Ep 215 || A Conversation with Paul & Faith Vanik of My Reseller Genie

[podcast_team]

The Vaniks share how and why they built their seller analytics and bookkeeping app, My Reseller Genie and Griff and Brian answer questions about combining shipments and when a seller is not able to offer combined purchases at checkout.

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Brian: This week we'll explore an online inventory and business tool that could be exactly what you need to track and manage your business on eBay.

Griff: Also, this week we have two questions. One about printing multiple labels for a single sale and how discounts and combined invoices work.

Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff, and this is the eBay for Business Podcast, your source for the information and we hope the inspiration to help you start manage and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. This is episode 215

Brian: Every week it just goes up a number, doesn't it?

Griff: Oh, well that's how numbers work, right?

Brian: Oh, that's right. Counting.

Griff: I think you can panic if we say the episode numbers are going down. Cause time, I don't know if you know physics, but time does point in one direction. For what we know.

Brian: I'm hoping to reverse it someday, but I haven't figured out how.

Griff: On the quantum level, you know, on the field level there could be. It's iffy.

Brian: Yeah. Now you're going over my head.

Griff: Time is a construct created by clock companies to make a profit.

Brian: I thought it was for the train so they would not smash into each other.

Griff: Well, that too, I suppose, right? We've just wasted some of our time. How was your week?

Brian: It was a good week.

Griff: You've been planning something with our CEO.

Brian: Yeah, Site visits coming up and that's always fun to get out and see customers and get others in the company to see customers in their space, not just here in the office or over a Zoom call, like in real life. IRL.

Griff: It's been a while since we've had those. I know John Donahoe, when he was CEO, he loved going to visit sellers in their work.

Brian: I think, and Jamie's done a few and so I think he's trying to get others out as well.

Griff: Oh good. Well that's nice to see. Starting up again.

Brian: It is Covid is further behind us and we'll knock on plexiglass or whatever this is.

Griff: What is this stuff? It's formica.

Brian: No, but otherwise it was a good week. I was thinking about one of our sellers as I was walking the dog this week.

Griff: Who?

Brian: Well, one of our friends.

Griff: Who's that?

Brian: Joe DeMarco is known as Hubcap Joe is on the site. And I'm walking Riley, I went to the post office as I walk in Riley and I normally don't do that. I just go around the park and on the way to the post office I'm walking and to my right, don't tell me there's a hubcap.

Griff: Oh dear.

Brian: And so I took a picture of it and I thought, okay, I wonder what it's worth. And then, so it's going through my head, I'm thinking, Okay, this is what Joe, And then I'm thinking, okay, should I pick it up and take it away or bring it home. So I look it up and I, I see it was a Fiat 500 hubcap.

Griff: Old or new?

Brian: Um, it was new but it looked like someone must have run up against the side cuz part of it was scratched up. But I took a picture of it and then I do a quick search on eBay and $124 for brand new ones. And I'm thinking, well this maybe it's like worth 40 or 50. But then I did a quick search and the used ones were around 20. And so I decided, I'm just gonna leave it. I'm not gonna carry it home with me on my walk. And then the next day I'm walking the dog and I thought, I'm gonna walk by and see if it's still there because if it's there I'm gonna pick it up and bring it home.

Griff: Oh, I'm on the edge of my seat.

Brian: It wasn't there.

Griff: Course it wasn't.

Brian: But I've decided the next one I'm just picking it up and bringing it home and I'm gonna try and sell a hubcap. If Joe can sell him, I could try and sell one.

Griff: Oh no, Brian's gonna leave eBay to become a hubcap seller on the west coast.

Brian: And I definitely will not do that. But I bet Joe would probably get more than the 30 or 40 bucks that I saw used because I know that he cleans his up, you know, takes good pictures and everything. So he'll probably say, Brian, you idiot, you just left $80 on the on the ground.

Griff: I don't think he'll call you an idiot. He'll just say, You may wanna rethink that in the future there, Brian.

Brian: Exactly. But it was one of those talk about free inventory. That's free inventory, no cost. All I would've had to do was carry it the half a mile back to my house.

Griff: I always wondered, you know, people leaving there because the owner might come back looking for it. Yeah. Could have been the owner who came back and found it and scooped it up.

