169 || Promoted Listings Advanced with eBay Seller Jeffry Radspinner of Venture Surplus

[podcast_team]

eBay seller Jeffry explains why he joined the Promoted Listings Advanced Beta and how it’s working for his business selling military surplus gear. And Rebecca returns to help answer seller questions about additional Ship From addresses, how to search Active Listings, and do Coupons stack on Best Offers.

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Episode (Show) Links:
A big change to federal tax reporting laws that will affect small-scale sellers
IRS Webpage on 1099-K
New eBay 3D true view offers buyers 360-degree item views
Carrier Holiday Shipping Cut Off Dates
Jeffry Radspinner’s eBay Store “Venture Surplus”

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Jeffry: Anytime I see a new feature rolled out by eBay, I like to be one of the first ones to try it because in 99% of the cases, it's a feature that's actually gonna be really, really helpful. For Promoted Listings Advanced, when I first saw it, I was a little skeptical. I looked at it and I thought, I don't know about this. This is a lot like Google Ads. And then Jacob from the eBay Ads team, he actually just gave me a quick demo and it suddenly clicked. I was like, oh, I can go in and promote just very specific items to the top. And I can optimize those specific items that could actually save money and help us get more sales.

Rebecca: I'm Rebecca.

Griff: I'm Griff and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your weekly source for the information and the inspiration to start, run and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 169, and you'll never guess who's in the studio on campus with me.

Rebecca: Who could it be?

Griff: It could be you Rebecca.

Rebecca: It is Me. It is me. And it's so exciting to be on campus here in the studio, recording with you, instead of doing it at home over the computer. It's just a totally different experience. And I'm really excited about this episode.

Griff: Yeah. And I think this will convince you to come into the campus studio once every other week to record, right?

Rebecca: Absolutely, you know, I feel really grateful to be here. It's so nice to be on campus and it's so to see your smiling face Griff.

Griff: It's nice to see yours. On our smiling faces later if you want a little inside scoop, the reason why we're all here, isn't just to record. But Brian and Rebecca and I, and I think Andrea as well, we're here to have head shots taken, our photos for the official eBay wherever our photos show up.

Rebecca: Which is always a very awkward experience.

Griff: Isn't it?

Rebecca: It is. You know, like.

Griff: Oh, I know.

Rebecca: Anyway, but you know, apparently they want me to have a picture occasionally on the website or where have you.

Griff: You're on the website a lot these days. So it's nice to have the best possible picture. Although the one they have right now is pretty damn glamorous. I mean, let's admit it.

Rebecca: Full of lies. It's like eight years old and highly photoshopped.

Griff: I'm not gonna tell you my secret I think mine is over 12 years old now. So I feel like the dear, you know, Dear Abby, for years in the newspaper, she had this like young photo and she was like 96 and falling apart.

Rebecca: Oh my gosh.

Griff: Well, I'm very, we glad you're here. And as always, we're gonna rely on you for our news. What's in the eBay news this week, Rebecca?

Rebecca: First in the news, the eBay news this week, the clock is running out to ship gifts or cards for the Holidays. So the cutoff date for retail ground service packages is December 15th. And if you're listening to the podcast the day that it releases that unfortunately was yesterday. But it's not too. There's some other important dates. For First Class mail, including cards you have until December 17th. Priority mail needs to by December 18th. And if you're sending gifts overseas, unfortunately the international deadline was last Thursday. Again, if you're listening to this the day that the podcast releases. Robert Road with the us customer relations team says this week, the week of December 14th, that is categorically always our busiest week.

Griff: So I see USPS has projected this year to ship 2.3 billion pieces of mail in one week, this week.

Rebecca: That is a lot of mail.

Griff: Heck it's mind boggling.

Rebecca: eBay has a complete list of all carrier holiday cutoff dates in seller center under the shipping center. Just go to Seller Center at ebay.com/seller-center. And then scroll down to the section for know your holiday carrier cutoffs and click on the link.

Griff: It's a good tip. And they're all there. It's a PDF you can download and print it. So you have it in front of you. And it covers both USPS, UPS and FedEx.

Rebecca: All right. Moving on the next thing. There is some really cool news on the eBay product front. This is like eBay in the 24 century.

Griff: Yeah, finally. Right?

