There were four prolific sellers, Bob Buchanon, Jeniffer Canty, Cory Kosick and Chris Maki in the session hosted by eBay’s Matt Ledwith from Top Seller Development.
Questions were varied from the ever popular “Where can I source stock” Where Cory answered the time honoured “Research, research, research!” Then drop shipping, only Cory drop ships some product and even he recommended sellers start out with holding stock yourself to get experience on eBay and managing your buyers before you start outsourcing tasks.
Time saving was a big topic with two solutions offered. Some of the panel prefer to use third party software to automate tasks and several employ staff for everything from Customer Service to listing auctions. Jennifer has customer service reps working from home who handle enquires from potential and actual buyers which works well. Looking for student employees and offering flexible hours gets high calibre staff for lower than average wages.
Third party solutions used by the panel included ChannelAdvisor, Marketworks and Bob actually employed a software engineer to write a custom solution for finance and consignment tracking.
A great question was how do you grow and take your business forward without funds. Advice ranged from loads, to drop shipping to growing organically and Chris prointed out he left profits in the business for expansion.
The only weak answer was how do you raise the profile of your listings internationally. The suggestion to add postage costs to countries you want to ship to was good, but none of the panel suggested listing on eBay sites in the territories you want to sell to. Jennifer pointed out that selling to Europe is great for US sellers as the dollar is so weak at the moment.
If there was one thing that would have made the session more enjoyable it would have been for Cory not to push his software product quite as much. He did at times explain how sellers could save money, eg you need to analyse how many times you list an item before it sells and just how much it costs you in fees. His software can assist with this but mentioning it in every answer was over kill. Transfering slow moving items into shop (store) inventory instead of core listings is a great suggestion as well as cutting out slower moving lines entirely.