Brian: Yeah, I'll think that I left it there for the owner to get it back.

Griff: Any news this week, Brian?

Brian: Actually there's no news to report this week.

Griff: Well, except that episode two of the new eBay seller Spotlight with Georgea Mpampanis. It's now live and ready for your consumption.

Brian: Wait. I thought the new episodes were supposed to drop on the third Wednesday of the month.

Griff: Yeah, they are and they will.

Brian: So why are two released within a week of each other?

Griff: It's to generate interest. Our good friend at Libsyn Rob, who knows the podcast world suggested we put out the first two episodes together and I can see the logic behind that. So the first two went out within a week, but the third one will come out on the third Wednesday of November.

Brian: Cool.

Griff: Yeah, so get to know Georgia. She's a delight. Just search for eBay Seller Spotlight. It'll come right up. And if you're on the community pages now we have revamped the entire navigation. You'll see a link on the top that says podcasts plural and you can select the eBay for business or the eBay Seller Spotlight.

Brian: So there was some news.

Griff: Well, it's better than nothing.

Brian: Great.

Griff: Well this week Brian, we have a segment coming right up that we recorded during our day in Vegas last month at the reseller remix. Rebecca and I talked with a couple named Paul and Faith Vanik and we talked about their accounting and analytics solution for resellers.

Brian: That's fantastic.

Griff: So we'll listen to that. Let's do that now.

Griff: Well here we are, Rebecca in Las Vegas.

Rebecca: Las Vegas, Griff. Oh it's so exciting to be on the road again.

Griff: Where are we? What are we doing?

Rebecca: We are the Boss Reseller remix, which is a seller conference held annually here in Las Vegas, meeting many sellers including...

Griff: Well right now we're gonna meet Paul and Faith Vanik. They do sell on eBay but they actually have a very interesting business. And when we were looking for people to come upstairs to our podcast room and I think you can hear applause in the background right now. Cause there's a session going on. They sounded perfect. So they agreed to come on. It's a great opportunity also to promote your business. Paul and Faith, welcome to the podcast.

Faith: Thank you so much.

Paul: Thanks. Excited to be here.

Faith: So tell us a little bit about Paul, about the business.

Paul: We're called My Reseller Genie and we are accounting software for resellers think kinda like QuickBooks, but the only people we care about are resellers.

Griff: That is the name of it, right? .

Paul: Yeah, that's the name. So we started out Faith, was a full-time reseller and I was working in corporate accounting and her first tax season was, it was tough.

Faith: A nightmare. To put it succinctly why it was a nightmare because I didn't know what numbers I should be tracking. And it was just very, very stressful because even though on the selling platforms that I was at. They kind of give you a breakdown of some things. I wasn't keeping track of it, I wasn't keeping a record and I didn't even know where to begin at the time.

Griff: Yeah. So like one of the difficulties that a lot of smaller sellers have starting out is managing their inventory. Especially when you're smaller, it's a great opportunity to start off using the accrual inventory method, which basically means that you don't record the expense for the item until you sell it. So that's great cause it matches your costs up with your revenues, which gives you a better insight into your business profitability. But it's tough because if you're not an accountant, you don't really know how to track that stuff. So you get to the end of the year and you're filling out your tax forms and it's like, it won't let you just put in cost of good sold. It says what's your beginning inventory balance? What's your purchases, what's your ending inventory balance? And then you use those numbers to calculate your cost of goods and it just sounds like voodoo. So we were like, you know, this doesn't have to be hard. We just need to give people a template that they fill out. Like put all your information in here and then we'll do the calculations for you. That was kind of our initial problem that we wanted to solve. We wanted to make accrual inventory accounting easy. And we started off as a spreadsheet, really fancy spreadsheet and we had some good success with it.

Griff: When you talk about success, you're just talking about the two of you for your business or were you already sharing this?

Paul: When Faith started off her first tax season, I made her a basic spreadsheet. Fast forward a couple years and Covid 19 hit, you know, a lot of companies got hit really hard and they had to make some tough decisions. I was working in corporate accounting and we ended up laying off a bunch of people in our company. Fortunately I kept my job, but the need for my services decreased a bit. So hours, you know, hours and pay rates got cut and I was looking for ways to supplement my income. Faith is like, you know, I think this could be an opportunity for us to take what you made me and make it better so it can serve other people.

