Episode 102 || Holiday Kickoff

[podcast_team]

This week, eBay VP of Seller Experience and Operations Marni Levine is our guest host for a segment with Customer Marketing Strategist, Jen Deal to kick off August’s theme, Holidays! Griff speaks with Program Manager Lester Dorman about the eBay Multi User Account Access (aka MUAA) feature and eBay seller Adrien Lavoie is this week’s seller story guest. Griff and Brian answer a pressing seller question around mitigating buyer concerns regarding carrier late deliveries.

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Episode 101 Links
MUAA
Adrien Lavoie eBay Store
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Hosts:
Griff, Brian Burke

Guests:
Marni Levine (eBay VP of Seller Experience and Operations), Jen Deal (eBay Staff), Lester Dorman (eBay Staff), Adrien Lavoie (eBay Seller)

Transcript:

This week on the eBay For Business Podcast:

"It's a mechanism that allows sellers to grant access to other users, to their Seller Hub, their employees if you will. Based on a set of permissions, you can control as a seller exactly what you want other users to have access to such as your listings, your orders, your Terapeak research insights. And so on."

"We tried with whatever we liked outdoor stuff, camping gear, and that friend of mine liked a lot skateboarding. So he contacted a few distributors. One of them saw our business opportunity and we met him in the parking lot and it went from there. "

"This back to school season there's a split between how many kids have to be at home. What kind of product are they going to need or support that they're going to need? So back to school is still there and there's still needs for material. And then there are still colleges and people that are going back to campus as well. I'll be it maybe in a different way. So it's very much on point still to be one of the big seasonal trends for the season back to school is definitely important."

I'm Brian Burke.

And I'm Griff, and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your weekly source for the information and inspiration you need to start and run and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is 102.

Only 98 more episodes to number 200.

Okay, Brian, stop that. No more milestones for a while, please.

Okay. Now I'm afraid to ask, how was your week Griff? Ah, great. Brian. It was just great. So different from the week before and the week before that. And before that, and before that, and before that, and before that.

Griff?

What?

Now, Why would you say that?

No, I'm serious. My week was fine. There's nothing to disturb the serene and unchanging cycle of my days and my weeks and my months. And before that, and before that, thanks pandemic.

It does all blend together. Doesn't it?

Yeah. How was your week?

It was good. Very similar to the week before. I'm glad I have a view of the park outside the window.

I never thought that time would be something that would be so unchanging, but I guess we're getting used to it, I suppose.

Yeah. Although I know for me personally, I'm going to be really happy when I'm able to go back and see sellers and back and see eBay employees. Um, I was on a meetup on Tuesday night for the San Jose meetup. Seeing everyone on Zoom is one thing, but it's being in person with, uh, with other people.

I'm looking forward to that day, but I want to do it safely. You gotta be realistic. It's probably not going to be this year.

Nope.

And although there was talk about the campus opening sometime in the fall, I don't think it's going to happen. And even if it does, I'm not going in until the danger is down to zero.

Yeah. That's the appropriate thing to do.

In the meantime though, I am listing and I'm selling and I'm puttering in the garden and I'm doing the podcast. So even though I might've sound slightly insane, a few moments ago, I'm actually in pretty good shape. It was just...

I know you are. So tell me, tell me what's cooking for this week's episode.

Well, first up, we're going to talk about MUAA otherwise known as the Multi User Access Account or MUAA with eBay Program Manager, Lester Dorman, and then we have another seller story to share. And finally, it's time to think about holidays and to start us out with our August theme about preparing for holidays, we'll talk with customer marketing, strategist, Jen Deal, and senior VP of Seller Experience and Operations. Our very own dear friend, Marni Levine. And Marni is going to share some top line points for all sellers to keep in mind as we now start ramping up for what will be the most unusual holiday selling season that any of us can remember, I'm sure.

I'm sure, but that sounds like a great show coming up and I'll be back at the end of the episode to help with seller questions, a seller question.

And it is a good one too. It's really good. It's about how to mitigate buyer concerns over late deliveries, something that's on a lot of sellers minds this right now.

Well, that sounds like a great plan.

It does. So why waste any more time? Let's execute it.

Continuing this month's series on seller success. One of the topics that we teased we would talk about is multi-user account access. Otherwise known internally by one of my favorite acronyms MUAA. Because you get to say it like this...(Muuuaaah). Many sellers probably have heard of it. Some sellers I know are actually using it. I thought it would be a great time for us to actually talk about it with somebody who knows it inside and out. So we can talk about actual use cases. Joining us now to talk about MUAA is program manager for MUAA itself, Lester Dorman, Lester welcome.

Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.

What is Multi User Account Access or MUAA?

It's a mechanism that allows sellers to grant access to other users, to their Seller Hub, their employees if you will. It's based on a set of permissions, you can control as a seller exactly what you want other users to have access to such as your listings, your orders, your Terapeak research insights and so on.

And why was it important for us to build this tool?

Well, what we've found from our sellers was that they were sharing their logins with other people, to have them do work on their accountants, which is neither recommended nor secure. A lot of sellers asked us if we could implement something that would allow them to grant access to limited parts of their account without exposing everything, letting them inside the moat of the castle. So to speak.

Is it available to every seller? Is it only limited to some sellers?

It is available to all sellers, as long as you have Seller Hub opted into. So any seller can take advantage of it. Yep.

