of more weeks consolidating my power Griff.

He'll be begging to come back in a couple of weeks. Or we'll be begging him either way.

So what do you have for us this week Napoleon?

Well, let's start with some items from the community and then a couple of newsworthy items that may fit.

Okay. Pick up the cues. Let's get going.

All right. First of all, this week we saw some confusion in regards to sellers who have had a listing removed or account restrictions or suspensions. Consistent feedback was provided that communication from eBay regarding these removals restrictions or suspensions is not clear and that the resources for sellers to educate themselves is frequently insufficient.

Sounds like we've got an opportunity here to improve our communications with sellers.

Yes, and we pass along feedback to the appropriate teams to improve the resources available to sellers, particularly for specific items and categories.

I saw there was some volume around Turbo Lister as well. What's up with that Doug?

Yes, retirement of Turbo Lister in our European seller communities drove discussion about the future of Turbo Lister, Seller Hub and the next steps sellers should take. Members want to know how much advanced notice eBay will provide before the full retirement of Turbo Lister on the U.S. Site.

Well there it is.

Well there we go. Sellers are seeking third party tools to Turbo Lister and frustrated that it's too useful to go away.

Well we've passed this feedback on along with the feedback that members are willing to pay monthly for Turbo Lister and that we should communicate our current plans for the tool.

Hey Griff. What tools are available as alternatives to Turbo Lister? Do you Know?

Let me think. Sellers can find more info in our Seller Center as well as a whole list of third party listing tools. You can get there by going to Seller Center at the bottom of any eBay page and you can see the link in this episode transcript as well.

Sellers can also go to our APP center at applications.ebay.com to see verified third party apps directly inside of my eBay. That could help out.

Audrey. We saw some interesting conversations on Facebook this week as well.

That's right. Sellers continue to have concerns about the shipping rate increases and our trading tips and advice, asking eBay to try and help negotiate better rates. I know for now we'll continue to follow this issue closely and keep sellers updated.

There was a positive sentiment over seller initiated offers.

Yes, sellers are very excited about seller initiated offers. Now seller initiated offers is kind of an internal term. The external term is make offers to buyers. Yes, those that are not in the program want in and there's lots of pent up demand and discussion about how to use the feature and how to tell if an item was sold via an initiated offer.

Oh by the way, just a reminder, here's how seller initiated offers work. There are two features on Seller Hub. The first one is edit price quantity and custom labels, and the second one is make offers to watchers. Now for edit price, quantity and custom labels, we're rolling out this feature which will allow you to edit price, quantity, and custom labels for all listings right from the active listings page. We're also rolling out make offers to watchers. If you're in our test group, select offers to watchers on your active listing page and you'll see all of your eligible listings. After you make an offer, you'll see offer sent next to the listing.

Sellers that have make offers to buyers seem to be loving it. What else do you have Doug?

A couple of quick news items, Audrey, and we all know how charity is a part of eBay's DNA. We did a cool tie in with the Grammys via eBay for charity. I think we do that a lot. Fans can bid on meet and greet with musician Shawn Mendes.

There are also nearly a hundred additional auction items donated by grammy nominees and winners like Cardi B, Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, Khaled, John Legend, Harry Styles, Sam Smith, Bruno Mars... My favorite Hi Bruno. How ya doing?

She's got the hots for Bruno.

Yes, And Fleetwood Mac.

I remember them. (singing) You can go your own way. Go your own way. You can call it…

We're going to get sued. Royalty Violations.

You better stop right there.

Speaking of eBay for charity, did you know Griff and Audrey that eBay set our record breaking year on our charity platform with nearly $102 million raised for nonprofits in 2018.

With a goal of raising a billion for charity by 2020. Didn't we also announce the next Retail Revival city.

Yes! That's a program I love being involved in unless I get snowed in, which happened once.

In Temecula?

In Ohio.

Oh, that's right. I remember that.

I was so excited that it was snowing until the morning I had to leave.

Yikes.

Greensboro, North Carolina becomes the fifth city to join the Retail Revival Program, which partners with local businesses.

As a reminder, Retail Revival is a 12 month program for local small business owners looking to leverage eBay's global marketplace to reach new customers around the world.

Is that it yet by the way? We seem to be running a bit on in this segment.

Well, I don't want to get into trouble.

That's never stopped you before.

One more snippet fits.

Go on.

I think I should have my name taken off this segment.

Too late.

Well, I heard this week that a certain ecommerce site is launching its own shopping channel to promote products on its platform.

How novel. We've been doing that for years, but we promote sellers and selling.

And we don't compete with our sellers.

You guys, we have to be aware of the sensors.