Faith: I will never forget that moment. I was standing in my kitchen, my husband was working at the table. He was trying to fill out job applications and you know, just trying to find more work. And at that time I, you know, I was really involved in the reselling community. I was on a lot of Facebook groups with resellers and I just kept hearing the same thing, which was, numbers scare me. I don't know how to account for my reselling business. And basically I'm just either not gonna do it or I'm gonna try and it's just gonna be like the worst three months of my life. I looked at Paul and I was like, Paul, what you made me was so helpful for me. I think that a lot of people need this. That like right around Covid was when he actually began to program in Excel. VBA, right? That's what you used?

Griff: Visual basic. The old days.

Faith: Right.

Griff: It's so nice to know someone still uses it.

Brian: Oh yeah. In corporate accounting and finance, we love VBA.

Griff: Cause it's consistent over the years, it never changes.

Faith: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And he created a gorgeous spreadsheet. It was automated, Beautiful to look at, easy to use. We sold over 500 copies of that to the reselling community. Five star reviews from our users. But we very quickly came to realize that in order to help more resellers, we really had to go web based.

Rebecca: Yeah. So I definitely agree that that accounting piece of it, tracking your numbers, it, it does feel like for a heavy lift for people who are starting their business. When you think about your software, the way that it works for sellers, is it just, you know, you plug numbers in? Or are you actually trying to educate your customer and help them understand? You threw around some terminology that probably some of our listeners don't even understand what it is. And so I'm wondering if you have an educational approach as well as just we'll spit out the right answer at the end.

Paul: Yeah. That's really important to us. Cuz you're absolutely right. We're really passionate about customer support and so we listen very carefully to the questions that people ask us. And we did find that we'd get a lot of questions like, What am I supposed to put here? Like even just the name of the field, you know, would sometimes be a point of confusion. And so what we've done in our software is there's little info tool tips everywhere. So like you run a profit and loss report and we've got an info tool tip that's like two paragraphs long explaining like what a profit and loss report is and why it's broken up this way and kind of how you can use it to help analyze your business. We're really passionate about educating people. In addition to just providing somewhere that you can put your numbers.

Faith: On top of that, we have a YouTube channel. Our YouTube tutorials are very, very detailed. They go through everything. We've even done an interview with a reseller CPA. So she's been a, a corporate accountant or no CPA for what, 30 years?

Paul: A long time helping small businesses and resellers.

Faith: Yes. Small businesses and she also resells herself. And so we actually brought her on our channel, I think this was back in March and we did a Q and A with her. So we got all these, you know, questions from our users, you know, we're like, Okay, what what would you like to hear about? And um, that was just fantastic. It was really educational. She is very, very good at teaching some of these terms as well. So yeah, we're trying to do everything that we can to educate as well as give people a great tool.

Griff: So anyone listening now who's going, Yes, yes, this is gonna save my life, wants to know what the YouTube channel is, We should repeat the business name, which is?

Faith: My Reseller Genie.

Griff: I assume that the YouTube channel is called the same?

Faith: Yes. It is. Instagram and Facebook as well.

Griff: Well, I subscribe to a lot of YouTube channels, so I have something to watch at night before I fall asleep. I'm gonna put you on my list. We don't get to answer questions about taxes. It's just a corporate thing when you have a company and you're kind of, we're like spokespeople right now. We're not really allowed to do that. So it's wonderful to have people who can help with that.

Rebecca: Yeah. And have a place to send people to, to get that information. Speaking of eBay, you had experience selling. How did that help you? Did that translate into building this other business? And what learnings were you able to take from knowing how to sell on eBay and run a business there into creating a whole new secondary business.

Faith: I'm trying to, to think of a way to succinctly answer that because it's one of those things that though that, you know, like you're picking up things from your own experience and selling. You know, like you're going to the thrift store every day or every week or whatever, and...

Griff: I wanna explore this link.

