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Episode 183 || USPS Scan Forms & A Custom Label Trick

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‎03-22-2022 05:00 AM



Rebecca: I'm Rebecca.

Griff: I'm Griff and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your weekly source for the information and inspiration to start, run, and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 183 and after a little extended absence, we're happy to have our very own girl next door, Rebecca, back with us in the studio next door.

Rebecca: How are you Griff? Hello!

Griff: Hello. It's nice to have you back, Brian, and I missed you.

Rebecca: Sorry. You know, sometimes work gets away with me, but I'm really glad to be here today.

Griff: Well, we're glad you're back. It's been an interesting few weeks on eBay.

Rebecca: Yes, it sure has. We had Investors ay just recently where CEO, Jamie Iannone shared a bunch of information and updates about our company strategy. That was really interesting to learn more, even for those of us who were here working here.

Griff: Yeah. And I saw a lot of extended conversation about the different aspects of how eBay's going to change or be enhanced in the near future. A lot of discussions about eBay Vault, for example, what is that gonna be? How how's that? What does that entail? What is fractionalized investing?

Rebecca: The vault is really interesting. It's like 30,000 square feet where sellers can actually store items. They can store their trading cards right there in safety and never even have to handle 'em. They know that they're safe in the vault.

Griff: Hmm. And they can sell them from there too.

Rebecca: That's right. Absolutely. And then the other cool thing is something, I think it's branded as The Wallet, but anyways, it's stored payouts and it's coming soon and sellers are going to be able to use funds that they earn on eBay by selling items to purchase other things on eBay. And I know this was a highly requested feature. I can't wait to use it. I think it's really cool.

Griff: Yeah. I think I would've used it in the last year as I've been selling more and then buying just makes sense to keep the money there. And actually what I'm curious to know, and I haven't asked anyone, this is, if you do this, will those purchases be part of the permanent record in your reports on payouts and payments? Because I would love to have a copy of what I've spent to for buying things on eBay. So we'll see when it comes out. And actually this is a news item about, something with payouts, but I'll let you get to it in a, in a moment. And in fact, Rebecca, what is the news this week?

Rebecca: Let's see what we've got on deck this week. First thing, last year, we had the launch of the Coded Coupons Tool, which was available to store subscribers or that it is available to store subscribers and that let sellers offer discounts to buyers by printing, sharing, and sending coupons to their buyers. The next enhancement is that with buyer groups, you can send those coded coupons in bulk to specific groups of buyers. You can reward your buyers with discounts on your own terms, build your customer base and send a coupon code to some of your previous buyers on eBay. You do have to build those groups of buyers yourself and there's tools to help facilitate that. And the way that you do that is by going into the Seller Hub Marketing Tab and access the new buyer group section. It's really quick. It's really easy to set up a buyer group and we will provide a link in the show notes so that anybody listening can go into those notes and get started.

Griff: Yeah, I think you can get started right away.

Rebecca: I think. So it should be there right now. I have, have to invest. I have not gone to look for it, but now I will.

Griff: I think I can start a buyer, our group for fragrances. So that'll be the first one I do.

Rebecca: Ooh, let us know how it goes.

Griff: I will. What else is in the news?

Rebecca: So recently, as we alluded to just a couple of minutes ago, we announced some enhancements to payouts. There's already the existing daily and weekly payout schedule options. Sellers now have two more options for when to have their payouts sent. It can be either biweekly or monthly. Monthly, biweekly, and weekly payouts will include the available funds that are earned from sales with confirmed payments through the Sunday prior to your payout date. So if it's Tuesday, the third Sunday, the first it'll be through Sunday, the first if I got my math right, who knows. In the event of a bank holiday or, or a national holiday, the, um, payout will be made on the following business day. You can learn more about the new payout option. There's an Announcement Board post. And again, look in the transcript. We'll have those links there.

Griff: Yeah. Episode 183. And again, this will be an option that sellers can select. It's not mandated that you have to have one or the other, you can select from all of the different payments.

Rebecca: And the headline here is how many different options there are to suit you and your business. And finally, in the news this week, a reminder that QuickBooks is now integrated with eBay Payments. We love QuickBooks because it's the number one rated accounting solution for small and medium sized businesses. According to the November, 2021 addition of PC Mag. If you're not already a QuickBook subscriber, you can subscribe now and save 30% for 12 months. This is an exclusive offer for eBay sellers from QuickBooks. And it's only available for a limited time. So go check it out and take advantage if you want to. So as we keep saying, look in the transcript for episode 183, and you can find the links and find out about subscribing by via reading the announcement board post.

Griff: Yeah. I mean, what do you have to lose? You might as well just check it out. Up next, you and I are gonna talk about a special tip for adding custom data into Seller Hub Transaction Reports using the custom label field and a little spreadsheet trick that maybe some sellers didn't know about. I was really excited when they found it. More coming up in the moment.

Griff: Rebecca two episodes ago when Brian was co-hosting. I mentioned that I had a new tip that I just discovered for including extra information about each listing or transaction using the custom label field and using it in a way that would record all the data into separate columns in your transaction reports and Seller Hub.

Rebecca: Okay. Tell me more.

Griff: I will, the episode was running way long, so I'd said I'd save it for either next week or the week after, and I can't keep putting it off. So it's your time. You're gonna have to help me with this.

Rebecca: This is good because I'm just learning about custom label field myself. So I'm interested in hearing about how I can make it more powerful for my listings.

Griff: One of the shortcomings, by the way of the current transit action reports is that there is only one column in every report. You can make sure it's added in when you customize your report fields and it's for custom seller supply data. And again, that's called the custom label field.