Audrey, that's all the news that fits this week. Thanks to you and Griff for having me and hi mom.

All right. Thanks Doug. Appreciate it.

Coming up next. The Main Story.

Welcome to The Main Story. The theme of today's show is "How to run your eBay business more efficiently". One way to do that is to use what we call third party tool providers. They create tools for managing your business on eBay and other channels. Third party tools can do many things. They can manage your inventory, they can manage and edit listings, they can manage shipping and fulfillment and a lot more. They often have capabilities beyond what eBay provides and can help you grow your business by making it more efficient. And of course, that's the theme for this week, driving efficiencies.

Today we're going to learn about a few ways that you can leverage third party tool providers. We're going to chat first with Erik Simon. He's the VP of Marketing and Business Development at Solid Commerce. We're going to talk about listing and inventory and listing management. Then we'll bring in Jason Harra. He's the CEO and Founder of Seller Active and he's going to talk with us about market data, insights and repricing. Welcome, Eric.

Thanks for having us.

Well, let's start with the basics. Why might a seller want to use a third party for listing and inventory management? How can it help their business?

Well, when businesses reach a certain size, managing listings can be very challenging. This is especially true if you have hundreds and potentially even thousands of products. So using listing tools such as those offered by a company like Solid Commerce can really help you with a number of things. For example, listing tools can help you create and launch listings in bulk. So our tool, for example, enable sellers to launch hundreds, thousands, even potentially tens of thousands of listings in one full swoop. In being able to do so enables you to save a lot of time and to sell faster. And let's remember if you can list more quickly, you can sell more quickly. You know, I always like to say to people, you wouldn't walk from New York to California. You'd take a plane, it's going to get you there much more quickly.

It's not going to get you there in 90 seconds but it's certainly a lot more efficient than walking. Using listing tools is very much the same kind of thing. It's going to dramatically accelerate your ability to get those products up on eBay, to get them up on eBay in bulk and to start selling and to start selling more quickly.

So Eric can platforms like Solid Commerce make it actually easier to list products? It’s a big question with eBay sellers because data entry is just, it's the most time-consuming thing probably next to taking photos and the least they have to do the better. So how does it help?

One of the benefits of using a platform like Solid Commerce is that you can take hundreds and even thousands and potentially even tens of thousands of products and you could list them in bulk and you can do so in a way that a lot of your prices, your rules, your descriptions, et Cetera, all of that is uploaded in one full swoop. And although eBay does have things like file exchange, which are certainly great, the more skews you have, the more complexity, the more moving parts you have in your business, that's really where listing tools like Solid Commerce are going to bring efficiencies to your operation. Not only on eBay but across between eBay and your website and between eBay and your other channels.

Erik, why is inventory so tough to manage and what are some of the benefits of good inventory management?

Well, it's certainly hard to sync inventory across different platforms, whether it's between eBay and your Shopify page or eBay and your big commerce site. The ability to sync inventory, the same number of widgets across multiple channels, that in itself is a challenge. A third-party platform like Solid Commerce can really bring automation and centralization to that challenge and make things much easier.

Number Two, knowing your inventory levels. Knowing when to reorder is a very, very big issue in the world of ecommerce. You never want a situation, we have too much products on hand, but you also don't want a situation where you have too few products on hand. So one of the reasons you want proper inventory management is you need to have a big picture of how many widgets are in your garage and how many widgets are in your warehouse so you can plan and run your business. Inventory management is crucial for that sort of thing.

It can help you avoid stock outs for example.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I like to say that one of the big sins of bad inventory management is either having too much inventory or too little inventory. You never want a situation where orders come in and you literally don't have widgets to ship. That's clearly a disaster. You also don't want a situation where you have a hundred widgets in your garage or in your warehouse and only three or four orders are coming in and you have too much product on hand. So inventory management is really what you need. Not only to manage your inventory between different channels, ie between eBay and your website. But inventory management is something you need so you can simply run your business and plan your business.

So earlier you and I were chatting and you said something really interesting about expanding the footprint of your inventory without buying more inventory. Now that's intriguing. Can you explain that a little bit better?

Good inventory management should enable you to take one widget and have that one widget show up both on eBay and on your website, whether it's a Shopify website or a big commerce website.

So in that scenario, you're not actually investing in two widgets, but you can economize and have the same product show up multiple places. Now let's say we take that scenario and we expand it to a hundred skews or 500 skews or a thousand skews. Well clearly in a scenario like that, you know, let's see, you have a thousand skews. You don't want to have to buy two or three of everything, so some things are assigned to eBay and other things to your website. We'll great inventory management enables you to take a limited number of skews or a limited number of products and assign those products and multiply those products across different channels.