Faith: No, no, no. He's actually a really good sport. I just feel badly though because he has to wait to eat dinner really, really late because I'm out thrifting. Um, anyway, so, no. So, you know, you're gathering information, you know, when, when you're at the thrift store and you're thinking, Okay, like I've gotta be keeping all my receipts. I have to be tracking all of my cost of goods. I have to be knowing, you know, how much I'm spending for each item. What is my mileage, what's my sourcing all that. But then also, like I was saying earlier, and that is just engaging with other people in the reselling community. And you know, like you're picking up on all of these fears that they have and you know, just trying to figure out, okay, like what do they need in order to have a really, really good accounting software. So we've kind of taken, I don't know, kind of, what's the word? Just taken all of that information and that's kind of what we've been going off of in order to kind of help us make this software. I don't know if that answers your question.

Rebecca: It's, is it okay if we take another stab at it? Cause it's slight nuance.

Faith: Sure. Sure.

Rebecca: So you were running a selling business on eBay and you knew how to run that business. So I'm wondering what business lessons you took from your own business experience selling Yes. And how that has translated into building a new and different business.

Griff: But their answer before was pretty good. So I'm just gonna leave this. I'm not gonna edit anything about this.

Paul: Well, I mean she, so she won't brag on herself, so I'm, I'm gonna do it. I think something that she learned really well as a reseller was just connecting and networking. And one of the great things about the reselling community is just how tightly net people are. Since everyone's dispersed, it's like even more important to use social media to connect and like, if you can find some local meetups to go to and have that personal interaction is really helpful. Cause I mean, working on your own is tough. I'd say being a reseller, getting that experience with networking and making connections with people is huge. Also, you know, the social media aspect of it, social media is really big and she handles all of our social media and I think she does a really good job. And yeah, starting off as a reseller, she got a lot of experience with that. And, you know, thinking about how do I creatively tell people about my day or talk about what I'm doing in a way that's, you know, maybe valuable and entertaining.

Faith: One thing that I would tag on to that is customer support, and just customer service overall. One thing that I took and I do take very seriously in my reselling business, and just full disclosure, I don't have as much time right now to resell as I would like.

Griff: So that was gonna be my next question. We were having dinner with a couple that are here at the Remix and they were talking about how their actual social media presence, and especially on YouTube, which has now become a big part of their income stream as it becomes more successful kind of eats into the whole core business. But the quandary is you can't do the YouTube without the content. So they have to keep selling and now it's become a big balancing act. It was a fascinating conversation. Is this the same thing for you?

Faith: Absolutely. Yeah. Although right now, because we're such a small team with, with my Reseller Genie, I'd say definitely the majority of my time is being spent on the business. But I keep my closets open, I make sales. But what I was saying about customer support is that I learned like very early on, people want to be communicated to, and whether or not they respond, like they don't have to respond, they don't owe me that, but like, I need to be, you know, the big person here and I need to be letting them know.

Rebecca: You just talked about customer service, You know, at eBay we're really all about feedback. We love listening to our customers. Have you gotten feedback about your product and has it been a part of how you've developed it over time?

Paul: A huge part. Like I said, we started as a spreadsheet and even with the spreadsheet we, like, we started with beta testers. So like I think we had 40, 50 beta testers for the spreadsheet. And we, we really listened to that to help develop and, and grow that. And then when we moved into building the web app, we started that in 2021. We had our MVP out in March, and then we were beta testing until November. And based on that feedback, we completely overhauled what we had. We were like, we need to build this a bit differently cuz it's just not working for people. And then since that time, we've been building according to user demand. So like a big thing that happened earlier this year is when GoDaddy Bookkeeping went out of business, a lot of sellers were like, Shoot, you know, I have a month to find a new accounting software.

Faith: Yeah. It was horrible.

Paul: We got a bunch of people who came from there. And I mentioned earlier the initial problem we wanted to solve was making accrual inventory accounting easy. And the thing is...

Faith: Can you explain that really? Is that okay if you explain that?

Griff: Yeah, I was gonna ask about the difference between cash and accrual and there's a recent change. The IRS has opened up the number of the type of sellers who can use cash. Yeah.

Rebecca: Let's do some definitions of key terms. I like that.

Paul: Yeah. So accrual inventory accounting means that you don't record the expense for the inventory until it sells. Cash Inventory accounting is when you record the expense as soon as you buy it.

Rebecca: Record where?

Paul: In your books.

Rebecca: Okay. But you should still be saving like receipts and those sorts of pieces of data.

Griff: An audit is an audit.

