eBay have announced that the Shopping Basket which is currently in Beta is to be rolled out across the site. They say that recent tests suggest shopping basket will be popular with buyers, and that they expect it to result in larger orders and fewer unpaid items.
The shopping basket will automatically replace the eBay checkout. It will also spell the end for the Buy It Now button on eBay which will be replaced with an Add To Basket button. This is a big advantage as it will remove unpaid items for fixed price eBay listings – buyers won’t be able to purchase them until they go to their shopping basket, check out and pay. Until that time the item will be available for other buyers to purchase.
As a seller you don’t need to do anything, but there are a few things that you should consider to maximise your sales, once the basket is mandatory for all buyers:
- Offer discounts for combined postage
Postage discounts are a great incentive for buyers to purchase more from the same seller. With shopping basket, all your discounts are clearly marked and buyers can view other items you offer. It’s easy to set up. - Consider offering free postage
In the shopping basket buyers will see two totals – one for the product purchase price and the other total for carriage. There is a chance that some buyers might be put off with shipping charges when buying from multiple sellers and by offering free postage there’s less chance of them dumping your product before paying to reduce shipping costs. - Offer a variety of postal options, including international delivery
Having more than one method of delivery and detailing the cost of each can increase the likelihood of purchase. - Offer multi-quantity listings with a longer duration on fixed price inventory
A listing that expires is a lost sales opportunity. List items for longer and stock greater quantities, so they remain available in buyers’ shopping baskets.
24 Responses
Blue sky thinking wanted as to how best to set up your listings to take advantage of the new eBay basket experience.
Should you emphasise urgency?
“Pay quickly or else you risk being left empty handed by a basket sniper.”
Or chilling out?
“Take your time, relax, do a one stop shop and fill your basket with my unrivalled exceptionally priced goodies to enjoy the best shopping experience and shipping discounts , and then make one simple payment. Easy!”
This is great, but seeing as they cant work out how to make carriage charges for offshore UK work.
Some isle of manner, comes along adds 50 items to his basket checks out and then states. The isle of man is UK mainland because royal mail say so. Then leaves 50 Negs.
So
Its pretty rubbish really.
fleabay needs to actually come up with a good solution for carriage charges first before implementing this.
Chris,
Is the substance of the post eBay speak or your take?
It isn’t totally clear.
The bullet points, at least in part, appear to conflict.
In the past there have been certain cases where PayPal didn’t support partial refunds depending on how the buyer paid. Will sellers who sell an item to a buyer this way be able to offer partial refunds or will they be required to offer full refunds?
any idea how the basket on Ebay is going to affect sellers using “Immediate Payment Required by Paypal”? ever since we changed to free P&P and made immediate payment compulsory, our sales have declined – simply because there is no incentive for buyers to stay in our shop rather than going elsewhere. to be able to offer a discount is an excellent idea, but am unsure Ebay will apply this to immediate payment items.
At the moment, there’s an option to ask the seller for a total price on multiple purchases. Sometimes this is needed because the seller hasn’t specified postage properly (or even at all, e.g. “freight”), and other times quite legitimately because it’s very variable depending on the product mix. How will the basket work if it contains a mixture of sales whose value is known, and those where it isn’t until the seller(s) respond?
Can you pay for some of a basket pending the response(s), or do you have to wait for all of them?
Having sent a “thank you for purchasing from me” email to a buyer they have just replied in words similar to:-
“I ordered two CDs can you confirm that you have received payment for two”
It transpires that the buyer purchased a second CD from one of my competitors, who has an excellent track record, so there shouldn’t be a problem.
However if the second sellers was less diligent and the buyer was unhappy who will get the neg?
I really don’t want to send a whole bunch of explanatory emails to confused buyers.
Confusion at the very beginning – doesn’t bode well for the future
I know that I am a bit unsophisticated in regard to things electronic so I am likely to be talking total rubbish but. The “Shopping Cart” is the electronic equivalent of the Tesco Trolley when I go shopping. So I finish in Tesco and pay. If there was something I could not find I then go to Sainsburys or Aldi, Or Co-op or Morrisons. I don’t just take my Shopping Cart up the road and continue shopping in the next store. Also if there is an Auction up at the Market I don’t go there and add a few more items. Yet in effect that is what is proposed. If all the goods put into the Shopping Basket are to be sorted and shipped from the same Warehouse it would not be a problem. But I have my stock here and northumbrian and all the other sellers have their stock in their premises. So even if somebody could get the system to work(and I have a horrible feeling that it will blow up in our faces) the customer is not going to receive one box full of the purchased goods. Instead they will receive(if the thing works) a blizzard of boxes starting a day or so after purchase and possibly going on for weeks(you only need an item or 2 from China). The more I think about it the more I am convinced that its going to be a total dogs breakfast. Or am I completely wrong?
Many moons ago(about 1971) I was an Internal Audit Assistant and I was attached to the Systems Auditor. In that Company before any Computer System went Live it had to be tested and aproved by the Systems Auditor. The Computer people had already done their testing and passed it. We were the final hurdle. My Boss had a proud boast He had never yet looked at a system without breaking it. The reason the Computer people wanted it to pass so they were only testing for things that they knew it could do-I sometimes wonder if that is what ebay does. So what did we do? Well lets say there was a 7 digit numeric field. We put 7 x 9’s in it and added 1. Invariably we got a row of 0’s-No use at all to an Accountant. We wanted bells to ring, lights to flash, error messages etc. If there was an Alpha Field we slipped in a few Numerics, a Numeric field we slipped in a few Alphas. We ran it with a dummy set of accounts and looked to see how it would deal with a few transactions etc. Invariably it would fail and we would reject it. There would be a lot of muttering from the Computer Department and they would modify it. Usually it failed a second and sometimes a third time(each time we would put in a few more difficult tests) until finally we were happy. After all as far as we were concerned we did not want to get to Final Accounts time and then learn that the thing had lost numerous transactions etc. (It did not have to be an Accountancy System we had the final say even over Shop Floor Production or Stores Systems). I sometimes wonder if ebay when they are carrying out their tests are letting those with a vested interest in the scheme do the testing and they don’t know(or care) that if it turns out to be a dogs breakfast it will do serious harm to the interests of a large number of people. Certainly from my point of view I would always advocate more(much more) testing of a system before it goes live(and let us Accountants have a go at it-OK and northumbriam) before it is allowed anywhere near the paying customer. After all if it fails in testing its a nuisance, if it fails in service it could be a disaster.
When will roll out be complete? Is it ebay UK only? Looking forward to getting less unpaid items