Rebecca: So we've launched a new feature that provides buyers 360 degree views of items and it's called 3d True View. Have you played with it? It's so cool.

Griff: I went to see it and I did. I played with it and it's like what I've seen on other places where you can move your mouse and turn the item all the way around. That's kind of revolutionary for eBay. We've never had that.

Rebecca: It really is. It's actually,, the first of its kind AI Technology.

Griff: Oh, AI's Involved?

Rebecca: Yes.

Griff: Well, there you go. .

Rebecca: And it's it's for the resale market and buyers can view in this case, sneakers from any angle, top, bottom, 360 degrees side to side, it's kind of like holding the shoe in your hands. When I played with it, I flipped it upside down and I could see every detail on the soul of the sneaker.

Griff: It is pretty cool. Yeah.

Rebecca: And the great thing about it is being able to have that interactive experience with eBay 3d true view. It enhances buyer trust and confidence by giving them a better way to evaluate these high value pre-owned sneakers before they make their purchase decision.

Griff: It's like you're holding it in your hand.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was really cool. It really means that buyers can closely examine every square inch of the item, even the slightest little flaws so that they know exactly what they're getting.

Griff: It's so exciting buy I've gotta get you to cool your jets. Cause currently it's only available in the sneakers category.

Rebecca: Yep. And it's only available right now to a handful of sellers, but we do plan to, I heard we plan to expand the availability of 3d TrueView to more sellers and additional categories over the coming months. In fact, I saw there's a link to sign up, to get on the wait list. And we'll also put that link in the transcript for episode 169.

Griff: I live, I love wait lists. I live,

Rebecca: You live for wait lists!

Griff: Yes. I live for wait lists. That's all I wanna do is wait in line. So sign up on our eBay 3d TrueView, wait list page. And we'll let you know, as soon as you're eligible to participate. And of course that link as Rebecca just said, episode transcript for 169.

Rebecca: Yep. It'll be there. And finally, in the news this week, we wanna share an update about a change to federal tax reporting legislation that's going to impact people who sell on any marketplace online, including eBay. So if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, I think we talked about this a number of episodes ago. But sellers, you're gonna hear us talk about it a lot because we wanna make sure that everyone hears about these changes and understands when it impacts them and their business. So here's, what's changed as of January, 2022. Next month, the IRS will now require payment processors like credit card companies and eBay for all annual online sales, over $600 using form 1099 K. This requirement and yes, I'm reading. So I get it right. This requirement previously only applied to sellers with at least 200 transactions in over $20,000 in sales each year. So everyone listening this change is going to impact your 2022 sales and your 2023 tax filing. So the taxes that you have to file by mid April, 2023, it does not apply to your 2021 sales, the taxes that you're probably working on right now. Basically what you need to know is that the current rules that you've been operating on continue to exist for the year that we're in now, 2021 and the taxes that you're gonna pay in a few months from now and then starting in January, that's when you have to start getting ready for the changes that come in in a year from now, does that make sense?

Griff: It does. Except you don't really have to do anything to get ready. It's just a, it's just a reporting thing. And of course you can read more about the change in the seller news announcement at ebay.com/announcement. And I also advise people to visit the IRS website. They have a page and an FAQ specific to 1099 K's and we will put the link to both of those.

Rebecca: And the other thing that I would say is neither Griff nor I, are tax professionals. We're eBay professionals.

Griff: Just barely.

Rebecca: Speak for yourself. If you out there are listening to this and you have questions about your tax liabilities or your reporting responsibilities, please contact a local tax attorney, a CPA, contact someone yourself to help you work through what you have to do and what you don't have to do with this change.

Griff: Yeah. And if you're selling with any regularity on eBay, you should have a bare minimum assistance contract or agreement with somebody who's a tax expert. It's not only that you meet your responsibilities, but a tax expert can help save you money on how you're reporting and taking expenses. You may be missing something. When we have Barbara Weltman on couple times a year, she points this out a lot, a lot of sellers on eBay, they don't take full advantage of what's available to them in the way of business deductions. So it's important to have that expertise.

Rebecca: Speaking of expertise, they're experts at selling on eBay, hire someone who is an expert in taxes. If your business allows.

Griff: And remember the money you pay to hire someone is tax deductible from your income tax. Right. Although I can't, I think it is. Let's just say, I find that that's what I've been told, but I'm not a tax expert. So don't take my word for it. Go to a real expert. Well, thanks Rebecca. Hey, we're gonna see you again in a bit for our very popular you've got questions segment, but first it's our seller guest segment for this episode last month.