So I'm going to take a moment and let you tell us what Solid Commerce, which is your company does to help with good inventory management.

Well, one of the things that sell ecommerce offers that I think is a really cool widget for sellers, is the ability to create virtual kits and bundles. And let me explain what I mean by that. Let's pretend you're selling an individual baseball and you're selling an individual baseball bat. The baseball is SKU number one, the baseball bat, is SKU number two. Solid Commerce actually enables you to create virtual new products. You could create a combination baseball plus baseball bat that becomes SKU number three. Then you can create a bundle of three baseballs that SKU number four. Then you can create another one of two baseballs and two bats thats SKU number five. Now, in reality, you've never actually combined all of these different products in your warehouse. You simply have two products, one baseball, one baseball bat, but with virtual kits and bundles, a seller can literally create more listings in search results, which obviously is a driver of sales. They can create greater product diversity, also a driver of sales, and they've never actually created new products. And by the way, they never even have to physically bundle those products in the warehouse. Using virtual kits and bundles enables you to sell the baseball and the baseball bat either in Combo or individually or in any combination you want. The actual quantities on hand of your various baseballs and of your baseball bats are all synced up. So you are still selling the baseballs individually. You're still selling the bats individually. You're selling various combinations and bundles of the two and the inventory on hand, whether it's a virtual combination or an individual product singly. All of that is tracked and maintained through proper inventory management software. And again, if you have one or two products, maybe you could do this without software. If you have 50 SKU's, if you have a hundred SKU's, there's no possible way. Any person, no matter how much of a genius that person is, is going to be able to do this without the automation and the centralization and the intelligence that the software brings you.

Let's talk a little bit about a topic that a lot of sellers are interested in and that is drop shippers. How can a third party platform helps sellers work with drop shippers? And I want to remind our sellers here that drop shipping from a manufacturer or provider that you have a purchasing relationship with, that's okay but fulfilling your orders by ordering from another marketplace is not. Let's talk about drop shipping and your products.

I'm really happy you asked about drop shipping because I think this is one of the most exciting ways sellers, particularly small and midsize sellers can expand their inventory footprint without buying any more inventory. At Solid Commerce we have some sellers who are working with let's say five or 10 different drop shippers. They are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales a year and they don't have a single piece of inventory on hand. The way this works is that a platform like Solid Commerce enables a merchant to have live inventory feeds directly from a manufacturer. The pictures, the descriptions, the prices of those products flow into Solid Commerce, Solid Commerce, republishes that onto eBay using certain rules that the merchant might have created. When the product is sold, Solid Commerce grabs that order from eBay, sends that order to the manufacturer. The manufacturer ships the order directly to the customer. The manufacturer passes the shipping tracking number back to Solid Commerce. Solid Commerce grabs that tracking number from the manufacturer and we post it back to eBay. At the end of the day, this means the merchant has sold a product that they never had to buy in the first place. This means the consumer from eBay has bought a product as far as they know. They bought the product directly from the merchant. Everybody is happy and using a scenario like this, a merchant can literally offer thousands, even tens of thousands of products. They've never had to warehouse anything. They've never had to prepurchase anything. They've never had to buy anything and a platform like Solid Commerce acting, I'm going to say like an intelligent traffic cop, automates this entire process.

When we talked about sellers, there's different types of sellers. There are big sellers, there are small sellers, sellers of one of a kind items, sellers that have SKUs. What kind of seller is a product like Solid Commerce best for?

We have sellers that on the small end are literally mom and pop businesses that might be running, you know, out of their garage and we've got sellers that are much larger. The issue if you want to use a platform like Solid Commerce is not so much size, it's the following. If you're on eBay and you also want to sell on your website like a Shopify website or a big commerce website, you're then in the multichannel business. In a scenario like that, a platform that centralizes a platform like Solid Commerce becomes really crucial. So I would say if you're on two or more channels, you need a platform like Solid Commerce and if you're only on an eBay and you want to expand to your website, that's also a scenario where you're going to get multichannel and you're going to need the benefits and the centralization that come from a platform like Solid Commerce.

What if I only have so much inventory? I mean I'm not looking to expand the inventory I have.

We have some customers who only have 50 SKUs or a hundred SKUs, but here's an example of something we offer that you're not going to get potentially from an eBay. Solid Commerce actually knows the cost of your item, how much it actually cost you to pay for that item. And we have a little widget in our platform where you can define what your profit margin is. You can define it by a percentage amount. You could say, I want to make 20% on this. You can define it by a fixed dollar amount. You could say, I want to make five or $10 and you can define it as a combination of both. You can say, I want to make 20% plus $10 which is my shipping costs.