Rebecca: Well, I mean, I think for some sellers that that level of granularity, it's probably needed. Save your receipts from Goodwill folks. Right?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. You want to have those records to back it up. So then a lot of the people were coming and they were like, I use cash accounting and it's kind of confusing to use cash accounting in your software the way it is. And so we developed a lot of stuff so that now whether you're cash or accrual it's easy to use. It's seamless. and we're actually, we're working on trying to get that message out there because, you know, some people signed up initially and they were like, this isn't great for cash. And so, you know, they went looking elsewhere. And so if they haven't found a solution and you're listening now come back, check us out. We have pushed a lot of updates.

Faith: Yeah. Really, really funny story. We were on our first day of vacation and we got the news about GoDaddy and so we literally spent our entire vacation from sunup until sundown just like trying to, you know, help with customer questions. And it was really, really exciting. I mean, it was heartbreaking because we were getting just hundreds of messages from people and they were freaking out. They're like, What do I do? And so, you know, we were happy to help them, but it was just a really, really funny thing. So yeah, wild time.

Griff: Thinking about GoDaddy and I was a customer, theirs for years and before then, when it was outright, one of the things I kept waiting for them to do, which they never did, it was obvious that GoDaddy kind of bought it and then didn't really care about it. Was a phone app. Is that on your horizon?

Paul: Yeah, it's absolutely on our horizon. Just like with any software, there's always so many directions that you can grow. We've talked to some customers and heard their feedback about what they'd like to see. And I think it doesn't need to be, you know, as full blown as the web app. At least initially. Like people they want a way that they can record their mileage, easy record expenses, maybe look up inventory items.

Faith: Yeah. Or even re record a, a random sale even. Like on the go.

Griff: You mean a purchase?

Faith: Either one. So you know, like you're out at Goodwill and you pick up a pair of shoes or something, you can just enter that in really quick. Or if you get a sale then and there. We have a lot of automation built in, but for other platforms it's gonna be a little bit more manual.

Griff: We should mention that you're, this is a multi-platform service. We kinda not make sense. I mean as much as we're eBay aficionados, we work for eBay, my whole life has been eBay. But if you're a seller, most sellers are, are spread out horizontally. And you want an app that's gonna work with 'em all.

Faith: Yes. Right. So yeah, we're actually, um, integrated now with eBay which we are really excited about. So we pull in eBay sellers information every 24 hours. So that's all automated. Our other automated piece is big in PayPal integration, so all of your expenses are brought in, but we're compatible with any and all selling platforms. And when I say platform, I mean even if you sell a blouse to your neighbor across the street, you can enter, you know, neighbors as a platform. Because you know, the goal of of good accounting is to have all of your numbers in one place. And that was one of the things sellers, we've even had people come up here, um, at the Boss conference and they're like, I have my numbers in three different places. I need it all in one place. And so my Reseller Genie allows you to have all those numbers in one place.

Rebecca: Did you have any experience with web development and product management before you started building?

Griff: Sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?

Rebecca: Yeah, it does. .

Paul: Yeah. So I, I worked in corporate accounting and kind of the way that I made a name for myself was I, I taught myself to code in VBA and I was able to automate a ton of stuff. That was my background in coding. I've done a little bootcamp class in web development just to get more of a sense for how that works. But our product development is actually done by web developers. Cause I was like, I could probably put something together that would work, but I want a professional to build this. I don't want people to be trusting their accounting in me learning to web develop.

Griff: Sounds like something I would do. .

Paul: We hire professional developers to make sure that it's built right. But then in terms of the actual product design and saying this is how this needs to work, that's where I fit in.

Rebecca: So what's next for you guys? What's on the horizon besides the mobile app?

Paul: Automation is key. Like the more we can integrate with selling platforms and make it so that people need to put in less time with their manual entry, I think the better we're gonna serve everyone. That's kind of like the big picture thing and then smaller picture, like there's, there's lots of miscellaneous features that users submit. We've got a board where we put everything that people submit.

Faith: Our development, I wanna say is 95% customer feedback driven.

Griff: Wow.

Paul: Yeah.

Faith: I'm a seller. Right. But I don't know everything. I don't know, you know, everything that everybody else wants and you obviously we can't do everything that is asked of us, but we take whatever the majority is and then we prioritize that and we love doing this.