And I think most of our sellers are using Seller Hub now. Let's go through a little bit of the features. What are the things that a seller can share with either co workers or employees or family members when it comes to divvying up tasks?

Right. Basically how a seller would use this in your, my eBay account settings, right? So there's a new permissions link. As a seller. You can invite other users and grant them specific permissions to access your account. Today what's available are listings. So the listings tab, the orders tab, um, most of the functionality and the Terapeak research insights tab. We have two different permissions for listings. One is a very kind of low level one where you can just give someone the permission to create content for your listings and save them as a draft. And then there's a second permission that allows people to publish those listings and revise active listings. So two separate permissions there. If you might have a new employee, you're not sure how good they are, let them work on some content for you, and then you can review it and publish it yourself, or have someone else do it.

Likewise with orders, we have a view order permission, which allows someone to just take a look at all of the incoming orders in different States. The advantage of that one is you can have somebody pick and pack your inventory. So if somebody orders something, buys something from you, then you can have an employee that just gets that stuff ready for shipping, takes it off the shelf, puts it in a box. And for Terapeak, for those subscribers that have Terapeak accounts, you can then delegate access to that research, marketing research insights to your employees also. So those are the ones that are available today and we're working on more.

And I'm going to get to that in a moment. But first I know that sellers who are watching this are probably wondering, how do I get to this? What is the navigation that a seller should follow so that they can get to their MUAA and set those permissions?

Yeah, there are a couple of ways to get to it. The easiest way is under your name. If you click on the hi, whatever your name is, there's an account settings link. And that takes you right to the landing page. There are a couple of other ways to get to it. You can go to your, my eBay and then go to your account tab. And then in your account preferences, there's the permissions link there.

That's the old way I still do. I still do it the old way and either way, you'll get to a place where there is an indication that it's MUAA.

Yeah. So there's a new landing page. And if you're a seller, that landing page allows you to add users. So there's an add user button and then the list of permissions with check boxes and you can select the permissions and send them an email. The onboarding process is an email invitation. And when you send the email to somebody in their email invite, there's an accept invite button. When they click on that, if they already have an eBay account associated with that email address, where they receive the email, it'll take them to log into that account. And if they don't have an account with that email address, it takes them to the registration flow. Now I will note though, we are highly recommending that people create new accounts if they're going to act as an employee for somebody else. It just makes the experience a little less confusing. So they're not hopping back and forth between their own personal account and a seller's account. They can do either, but we recommend they keep, they keep their personal account separate.

Okay. So I didn't know this when you're adding someone, you add them by email address, not by account name.

A lot of our sellers asked for this cause they like to control the email addresses of their employees so that they can create an employee email for them. And then tie that to a work account, right?

If you haven't an account with that email address and your boss, or the guy you work for, or your family member, who's diving up this task and handing one to you, puts in that email address, which may be a company email address, they've created, the person who receives it, who goes to accept it will also be required to then register a new account for that email address. Is that made clear to that person when they receive the invite?

Yeah. It's in the explanation when they get it. Typically this person knows it's coming, right? It's not like you're going to invite some complete stranger to access your, you know, your Seller Hub.

Just earlier. You mentioned that we talked about what it does right now, but that that's always a changing thing that there's, there's additions to the different types of tasks that a seller can designate to an employee. What are some of the things that are in the pipeline you can talk about?

Yeah, so it is permissions based which means that a seller has kind of the fine grained access to whatever permission they want to give to one of their employees. They can mix and match permissions from different types of roles. Um, as I mentioned, we have the listings tab. We have the orders tab and we have the Terapeak tab. In orders today, all we have are view orders and download order report, but coming soon, and I can't give you an exact date, but pretty soon we'll be some shipping permissions. So we're going to enable creating and modifying shipping, tracking information. So that's going to be added fairly soon. And also what a lot of people looking for is to be able to create and print shipping labels. So we're hoping to bring those in this year.

Before holiday, hopefully?

Maybe it might be close to holiday. It will be Q4.

There's a lot of running a business that happens to be post-transaction. What about those particular areas?

Yeah. We're working on those. Those are a little more challenging because we're actually replatforming a lot of that functionality off of our old legacy. If people know the V3 environment and there's a big effort going on right now to replatform and then bring a lot of that functionality up to the modern stack. We're hoping to begin work on that very soon as well. And, um, early 2021 is what we're targeting for introducing returns, cancellations, refunds, member to member messaging. And then we can start looking at making more fine grain divisions of permissions based on what sellers are looking to do and creating roles that might have preset permissions in them, things like that. Essentially once we get post-transaction stuff done and maybe add some payments permissions as well with the new Managed Payments Platform, that'll cover just about most of Seller Hub. You know, it really has something that sellers have looked for for a long time. And I think some had given up on, but we're finally, you know, seeing light at the end of the tunnel to making this a really valuable addition for them.

I think back about 10, 15 years ago, when I first started fielding requests from sellers saying, Hey, you know what would be great? If I didn't have to give my user ID to my employees so I had more control. It took a little while to get there, but Hey, better, late than never. And I'm sure most sellers now are really happy that we finally did it.

Yeah. It's been hard to implement to be perfectly honest. This is something where essentially an eBay identity is an eBay account, right? And it's a one to one relationship. So we had to create a mechanism to link accounts together rather than have like a hierarchical structure. And that was the challenging part to it, but it ends up being a more secure part because now we can put things like 2FA in place so we can make employee accounts more secure. That's actually coming pretty soon too where employees will need to use 2FA.