Oh I love this.

And you can add those rules into your products for eBay. This means that as you're bringing in products on eBay, your rules were already set.

Lots of ecommerce management tools out there. And how should a seller evaluate them as they shop? I mean there are different tools for different needs and I think it's, it can be confusing for sellers. So what advice would you give them in evaluating and comparing?

I think the first thing sellers need to ask themselves is what are the main challenges I'm facing? Is it challenges around sinking inventory between my eBay store and my Shopify store? Is the challenge one in which they want some automation of shipping built in? Solid Commerce offers that as well. Is the challenge one in which they want to sync their inventory levels between different channels? That's something Solid Commerce offers also. So I think that two questions I always stayed up to people when they're evaluating different platforms out there is number one, what are the inefficiencies in your business where you feel the ability to centralize and automate could make your life easier? And the second thing I say to people is when you're talking to a platform provider, ask what cool widgets they have that you might not have thought of. So for example, the ability to have your prices change synced with the cost of sale. A lot of merchants are unaware that that feature even exists. The ability to have automatic relationships, automatic data sinking with your drop shippers. That's something a lot of people don't even realize exists. One of the things Solid Commerce also does for drop and drop shipping scenarios is that we know the cost of goods for your job shipping. So because Solid Commerce enables you to add in rules about what you want your price on eBay to be, literally if you had a hundred or a thousand products that you're selling that are being fulfilled by a manufacturer, Solid commerce can again bring levels of automation to your business that you might not even know exist.

Thanks Erik. That's great advice and I want our sellers to remember that if you're looking to grow your business, good listing and inventory management can really help you scale without having to necessarily hire and as we are keeping with the theme of the show, it can help increase the efficiency of your business. Erik, where can sellers learn more about Solid Commerce?

Well, we've created a special offer for folks listening to this podcast and they can go to solidcommerce.com/ebay500. And we're actually offering $500 off our platform for any listener who comes to our site from this podcast. So just to say the website again, it's solid.commerce.com/ebay500.

Erik, thank you. This has been great.

Thanks for having me.

We've been talking with Erik Simon, VicePresident of Marketing and Business Development at Solid commerce. Coming up next we'll explore another third party providers tools for assisting with dynamic repricing of live listings. Don't go away.

Now. I'd like to welcome Jason Harra. He's the CEO and founder of Seller Active. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Now your expertise is in market data and repricing and we'd like to dive into both of those topics. Let's start with market data. That's also known as understanding the market for your items. How can sellers use market data to form their selling strategies?

Well, there's a lot of ways. I've got a couple of examples I'm prepared to talk about. I do believe that the market data, or we call it competitive offer data, is the most important data or a seller to leverage when making purchasing decisions. It's come up in my experience as the best way to gauge demand online and you can get to it per channel. You can get it real time. And I have a couple of examples that I could go through it with you guys.

Sure.

So in textbooks, which is a kind of my former life, we actually had two different flavors of market data. We had market data that would tell us what the sales demand would be during a certain week of the year or a textbook, which is a highly seasonal industry with back to school season. And we had market data for buying the books from students. In textbooks, You know, it's a, these are commodities and they are very easy to actually sell because of the forced purchase nature of them. But acquiring them is actually really hard. You have to pay more than the bookstore, you have to pay more than exchange. So we would have bots and leverage other software to gather online by buyback prices. We called them buyback prices or trading prices. And then model that against sales prices and then make determinations, you know, in real time how much you want to pay for a product given our labor costs and shipping expenses. You can take that same example in to almost any product vertical. I would say with the exception being collectibles, some of these things that are also quite rare don't move fast enough for there be a lengthy amount of data. Like i'd say rare baseball cards. Vehicles are hard to do that way. But every other product vertical that I've come across can leverage market data to make better buying decisions and selling decisions.

Jason, have you or one of your customers uncovered a surprising insight about market and demand that led them to make a pivot in their business?

Yeah, there's a couple of think of. So early on in our early days at Seller Active, we were actually working with an eBay seller who was big into the, like the storage wars craze where he would go in and pay for a unit and take whatever it is that you could find, sell it on eBay. And he acquired quite a bit of inventory, a lot of media, so a lot of books, movies, music and he'd come to us with no technology background, no software and was interested in using our repricing, which is powered by market data. And after turning on our repricing, he sold all of his inventory in about two months. He sold well into the six figures worth of his stock and actually went out of business because he didn't have any other backup supply. He had no other, you know, really solid distribution channel for that stuff. It's kind of hit or miss with storage wars. So that was a funny one. I remember thinking, oh man, you guys had a great job and now I'm out of business until I could find more products.