Griff: Gee, I wonder who else does that.

Faith: Yeah. And it's really gratifying to do it that way, you know, cuz we wanna make something that's making the majority happy.

Griff: Well, I wanna tell everyone that we've been talking with Paul and Faith Vanik. Their business is called My Reseller Genie. It's a product that you can purchase from their website or subscribe to, it is a subscription. At MyResellerGenie.com. We'll put a link to that website and their YouTube channel in our episode summary overview for this particular episode.

Rebecca: Now one last question that we're gonna ask everyone at the end. What's your piece of advice for other sellers who are listening?

Paul: Don't procrastinate.

Rebecca: I like that one.

Paul: It is hard advice. It's hard advice, but, you know, I think it's better to get the hard advice now than wait until it all like mounts up and buries you. So yeah, don't procrastinate. That's my best piece of advice.

Faith: Yeah. Mine would be to stay consistent, but consistent in the way that you need to be consistent because we're all different. You know, we're all wired differently. My husband Paul's consistency looks a lot different than mine. So, you know, if that means, you know, you're entering, like you're keeping up your books once a week or maybe that's once a day. Like whatever you need or, you know, you're listing three times a week or once a week and you're listing a lot of items at once. Like be consistent and figure out what that looks like for you though and then stick with it. Cuz that's gonna go a really, really long way. Or in social media especially, consistency is key.

Rebecca: Great. Thank you.

Griff: We've been talking with Paul and Faith Vanik. Their business is called My Reseller Genie. It's a product that you can purchase from their website or subscribe to, is it a subscription at myresellergenie.com. We'll put a link to that website and their YouTube channel in our episode summary overview for this particular episode. And so thank you and continued success.

Paul: Thank you so much.

Faith: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: We as always got answers. Our first question, Brian is from eBay seller Robert who sent the following email to podcast@ebay.com and he starts off with riddle me this.

Brian: Oh, I like it already.

Griff: Yeah. I'm immediately a Batman. Why can't my buyers make multiple purchases on eBay motors? They used to be able to buy but not pay for the items and then request a total from the seller. I gladly combine shipping on multiple items, but now they can't request a total and I can't even send an invoice. The buyer must pay for each item individually and then I have to refund the excess shipping. Makes no sense. It's been going on for two years now. It's all over the forums, but eBay refuses to do anything about it. Who came up with this plan? I've spoken to phone reps countless times. No one has an answer. Sincerely. A seller since 2002, Robert.

Brian: Well Robert, the only reason a buyer would have for requesting a total is to receive a discount.

Griff: That is correct.

Brian: Yeah. It appears all of your current listings are already offering a 20% discount when a seller is offering a discount. Buyers are not able to request a total for those items.

Griff: That's true. And that was set up by the Promotions team is deliberate so that you're not confusing a buyer that's, you know, you're already offering 20% discount. It looks like he's got a markdown event happening in all of his listings it says 20% discount. So you're already providing them a discount for the item. You can't because of promotions, you can't provide a second discount on top of that, including discounted shipping. So Robert, I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything, you know, amiss. So I went in as a buyer and I was able to add six of your listings to my eBay shopping cart and though I didn't purchase them, I would've been able to pay for them with one payment. But because, as Brian just said your listings are all currently showing a promotions discount and again I assume it's a markdown event. The option for requesting a total from you when the buyer sees it on the checkout page, it's disabled, it's grayed out.

Brian: If you wanna offer a shipping discount on top of your 20% discount, you would need to issue the buyer a partial refund for shipping after the buyer submits payment.

Griff: And that's what he's been doing.

Brian: You can send partial refunds for any order in the order's view of Seller Hub. One way to issue shipping refunds is to issue a prorated partial refund for each individual order by clicking the send refund link for each order.

Griff: Right. Or you could just click one order. Right. Right. And just give them, just send them the entire amount as a refund for the shipping. You can do either one. So you don't have to do it for each, but you've got that option. Yeah. So it's not a site bug, it's a deliberate design. There is a logic and a reason behind it and hopefully, I don't know what forums you were talking about Robert, but feel free to take this response and share it with your fellow sellers.

Brian: I'm gonna hop on the eBay community forums at community.ebay.com cuz I wonder if that's what he is referencing. Yeah, I'm gonna do a search.