We should say that's two factor authentication.

Two factor authentication when they log into somebody else's account, they'll need to have that turned on to get it.

You might need a special code, has been sent to your phone or your email address. You'll need to enter that in order to log in.

Correct. Yep.

Well, Lester, thank you so much. This is great news for the holiday and I'm so happy to hear that new things will be coming if maybe not this year, next year. Lots of sellers will be looking forward to that too. So thanks for joining us and talking to us.

Sure. And thanks for having me, It has been a pleasure.

We've been speaking with Lester Dorman. Lester is the Program Manager for Multi User Account Access, otherwise known as MUAA and we'll be joining him in the future to find out more enhancements as they are launched.

Continuing with our mini series, 25 Seller Stories for 25 Years of eBay, we return to our good friend up North Canada to meet our next seller, whose story was selected. Adrien Lavoie sells on eBay under the user ID boardshopW that's B O A R D S H O P W. So boardshopW all one word.

Welcome Adrien. What do you sell on eBay?

Mostly shoes. So branded branded shoes, I'm thinking about either Adidas, Puma, ASICS and the other well-known footwear brands. To start from the very beginning, I started to work for a company, a bicycle shop that used to sell on eBay. That was back in 2005. And while I was, I think, 15 years old, and I was kind of at the right place at the right time because the owner had the guts to start selling online and he started to sell on eBay. As I wasn't as good as a mechanic, as an internet geek, He assigned me to the online sales. So for the listings, taking pictures and customer service. So that was my first experience with eBay back at that time. In the meantime, after a few years, I basically knew how everything worked in terms of transactions and even international transactions, because we sell a lot to the United States from Canada. And I started selling a few things here and there as a sideline.

I see. What year would this be?

Well, probably 2006, 2007. A year or two after working there, I started to use eBay a little bit more, but the shop itself, my shop started officially in 2011.

So you started out working for someone else. Did you find that was really helpful when you transitioned to your own store on eBay?

Oh, yes, yes. As I started just personally for myself, I kind of tried here and there and selling, I did a lot of bicycles, so I, I used to sell bicycle parts or even electronics. So iPods or iPod Touch in my younger days, that was a lot of trial and error. But when I started with eBay for my store, eBay is really easy to use and user friendly. So no, it was really, uh, easy to go and very smooth.

Starting off with, it sounds like a little bit of everything, including electronics. How did you end up selling shoes on eBay?

Well, I didn't want to sell bicycle parts or try to bypass my, my old boss. I was with a partner at that time at the very beginning in 2011. And we were trying to find something that was interesting to sell something that we liked as well. And it was very difficult to find some distributors even Googling online. It was, it was very difficult. So we tried with whatever we liked, outdoor stuff, camping gear, and that friend of mine liked a lot skateboarding. So he'd contacted a few distributors and, uh, one of them positively saw our business opportunity and we met him in a parking lot and it went from there.

So that was when you ended up selling skateboards at that point.

Yes, exactly. And this is why the name is boardshop. We started with skateboards and that company was selling shoes as well. So we started with the skateboards, but we purchased a few pair of shoes for ourselves and for, for a couple of friends and family, and we saw that the shoes sold well, they, you know, shoes are easy to ship. They can have a good value. They're quite light. So it's easy to carry even in the warehouse or receive large quantities. So I think it's the perfect item to sell online.

It is a good item. I actually enjoy selling shoes myself, but it is not easy finding sources of shoes to make a viable business. Wasn't that a challenge in the beginning?

Yeah. Well, so we started in 2011 and we were having some difficulty. I mean, we had maybe two distributors, but of course we needed more to find more inventory. And a lot of the distributors didn't want to do business with us since we didn't have a storefront. They didn't want to sell to anybody who was doing business from their basements, which is understandable. When I finished my bachelor's degree at that point, I was alone in the business. I had gathered enough sales to rent a commercial location, a main street. So I used that as a warehouse. And I tried at the same time to have my bricks and mortar store work efficiently, but after a few years, the store itself didn't work out that well. So I was just using the place as a warehouse.

Sure. Of course. But your distributors don't necessarily know that. So all they know is you have a location on Main Street.

Exactly. But I'm not there anymore. But at a certain point, we made our case. We purchased a lot of shoes. We were a great customer. We paid them immediately. So after a while their terms kind of went down and they kind of tossed it and Hey, the online thing is there to stay. So let's continue doing business.

Does your distributor provide you with the brand names that buyers search for and demand? I know it's not that hard to find sort of generic shoes, but they're generic and isn't it a brand name play here?

Yes. I'm a small business. I'm not a marketing whiz. I'm not to use to SEO. So I want the easy thing to do and selling on eBay is first of all, easy. And then afterwards getting the branded products is quite easy. People do their own research. I didn't have to do much, the difficult part was to find the distributors and the right product. So that was the difficult part, of course,

In the supply chain when it comes to the brand name, shoe manufacturers. And of course we're talking about names like Nike, New Balance, ASICS all the, you know, the big names. Have you ever been able to purchase directly from them or is it always just through a distributor

From one company to another differs. Some companies like Adidas for instance, they're huge. They're a huge company. So technically we purchase directly from us. Their representatives are in house. So they work for Adidas, smaller brands or other brands that don't have as much power as Adidas, maybe have smaller distributors, or they have representatives that have different brands. So maybe five or six footwear brands. So it's a little bit difficult to find online. And two, you kind of have to make some calls and after a little while it gets a little bit more easy. Cause everybody knows everybody in the footwear branded products. Now we kind of made our names and we can ease a little bit through more easily.