Rebecca: So where do I go look for the custom label field?

Griff: It's available or any seller to input, whatever text they at the point of listing an item, it's actually on the list item form. The new tool as well, It's a separate field. It says custom label. I think it's right under the title. And once a listing is live to site, that same field is available on the Active View in Seller Hub as a separate column. And you can edit it while the item is active.

Rebecca: That's Seller Hub, click on the Listings tab and then click on Active.

Griff: And in that view, your active listings, you can add, or you can edit the custom label field. If it's not showing up, you do need to go up to the right hand side where it says customized and make sure that the box for the column for custom field is checked. Most sellers have it checked. I think.

Rebecca: Yeah, for me, it's showing up as custom label parentheses SKU.

Griff: Oh Okay. Well custom. Yeah, a lot of sellers use it for SKU, location of an item and that custom label field can accommodate up to 50 text characters. And like I said, sellers use this for all sorts of purposes, myself included. Some use it to indicate, for example, A SKU piece of inventories location on or in a bin or even where it is in a room for some small sellers, it's up against the west wall in a box. Others use it for recording the date, the item was purchased and the item cost. And that's a good one. I use all of those in custom field.

Rebecca: Oh, sorry. I was busy looking around Seller Hub trying to figure it out.

Griff: No, that's fine. No, no. You should, it's good that you're looking around seller hub while we're discussing this, because I think you're acting as a proxy for the audience. So this is helpful.

Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it wouldn't be a terrible idea for someone listening to actually go to your computer, fire up eBay, go to Seller Hub and, and look around with me.

Griff: Yes, exactly. Unless you're driving.

Rebecca: Well, yes. Not if you're driving.

Griff: Driving. Yeah. Make a note that you'll listen to it later.

Rebecca: Yeah. So I actually got snagged up. I can't believe I've never really explored this it's cuz you know, I'm a dilettante.

Griff: I wouldn't say that.

Rebecca: You know, I don't do this as my full-time business. So, you know, I'm always discovering new things.

Griff: But let's make it clear. You do have things for sale right now.

Rebecca: Yes I do. I do have things for sale right now, so that I'm able to look through all of these. I hadn't realized I could customize the table in here where I look at my active listings.

Griff: You can add or subtract columns, you know, I don't need the big column cuz I hardly ever use the auction format. Right. And you can also rearrange them. So you can put them in the order that you need. So you can see those columns right up front. I should do a whole other segment on customizing a table.

Rebecca: This is very interesting for me. I hope that the audience is enjoying playing along with this, but let's stay on topic.

Griff: I should mention by the way that there is another field that a seller can use for custom data, but it's only available after a listing is live and you can see it in your active view. It's called the, My Note or just Note field. It can be very useful as a custom field, but unlike the custom label field, the note field doesn't show up as a column option for any of the several eBay transaction report types you can download. So it is of limited use. It's been around for a long time. It can be useful, but like I said, it doesn't carry over to reports. So any data you put into there disappears after 90 days.

Rebecca: Right, but if, if it's a short term note that you just wanna make on that particular item while it's for sale or you know, maybe you can say that you got X number of offers that you didn't take previously when you re-listed something like that.

Griff: That's a very good use case. By the way, one of the suggestions I have seen from sellers over the years is that they want more than one custom label field. And the addition of more of these fields absolutely would be the ultimate solution for a lot of sellers. And that could happen someday.

Rebecca: But I think in the meantime, it sounds like you maybe have a workaround, which I'm gonna learn here with you and with our listeners.

Griff: Yes. I, I did find a workaround. I found a way for sellers who need to have more than just one custom label field in their eBay reports to actually create two or even three or maybe even four separate columns in any eBay generated report after they've down loaded it, using the data that, that seller supplied in the single custom label field. And there's a little trick that most every spreadsheet program can do. It's called convert text to columns or split text to columns. And by most every spreadsheet, I mean, of course Excel, which a lot of people use with Windows, but also Google Sheets and, and even Numbers on a Mac.

Rebecca: So here's the thing. Spreadsheets are seriously like the killer app of the internet. I mean we love social media. We love our marketplace. There are many things about the internet that are for good or for ill, really powerful. Spreadsheets are the unsung hero.

Griff: I think a lot of people don't realize just how powerful they are. You can create spreadsheets that do amazing things.

Rebecca: It's so true. It's so true. And what I find is every time I go to look up, how do I for Excel or, or Google Sheets, there's always an answer and going and looking it up, reading a couple of forums, reading a couple of like factual articles. You can make spreadsheets, do everything except for cooking dinner.

Griff: I actually found this trick and a lot of our sellers may already know about it by doing that. How do I? And I found it and I'm really glad I did because this feature is gonna be of interest to any seller who's using the custom label field for more than one data type, for example, this is what I do. The day of purchase for an item, the cost of that item or maybe even the location in inventory for that item. There are the places like the, My Note field where you could put this, but this really works. This really works.

Rebecca: All right. Well, I'm really excited. I'm here deciding if I'm gonna try and step through it or if I should just listen, I think I'll listen so that I'm paying attention, but then you know what, I'm gonna go back and re-listen to us and I'm gonna try it again on my own and I'll report back.