Griff: We were really lucky, really fortunate to have Julie Klein come on and tell us about promoted listings standard, which is how that's been rebranded. A lot of our sellers in this audience they're experienced with Promoted Listings Standard. It's really easy to use and it's cost effective. You don't pay unless you sell something, but also about a month ago or so we introduced a new feature called Promoted Listings Advanced, and it's still kind of in beta, but I wanted to explain to our sellers that are listening, how this works and why it may be worth testing. It may not be for everyone, but it's definitely a very interesting program. And I was gonna have Julie come back. And she said, well, why have me? Why don't you have an actual seller who's selling on eBay, who is in the beta program for Promoted Listings Advance? What a great idea. So join me in welcoming our seller Jeffry Radspinner. Hi Jeffry.

Jeffry: Hey Griff. Thanks for having me.

Griff: It's our pleasure. Tell us a little bit about your business Venture Surplus.

Jeffry: Venture Surplus is an online military surplus store. It takes your standard old school, military surplus and moves it online in a more clean and organized way. So we have all of the uniforms and gear that soldiers need when they're deployed and in the field, we just make sure that our armed forces always have the gear so that they're ready to go.

Griff: How long have you been doing this?

Jeffry: I have been doing this for about seven years.

Griff: On eBay or were you doing this before and then came on eBay?

Jeffry: Oh, no, I've been doing this on eBay the whole time. I think I've been selling on eBay for 11 years now. I've been doing Venture Surplus on eBays to specifically military surplus for about seven years now.

Griff: What got you interested in military surplus?

Jeffry: I actually worked for another guy that did a little bit of military surplus, but he liked to sell a whole lot of everything and he was really, really good at it. But military surplus, I just thought was really interesting. There's the coolest gear. They just get issued all kinds of cool backpacks and jackets and all kinds of stuff.

Griff: Is your current market, just people that are in the military or do you find civilians like what you sell as well?

Jeffry: We have a lot of civilians that like to buy this stuff because it's just good quality gear at a fraction of the cost of like your civilian equivalent. Uh, these parkas that we just got, they're called N3B parkas. And to find something equivalent like that on the civilian market, those things are 300,, 400, even $600 a piece. We've got them up for a, I think $135 right now, which is awesome to be able to have really high quality gear like that, that we can get to civilians, veterans and our soldiers.

Griff: Your store on eBay is named Venture Surplus. I will put the link to Jeffreys store in the transcript for episode 169 so you can find it quickly. When you started selling military surplus did you do any research beforehand to understand the existing market, for example, your competitors in pricing?

Jeffry: Not exactly. It was more of a just bought stuff that I had seen on guy that I had worked for. I had seen him sell that already. And so it was kind of, I knew what kind of stuff was probably gonna sell. And I started off with just that kind of gear. And from there just kind of moved into other things and experimented with other types of military surplus. Moved a little bit more into clothing, a little bit more into things like pouches and vests that they need and just all kinds of stuff.

Griff: We never ask a seller to divulge their sourcing secrets. So we'll avoid that question like the plague , but I do wanna get an idea of just how big your business is right now. Can you give us some example of how big your business is on eBay?

Jeffry: Right now we have about 500 SKUs, parent SKUs listed on eBay that doesn't count variations and sizes. I mean, that's a lot of products. It's taken us a long time to build up the inventory and have just a regular supply of all of this stuff.

Griff: How big is your operations?

Jeffry: I have a total of six people working here. I've got three people that all they do is just manage the inventory and receive all of the inventory as it comes in.

Griff: And that's a lot of work.

Jeffry: There's a lot of work handling, used gear. There's just a lot that goes into inspecting it and making sure that it's exactly as described for our buyers.

Griff: Does any of the inventory that comes in after it's inspected, not past your inspection and if so, what happens to it?

Jeffry: We like to do this thing where we call 'em in different conditions. We saw a lot of other sellers calling them like new, like new, very good fair stuff like that. And I thought it was a little complicated. We made it a little simpler. You've got new, which is new means new. There's your used gear, which means that it's just gonna be really, really good condition. A lot of times it's brand new. But we will see something little on it and we're like, oh, that's, that's not new anymore. So used is usually pretty good. And then we have one more, we call it defect condition, which just means that it's probably gonna have a little hole or a stain or something like that. It's just a little bit beyond what we normally like to do. And so we'll take the, our defect conditions and sell those at a super discount.