Oh dear.

Yeah, good problem to have I guess. But we never saw him come back after he sold his inventory. I don't think he could acquire enough product.

I hope it worked out for him eventually. Let's talk a little bit about repricing. Some of our audience may not know about repricing, so can you tell us what it is and why would an online seller want to access anything called repricing?

So repricing is, as I defined it as the act of making a pricing decision based off of the market data. Market data comes in two flavors. I would say there's direct competition market data and indirect competition market data. The difference being direct competition is offers on the same exact UPC or ISPN or GTIN. Indirect would be maybe a branded product that has no direct competition but has indirect competition via search. So say a black cell phone case, right? So repricing can come in many different flavors, but the most common flavor is on direct competition where price is going to win out. The various channels out there usually always we're looking at price as a heavy, heavy influence over search results. Price is going to win out on most channels most of the time because it's a major factor in the buying decision with the consumer. So repricing will actually keep your price at a preconfigured level, but it will also reprice it automatically if the competition comes in and tries to beat you on just price or just shipping price. It can take many different inputs customizable to your business. Your dynamic costs, the site fees listed on a channel, the listing fees on a channel, shipping costs. You can put all this into a algorithm and basically spit out a recommended price where you're still covered for profit margin, but you're not losing visibility on say, the buy box.

What kind of seller is this ideal for? And we're talking about your service and your products at Seller Active. What categories tend to use things like we pricers?

Anything that's a commodity, I'd say media is an easy answer there, right? Anything that's going to, you're gonna find the same book on any channel, the same music on any channel. So commodities are easy. Probably the easiest vertical. Apparel actually can be repriced. People searching for a, you know, blue dress, probably a bad example, but there is competition, right on blue dresses. Really anything with competition, which sounds like a cop out answer because everything has competition.

That's true.

But the things that tend to move quickly and have a lot of demand will be able to leverage repricing the best. The things that are slower movers can still leverage repricing. The only categories that we've kind of steered clear of with automation are going to be collectibles or you know, rare goods.

It's hard to categorize. I mean it's hard to, it's hard to actually do price comparison.

Yes. And not a lot of those price fluctuates depending on the, uh, the sentimental value.

Sure. Of course. You know, one of the biggest fears sellers have about repricing is this, uh, this concept of racing to the bottom. In your view does repricing just create that race to the bottom? And if so, how can sellers use a repricer without eating away at all their margins? I mean, it can get pencil thin there.

Yeah. In my experience, that's definitely the top concern. This race to the bottom concept. But in my opinion, and I'm a big data guy, the race is already on, so either you're gonna be in the race, they're gonna be sitting on the sidelines. It does depend on your strategy. You need to have a strategic advantage in your acquisition, or your logistics or something. Because if you do have direct competition and you don't have a repricer, I've not found a strategy that works because everybody else has one. It's impossible. So we do get customers who come on who manually try and change their prices, you know, every day. And they figured this out that as soon as they have direct competition, it's a different ballgame. The race to the bottom though, I think it can be real. You have to have margin to play this game. You can't, I don't think drop shipping models will last many years without some strategic advantage to find something that nobody else is selling and then drop ship it. But as soon as other folks start drop shipping the same products, you're in this race, but find a repricer that also prices up. There's a lot of tricks to this game. There's dynamic settings that allow you to, you know, be smart about how you price. It's not a fixed penny every time, and we can take different approaches there, but also when you hit the floor price or you and a competitor are racing to the bottom, so to speak, the best repricers will then bump you back up to what's called a fallback price. And what happens is the other bots chase you back up again. If they're bad bots, they'll stay really low. This competitor will sell out and get a lot less profit and then you'll fall back to being the number one position. But the good bots will actually come back up again because there's margin there. And then what happens is you kind of reset all over again. The visibility, you're still vying for that number one spot. So you still get hours or days with the visibility back and forth. Again before you race to the bottom, but it basically just resets. It's a constantly going up and down. So it's not like folks are really stuck at the bottom. There's lots of ways to make that more of a dynamic approach where you're coming back up again and then you're back in the first position and you're taking bot race back to the bottom. There's also strategies out there I've seen work really well, where you purposely race to the bottom and then you back out and let your sellers sell their product at a much lower price.

Of course. Are there any other repricing strategies sellers may want to consider, and I want to give you a chance to also talk about the solutions that Seller active we'll provide to sellers who are looking for some repricing guidance.