Griff: Yeah. And I I'd recommend that anyone who doesn't have the time to actually go back and listen, remember we have a transcript with every episode that you can read through and you can see actually really simple and I'll, I'll do my best to verbally explain how it works. So the first step is deciding what types of information you want to record. For example, as I stated previously for myself, the date and location of purchase is a popular thing that sellers like to have a record of. Maybe the cost of the item, the cost of that good. That would be three data types right there. That ideally would be best in three separate columns on the report, but whatever you decide you need, you have to give it a little thought, how many data points do I need? Once you've decided on what types of information you want to record for posterity the next step is to well start recording it in the custom label field for every it you list. But, and this is super important hypercritical information that data has to be typed in using a consistent format with one type of something called a delimiter.

Rebecca: Okay. Sounds like you're getting technical. But at first I have a question. Yeah. What if I start out by recording two, two data points, the original cost of the item and where it's stored in my house, is it in the closet or is it in the garage? Down the road I decide that I want to add in the date that I purchased it. Do I have to think everything through at the front end? Or can I evolve down the road?

Griff: That is a great question. It is possible to evolve this down the road. It depends on how often you download your reports, how many reports you create, because once you've settled on, for example, if you just use two data points in the custom label field, that's gonna work for using those, you know, the comma delimiter that we'll talk about in a minute, that's gonna work for those reports. But in the future, if you increase the custom label field, it's just that that will then create in the next report the third column, when we do this little trick. So actually thinking about it. Yeah. You can involve this. It'll work fine.

Rebecca: It'll just be blank for the ones where I didn't put the third point in. Okay. This makes sense. All right. I know what delimiters are, but let's spend the little time to defining that for our listeners.

Griff: It is a way to let a program or application like a spreadsheet know at the point where the delimiter shows up in the text, like a comma, it could be a space, it could be a semicolon. It could be a tab. That tells the application, the data that comes directly after this goes into a new column. Or a new place. It's a very common way in, I wanna say data processing I think.

Rebecca: It is data processing. Let's be honest. I have to say that in my experience and I have worked with delimiters, but for other things like printing out like labels to do a big mailing of my Christmas cards.

Griff: Exactly. That would be a, a perfect way to use them.

Rebecca: Exactly. So the one thing that I would advise our listeners, I would recommend using a comma or other visible delimiter and not a space and not a tab, even though you said that Griff, because when it's visible, you can see, is it there? Is it not? If you do a space a little bit harder, did you do a single space? Did you double space? And once you start not being perfectly exact about the delimiters, the computer is like, I don't know what you're talking about and like barfs.

Griff: Yeah. You have to be consistent and in my experience, it's like yours. I use the comma with no space after it.

Rebecca: Yeah. And that's the standard in my experience as well with, I don't know, whatever tech people do, this sort of thing for a business.

Griff: Well, it's the most common, it's actually the option in Excel that comes up. You get to select the delimiter.

Rebecca: That is what it is. Yeah. That's what I'm remembering.

Griff: And again, for like, for my needs, I do like to know the date that I purchased an item, cuz I can tell how long it's been sitting in my death pile or sitting in my not selling pile. And I like to know the location of the purchase. You know, for example, a lot of my shirts I bought in thrift stores and I like to know where I bought them. And then of course the all important cost of the item now that I'm using this tip, I typed this data for each item individually upon listing into the custom field on the listing form at the time of listing using this format, date delimiter. So it's a comma. Location, could be as much text as you want, then a comma and then the cost. And you have to keep that order, whatever order, not the order, I've just, you can reorder these. But once you settle on a format, you have to use it consistently for this to work. And like I said, and you said as well, the delimiter could, it can, can be a comma or a semicolon, tab or space. But I agree with you. I think it really is best to use something you can see. And in this case, the comma is very common. If it's your taste to do something different, I know with Excel, you can combine delimiters. For example, you can say the delimiter is a comma and a space. Again, our suggestion is to just use a comma, only one comma and no space afterward.

Rebecca: One thing is I am poking around a little bit in solar hub. As we talk after all this is not available to change around in sold items. Is that right?

Griff: Right. Good. And I was gonna get to that, but you, yeah, that's fine. The custom label field is not available as you just noticed for editing and sold items on the orders page. But once you start employing this tip, you can always go back to any spreadsheet report and you can manually enter or change or edit data that is gonna now show up in these new columns you're creating. Okay. And you're gonna do this automatically. It's so cool.

Rebecca: All right. Okay. So we've talked a lot at theory here. How about you? Gimme an example. I work really well with examples. Maybe our listeners do too.

Griff: Too. Sure. I'm gonna give you exactly what I've been using now for a couple months in the custom label field. When I list an item and I just listed one, I put BIN009, What do you think that means?

Rebecca: Bin number, see nine. And that's where you have it stored.

Griff: Yes. I have a bunch of bins. There's like 20 or 30 of them. And I know that this item is in bin 009. . Put a comma so every time I list an item, the location is gonna go first. And then next I put 10/01/2019. The date of purchase.

Rebecca: And Excel doesn't mind the slashes cuz it's looking for those commas. It's not looking for slashes for the delimiters. It's looking for the commas.

Griff: Right. But something cool happens in the future.

Rebecca: All right.

Griff: The cool thing is that when you do this in Excel, at least, and I think in Google Sheets and Numbers, because you're using those slashes, it automatically formats the column for date.

Rebecca: Oh, I like that.

Griff: And that's the new column that you're gonna create. Then I have comma. And then I have in this case, 24.99, that's

Rebecca: The cost that you paid.

Griff: And you can put the dollar sign if you like as well. That's not gonna impact anything. And then finally I have a abbreviation set that I use to tell me which script store I bought it. For example, WGGW

Rebecca: I can't think of it.

Griff: Willow Glen Goodwill.