Griff: That would be the market I would be interested in.

Jeffry: It's it's a good deal. I mean, if you don't mind like stitching a little hole or washing the shirt before you use it, I mean, you've got yourself a really good deal there.

Griff: The reason why I asked about research is that I know that from our conversations with Julie, that you were one of the early adopters of Promoted Listing Advance. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what that experience has been like for you, what motivated you to try it? Anytime I see a new feature rolled out by eBay. I like to be one of the first ones to try it because in 99% of the cases, it's a feature that's actually gonna be really, really helpful. And first adopters are usually the ones that get the most benefits out of it, especially before anyone else has hopped on board, cuz it's just so much cheaper to use. For example, just the Standard Promoted Listings. We started using that immediately. And when we first started using it, we were the only ones promoting in our category for probably the first month. And then we started having a few more people pick up on it for Promoted Listings Advanced. When I first saw I was a little skeptical, I looked at it and I, I thought, I don't know about this. This is, a lot like Google Ads. There's a lot more work that goes into it and I don't wanna do it like that. And then I had Jacob from the eBay Ads Team. He actually just gave me a quick demo. I think we spent maybe five minutes going over it. And it suddenly clicked. I was like, oh, I can go in and promote just very specific items to the top. And I can optimize those specific items that could actually save money and help us get more sales, especially since it's so new. And there's not a whole lot of people using this yet. Just immediately hopped on that and figured out how to do it. I mean, Jacob gave me a five minute presentation and I spent another 20 minutes reading on it and experimenting with it. Before I had it down in the name, it says advanced. So it's yes, a little more advanced takes about 10 more minutes to learn the standard.

Griff: Also it says it's actually got lots features that provide you some control over how a campaign is going to work. What is your favorite feature of Promoted Listings Advanced?

Jeffry: I think my favorite feature is the ability to download all of the keywords and see what kind of hits I'm getting on that. Cause that's something that hasn't really been available on eBay before now. And I love seeing what people are searching to find our products.

Griff: Do you use that data from that particular download to make alterations changes or edits to a particular campaign?

Jeffry: The campaign as well as the listings too. If we see that someone is searching a specific keyword that we just left out of a out of our titles, then we'll go in and just fix that up. It's good. In two places there,

Griff: Have you found that by adding a keyword, you suddenly start to get sales?

Jeffry: Absolutely. There are times that we list an item and i know it's an awesome item. It just, for some reason won't sell. And so when that happens, we'll usually go in every 14 days or so, and just tweak it. We'll check and make sure it's in the proper category. We'll look at our description. Did we put something weird in there That's just deterring buyers and then we'll start messing with the keywords up top and just keep tweaking it every two weeks until we get it moving.

Griff: I know there's a lot of information and Ads Academy about this. Have you used that documentation as well?

Jeffry: I used that a whole bunch. I really like that all of that stuff was in there. A lot of it I already knew, but going back and brushing up on it is always helpful. And then the Ads Academy, I just discovered that actually just a few days ago and I have been going in there and just taking a look at it and it's got a lot of helpful resources.

Griff: There's a budgeting feature to Promoted Listing Standard. And there's also one for Promoted Listing Advance. Can you explain to our audience how that works?

Jeffry: The budgeting feature on there , you basically tell it, I'm willing to pay up to this much, for example, 20 cents, if someone clicks on it, but on top of that, you can tell it, okay. So I don't want to pay more than $2 in a day. I will take up to 10 clicks at 20 cents a piece. That way I can test it out without breaking the bank. I like to go in and just give them little $10 budgets just to test them out. And I'll usually give them $10 a day budgets. It very rarely actually hits that just because of the category we're in. We don't get that many hits and clicks on it. But after running that for a week or two, I've got a pretty good amount of data from there. And I didn't have to break the bank to get that data.

Griff: Yeah. That's not a lot of money to have to spend to do that.

Jeffry: No.

Griff: Do you test everything?

