Sales Worth Celebrating

One of the hottest new ways to sell on eBay arrived in April with the launch of eBay Express. With its clean, easy-to-navigate design, eBay Express allows buyers to purchase gifts faster and easier. "This site was built for the convenience shopper who is looking to buy right away," explains Carolyn Pollock, eBay's senior manager of merchandising and creative marketing. "We think this will be a great place [for shoppers] to go for gift giving."

The new eBay Express mirrors more traditional online retailers; eBay hopes it will attract new groups of consumers who are accustomed to shopping online for the holidays but may not have had eBay as their top-of-mind place to buy new merchandise.

Opting in to eBay Express is simple--in fact, qualifying sellers will automatically have their listings shown within eBay Express. "Promoting the Fixed-Price items on the eBay Express site will enable us to extend the holiday shopping season on eBay," Pollock explains. "So while the typical season goes from mid-November to mid-December, [Express] will extend it a lot closer to Christmas Day."

Another benefit to holiday sellers: eBay plans all sorts of special marketing support during the holiday season. eBay's Merchandising Calendar (http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/calendar.html), for instance, shows which products and cat-egories will be promoted on eBay's home page each week through December. And attention all toy sellers: eBay's Toy Finder allows shoppers to search for toy gift ideas by age and product type, and also by what's hot.

To widen the circle of potential buyers, eBay is planning to continue its successful "It" campaign on TV and online for both eBay and eBay Express. And uncertain gift-givers will appreciate the Holiday Gift Guide, which will launch in November and give buyers plenty of gift ideas.

The PowerUp newsletter provides sellers with monthly e-mail notifications of free listing days, feature discounts, top sellers and hot lists. Also, make sure you check the Workshop Calendar (http://pages.ebay.com/community/workshopcalendar/current.html) for valuable information on everything from improving your search engine rankings to shipping across the border. Many of the topics are marketing-related, especially as the holidays draw near.

Of course, eBay's vast and detailed data on what's selling and for how much is what most sellers look at when deciding what they are going to offer. An important tool in your arsenal for studying buying habits is eBay's "Hot List," which is available on Seller Central at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html. The report offers an easy way for sellers to instantly see which products within each category have been recent hot sellers.

Another way to get a quick snapshot of eBay's marketplace dynamics is through eBay Pulse, which provides a daily rundown of the most popular searches, products and stores, as well as the most-watched items in every category. You may note, for example, that sales of combination DVD/VHS players are slowing down, while sales of DVD-only players are picking up. This information can help you adjust your inventory in time for holiday shoppers.

'Tis the Season for Sales
The holidays are both good news and bad news for entrepreneurs: More people are shopping online at this time of year, but more sites are clamoring for their business. Making your product stand out and making it as easy to buy as possible are the keys to holiday success.

"The [eBay] marketplace is so competitive," says Phil Dunn, co-author of 7 Essential Steps to eBay Marketing and an online marketing consultant. "Chances are someone else is selling exactly what you are. You need to keep an edge."

That edge can be as simple as investing in the next level of eBay options, as Jin did by upgrading his Store and adding subtitles. Or it could be capitalizing on the numerous shopping comparison sites that become the strategic holiday shopper's way of finding desired items at the best prices.

There are many comparison sites available to shoppers, and they vary according to their search param-eters and the number of stores included in searches. Shoppers trust these sites to help them find not only the best prices, but also the retailers with the best customer service, which is why it's important for your products and site to be included. And although fewer shoppers use comparison sites than general search engines during the holidays--8 percent vs. 64 percent, according to Jupitermedia Corp.--buyers who use comparison sites are highly motivated and much more likely to make a purchase.

If you want to tap into comparison sites, the easiest place to start is Shopping.com, which is not only one of the largest sites of its kind, but is also an eBay company. That means your listings are easily transferable--all you need to do is set up a merchant account that deducts a preset amount for each click-through to your eBay site. But there are many other sites to consider, such as Froogle.com, NexTag.com and PriceGrabber.com. Some will list your products for free; others charge a sliding scale rate based on how high your listing appears in search results.

Before you can effectively reach customers, though, it's important to know who they are. Are they mostly repeat buyers or newcomers? Thirty-something new fathers or empty nesters? Bargain hunters or affluent prestige seekers? Getting a picture of who your customers are will help you target them more effectively.

According to Meg Sloan, eBay's director of consumer research, the most relevant data for understanding buyers of eBay merchandise comes from eBay itself. "We make a pretty sizable investment in our research," says Sloan. "We have the virtue of proximity, and everyone in the research department does a lot of buying and selling themselves." Sloan advises sellers to pay attention to the seller newsletter and e-mails, where eBay's research findings are parlayed into tips and advice.

In addition to eBay Marketplace Research and your own eBay Sales Reports, there are third-party software products that can help eBay Store owners analyze sales history. Market Blast (www.marketblast.com), for example, is a listing and sales management package that enables you to analyze trends and customer habits. Others, like HammerTap DeepAnalysis (www.hammertap.com), MPire Researcher (www.mpire.com and Terapeak (www.terapeak.com), are data mining tools that analyze item pricing, listings duration and top upgrades within eBay's seller marketplace. These solutions offer a host of features that could help boost holiday sales: what features, durations and titles will help close the sale; how much money a product will make on eBay before you place a wholesale order; and how to read category trends so you'll know which ones will be hot this year. You can link up with these Certified Providers in the Solutions Directory on eBay (http://solutions.ebay.com).