The sellers don't actually consider that aspect of nailing down a supply chain that's consistent. And a big part of that is being known, networking and establishing personal connections with people from these various companies and distributors. It's not always easy, but it's not impossible.

Exactly. And I have to go the traditional way as well. And to go to footwear shows, I think I went to Toronto to find some new brands and I did the typical thing. It was the first time I did it, but I had to go to little tents where people than reps were and make contact and talk about my business and do my little sales pitch. And it finally paid off. I mean, it was quite interesting. Yeah, no, it's a really cool thing to do, but it's the difficult part for me.

Easy. I think even if you're made for that activity and there are people out there who are just, that's what they crave is being salespeople, selling their business. If you don't have it, It's still a skill you really need to acquire if you're going to be able to compete, especially in a category like athletic shoes.

Yes, exactly. And actually a friend of mine, who's already doing business online for something completely else then shoes, but he wanted to open a different portion of his business. And I think he wanted to go into not beauty products, but like, shampoos and stuff like that. And he was asking me like, what do you do to contact these people? I can't find the distributor online. Who's importing those products in Canada? And I told him, man, you need to make some calls. You just have to ask everybody, ask the right questions. And you'll be able to find somebody or a company that can sell the product to you, but you need to make calls.

Cause especially right now, I know that there's nothing quite like meeting face to face with people at something like a trade show, but trade shows are kind of on hold right now with the pandemic. So this is not an easy task to pull off, especially today where you're going to have to make the calls so you can establish those personal connections.

Well, right now, more than ever sales reps are basically waiting for people's calls. I'm calling some people right now that maybe said no in the past or for selling me some shoes. And I'm like, Hey, I'm calling back just to do a little checkup. Do you want to sell me some shoes now that it's going, not that well in the physical stores and people and companies are opening their minds a little bit in that term. So I think it's a great opportunity.

You started with shoes. Did you have a personal affection or passion for shoes yourself? And if so, have you established your own personal collection?

That's a great question. I wasn't a sneakerhead at that time, but I did a lot of mountain biking in the past and downhill mountain biking. And in those years, people were basically wearing skateboard shoes to use for their big flat pedals. I was kind of indirectly looking a lot and wearing a lot of skateboard shoes. I kind of had a, not a passion, but I was very interested in those sports styles shoes, but I didn't really have my collection. At one point of course, I was trying to invest all my profits back into the business. And at one point you're like, Oh, I just received hundreds or thousands of shoes. Maybe I can pick one for myself. And I started doing that a little bit. At one point I was like, I have too many shoes. I can't, I can't really do that all the time. So now I probably pick like one pair per year. And that's about it.

Like to keep active as a seller because it keeps me in the know of what sellers go through. I have developed an interest in shoes over the last several years.

What have you sold?

Yes, I sell. But what I've done is I'm not a large volume seller. I keep my eye out for close outs or liquidations online, and then I'll purchase these shoes and I'll hold them for a year or two. I actually put them in, in my garage and just store them away for a year or two. And I find that even though the trends change, once they're no longer made, they do go up in value, even just the, you know, pedestrian shoes, because people want to buy a second pair that they liked, but they're no longer available. I've always thought if you ramped this up and you had the capital, it may actually be a viable business model buying shoes and holding on to them for two years. But I see also there's probably some inherent risks, like getting a trend wrong and saying, yeah, there's a reason why those were closed out because no one wanted them.

But it's funny that you say that because it's close to what I'm doing. I specialize in closeout deals and end of line products. So especially in Canada, we're maybe a little bit late in terms of getting the shoes there. And sometimes, well, first of all, we're a lot less sellers in Canada than in the United States. The market is a lot less saturated. That's good for me. But yeah, I purchase closeouts and align products and sometimes what I see is there's nobody selling that shoe anymore. Cause it's probably all sold out. So basically just like you, I put on the shoes online and people are messaging me like, Hey, do you have that size? I love those shoes. And I had them for two years. And you're the only sailor do you ship to whichever country. And yeah, it's a part of my success. Of course.

I always wondered if the major shoe manufacturers figure this out, they probably already know it. It's just probably not a market. They feel they need to address, but suddenly they start making it possible to recreate shoes on an endless basis, which would put you, and I kind of in a really precarious position as business models, but they haven't figured that out yet or they just don't even care, I suspect.

They probably don't even care.

Are there aspects of your business that connect to your personal life in a way that they help fulfill? I know a lot of the sellers that we've talked to have, for example, either they have a special charity or they have a special interest outside of business and they've managed to find a way to connect those two. Has that been the same for you? Have you, do you have a connection like that?

Well, I guess that when we, we ship a lot of shoes, we get a lot of returns and sometimes the return can't be sold back online or they can, but it's maybe not worth it every time to sell and relist, every single pair of shoes returned that are a little bit used. So what we do each year is we donate the shoes each year, close to Christmas, I think. And it's the little place that's in my town, my hometown. And last year we gave a bunch of winter boots and other shoes and the kids, we received some pictures afterwards of the kids getting the packages. That was great. Since our sales went up, we have more used shoes to give out. So we're going to give them out again this year to the same place. And I think that's, that's good. I mean, we could sell those back, but for the time it's just easier to give everything. And it makes a bunch of people really happy,

Right. And not to take the focus away from the altruism and the, and the generosity that you exhibit, but there's also a business angle to this, I assume in that you get a tax credit.