Griff: Okay. Yeah, our next question was also sent to podcast@ebay.com. This time by eBay seller Patricia, who has sent questions before. And before I read this question I have to tell you, this is gonna be a little bit controversial and I had to think about how to word this because it kind of reflects a little poorly on our beloved company. But here, let's read what Patricia said. Hi Brian and Griff. I put Brian first so he feels good.

Brian: Thank you Patricia. I appreciate it.

Griff: I got a problem. I hope you two can help with or send up the ladder for a review. It has to do with times when an individual buyer purchases two or more items from a seller that pays for each item separately rather than putting him in the cart or carting and doing one checkout. And then that buyer wants the seller to combine shipping. This happened to me at least three times in the last 90 days. The first time it happened, I contacted eBay for Business on Instagram and asked how to handle the need for tracking numbers for two items paid for separately but shipped in one package. Now this is where it gets controversial. The helpful rep told me to create and upload a dummy tracking number for one of the two items and assign the actual tracking number to the outgoing package. I also issued the buyer a refund for excessive shipping fees. This worked, I shipped the combined orders and moved on. But today I learned that eBay noted that the dummy tracking number was never scanned by the carrier. And I found as a result my metrics were dinged.

Brian: They would be.

Griff: Yep. Patricia says, if this happens often enough, a Top Rated seller as I am could lose their top rating simply by doing what we are instructed to do to serve our buyers. This does not seem right or fair and I believe there must be a better way to handle these situations other than refusing a buyer's reasonable request to combine shipping. Am I missing something? Is there another way? Love your podcast and always learn from you and your guest. Patricia Heir Supply on eBay. H e i r s u p p l y

Brian: I like that. It's funny, it's creative.

Griff: Heir supply, like you know, heirlooms pretty good. Oh, Patricia, Patricia, Patricia. First off, I am really sorry that the rep gave you that bad information and it was bad information. We have asked the customer support team to coach the rep in question

Brian: And I know our reps mean well in those situations and they do provide excellent information 99% of the time. But sometimes the wrong advice is given.

Griff: They're only human. Yes. Yeah. So it happens.

Brian: In this case the wrong advice was given.

Griff: Absolutely. But never under any circumstance should you or any seller actually make up a dummy tracking number. It's a very, very risky strategy as you have discovered or at least partially discovered.

Brian: And Patricia, you can always combine sales from the same buyer at your discretion using the bulk label flow. You can access this flow by checking the box for two or more orders awaiting shipment as opposed to printing a label for each order separately.

Griff: Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Brian: During the bulk label flow, you'll be prompted to combine shipments from the same buyer. If you select this option, you can edit the size and weight of the box prior to printing out a single label. I use this option all the time.

Griff: I do too. It in fact, you'll find that if you're using the bulk label process, and again, it's very easy to do so when you go to print a label on the orders page, just check more than one box. And then print labels, there's a prompt on the top. If you have two or more purchases from the same buyer, it'll say, do you want to combine these? You can combine them or you can let them stay separate. And keep in mind that when you combine shipments in the bulk label flow this way Patricia, the system will generate one single tracking number and it will apply it to each of the single orders of the combined shipping package. So again, if you need to change, if you do this combining, you'll have the ability to change the box size and the weight if that needs to be adjusted. And then when it comes to shipping refunds, partial refunds for discounting the shipping, you can always issue a partial refund. It's a separate process. You just go to the orders page, find the item or items you usually can just use one item and then just issue a partial refund for that based on how much you're giving for the shipping.

Brian: For combining the shipping.

Griff: Yeah. It's why I'm gonna tell you, that's why a lot of sellers when they can, will, will use quote unquote free shipping cuz they've folded the cost of shipping into the price of the item. Now you've taken discounts off the table. The only thing you have to worry about if you wanna offer discounts is the the ones that are, you know, for, you're gonna buy three or more. You're gonna get 20% off or whatever. And this is for Robert and for Patricia and any other seller that what's great about promotions is it's all pre-payment. So the buyer doesn't have to get into this. It's a particular eBay legacy old school from eBay 1.0 where there was this back and forth negotiation for getting a price after someone has agreed to purchase nowhere online can you do that? It is very inefficient.