Absolutely. So repricing is an evolution, so there's always going to be, I think new strategies coming out. But there are four strategies that we built into the product that we find cover most use cases. Most popular strategy is what we call target rank. So you will a set a rank and 95% of our customers pick rank one. So it's basically, you know, give me the lowest price and its price plus shipping, including their fees as a floor. And we will just keep your products priced at your target rank, which like I said, I would recommend the one, depending on the vertical, you might decide to say I want to go two or three because there's folks in the space that you want to sell out, but target rank is the most popular one for eBay. There is velocity pricing, which is newer to the space. Velocity Pricing is set up to solve for a velocity of orders. So you would come to Seller Active and say, I want to sell a hundred of these widgets in the next 30 days. And it helps to be realistic. You can't sell a hundred widgets in an hour and if you did that then we would drop your prices pretty low. The algorithm will tinker basically scientifically with your prices trying to solve for an order velocity of your choosing. So we will lower prices until orders are coming in. As orders come in, we'll measure them against the schedule and if you're selling too quickly, we will raise prices. We'll test the price elasticity of the channel. It's really good for folks who maybe are overstocked and really don't, they need to blow something out but hey don't know what to set the price on. Or they have no direct competition and they have nothing to price against head to head.

So it's perfect for sellers with indirect competition or unsure of the market price and want to test a couple of different options. The other strategy is also price mirroring. So price mirroring will take the output of our repricing algorithm on one channel. Say a channel has a buy box, and it will mirror it to eBay in near real time. That's a really exciting one I would say for most sellers. Because there's more competition on some other channels for different verticals and you can leverage our repricer for those channels where the buy box is the most important by far factor in making a sale. And the price that comes out of it can be sent directly over to eBay with modifications percentage or dollar amounts up or down. And it's much, much faster than having to pull eBay. I want to thank you for coming by, Jason.

Thanks for having me.

So where can sellers learn more?

They can go to our website, selleractive.com. If you come to our site and call us chat, email and mention the podcast, I'll give you two months free of our service. It runs from $79 a month all the way up into the thousands. We don't care, all sellers of all sizes come talk to us. Mention the podcast. We'll put the Promo code in and get two months for free and hopefully reprice the heck out of your products for you.

Thanks again, Jason. We've been speaking with Jason Harra, he's from Seller Active and we've been talking about how third party tools like Seller Active can make your eBay business more efficient. Up next we'll visit Inside eBay.

I'm Audrey Tracy and welcome to the Inside eBay segment. Today we're chatting with Alyssa Cutright VP of Global Payments. Welcome Alyssa.

Thank you.

All right, this is your first time on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. We've had Vikas and Kehala on before, but we're super excited to have the lady leading one of eBay's top global initiatives come and give us the first update for 2019. So first tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your role at eBay and why you're so passionate about eBay's focus on managing payments for our marketplace.

Thanks Audrey. So I've been at eBay for just about two and a half years now. And in addition to looking after our strategy and payments, I also manage our billing and our risk areas. And I'm super excited to be here. It's really rare that you have the opportunity to drive such impact and change in our efforts around payments. And it really all comes back to our customers and their experiences and the opportunity we have to make things simpler, easier, and just better for both our buyers and sellers.

When we talk about managing payments, why is it so important that we make this change to our marketplace?

Yes. If you think about our current model, or our previous model that we've been operating in for many years, it just simply doesn't give us the flexibility and control over how transactions operate in our system. And in our future state we will have full control over the experience for both our buyers and our sellers. So to simplify things for our sellers. And then when we look at our buyers, it gives them choice to pay the way they want to pay. And that gives more buyers the option to come into our platform and pay in a way that is familiar for them. And for sellers, that can mean that they're going to see buyers they may have not seen in the past. And so all the way around, it's more simplified, it's streamlined and it's simply easier. As we look to the future, even for new ways to shop and the way marketplaces may evolve in the future, It gives us tremendous flexibility.

Since January 31 last year when we announced, what has happened so far in our multiyear journey?

So as we shared just about a year ago, this was going to be a multiyear journey for us. And in September a select group of sellers in the U.S. were invited to the initial rollout of the program and we're really pleased with the results that we are seeing. We've learned a lot from our sellers in the last few months and we're taking their feedback into account. Iterating and improving the experience as we go. So an example of this would be partial refunds. We've quickly included it in our roadmap as we've heard from you that it's important for your business. And in addition, we know that allowing your buyers to pay with PayPal is also an important feature that we need to introduce. And we are well on track to bring that out later this summer. And as we said before, it's a phased roll out over the next few years. We're moving as quickly as possible to complete this process within the parameters of our operating agreement with PayPal, which remains in place through mid 2020.

And how successful has it been?