Rebecca: Oh!

Griff: so that's four bits of data separated by commas, no spaces. I do this for every new listing.

Rebecca: So what if you don't remember what you paid you about an item? Do you put an NA? Do you leave it blank? What's the plan?

Griff: That's a good question, cuz that happens a lot, but I don't wanna screw up my format. So since the tip for converting and splitting texts from one column to two more columns, won't really work out right if the data place holders aren't used those, delimiters, I fill in those with NA.

Rebecca: Aha. Got it.

Griff: So comma NA but again, you have to do it in a consistent order that you're always using. You could fill it, anything in that you could put zero or the number zero. You could just use two commas and leave no space between them. And it'll jump, it'll leave it empty. But it's up to you how you want to do it.

Rebecca: Okay. So once I've started filling in the custom labels, I filled it in on a bunch of my listings and I wanna download a report. What's next?

Griff: Well, this is the cool part! This is the part that was like, I got so excited. Again there's probably sellers out there, way more experienced than I that go, you're excited by split text into columns? That's what gets your Jolly's Griff. Come on, get over it. After you've generated and downloaded any transaction report after you've started doing this and you open it using whatever application you use, like Excel or Google Sheets or Numbers, check the data and the column for custom labels. And you should see the information text in that column, row by row. And it's gonna have each type of data you have selected to include separated by the delimiter of your choice, for me again that's the single comma with no space afterwards and it's all there. Then we're ready to process it.

Rebecca: Okay. Then what?

Griff: Depending on what application you use, find the feature for that application that lets you split data from one column into two or more columns.

Griff: As you said, there's several different applications. Where do you find it?

Rebecca: In Excel the feature is found on the data menu bar and it's called text to columns. In Google Sheets the feature is found under the data menu and it's called split text to columns and on a Mac for the numbers application. I think it's a little bit more involved, but there's a really cool YouTube video I found. And I'm gonna put the link in there, but again, you can do it on numbers as well.

Griff: Okay. And of course, cuz I always say it. We're gonna put that YouTube video link in episode 183 transcript.

Rebecca: Yeah. And once you've applied the spreadsheet split text to columns feature, you should see your data from the custom label field separated out into new columns. The number of which matches the number of data types you've separated by a delimiter. You can then give each column a header name to define it.

Rebecca: Okay. So what's the point of doing all of this?

Griff: Well, I thought you'd never ask because besides being a clean way to keep a record of things like item, location, date of purchase, price, very important one or cost with each type of data and separate columns the one column, for example, the cost of the item can now be formatted as currency. And then you can auto sum that column for the period of time it covers. And you have a quick way of determining the total cost of goods sold for that period of time, whether it's monthly or even if it's annual, this saves so much time!

Rebecca: So you can auto sum all of that, but also have your item location. And you're not trying to sum a location, which clearly is not gonna work.

Griff: It's not. If you keep all this data in the custom field, there's no way to sum that total for cost of goods, unless it's in a separate column. And of course there's an obvious thing here.

Rebecca: I know what it is.

Griff: What?

Rebecca: if you use the custom label field only for the cost of item, then you don't have to go through any of this.

Griff: No, you can just skip to the next segment.

Rebecca: We should have said that back at the beginning.

Griff: I thought about it, but then I thought, oh wait a minute. I don't want anyone to miss out. So if you spent the last five, how many minutes now? Oh, 20 minutes listening to this and going, oh geez, I don't need this. I'm very sorry. I hope you were entertained. But my conversation with sellers, Rebecca leads me to believe that most of them tend to use the custom label field for more than just one data point.

Rebecca: Which is why we started out by saying that this is a request and here at least is a hack or a workaround that will make it work.

Griff: Exactly. And I did mention earlier that the other option available to sellers is, and this is only once an item is listed, live to site is the note field. It's called the note or my note field in the active view page. If you want to use it, it's really easy to access per single listing and the edit dropdown menu to the right of the item title in the active view page, the option is called Add, Edit, Note. This note field like the custom label field is only visible to the seller, never to the buyer or the public. And it does have a capacity for 250 characters and it can be edited. However, However, this field is problematic for storing data long term. For one thing, it doesn't show up in any downloaded report and it will not carry over to the orders page when item sells. So you can add a note to item in the orders page, of course, but once 90 days has passed that data is gone including the added note field. However,

Rebecca: However, again.

Griff: If you also print your orders as order receipts using the print label or more features on the orders page, and we covered this in a previous episode and you print these order receipts, either as hard copies or what I like to do, I like to have PDFs because then it's the image of the item and all the other order information you can customize what's included on the order receipt by selecting customized before you print it or them because you could print out single or you may be printing out multiple orders as hard copies or PDFs. And one of the boxes to check for inclusion in that printout is My Note. So there is a way of storing that My Note information for posterity, but it's not in a spreadsheet. It's gonna be in a, like a piece of paper or a PDF.

Rebecca: Right. Which makes it much less searchable. And it can't like all add up. I'm thinking again, because I'm learning about this note field, it's more like a sticky that you would put on the side of item rather than a tracking data point that you would actually use for running your business.

Griff: Yeah. That's a great analogy. It's like a sticky note. We should call it that. But I think it's actually trademarked. I used to use the note field for everything because, but because it's not included in any of the downloadable reports and because it's only available for 90 days, I've now switched over to putting all my custom data into the custom label field and now splitting out the text into separate columns, using that wonderful split text to columns feature and it lasts forever.

Rebecca: Whew. All right. We made it all the way through, you know what I'm thinking?

Griff: What?

