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The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
When you sell auctions, you can waste a lot of time either by over-recording (making more work than necessary) or by under-recording (meaning you'll have to waste a lot of time sorting out what's going on when people send you checks with scanty information or no cover note at all).
The method I use today works fine for me for handling about a hundred auctions a month. More than that, and I would seriously look into special software for auction management.
When an auction ends, I print out the page with all the information about it, including my description and terms and the name and email address of the winner. I then use those pages to record by hand any and all additional information regarding that sale -- such as the shipping address, shipping cost, type of payment, and date of payment. I put these sheets in manila folders. One set of folders is for items sent, but not yet paid for. Another set is for completed, paid transactions.
At eBay, when the winner's username isn't the same as his/her email address, click on that name, enter your own identification information when requested, and check the box for the system to "remember" you. Then when you see the email address of this person, click back to the auction page, click on Reload in your browser and that address will now appear on the auction page so you can print it.
Then I write an email to the winner, beginning "Congratulations", and providing details of price and shipping cost. Then I add by cut-and-paste my standard message, which has details on how they can pay and how they can reach me. The auction page goes into a manila folder for pending auctions of that particular type (e.g., comic books, trading cards, etc.)
When the buyer replies by email, providing a street address, I save that message electronically in the auction folder in my email account. I also write that info on the printed copy of the auction page, and package and mail the goods. (I find that for items selling for under $30 there's no need to wait to receive payment, or to wait for a personal check to clear. The vast majority of people are honest and cooperative. By filling the order immediately, you delight the customer, who didn't expect such quick service. The great feedback you get and the relationships you build with these customers are likely to boost the prices on your subsequent auctions, more than off-setting a rare loss. And at the same time, you greatly simply your paperwork and record keeping.)
Then I move the printed the auction page into the "Sent" folder for that type of auction, and I make an entry in a spiral notebook, where I include the type of item, a brief description, the sales price, the shipping cost, the name of the buyer, and the date I shipped the goods.
When payment arrives, I use both the notebook and the auction sheets to decipher exactly what the payment is for (many people are very sketchy about that), write "paid" next to that entry in the spiral notebook, and move the auction sheet to the "Paid" folder for that category of goods.
When you are dealing with many checks, each for a small sum, you can wind up spending a lot of time sorting through them, recording them, and depositing them. When I was at the height of my comic and bottle cap selling, I was getting about a dozen checks in a day, for an average of less than $10 each, with many of them (bottle cap auctions) as small as $2.55. I deposited these using postage-free bank-by-mail envelopes provided by my bank, saving the time it would have taken to drive to the bank and wait in line.
I entered in my check register not just the total of that day's deposit, but also the amounts of each check, together with the last name of each buyer. That provides me with a quick extra backup to my other ways of keeping track of transactions.
Obviously, there are many other ways you could handle these tasks. The important point is that you need to be efficient and consistent, and be prepared to backtrack, given all the manifold ways that buyers may respond. or instance, some people won't respond to your email, but rather will send you a check with a note and their street address. Some just send the check, and the only indication of their address is on the check. I have to match the scanty information provided by snailmail with the sheets in my Pending folder to determine what I need to send them.
Be prepared for the infinite and unpredictable variety of human response; but at the same time, keep your record keeping as simple and time-efficient as possible. And don't turn to automated techniques until you have had enough experience to determine if you really need them and if they will actually cover the variety you are likely to encounter.
In the words of my friend and fellow auction seller Tracy Marks (torreyphilemon at eBay), "Systematize! Systematize!" She breaks her process down into: listing, recording buyer, emailing buyer using form letter, indicating response, indicating payment received, indicating shipped, indicating having given feedback. She uses tables in Word and different color highlights for the various stages of the process.
How efficiently you can handle the record keeping will determine how many separate auctions you can maintain at a time. I found, with my homegrown techniques, that I could handle a maximum about 100 simultaneous auctions -- each running for seven days, and with some ending each day of the week. At around that point, the sheer volume and the tedium of all the tasks involved started to become a serious burden. I was able to handle that many only because I had many customers who bought than one auction item from me in the same week, often doing so in order to save on shipping charges. So 100 auctions might translate to less than 30 individual customers, and of those 30 maybe a dozen had done business with me before, and I might even have credit card info on file about several of them. All this repetition cuts down on the recording keeping, as well as the time involved in packing and shipping.
Next week, we'll deal with record keeping from the perspective of taxes. (Yes, this isn't "free money." Everything you earn from auction sales is income, subject to the same taxes as all your other income.)
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
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