So it's been great. We've had a lot of good feedback and the dialogue has been really wonderful with with our seller community thus far. We've intermediated over 143 million so far in payments which translates into roughly 1.2 million in savings for our sellers. And on the power of introducing a new form of payment, in just the short period of time we've had Apple Pay up on the site, we are already seeing 12% of eligible transactions on IOS devices move to Apple. So it really shows how powerful it is to provide buyers a choice in the way that they pay. So we're excited to continue to bring new options to the buy base, which ultimately translates into more sales for our sellers.

And what's ahead for 2019?

So in 2019 we're going to add more of those payment options. As we said, we know it's important to give our buyer's choice. So we've talked about PayPal and we will look at other relevant forms of payment that may be of interest to our buyer base. And then we're going to continue to expand our capabilities around our Global Shipping Program, which we know many of you participate in. We're going to improve the experience around partial refunds and continue to listen to your feedback and incorporate that into our roadmap as we move through 2019 and into 2020.

I have to say I've been really impressed with how the payments initiative has taken in so much seller feedback. It's been really great.

Yeah, it's, it's been a cornerstone of our strategy from the beginning and we wanted to do this differently. We knew this was going to be a multiyear journey and it was going to be different and we want to make sure that we keep that dialogue up and we continue to hear from you all through the journey.

And as we wrap up, any last comments for our seller community?

Yeah, so to build on that, keep the feedback coming. It is critical to us. First and foremost to our strategy is the experience for our buyers and sellers. And the seller community is really important in helping us craft the right experience for the sellers as well as for our buyers on the platform. And when you're invited to join us. It's really important to continue to get more types of sellers in different verticals and that have different business models onto the program that can provide us feedback in the way that they experience. Stay up to date on what we're up to on the Seller Center, which you can find at ebay.com/payments and then finally I would just say trust in the process. We have our best and brightest on this. This is a top priority for eBay and we're really committed to making this a really great experience for our buyers and sellers and we want to continue to hear from you all.

That's great. Thanks, Alyssa.

Thank you.

We've shared some really great resources today to easily get your inventory onto eBay. And now we want to talk with an in house expert Shefali Singla about promoting those items efficiently on the site. Shefali remind us very quickly what promoted listings are and why sellers should use it.

Hi everyone. This is Shefali and I'm really excited to be speaking about promoted listings. It is an advertising service that allows you to gain more visibility and the service promotes your listing in prominent places across eBay, amplifying the visibility of your listings to more buyers on the site, and thus improving the likelihood of sales.

We've been talking about efficiencies today. In fact, that's the theme of this week's podcast. So how do you use promoted listings more efficiently? I mean, you can just choose any listings, but is that a good strategy?

I'm going to recommend a couple of different steps. Essentially it takes three steps to start using promoted listings. So it starts with how to select the right listings and what I would recommend is using our recommended items option when selecting listings to promote. How you get there is by clicking on get promoted listings or ebay.com/getpromotedlistings and when you start creating a campaign you will see that option on the left navigation bar. And that is a suggestion that we think the set of listings that you should consider promoting first because they might benefit most from the promoted listing service based on the marketplaces trends that we have monitored, based on various different elements and factors that we have determined. Other strategies that I find many other sellers using are particularly around promoting newly listed items so that they can generate more traffic towards this.

I see that, yeah.

Or promoting their bestsellers to increase sales velocity on already popular items. Or lastly, a lot of sellers think about are my items ranking well in search? And how you think about that is are my items in the top five searches on eBay? If they're not, you might consider promoting them on eBay and boosting them up in search results so that they can become part of the buyer consideration.

So if I've got a lot of items in a category that's just really high inventory, there's lots of items and even though I'm doing everything right, it's just hard to compete in ranking with all the other thousands and thousands of listings that are similar in a search result. Promoting that item might give me the boost I need.

And then here's a couple more strategies around how to select add rate, because that is the next option you need to think about. What is my cost going to be? What does it going to take to get these listings to sell? Keep in mind that with promoted listing, you only sell the item when the buyer clicks on the ad and then purchases that same item within 30 days. If any other actions happen during that time, we will not charge you for the clicks. Typically I recommend that if you have low competition or you're not ranking well in best match, which is within the first top five results, I'd recommend you actually consider keeping a low add rate. But if you have high competition and low margins, I would suggest using the trending ad rate that we show in our various tools. And the third portion is if you have high competition and high margin consider going half a percent, 1% more than the trending rate. So you're in the group of people with the higher likelihood of showing and that gives you a bit of an edge in terms of selecting the ad rate that is most optimal for you.

When we say trend rate, that's based on eBay data. So we're not just making this up.