Rebecca: I think it would be interesting for you to maybe, you know, we use a dummy account or something might be interesting for you to actually do a screen recording of going through all this and showing it. We publish that video along with maybe the other YouTube video that you mentioned and that way people can watch along and watch your mouse go around and click here and click there and type in the other place.

Griff: That's an excellent idea. And we'll get to work on it right away. That's all for this tip and I hope you find it useful again, if you have any questions about it, feel free to send them to podcast@ebay.com or you can call them in to 888-723-4630. And Rebecca, I want to thank you for putting up with me during this segment. It's very verbose. It's a lot of language.

Rebecca: I mean, it's a lot of steps. It's a lot of details, but this is like learn on the front end to save a bunch of time in the day to day.

Griff: Now I know you have meetings that you're overdue. Will you join us later for questions?

Rebecca: Yes, I'll come back.

Griff: Great. But first we had an interesting issue about scan forms. You know, USPS scan forms. This popped up in the community discussions last week. Now to find out exactly what the issue was and the solution to the issue I thought we should ask the expert.

Griff: There was a discussion recently on one of the eBay community forums about USPS scan forms. One of the comments made in the discussion caught my eye. It stated that scan forms for printed bulk labels on eBay were only available at the moment of printing and then disappeared after that. That didn't seem right to me as I recall that all scan forms for all batches of printed labels were available for the entire day. But since I sometimes remember things in accurately and to make absolutely certain, I thought, well, I know Let’s Ask Tyler.. welcome back Tyler.

Tyler: Oh, it's a, it's a pleasure to be here, Greg. Thanks for inviting me back.

Griff: So Tyler, explain to our listener exactly what a USPS scan form is.

Tyler: Absolutely. A USPS scan form is a single barcode that contains the data for all the shipment included in a batch label job. It's generated at will by a seller at the time the seller purchases and prints out a batch of labels in bulk using eBay's bulk label printing flow.

Griff: Yeah, that's what I thought. That scan form, it's a convenient way to present a single scan option to say your USPS clerk or your USPS driver If it's a pickup and these are USPS employees who may be hesitant or sometimes even resistant to scanning a single lot of many parcels, you know, all of the shipments, like if there's 10 or 20, they're gonna say, I don't have time for this.

Tyler: Exactly. In fact, that's what the discussion on the community board actually, that's kind of how it started. Someone posted that their local post office was limiting parcel scans to five parcels only, just five.

Griff: Wait a minute. Is that true? I thought USPS was required clerks to scan all packages on request. No matter how many?

Tyler: Apparently some post offices, it appears mostly those in rural locations have been given the okay to limit scans to only five parcels per customer.

Griff: Okay. But, uh, there's always the scam form. Any seller who's using the bulk label option on eBay can print out a scam form for that batch of labels and bring it to the PO or have it ready for the USPS driver if they're having things picked up. So what was the issue?

Tyler: Well, so several sellers stated...

Griff: Nice alliteration there, by the way.

Tyler: Thank you. I practiced. Several sellers stated that their regular procedure was to print out bulk labels in two or more batches as sales are made during the day. And that the scan forms for previous bulk labels were not available once the seller left the printing page for that batch.

Griff: Is that true?

Tyler: It is kind of. Once a seller finishes printing out a batch of bulk labels and leaves the labels page there is no direct link back to the scan forms page.

Griff: No direct link. That's not good,

Tyler: But there is. It's just not easy to find the links.

Griff: Wait a minute. Links. Plural?

Tyler: Yes. Links. There are two links to get back to the scan form page after a seller has left the bulk label print pages.

Griff: Dear, this sounds hard. Okay. What are those links?

Tyler: You have to start on the shipping labels. So you'd go to Seller Hub. Then the orders tab. Once there, look on the left hand navigation and select shipping labels.

Griff: Okay. I'm actually doing this as we talk. What then ?

Tyler: The title at the top of that page should say track and manage your shipments.

Griff: I see that. Yep.

Tyler: Great. Now adjust under that is an elongated box with text that says have more orders of awaiting shipment. Try the bulk shipping tool.

Griff: Oh yeah, there it is.

Tyler: Click that box.

Griff: OK. All right. Now I'm on what appears to be the bulk shipping by labels page. In fact, it's actually reminding me right now. I have a sale to ship out today.

Tyler: Well, congrats on the sale. Thanks. Well, you'll be set up for success. This page is where any pending shipments for sold items are going to appear.

Griff: What if I don't have any pending shipments?

Tyler: Well, you'll still get to that page, but the order section will be empty and might say you have no shipments or something like that.

Griff: Okay. So then what happens now? I I'm looking for scam for forms,

Tyler: So if you'd look in the upper right hand corner, there's a link for scan forms.

Griff: Of course. It's right there. I see it now.

Tyler: Brilliant. Uh, go ahead and click that.

Griff: Okay. Oh, there it is. The elusive scan forms page.

Tyler: Excellent. You finally made it. You should probably bookmark that page in case you forget how we got there.

Griff: Yeah, I do tend to forget. So I just book marked it. And so this is how I can go directly sort of to the scan forms page outside of printing a label.

Tyler: Exactly. And if you have purchased at least one batch of shipping labels during the same day, you view that page and you did not previously generate scan forms for that batch. You'll see a prompt to generate that scan form on this page. If you purchased more than one batch of labels, say you purchased bulk labels three times during that day and you didn't generate scan forms for those batches. There will be three prompts for generating the three scan forms.

Griff: I see I get this now. So how long are those prompts gonna be there?