Jeffry: Test just about everything. I don't think there's a single campaign on Promoted Listings Advanced that I haven't tweaked at some point, cause I like to go in there and just nonce a month look at all of the keyword data and see what's not working. I mean, to an extent, all of these are a test and they continue to be a test until they're optimized and they're only optimized for so long before you gotta do a little bit more on them, but you can do that once a month, once a quarter, whatever you have time for,

Griff: We always are interested in what a seller thinks about a tool, not just to hear what's working, which is great. We'd love to hear what's working. We'd like to hear what you would like to see added or changed about a particular feature. We'd love to ask sellers that, is there any feedback that you provided or would like to provide that team when it comes to the Promoted Listing Advanced Beta?

Jeffry: Oh man, I did before this last update and this last update brought in all of these keyword reports, negative keywords and all of these features that I thought I was lacking. And at this point, I don't know what else to add to it. That was the greatest update. Cause they rolled out several new features and it was everything I had been wanting to see in there.

Griff: You know, I worked for eBay obviously, and I'm very proud of that connection, but I'm especially proud of our product team that's reacting so quickly to seller feedback when it comes to making a tool better. I wanted to talk through a campaign specifically if you don't mind to explain how that works for a seller who may not be familiar with the tool itself, let's start from the beginning. You're starting a campaign. What's the first step?

Jeffry: The first thing I do is I pick out one to 10 items that I want to advertise. I usually like them to be very similar items. Cause I don't want to go in there and say, this campaign is gonna cover pants, jackets and backpacks because it's a little too broad and I wanna be able to go back and measure the effectiveness of that campaign. So usually I'll pick very similar items or items that are just in different conditions. In the collectibles category everything has to be listed separately. If it's new, it's one listing. If it's used, it's another listing. And so I'll usually pick out my new and used and put them in the same campaign. For example, one of the campaigns that I did, it was gloves. I just wanted to get my gloves out there. So I picked out all of the same brand of gloves, which were the black hawk gloves and I put it all together and went in there and started looking at the keywords that I wanted to use. When you get in there, there's all kinds of keywords that are just automatically suggested by eBay. And at first, these weren't very good. So you really had to be really careful about it.

Griff: What do you mean? They weren't very good.

Jeffry: The keywords were so broad. I mean, I'm in there trying to sell these cold weather gloves and it's trying to tell me things like cycling gloves are gonna be good for this or just gloves in general. And gloves is a little bit too broad for that. I wanna go with something like cold weather gloves or leather gloves. And I wanna get just a little bit more specific than something like gloves because that's got 28,000 monthly searches and I don't want 28,000 people seeing something that's not entirely relevant to them.

Griff: It could cost you money in a campaign.

Jeffry: Right? I, I usually just start by looking at the suggested keywords and I'll just uncheck the box to the top. So none of 'em are checked and I'll just scroll through it and look at all of them. At which point I like to go ahead and add them and then I'll go in and add some customized keywords things that I would search if I was looking for this, which doesn't necessarily mean that anyone else is gonna search, but I just like them to be in there. Plus I can collect the data on them and see if they are relevant. After that you just go down there and you tell it's, I want to bid 10 cents per click on this. So every time someone clicks on this, I will pay 10 cents. At that point, I think I usually activate it. I'll give the campaign a title and in the title, I usually give it the date that I created it. Cause I like to see when it was created when the last time I modified it was. And then when I go in there a month later and look at the performance, if I decide I want change it, I'll update the date again. So I know, last time I updated this was then so I don't wanna be tweaking it a week from now. I wanna make sure that I've got a good amount of search data. After that first month that it's been there. I'll go in, take a look at the performance. If I am seeing, a lot of clicks, but not a lot of sales, then I'll go and download the keyword report to see how many hits am I getting on these keywords and how many people are clicking and which ones are actually converting. I like to see a lot of data on there before I start taking keywords out a month to three months is probably a good time before you start editing your campaigns.

Griff: Wow. I wouldn't have thought that long.

Jeffry: Yeah. You want a lot of data. And the reason I say this is I used to do Google Ads and for Google Ads, a lot of times you let it run on either a really large budget for about a month or you have a smaller budget and you let it run for three months before you go in there and even try to mess with it. And this is very similar in that aspect, a lot simpler, but similar. And from there you can take the keywords like, oh no one searching this is ever going to buy. Let's just say, they're looking for leather gloves and these are, are military gloves. No one searching leather gloves is gonna search, be looking for the military gloves. So we wanna just make it a negative keyword and say, if anyone searches that do not show my listing in there.