No, this is an average ad rate that we have seen across sellers that are promoting similar items like yours. And here's another advanced tip for maximum efficiency. So if you're on your active listings page in Seller Hub, click on more than one listing to promote and then click on sell it faster. You'll see an option to automatically stay above trending rate based on a percentage that you choose. So you could basically say, I want to always stay above my trending rate by 0.5% and it automatically keep your listing at that level of optimization at all times.

So you don't have to go in and make the changes.

You don't have to check in any time. Plus if you're worried that you might overspend, you can actually even set up a max cap so you never exceed a certain percentage. And so here's an example. You may say, I want my item to stay 0.5% above the trending rate but never exceed 10%. And you could set that and it's all automatic and you never have to touch it.

I love it. These are great efficiency tips. So are these features, these new features, the sell it faster, these available to all sellers, how's that working?

It's working great. In fact, we have just expanded promoted listing service to all sellers in good standing, whether you have a store or not, which means if you are above standard or you're a new seller and you don't have a store, you can now take advantage of promoted listings and see all of this option within your Seller Hub experience. So make sure to take advantage of it this season.

I know I'm going to, I didn't know about this so I have to rush home tonight and take a look to see which of my slow listings i'm going to promote. Shefali I want to thank you so much for stopping by. It's always a pleasure.

Thank you very much. We've been speaking with Shefali Singla and she's been telling us how we can use promoted listings to help drive efficiency both in our business and hopefully in our sales. Coming up next. It's the end of the show.

And that's a wrap for us.

Another show in the can. Your eBay selling should be just a little less inefficient now that you've listened to this episode.

And we'll be back next week with a brand new episode with stories and topics tailored to your needs as an eBay seller.

That's right Griff. You don't want to miss it, especially if you like to stay updated on what's happening in the world of eBay selling.

Oh, you know, Audrey it can be so hard staying updated these days. What with all the information and misinformation that's out there on the interwebs, we hope our show helps guide you towards the happy land of seller best practices.

Happy Land of seller best practices. Are you on drugs?

Don't worry. It's all legal. It's called Updatedal. Helps the seller stay updated no matter what the season. Take two, maybe three. Update tablets every year to stay updated.

Enough with the hints.

I don't know what you mean.

Yeah, right.

We got you down dates. We get you updates right here on Selling On eBay and just stop. Please just stop.

Now is the winter update of our discontent.

Even Shakespeare isn't safe from your wretched puns.

If you're curious about what we're talking about, well, why not ask a question?

Great pivot Griff. If you want to join the fun here on Selling On eBay, you can be a part of the show when you call us at (888) 723-4630.

That's right. Call us at (888) 723-4630. You can call that hotline anytime of the day. Any Day of the week. Leave a question or a comment and we just might put it on the air.

Are you an introvert? Does public speaking give you the willies? Would you rather eat worms than hear your own voice on the air?

Delicious.

You do have a lovely voice by the way.

Same for you. Well, just for you, we have our very own email address where you can send your question if you prefer. It's sellingonebay@ebay.com that's sellingonebay@ebay.com.

Yeah, I have some questions too. Hey seller, cooped up at home? Maybe snowed in or worse iced in. Have you been winterized for so long now that you forget what the outside world looks like? Kind of like being tied to the bed ala misery. Have you given up all hope that spring will return? Then you should be attending a local eBay seller meetup in your area. What's wrong with you? At seller meetups, sellers share tips and stories and insights, and even a little commiseration. You can see meetups that are scheduled on our special eBay community page for meetups@wwwdotebay.com/meetups. Oh and by the way Audrey, so every week if we have one, we're going to announce the latest new seller meetup that's been added to our roster at ebay.com/meetups and this week we have a brand new group in San Antonio. So San Antonio, welcome to the meetups page.

Wow. Way to go San Antonio.

If you're in the San Antonio area, look up this meetup.

You're going to want to go to it.

You're going to have great time.

Okay. And don't forget to tune into our weekly live video stream on the eBay for business Facebook page every Wednesday at 1230 Pacific time. You want to go to facebook.com/ebayforbusiness.

Oh, you look so good on that live broadcast.

Please stop.

It's time to roll the selling on eBay podcast. crew credits, Babe.

You got it! Director of Community, Brian Burke. Community Manager, Alan Aisbitt. Community Manager and Technology and News Editor Doug Smith. Marketing Strategist, Liz Austen. Editor and Chief and Cohost. That's you Griff. Script Writer and Cohost and Top Girl Audrey. That's you. That's me. Audrey Tracy.

Selling On eBay is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.

Not Bad. You think they got the hints?

I don't know. Maybe we'll have to update them next week.

Right? Update, update, update, update, update.