Tyler: They're available for generating up until 8:00 PM Pacific time that day.

Griff: And I noticed when I did have one of these that there's a little countdown clock and it shows hours, minutes, and seconds. And it did appear that when I did the calculation it's yeah, I think you're right. It's around APM. I wonder if that's for every time zone, I should ask the Shipping Team and get back to us.

Tyler: I'd be really interested in that. It would be great if it was by region.

Griff: So if I purchase more than one batch of labels during the day, there's gonna be more than one scan form to generate the system. Doesn't combine them.

Tyler: Correct. But technically, if you have say five scan forms to generate, that would be five scan sheets for the postal clerk to scan. Even if there are 25 parcels with five parcels on each scan form, that's still only five scans.

Griff: Ah, so that would be meeting their, "We'll only scan five", but there's 125 parcels here, but there are some better practices here to help make it easier for sellers and, and postal clerks.

Tyler: Yes, there are, for example, depending on what time of day you take parcels to your local post office or when your USPS driver comes to pick up the day's parcels, you should try to hold off purchasing labels until closer to the time of drop off or pickup. So you have fewer scan forms to give to the driver or clerk.

Griff: Yeah. And if you purchase single labels and this I know, and I think sellers have asked for this a lot, if you are purchasing them as the sales occur, which some sellers do, oh, I made a sale print the label, those single labels are not going to be combined into a scan form. So they're not grouped together. They're not in a scan form. That means those gotta be, if you want to, you're gonna have to have them scanned individually.

Tyler: Exactly.

Griff: It would be nice though. If we had a feature that combined those.

Tyler: It would be an excellent feature, you should put a bug in somebody's ear.

Griff: Yeah, I will. I'll put that. I'll put that in the Product Teams ear. Maybe that'll something will come in the future. I don't know.

Tyler: But for now the best or better practice for purchasing and printing out labels is to arrange your working day based on your expected daily sales volume so that you're printing as many of the days labels in single batches.

Griff: Yeah. And if it's possible, only purchasing labels a few times, or even just once a day and generating as few scan forms as you need to, for that day shipments.

Tyler: That would be ideal. But every seller's preferences will be different depending on their circumstances. But knowing where to find the day's scan forms after you have purchased two or more labels is I hope, helpful.

Griff: Oh, it is. It is. Like I said, I've already got a bookmark and you should bookmark it too. If you're listening. I usually only purchase labels once a day, by the way, Tyler, at least for USPS shipments, I tend to have more UPS shipments these days. And my cutoff is around mid afternoon. And if I make sales after that time, I usually leave them until the next day to purchase and print.

Tyler: I suspect that's what most sellers do. But there are sellers who tend to purchase and print labels for each individual sale right after it happens, which results in a lot of single label purchases, which don't generate or combine into a single scan form.

Griff: Yeah. So that seller will have to ask for scans for each shipment by either the pickup driver or the PO clerk at the post office.

Tyler: Exactly. And we know that single scans of a lot of shipments make PO employees well sometimes a little peeved.

Griff: Oh, I've seen it. When I bring in a big box or a big bag of parcels to the PO to drop off the clerk's face tends to tighten up. And he, or she is immediately in the defensive mode. But then I pull out the scan form and say, just one scan today and they smile and say, thank you and gladly scan it. So it works.

Tyler: Make 'em get ready to have a fight and then just be really excited that it's just single scan. It's very clever.

Griff: I'm sure sellers know exactly what I'm talking about. When you come in with all those parcels and you look at, you see the face.

Tyler: They see you in line waiting to go through and they're trying to figure out which of them in the rotation will have to help you and scan all of those packages.

Griff: And then ha ha scan form. Look, if you don't have a scan form, I found in the past that if you're going to ask any service employee like a clerk at a post office to do extra work, bring in a few donuts in a box they love 'em.

Tyler: It never hurts.

Griff: Well, Tyler, it's always a pleasure. Thanks for shedding some light on this. I hope the folks in the community discussion, listen to the podcast and get this information. Hopefully it'll put their mind at ease.

Tyler: Me too. I hope it helps.

Griff: Thanks again, Tyler, we'll talk to you next week.

Tyler: Absolutely happy to be

Griff: Here. Tyler Langston works for our Global Customer Support Organization and is a regular in the community forums. And we now have him on our segment. That's called, Let's Ask Tyler. We'll put the link to the scan form page in the transcript for episode 183.

Rebecca: You got questions?

Griff: Well we got answers. So there! Hmm. And our first question this week, Rebecca. Well, it's not really a question, but it's really good. And it comes from long time eBay seller, Sherry let's listen in.

Guest Caller: Hi, this is Shari Smith. My eBay user ID is shari_sells and that's SHARI. So I just listened to your eBay for business podcast. And I love hearing you both talk Griff and Brian and I was listening to you talk about making a spreadsheet in the transaction report. And I wanted to share with you that what I do is I use QuickBooks and I have QuickBooks online and I have my bank account linked to QuickBooks. And so my eBay payments to me that I have on daily will be in my Wells Fargo account. And then that post to my QuickBooks and that are, the fees are already taken out. The shipping's already taken out. And so I don't have to do it that other way. So in way, I just want to throw that out there. That that's another way to go. And also just to thank you guys and to tell you how great you are. Thank you so much.

Griff: Well, thank you, Shari. I'll be sure to let Brian know that you called and he'll appreciate it.

Rebecca: And what a timely call too, because Shari, as I talked about it, the beginning of the podcast, we announced recently that we have a partnership with QuickBooks for eBay sellers. And it's great to hear that it's the system that works best for you and it's may work best for our sellers too. So thanks Shari.