Griff: That was gonna be my next question, because I think a lot of people are confused. What is a negative keyword?

Jeffry: Okay. So a negative keyword is a word that you just don't want your listing to show up for, for example, like leather gloves. If you don't want your listing to be advertised. When someone searches leather gloves, you're going to go to your negative keywords and you're gonna add leather gloves in there and just tell it, don't show my listing there.

Griff: That's very interesting. It's starting to occur to me and I should have picked up on this earlier that, of course, this is a way of advertising and promoting listings. This is a great data collection tool.

Jeffry: Absolutely.

Griff: And how do you store all this data? Is it stored for you in PLA or do you have to like download it and store it yourself on your computer?

Jeffry: So far It looks like everything is just stored in PLA you can download a lifetime report of that campaign. So that's got all of your data for the entire campaign, or you can tell it just download 30 days at this point. I don't really see any reason to actually save your research unless you're gonna be doing something with that spreadsheet that it's giving you otherwise you can just let it stay in PLA.

Griff: We talked about the fact that you're bidding. That's part of the process you're putting in a bid. I think a lot of people may be familiar with it, but I just wanna go over that quickly for sellers who may not be aware that when you're budgeting and setting up a campaign, you can pick how much you're gonna bid for every time someone clicks on your listing appearing.

Jeffry: When you bid, you're saying, I will pay up to to 20 cents for my listing to appear here if and someone to click on it, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that you're paying 20 cents for someone to click on it. If nobody else is bidding for that same keyword, then you're probably gonna have your listing show up for 2 cents for a click. Which is just crazy cheap. Imagine getting a hundred clicks for 2 cents and out of those hundred clicks, three people buy that's that's really, really good deal.

Griff: That's a good point to make is just because you're bidding a certain amount for a keyword placement that doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna pay that, right? So that's the idea of the budget. You know, that you budgeted that amount of money. You could end up paying your budget, but more likely you're probably gonna pay less.

Jeffry: It's actually rare that I hit my full bid. A lot of times I'll go in and I'll start my bids at just 10 cents a keyword there's suggested bids in there. It tells you, Hey, if you want to get clicks, you might want bid 27 cents a piece on that particular keyword. A lot of times I'll start it at 10 cents and just see what I get, cuz I don't wanna go crazy with it. If it's not gonna be one that works. 10 cents and then you go in there, edit it, maybe raise it to 20 cents. If you find that it's actually worth it and you wanna make sure that you are getting your listing shown in there rather than someone else that's bidding on that same keyword.

Griff: Do you look to see where some of your campaign listings are appearing?

Jeffry: Oh yeah, definitely. I am constantly doing searches on eBay for listings like mine. I see who else is selling them. I like to see where I'm at in the search results. And I like to see just how it looks in the search results.

Griff: What have you learned from this?

Jeffry: I learned a lot about our competitors and I see, uh, a lot of people out there just using weird keywords or using, just odd things in their titles and things that I don't wanna use. But then I also see people out there that have really, really good keywords and really good listings. And I just want to go and do something similar to them.

Griff: And you can, right? You can, you can adopt their practices. There's nothing stopping you from editing a campaign and adding subtracting keywords.

Jeffry: Absolutely.

Griff: This is really great insight. I have to confess that I'm learning a lot too. Is Promoted Listing Advance, going to be something that every seller should test or are there certain types of categories of items where it might not work?

Jeffry: I would say it's not for every seller. If you're selling one of a kind items, unless that one of a kind item is worth a whole lot to you and you're selling it for, to me it'd have to be worth several hundred dollars. And I was gonna make several hundred dollars by selling it for me to go in and make a campaign for one specific item. I think it's better for things that you have several of or a whole lot of, and you can just keep restocking it because then you've got a campaign that's just gonna run forever and you do the work one time done, whereas single listing, you're gonna do all that work and you're gonna have to do all that work again for your next listing.

Griff: And that's a great differentiator so that if you're a seller deciding which program should I use, whether that's promoted listing standard or advanced, one of a kind, not high value items are probably in my experience from using it going to work well for you. But if you have multi skew, you have lots of quantity available currently. And it's something that you can restock this is a way of grabbing market share and holding onto it. That's the important thing here because campaigns can be altered and changed and adapted dynamically as they're running. And as you see, they need to be fit. This is what I'm taking away from our talk together. I hope I got that right.