We get a credit. Yeah.

Because you've donated and you get to write that off. So it's not on top of that, you know, and I think it's important to bring that up only because Adrien, a lot of our sellers are so fixated and obsessed with not wanting to take a return, that it's a bad experience and it's going to ruin my business. And if you're really in business that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. You can always turn this around so that you either can write it off as a loss. Or you can say that you donated and this in the long run over the year will help your business.

Yeah, exactly. It took me a while though, to kind of accept that, that people were returning shoes either used, or it's a small percentage of people that do that, but it's just a cost of doing business. And I had to accept that and well, do I need to close my business because of few people are returning used shoes. No, it's just the cost of doing business.

I mean, it's understandable. I mean, no one wants to have to take a return regardless of how big their businesses is, we want everything to be perfect, but that's just not the nature of retail.

Exactly. I know. And it's a great question to ask yourself because people are purchasing more and more online and big companies are, I mean, I'm a small company. So I receive some shoes. I can't even imagine the quantity of used shoes that big companies are receiving. And I'm, I'm wondering what they're doing with it?

It's a good question. I suspect they do have some sort of channel where they liquidate and then people are purchasing them and reselling them as slightly used or no box. You know, if they show no wear.

Probably, but I haven't figured that one out yet. There's the next step in your journey!

Probably.

Of course it's a completely different market when you're selling something that's not new in box. If it's not collectible, a collectible shoe that, you know, a sneaker heads going to be searching out, then that's a different market and it may not be profitable in the long run.

It's a different market, but I'm sure that I could assign an employee to that at one point and it could be worth it, especially because another point of shoes is they always keep a certain basic value. Even if a shoe is purple, even if a shoe is a weird or very ugly, I mean, everybody's willing to pay $20 or $30 for just a pair of shoes that you go paint in your house or you go outside. So I think that's a good point.

Is any one place that I've discovered where beauty is definitely in the eye of the shoe head it's in shoes, because I've seen some really ugly shoes that I wouldn't go near, bring lots of money and people wear them. And I think, well, more power to you. I would never put them on. My own weaknesses, green shoes, my favorite color green. I think it's a lot of times it's the hardest to find. So I'm always on a quest for my own. I have a small collection and it's all green, all green shoes,.

Are they sports style ?

Mostly things like New Balance or Adidas or ASICS, it's funny thing with me and my feet. Nike's never felt good on my feet. So I'm not a huge Nike collector.

I hear that a lot people have their specific brands that they like. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty much a personal thing.

I think because I have 66 year old feet now they like comfort. They want to be in, you know, they love Skechers and slip right into them. So how has business been for you in these last few months during what is, I know it's an overused term, but really unprecedented, none out of us in our lifetime have ever gone through something like these last six months of a pandemic. How has business been for you?

At the very beginning, Just at the point where they started to close everything, we saw ourselves probably go down 40%. I was lucky enough to be an online seller and continue selling kind of as usual, but also they were closing down tons of stuff. And while here in Quebec, in Canada, there was a list that we were waiting and a lot of the States as well sent out those lists of business that could keep doing business. And we were waiting anxiously for those lists and we were fine. One of the stuff that everybody could keep doing is online selling. So we were fine, but still the sales went down 40%. But the good thing is we're a really small business and I try to keep it effective and efficient. So we could have survived that for months and months and even years. So that was fine. But after a while, maybe when they started to hand, hand out the checks and the money, and then we saw ourselves go up and they're even higher than what we expected for that year to be. So now we're doing great and there hasn't been much difference for us. We're only four employees plus myself. And we have a big warehouse, we have 11,000 square feet, so it's easy for us not to bump into each other or even keep our two meters.

Yeah. And I think it's a very important point. You made, which it's beyond the scope of what we usually talk about on the podcast, but it is a business concern when it comes to something like emergency pandemic stimulus checks going out, remember, as you just said, they go to people who then spend that money and put it back into the market. And that stimulus, isn't just going into their wallets and ends up having a pay over effect into many different businesses who then have enough sales to go out and buy more inventory or keep their employees online and working. And those people are able to then go purchase things. So the stimulus is not just for that one person receiving the check that stimulus goes on and on and on every time that money is put back into the market.

Yep, of course. No, I think it's a good thing. I saw it on my end, more sales goal going up, but I'm online too.

There's a lot of uncertainty right now about how long our current situation will be in play, whether or not this will lift by the end of the year. Maybe they find treatments or vaccines, or there are people discussing this could go on through next year as well. Are you making any contingency plans for your business? Should the pandemic continue beyond this year?

As I mentioned, it's not much of a big different for us. We saw some changes maybe a little bit, but it's complicated to see where this will go because more people are purchasing online, but fewer workers maybe add the distributors or even maybe if it's made in China or Vietnam or Indonesia. It depends on many countries, many factors, even just thinking about getting the boxes, from the boxes to ship the products into it can be very difficult if this business shuts down. But I must say that I was quite lucky in all of that and that hasn't changed a lot. I just crossed my fingers that it continues like that and that we can continue doing business and grow as much as we can.