Griff: Yeah. And as we mentioned at the top of the episode, we'll put the links for that QuickBook special deal for eBay sellers in the transcript for episode 183, give it a try. It might work for you. Our next question was emailed to podcast@ebay.com by eBay seller, Lori, and she writes: Hello podcast team. I was wondering if you could help me out with filing a claim with USPS lately, whenever I file a claim, they want the item brought in, but unfortunately I never have the item because I'm not gonna have a broken item shipped back to me. And also I don't want to burden the person who just got the damaged item and is already irritated with having to ship something back to me or bring it into the USPS office where they live, also that costs more money, shipping it back on an item I've already lost money on. I was wondering how does anybody get these claims approved? I know I could ask the customer, but that would mean they would have to hang on to the item and take it to the post office. And by the time the claim has been filed, the customer usually does not have the item anymore and if they do, well I just don't feel comfortable asking 'em to go out of their way and take time out of their busy day to go to the post office. Who would want to do that? Good question. How do resellers get their money back from a damaged item then? And why does USPS suddenly ask this? I don't get a lot of damaged items because I ship properly, but occasionally a package gets trashed. I know it's happened to me. Thank you so much. I really look forward to hearing how to deal with this signed Lori. Well,

Rebecca: It's a good question.

Griff: It is a great question, Lori, cuz making a successful claim with USPS as you just discovered, can be really difficult. Each PO location is gonna, it seems like they make different requirements and sometimes a post office will accept a claim with just a printout of photos provided by a buyer for an item that was damaged in transit, but not always some will require the buyers as you have found to bring the damaged item to their destination PO and you're right. Most, any, buyer's not gonna wanna do that. They're not gonna wanna make the track and to the post office. And it's all on your behalf by the way, because hopefully they already got refund. They just want the item intact or a refund, no matter how you handle it, it's gonna certainly be a hassle all around.

Rebecca: Lori, You might wanna consider using the other insurance option, which is Ship Cover at the point of printing out your label. Word is among sellers that it's much easier to file a claim with them. There's a cost, but it's minimal. And for items over certain value, it could really prove well worth the cost. The other thing is sometimes the damage to an item. Isn't something that shows in a photograph, right?

Griff: Yeah. And especially if it's something where the box doesn't look damaged itself. It is tricky. It's very tricky. And Lori did ask me in this, if I knew how other sellers handled USPS insurance claims, I don't. I actually haven't had that conversation with many sellers. So what better time to ask than on a podcast.

Rebecca: If anyone out there has a way of dealing with USPS insurance claims that has worked for you, let Lori and Griffin me know too. Call it in at (888)-723-4630. Or email it to podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: There is an eBay For Business Podcast mug for in it for you.

Rebecca: That's a great point. One last thought about the insurance thing. If the post office is really ought to make things right, adding in break to your business costs and the way that you price the items is another way to approach this. Don't you think?

Griff: Yes. And we can, we'll go over that in a future segment about how you can mitigate costs like breakage and loss for having to refund a parcel like this in a future episode, there's actually a way that I use it. So I don't even bother with insurance. I've had very few items arrive damaged. I had, I think one last year, a CD where it arrived, cracked. And uh, I just refunded them.

Rebecca: But that's not to say that it isn't a worthy effort for some seller. So if you out there know how to make it work for you and maybe for Lori, let us know and we'll cover it. Okay. So our next email comes from eBay seller. Ben who wrote: Hi, Brian and Griff and Rebecca.

Griff: This is the problem with being gone for more than a week. They got Rebecca hooked.

Rebecca: Ben asks, is there a way to see the reason that I only have 4.9 out of five stars on one of my detailed seller ratings star ratings on my eBay feedback? I understand 4.9 out of five is still really good, but it would be nice to know the reason that I did not or exceed my buyer's expectations or at least which listing I received a below five star rating so that I can improve going forward. When I click on the feedback stars, it only gives me the average star rating and no details beyond this that I can find any help would be greatly appreciated as well as getting an eBay mug. Thank you, Ben from Wisconsin.

Griff: Oh, Ben you take me back that old DSR feature Gosh its been around since 2007? 2008? It's been years. Actually years since anyone's ever asked me about them.

Rebecca: All right. Walk us through, how do they work?

Griff: Detailed seller ratings are aggregates of all the ratings. Each buyer has left for things like item description, communication, shipping costs, shipping speed, and they show an average rating based on what buyers left. So for example, a 4.9 would indicate a lot of fives got left and maybe one or two fours, which aren't bad. Some buyers who are satisfied will often leave a four instead of a five. There are buyers that you could hand them the keys to the city. And they're gonna say that was great. You're getting a four. It's just the way it is. It's very subjective. Right? And DSRs have a long history on eBay, but I gotta be honest today. They're kinda like a vestige organ, like an appendix in that they once served sometime in prehistoric eBay times, they actually served as a way for eBay to evaluate seller per performance.

Rebecca: Oh, for eBay. But not for buyers?

Griff: Buyers didn't pay too much attention to 'em. They still don't.

Rebecca: Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

Griff: It's probably something that we should get rid of or change out for something else. But there was a point in time where your DSR is. They counted against your performance. You could lose top rated seller status. If you didn't keep a high DSR. That's not true today. They're not used at all. They were very controversial back then, but not anymore. So Ben, my advice about DSRs is don't sweat. 'em, there's no way to determine why a buyer has left a certain DSR are cause they are anonymous. And as you've discovered, they can't be tied to a specific transaction and we no longer use them for evaluating a seller. And unless your rating is really low for any of the rating types, it's safe to say that buyers don't use them either. They just overlook them. I mean, I have never seen anybody with a DSR rating that was like a two or three.