Jeffry: Yeah, that sounds about right. I think for all of the sellers out there, just selling individual or one of a kind items, I think the Promoted Listing Standard is the way to go.

Griff: So I hope this has been good news to a lot of our sellers who listen, who sell besides one of a kind items. They sell SKU items. This could be a great way to compete. We're heading into the new year. And I think we can expect a lot of updates to keep coming to the program. Do you have anything else you can tell our sellers about what's worked for you or that sellers should keep in mind?

Jeffry: I think just experimenting and then checking on your campaign once they're created, this is not a one and done deal. You definitely wanna take a look because as more sellers get on board with this, it's gonna get a little more competitive as you are bidding. If there's a hundred people bidding on that same keyword. It's gonna go to the highest bidder every time. So you wanna make sure if you want that visibility, as it gets more competitive, you've got a good bid in there.

Griff: And that's kinda similar to how Promoted Listing Standard works. It's not something that you just wanna set it and forget it. You do wanna go in and see, do I need to adjust my rate up or down over time? You can't just let it sit there or it won't work for you. I wanna remind our sellers that you can find this by going up to your advertising dashboard in Seller Hub, just go to Seller Hub. There is an advertising dashboard from the marketing tab and then click on Create New Campaign and you'll see the advanced option on the right. Give it a test. If you think your merchandise is going to work well or has the possibility or the potential to benefit from using Promoted Listings Advanced, remember you don't have to commit everything in the world. You can start a small test and see if it works. And if you do, I wanna hear from you, I wanna hear how the campaign works. Better or not so good. It's fun. I just wanna hear the stories. Jeffrey. I'm glad it's working for you.

Jeffry: I really like it. I'm really glad that that was a feature that was rolled out.

Griff: Can we have you back on the show to talk about this in about six months?

Jeffry: Yeah, absolutely. I'd be happy to.

Griff: Fantastic Jeffrey. Thanks again. A and best of luck in the new year of 2022. Jeffry Radspinner has a store on eBay called Venture Surplus. We'll put the link in the transcript for episode 169. Do check it out and please go to the advertising dashboard link in Seller Hub, under marketing tab, and then create a new campaign and see if it'll work for you.

Rebecca: You've got questions.

Griff: We've got answers. Well, at least I hope Rebecca does. Rebecca, would you do the honors for our first question?

Rebecca: I sure will. eBay seller Jason emailed podcast@ebay.com with the following. Hey, Griff, question. I am a part-time seller on eBay. I have recently set up a line of inventory that one of my employers, me to help them sell on eBay. However, they will be shipping this inventory from a different address than I ship from. I'm not drop shipping. This is actual inventory sitting in a warehouse, just in a different state.

Griff: Yeah, that happens. Yeah.

Rebecca: He goes on to say tons of merchandise at my disposal. Is there a way to set up two different ship from addresses or should I set up a second eBay account? Look forward to your answer. I always talk about topics from your podcast on my reseller Live on YouTube Saturday mornings. Great. It's on a channel called Bluegrass Picker for now. Eventually it will be on a channel called a show about nothing.

Griff: Is it Seinfeld?

Rebecca: No thanks in advance for I'm Jason Gardner.

Griff: Hi Jason. I can imagine, I guess that you're into bluegrass music, but if not a show about nothing works too. good news. You don't have to open a second account. One account can have multiple ship from addresses. In fact can have one, two or more. And a lot of sellers have them set up that way with multiple addresses just to meet situation you're in, which is they have inventory in different locations. Oh, by the way, I know you said I'm not a drop shipper, but there's nothing wrong with drop shipping. It's just that particular just in time buying from another marketplace and then having it shipped to a buyer that's what's not allowed, but drop shipping is perfectly okay. So here's how you can set up your multiple ship from address. Go to my eBay accounts. So if you click on my eBay and then click on the accounts tab, it'll take you to a page called account settings.ebay.com. And you'll find there's a, a section there for addresses. Click the ship from address link, and then click add address. And you can add 1, 2, 3 more. If you want, when you list an item, you can select a relevant address by zip code from the item location section, and then that'll be important for making the correct determination for calculated shipping. If that's what you're using, you just put in the zip code for that address. However, here's the important part. When you print a label through eBay, you can edit the ship from and return to address by clicking, edit on that page and then selecting the related address depending on where the item is located. This should be pretty simple. You just have to give these instructions to the person at your other location. If they're the ones that are printing out the label so they can select the right address when they ship the item out. So that the ship from and return to address is correct in case it has to be returned. And don't worry, Jason, I put you on the mug list. In fact, I think your mug went out yesterday.