If somebody were to come up to you and say, "Hey, it seems you're doing pretty well. I'm not going to compete against you with shoes, but I certainly would like to start running a business online and is eBay a good choice? And if so, what advice would you give me as a new business owner, new seller coming on to the platform for the first time?"

Well, even if you're not an eBay seller and you're not on the platform at that point, I would tell you to go on eBay, because that was my personal experience. That's where I started. It was easy for me. It was risk-free, it was just really easy. And if I had to start all over again, that's where I would go. And it applies to not only shoes, but tons of products. I would certainly tell somebody to go on eBay and it is really use your user friendly compared to other platforms that I've tried working with. So Nope, nothing is up to eBay of course.

Well, I agree with you, but I'm biased. So I like to hear it from somebody else occasionally.

And eBay isn't paying me so it is really from the heart and I really do appreciate a lot what eBay has done.

Thank you. Believe me, every two weeks, I'm amazed that I get paid for what I do because it's so much fun. And part of it is talking to people like you, Adrien. So thank you so much for, well, congratulations on being selected out of thousands of people for those 25 slots. And thank you for talking to us.

Thanks for having me.

We've been speaking with Adrien Levoie. His user ID is boardshopw that's B O R D S H O P W. You can find all you need when it comes to shoes on eBay at boardshopw.

You may be enjoying your Summer, but this is the time of year when retailers and sellers and merchants start thinking about the holiday season. Yes, I know it's 90 degrees out and it's humid, but yes, you have to start thinking about the holidays. So I'm going to turn this over now to our guests. Joining us now is Jen Deal and Marni Levine, our Senior Vice President of Seller Experience and Operations. Take it away. Thank you, Griff. I'm here to watch holiday kickoff month. I know it is August, but we're already seeing people shopping for holiday and searching for holiday items. So with me today is Jen Deal, our fabulous Seller Marketing Manager, Resident Holiday Expert, and eBay Seller and Buyer. Welcome Jen.

Thanks, Marni. It's great to be here.

Let's talk about quickly some of just the recent trends. Because when we get into talking about holiday, we're thinking of like Christmas and Thanksgiving, but we're seeing some interesting trends right now with back to school and online shopping in general.

People are definitely getting comfortable with spending online, and this is a new normal that will probably stay. And as most families have already had a taste of what it's like to have students at home for many students that are still sheltering in place around the country are going to need more of a setup at home. This back to school season there's a split between how many kids have to be at home. What kind of product are they going to need or support that they're going to need? So back to school is still there and there's still needs for material. And then there are still colleges and people that are going back to campus as well albeit maybe in a different way. So it's very much on point still to be one of the big seasonal trends for the season back to school is definitely important.

That's great. And we have tons of great products. I know many of you sell or sell in our electronics categories. I know I bought a refurbished laptop for my son who will be doing school from home. eBay certainly has plenty of inventory and will be at the forefront. If you're in that category list all of your products, people are absolutely looking for them. And after back to school comes Halloween season, who knows what that'll bring. Obviously, having a mask now is not about Halloween. It's about safety. So that'll be an interesting thing to see, but let's talk about Thanksgiving and getting ready for holiday. Tell me a little bit about what people are doing, how now all of a sudden, we're seeing a lot more engagement with holiday in August than we'd seen in the past. Tell us a little bit about how to get ready for that and how this year is different. This year, people around the country have started their holiday planning already months and months earlier than normal. Usually we start to see behaviors peak in September, when people are really starting to search for Christmas items, holiday giftables, decor, things like that. And we're already seeing that start to pick up. And a lot of that is because of shelter and place orders and this desire to have something to look forward to and also the possibility that holidays may be socially distant this year from friends and family. So they have to get creative and they have to figure out how they're going to host celebrations or, you know, maintain some of the traditions like opening presents together and things like that. And as people are trying to be hyper focused on being together, they might actually be doing that virtually, which means if you are someone that's not going to go somewhere else for the season to someone's house that usually is hosting, you might be hosting your own celebration at your house at your Thanksgiving table.

And if you were never a host before, you need to get the decorations and maybe a cook book.

Yeah, exactly. You might need, you might need a pot or maybe a new stove. So, and if you think about that, that might be multiple people in your family, right? If you're trying to get together around a virtual table or a virtual Christmas tree, you're talking about someone who is going to have to get themselves set up. Every household is going to be decorated and with the spread and having all the things they want for their holiday season. And so there's an opportunity there actually, to sell to those newbies, to lean into new things that they're going to need.

Exactly. Obviously we have tons of buyers. We have 8 million more buyers than we did just last quarter. So the buyers keep coming. So keep listing.

As we talk about holiday, we'll continue to talk about holiday through the month. We'll give you more insights into what we actually see moving and when.

The other thing I was going to mention was, you know, there's been a considerable amount of people in our country, certainly and around the world that have felt a financial impact about 50% of the world's population at some sort of financial burden placed upon them. But from what I hear actually spending doesn't look like it's gonna go South. It looks like actually spending is going to go up. I've heard parents talking about them, wanting to spoil their kids. Their kids missed out on a lot of great activities, birthday parties, proms, graduation. And so it looks like people will actually be spending quite a bit, which is great to see, especially with everything that's going on. But I think it's important for our sellers to know that and be ready and be ready at the get, like right away. Because people definitely are going to want to buy things early, to not miss out on any of the hot items. For sure.