Rebecca: I respect Ben's point of view about wanting to know and being able to do better and meet and exceed. It sounds like, like you said, he shouldn't sweat it in particular on this.

Griff: Yeah. That's that's true. We got another email. Would you like to read it?

Rebecca: Oh, happy to sure. This is from seller Robert and Robert says: Griff and Brian and Rebecca. I've been doing eBay for quite some time and have always struggled with reports and statements. I do have a quick question. I'm going to listen to this episode again to make sure I didn't miss anything, but I feel that the monthly financial statements are so hard to understand my question. Is there just a simple statement, recap on a monthly basis of total sales fees paid to eBay shipping fees and anything else? I can find no report that I can reconcile to my 1099-K to my monthly sales. Am I missing something? Super simple monthly recaps would make bookkeeping a lot easier. Thanks from Robert and his store is Bobby's Football Pins And Things.

Griff: Great store name. Yeah. Robert you'll probably want to download and use two of the reporting features that actually aren't spreadsheets. These are the monthly statement report and the monthly invoice. These are found both on the Report's Page, under separate tabs. So there's under the payments tab in Seller Hub. And we're gonna put links in the episode, 180 3 transcript that go right to this page.

Rebecca: What's cool about the statements and invoices is you don't to generate them. They're available by month for immediate download and they are available for 24 months.

Griff: And they're concise. They're I think they're what you're looking for. They're just the month's fees. For example, in a recap, you don't have to go through a spreadsheet. They're actually really easy to read, but again, to Rebecca's point, they do roll off into the ether after 24 months. So it good practice to download them on a monthly basis to store on your end. I actually have a calendar reminder set up, Hey, it's the last day of the month, download this months statement. The monthly statement has all the financials for that one month, you can download the full statement for any month to view and keep as a record. The monthly invoice shows the fees charged and final value fees. The 30 cent fixed fee per payment, and any shipping labels purchased for that month. And you can download the detailed download option for the monthly invoice on a monthly basis, and you can save them in your records.

Rebecca: So one note Robert, about your 1099-K you do not need to use that for reconciliation. And in fact, the IRS recommends against this. The purpose of a 1099-K is simply the IRS letting you know, it's notice telling you that they know X amount in funds were processed for you by a payment processor like eBay Payments. Exactly. It's just saying the government sending you a heads up saying, we know about this.

Griff: We know about it, right.

Rebecca: The numbers on your 1099-K and your profit and loss statement do not need to reconcile. Just sort of be in the ballpark for gross sales. However, as we always recommend, you should definitely consult your own tax professional for more detailed guidance when it comes to taxes in your business.

Griff: Yeah. There's such a misunderstanding about the purpose of a 1099-K. It is just a notice, It's a heads up. You don't send it in with your tax report and you don't, it doesn't have to reconcile to the penny cuz it's just gross amounts. It doesn't take into any consideration your valid expenses that you're going to actually declare on your text report. Rebecca, we've answered the next question from another seller in a recent episode. But you know, I think it bears repeating for those who might have had the same question and may have missed our response in a previous episode. So Jason emailed podcast@ebay.com to ask: Here's the question. And it goes to mobile app print. We ship many baseball cards via the eBay standard envelope. However, it does not pop up in the mobile app as an option. Will that be added in the future? We love using the mobile app for our business. And I'm gonna give you the address for a mug as well. Jason his eBay ID is Sweet Tea Pickins.

Rebecca: I love that store name. Store names are just clever. I love it. Yeah. So we asked the Mobile Team about this missing feature and they totally assured us it's on the roadmap for inclusion in the app. We just don't have a date to announce at this point, but when it is expanded to other categories, you can be sure we'll talk about it here on the podcast.

Griff: And it'll also be on the Announcement Board. I hope, cause that's a big when we expand category is big news. Our next question is from eBay seller, Patricia, who noticed that a certain cool feature on the eBay app seems to have disappeared. She says: Hi, not sure if this has been answered already. Why did the option to search with camera on the app go away and is it ever coming back? Thanks.

Rebecca: This feature is called Image Search and it was removed temporarily as you notice in December. And that was because of some compatibility issues, but it will be returning in the near future with some enhancements. Stay tuned to the podcast and we will let everybody know once it's back.

Griff: So that's our questions for this week, Rebecca.

Rebecca: And if you have a question or comment you'd like to share with your fellow eBay sellers, don't delay, make Griff happy and call us on (888)-723-4630.

Griff: Oh yeah. Calls are my favorite part of the podcast. We don't get enough of them. (888)-723-4630 And you can call that hotline any time of the day, any day of the week, leave a question or comment, and we just might put you on the air.

Rebecca: And if you are still not a call on the phone person, you can always email us at podcast@ebay.com, that's podcast@ebay.com.

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

Rebecca: Check the announcement board for UpToDate Seller News.

Griff: Explore the split text to columns option using the custom label field to keep track of, of your custom data. And if you're not using 'em start using scan forms.

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

Griff: On our next episode, with the upcoming rate increases for USPS services that were announced back in January, we're gonna take a closer look at the others services as possible alternatives that you can test.

Rebecca: And of course we will address your questions as well. And we'd like to, again, thank Tyler for joining us this week.

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

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The eBay for Business podcast is published every Tuesday morning and is presented by eBay, Libsyn and Podcast411.

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