Brian: And like you said, as under the marketing tab in Seller Hub setting up promotions avoids this back and forth.

Griff: And it's really important to avoid it if you can because it's, it increases the efficiency of a transaction without having to bog it down with the friction of a back and forth. Well will you combine, well I'll combine, well will I get a discount on shipping? Well, let me see, how about this much? I don't know what about that much.

Brian: Or even after you've agreed and the package arrived and back in the day when the price of the shipping was included in that label that was stuck on the package and it was 25 cents more than the buyer paid 25 cent more than what it was costing. That often would generate an email to the seller, you overcharged me.

Griff: You're making money on shipping. Well what's cool is you can also take that out of the equation

Brian: Yes you can now.

Griff: But just don't print the value. You know, in defense of sellers. Sellers, we always say to sellers, Hey, you should do what it takes to make your customer happy. There is line. You're running a business. If you need to charge X for shipping, don't apologize for it. Right? It's your decision should you want to give a discount or you know, a partial refund. But don't feel guilty about saying, No, I can't do that. I'm running a business and the prices are as shown. There are very few places, if any, outside of eBay. I guess this is the marketplaces where you can do this, where you can like get into this back and forth negotiation about your business costs.

Brian: And like you said, you can avoid all that back and forth by setting it up in advance with multi purchase discounts, things like that. Buy one, get one free, all that.

Griff: These two questions, the one from Robert and the one from Patricia kind of touch on the same theme, different facets about combining shipping and providing discounts. We only have two questions this week.

Brian: Good questions though.

Griff: I have a third question that I haven't got all the feedback I need back from the Shipping team. So we're gonna hold it for next week.

Brian: Maybe a little teaser onto the subject?

Griff: Yeah, I can give you a teaser. It's an eBay limitation, which, not sure why it is in place, but it has to do with, if you have multiple items in a single listing where someone's buying multiple items and they're big items, right? And they purchase a certain number but you have to ship them separately, there's no way you can combine them into it. And the one we're gonna use, there are, well I'll give it away, it's bar stools, but eBay has a limitation where you can't print more than four extra labels. So if you had six bar stools, you can't print out that sixth label. So we're gonna address that once I've got all the information back from the Shipping team. And then what about refunds? If somebody wants to return two of them? And that's complicated too.

Brian: So that's a multilayered question.

Griff: And the Shipping team has sent me some information so far and it's just, I have to parse it and get it ready for next week. I thought we'd hold it off. So there's a little preview of coming attractions.

Brian: Tune in for bar tools next week.

Griff: Anyway, that's our questions Brian.

Brian: Well maybe you have a question about selling on eBay. If so, don't hesitate. Call us on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: Yeah we're paying for that voice line. Please start using it. (888) 723-4630. Call that hotline any time of the day, any day of the week. Leave a question or a comment and if it's appropriate, we're gonna put it on the next episode.

Brian: If you're not a call on the phone person, you can always email us@podcastebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: And now, as we do every week, it's time for your three point podcast checklist.

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

Griff: You know, as the end of this is number two, as the end of the year approach, this is a good time to take stock on how you keep business and inventory records and maybe consider a new service format, a new format or a new method for tracking your business. We'll post links to the best available options out there for eBay sellers, including a link to our guest this week.

Brian: Paul and Faith.

Griff: Paul and Faith from My Reseller Genie.

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

Griff: On our next episode, we'll have part one of a two-part interview featuring a real teenage entrepreneur. And boy is he amazing. And part two will be the parents that got him started.

Brian: Oh, very interesting.

Griff: Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

Brian: That'll be a fun one as well. We'd like to again, thank our guests this week. Paul and Faith Vanik of My Reseller Genie.

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

[bluewate-61]

This was a fun and highly valuable podcast for all sellers as we close out the last quarter selling year. The solutions for pulling all your sales and purchases together in an understandable format are excellent. Thank you for your time sharing and assisting , so we may go forward to focus on supplying quality for the buyers.

[sam278_7]

superb

[hubcapjoes]

Guys, thanks for the shout out early on. FYI I will buy as many Fiat 500™ hubcaps as you can get. I have none in my brick and mortar store and I have several customers wanting them.  Rock on guys! 

Joe DeMarco, eBay seller hubcapjoes