One of the things that came out of shelter in place was this feeling around the globe of scarcity and the difficulties of getting what you needed or what you wanted in a timely manner were really elevated during shelter in place. And a lot of that has been corrected, but not all of it as we have still some restrictions in place at warehouses or within the supply chains. Whether it's through a carrier that has a lot of pressure in one channel versus another, and trying to get products to you on time and quickly or a supplier that can only run X amount of hours to get product out the door or retailers, even or manufacturers that are pulling back on how much quantity they can actually have ready for people to sell. And for consumers to buy those limitations might still apply for the next several months. And as a buyer, who's trying to prepare for holiday sooner, because if there's a bit of that anxiety, I might not be able to get what I want to spoil my children and you know make my house amazing, or my experience amazing. They're going to buy sooner. They're going to want to ensure that they have those products, as well as the seller should think about listing now. Having all of the options for being able to support that item, getting into their heads, whether that be a price point, different kinds of shipping options, thinking about what does it mean to get your product in your hands, on the site and then to a consumer, all of those things have some level of impact due to COVID-19. And I think you have to think about that as we talk about holiday.

Yeah. I mean, supply chain in general is going to be a big conversation. We'll be talking about that a lot over the next few weeks, staying obviously in close contact with the UPS and FedEx and USPS, and there's more to come there. We want to make sure our sellers have all the information we have so they can be fully prepared. I am so excited for the upcoming months. Just kind of wanted to give you sellers a little bit of an update as to what we're doing each week. So week one is all about getting prepared. We'll have information again around when to list, how to list, preparations ,trends. But let's get prepared and earlier than ever. Week two is all about what to sell. Jen mentioned people maybe entertaining for the first time. They may need some decorations or some cookware what's to sell this holiday. What's trending will be week two. Week three is buyer behaviors. A lot around what buyers are looking for, their expectations, shopping early, a lot of great insights there. And then week four is we want to help you create your own holiday marketing strategy. How do you reach your buyers? How do you get your items visible with all millions of buyers and millions of sellers? How do we make sure your items are shown and marketed properly? That information will be on the podcast. We'll have our seller check-ins, we'll do videos, obviously on the community board, eBay For Business, we'll be everywhere trying to give you all the inside scoop on holiday and what you can do to prepare. I think that's all we have for now. Oh, and of course, Jen, we will be launching our shipping playbook and holiday digest. So be on the lookout for that. That will be your Bible through holiday, for sure. For now, we're going to move on and please join us next week for week one, let's get prepared for holiday and we'll see you then. Thank you, Jen, for joining.

You're welcome.

You have questions. Well, we have answers don't we Brian?

We do.

It's time for our weekly question and this week we only have one question.

But we have more than that in the waiting in the queue, correct?

Yeah, we do. And we'll have to get to them in the next few episodes because this show is already over scheduled. So it's, I don't want it to go much longer than an hour.

So what's today's question. Well, it's a good one. It's from Caleb and he writes, "hello. I just read the blog post from seller communications from July 27th. And while it contains valuable information for me as a seller, I am curious what I can do when buyers open cases or packages take really long and the buyer gets upset. I just had a buyer demand $10 today because UPS is late. I just ignored their request and shared their tracking number with them, letting them know it is out for delivery today. Obviously, if I need to take care of a customer and make them happy with $10, then I will. But what is eBay doing to protect sellers from I'm assuming this kind of extortion from buyers due to carrier delays? I understand totally that it's really just the cost of doing business, but maybe there's a chance eBay will help. Thanks for all the great information you guys push out every week on the podcast. Caleb." Well, you're welcome Caleb, and I think we might have some answers. What do you think Brian?

I think we do. And as you can imagine, this is a really common question right now with all the carrier delays across the globe, due to the pandemic and some of the stuff that we've even seen specifically around USPS over the last week or two,

It is a common question right now and sellers want us to do more, but frankly, there really isn't much more we can do because deliveries are not consistently delayed. And so, you know, an overall message doesn't really get read by buyers and buyers tend not to read eBay messages or alerts anyway. So, you know, we're kind of in a catch 22 here.

Yeah. I mean, that's correct, but I think that delays are sporadic and not constant. I mean, I had an item arrive within, you know, three days recently, but there's a lot of seller can do to help relieve a buyer's concerns whenever there are going to be shipping delays.

Yes. In fact, there's several actions the seller can take. So let's outline a few of them Brian. First, the seller, I want to make this clear, a seller is never required to send a partial refund for late delivery. So that $10 you were right not to send it. I would not recommend doing that ever. Especially if the reason is for a carrier delay, I think what you need to do is not necessarily ignore them, but say, "Hey, your item is in transit". And give the tracking number like you did, and should the item go missing after a period of time, then we can talk about a refund.

Really good advice. And I think the second thing a seller can do and what they should do is if they've shifted and they can see check the status of the shipping, their packages and check the tracking. And if it appears to be delayed, contact the buyer and let them know before they contact you.

Yeah. I mean, that's really great. Not waiting for a buyer to get upset and email you. If I look at the tracking of everything I send out, it's not that hard. I don't have hundreds of sales every day. But if I find something that looks like it's, it should have been delivered and it's still in transit rather than wait for the buyer to contact me. I always send them a message saying, I'm watching the tracking for this. And it looks like the carrier might have a delay. I just want you to know that I'm aware of it. I want to make you aware of it, but have faith ,be patient. It should get there. It's all about the pandemic and all these carrier delays. And I've done that once or twice in the last few months and buyers say, "well, thank you. That was so nice of you to let me know."