Rebecca: Our next email was, and by Suzanne who writes, please tell me if I'm missing something, but I haven't figured out how to locate one of my listings easily. I've tried through Seller Hub, listing, active listing. Now what I scroll until I find the listing I'm looking for? If this features unavailable, can we get it on the eBay teams to-do list? Thanks for all your help. Suzanne PS, one of gifts my husband ever gave me was a thermal printer. I would never have said anything about one until Griff put that ear worm of buy a thermal printer into my head. So a big thank you, Griff.

Griff: It worked, it worked! I wanna thank the academy for every well, hello, Suzanne. In Seller Hub active view, there is actually a section on the top of the page and a lot of people miss it. I tend to think it may be something that's a design issue. Maybe we should revisit this and redesign it. If you remember a word or words in your title, you can use that search section on the top to search your entire inventory by title. I use that all the time. I only have a hundred listings up at a time, so it's really easy to scroll, but I'm lazy. You just have to use that little search bar on the top. I know it's on the active listings page. I think you can also search your orders the same way, and I'm glad to hear we've actually converted another seller into being a thermal printer enthusiast.

Griff: Our next question was posted on our podcast Facebook group. It's from seller Cherry and she asks, hi. I have a question that's nagging me. I expect there may be someone else who needs a definitive answer. If I make an offer or accept an offer and send a coupon as well, can the buyer take the lower price of the offer? And then also take the coupon amount off at checkout? My understanding is that if this was an offer situation, either way they could not use the coupon as an additional money off. PS I'm getting my coupons used as well as selling with regular promotions, a tad above the suggested present.

Rebecca: It's a great question. And I thank our Tyler for locating the right answer. Cherry, If an item has a Best Offer or seller initiated offer, the offer takes priority and a coupon cannot be applied.

Griff: Yeah. And that's good news cuz sellers wanna know you have to control your profit margin. You don't wanna give away an extra discount. If that wasn't your intention and Cherry, it's also worth noting that coded coupons are not stackable with other promotions, such as order discount or shipping discount or volume pricing. And if several promotions are running concurrently on a listing, buyers get the best discount. So whatever it is, that's the one they get. And one more little thing to note the coupons do stack with markdown sales. So keep that in mind when you're creating a markdown sale, that there's a chance that a buyer can get the discounted markdown price plus the coupon discount, but for seller initiated or just best offers. No you can't use.

Rebecca: Great question.

Rebecca: Thank you Cherry.

Griff: Does anyone else out there have a vexing question or pithy comment? Why not share it with your fellow sellers by calling us at (888) 7 2 3- 4 6 30.

Griff: Yeah. And at this point I feel like it's almost like an NPR fundraiser, but I really wanna draw attention to the fact that nobody is calling (888) 7 2 3 - 4 6 3 0. And there's no tote bags, there's no mugs unless you call that number. That's not true. I love that number. You can get your voice on the show. So (8 8 8 )7 2 3 - 4 6 3 0. Like I say, every week you can call that at, at your convenience, any time of the day, any day of the week, no matter where you are, just leave a question or comment and if it's appropriate, we're probably gonna put it on the air, just do it.

Rebecca: And of course, if you're not a call on the phone, kind of a person.

Griff: Which our entire audience seems to be!

Rebecca: You also can email us at podcast, ebay.com, that's podcast, ebay.com.

Griff: Don't forget your daily podcast to do list.

Rebecca: Check the announcement board for UpToDate seller news.

Griff: Keep an eye on the seller center page for carrier holiday cutoff dates.

Rebecca: Check the transcript for this and all episode for follow up on what you've heard and to see the links that we referenced during the episode.

Griff: On our next episode, we're gonna meet an eBay employee who also is a full time eBay seller. I dunno how he does it.

Rebecca: And we'd like to again, think our guest this week, eBay seller, Jeffry Radspinner of Venture Surplus.

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