Exactly.

I mean, they appreciate it. And then they know you're on top of it as well.

Exactly. So that's another thing you could do proactively. The third thing you can do is if you're having a lot of these and depending on where you're located in the country, that might be the case. Maybe you should place a text message in your descriptions on top alerting buyers to the possibility of carrier delays due to the current situation globally. I'm not so sure we can still use the word pandemic in a description and have it get there. I think there's, there's a block for that.

Might hit some of our filters. Yes.

So just say current global situation and that should do it.

Yeah. And, and the one guidance that I'd give there is that I don't do it so big and all like I'm all red and all caps in a way that might scare off a buyer. You can provide the message in a manner that doesn't undermine your overall description.

And what's the fourth thing they can do? I love this one.

So the fourth one, and this is something we haven't talked about is use the seller FAQ to proactively answer questions automatically. And sellers are probably asking what are seller FAQ? And these were designed about 10 years ago to help sellers respond to common buyer questions automatically.

We had a lot of sellers that were saying, ""Hey, I get more buyer questions on eBay than any other marketplace. What can you do to help? So we designed these FAQs and then typically eBay, I think we marketed them for a little bit and then kind of forgot about them.

Well, I think we just assumed every single seller who was on the platform or ever would be on the platform would just know that they're there.

Yeah. Well, I don't think that actually worked out. So a seller can create questions and answers that'll be presented to the buyer whenever they attempt to send the seller a message from either their purchased item link or from the item page. So that could be the order details or the item page. Now, if you're a buyer, you may have seen these. If you've ever attempted to ask a seller a question, there's a thing that says choose a topic. And there are some different areas they're shipping payments returns. There's another one I can't remember but and then you can, they're all grouped under there. Some of them are automatic by the way. So we'll talk about that in a minute as well. But if you're a buyer you may have seen these well that those are the seller FAQs.

Yes. And I think a you've probably leveraged them more than I have Griff.

Probably. The way they look, if you haven't, haven't seen this as a buyer, is that when you send a question, they'll say select a topic and, and they are these, I have a question about using my item or I want to send the seller a message. I didn't receive my item. I need to return my item. I received an item that wasn't as described and other. There's also one on the orders page that's only up for a while that says I would like to cancel this order.

Some of those questions are automatically filled in based on the information the seller provides during listing. For example, you know, do you accept returns? And we'll pre-fill that with the seller's return policy.

However, besides those that are automatically filled in a seller can also create custom Q and A's around the topic. For example, like my item has not arrived yet and it's late and you can put that under the topic, I didn't receive my item with a custom answer. Something like ,"due to the current pandemic" and I know you can say pandemic in these answers, they're not going to be blocked. "Some carriers are experiencing significant delays in delivery to check the delivery status of an item. Please follow the package tracking provided in the order details for the item". And then that way, if someone, if a buyer sees this, they, Oh, Oh, I didn't know. I got to check the tracking. You can head off at the pass so to speak some of those panicky buyers before they actually start corresponding with you directly.

And the nice thing is, is getting to the place where you can access and create and edit. Your seller FAQs is fairly easy. In Seller Hub in the overview page, scroll down to the section for shortcuts and click site preferences. Then on the next page, click the link on the left hand column for managed communications with buyers. Then on the next page, scroll down to the edit link for what your buyers can do. Click edit. The seller FAQ section is on the next page. Follow the instructions from there to view, edit, delete, or create custom FAQs.

Oh, and by the way that another little tip. When you're on that shortcuts page on the Seller Hub, you can actually add your own shortcuts. So if you collect the URL for that seller FAQ page, you can go back to copy it, go back to the Seller Hub and in the shortcuts section, there's a little gear on the right hand corner. If you click that, you can add your own shortcuts. You can give it a name and then put the URL in. So that's pretty cool. So that's what you can do as a seller to assuage buyer concerns about carrier delivery. I think it pays to be proactive. You want to maybe check the status and if you see something late, let the buyer know, put a message in your description. If you're getting a lot of these and if you're not using them, go check out the seller FAQs. They can make all the difference.

I'll be interested to see if we get any questions from our listeners about the seller FAQs. You know, and hopefully that answers Caleb's question. And if you have a question you would like us to answer on the eBay For Business Podcast, you can call us on 888-723-4630.

You heard that right. 888-723-4630. Call that hotline anytime of the day or any day of the week, leave a question or comment. And we just might put it on the air.

And if you're not a call on the phone person, you can always email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Well, Brian, that's all for this week. I want to thank our listeners for listening and don't forget your daily podcast to do list.

Check the announcement board for up to date Seller News.

Create some custom seller FAQs, do it now, today.

That's a really good one this week. And then check out the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to see the links we referenced during the episode.

Now on our next episode, we'll introduce our August theme preparing for the holidays, and we'll also meet our next seller from the 25 Sellers Story Miniseries.

Again, we'd like to thank our guests this week. Program Manager for Multi User Account Access, also known as MUAA, Lester Dorman. Customer Marketing Strategists, Jen Deal, and Senior VP of Seller Experience and Operations, Marnie Levine and eBay Seller. Adrien Lavoie.

The eBay For Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.