Managing your auctions to sell more profitably --

Posting auctions with "inventory"

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Our online store at Yahoo
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My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)

The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.


Online auctions are a great source of "found money," letting you turn objects that you considered trash into cash. But they also can be a source of lost time, meaning you wind up doing nowhere as well as you thought you would.

Even if you do all the work yourself, you need to think of the time you spend as a cost. (How much is your own time worth to you?) And anything that helps reduce the time you spend per auction increases your real profit

So how can you organize what you do and how you do it to minimize time spent in repetitive, hassling activities? How can you maximize the number of auctions you can juggle effectively, while keeping this a fun activity, rather than having it deteriorate to another dreaded chore?

I had been scrambling to keep track of my auction-related activities in paper notebooks and computer files and folders full of printouts of auction descriptions with handwritten notations. Then I finally switched the Auction Manager, a free service offered here at AuctionRover.

You can click to "Take the Tour" and get a quick view of the various features. But until you start using the Auction Manager, you won't get a sense of what it can mean to you in terms of saved time, reduced stress, and greater flexibility and control in managing all aspects of your online auctions -- not just at eBay, but also at Amazon.com and Yahoo.

So how can a single application help numerous auction sellers, each with their own idiosyncratic ways of doing things? We all have different starting points and what to one person is obvious to another is a revelation. We even use and understand words, like "inventory," differently.

When I saw "Inventory" as the first element in the Auction Manager, that put me off. I sell stuff from my attic as "collectibles." I didn't buy this stuff to resell it. There's no cost associated with it. I keep it in stacks so I can tell at a glance how much of what is left. So why should I waste my time keeping records of inventory?

But I do need to list series of similar auctions. For instance, I have many Davy Crockett cards that I saved when I was a kid back in the 1950s. I sell them in lots of four, so they are likely to sell with a starting price of $5 -- which is about as low as I can go and not waste too much time per auction for the activity worthwhile for me. Each auction has much in common -- the same standard terms and the same basic description. But each has a slightly different title (listing the numbers of the particular cards) and some new words in the description (the name of each card and its condition). I used to list new ones by accessing the description of an auction that had closed and then "relisting" it, editing to enter the new information. Now I do it all through the "Inventory" function in the Auction Manager.

I click on "Inventory", then on "Create new item." There I enter the title of the first auction of this kind that I plan to do, assign a number and a name to this category of goods that I have for sale -- not an auction site category, just a name that makes sense to me (e.g., comic books, baseball cards, coins, postcards). If I have a lot of similar items, and will want to run a series of auctions, but haven't bothered to make an exact count, I pick an arbitrarily high number for the starting quantity -- 100 or 500. I skip purchase price and reserve because those are irrelevant to me. And I enter $5 as the starting bid, which I'm now using for all my collectibles auctions. Then I enter the item description for this first auction, choosing at the same time a template, for how I want to information to appear on the screen. Then at the bottom of the screen, I choose which auction site (eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo) I want to sell this item at, and when I want the auction to start.

Next, I click on "Continue" to get to a form tailored for the particular auction site I have chosen. If you wish, Auction Manager will remember your standard settings for each of the different auction sites and fill that in for you the next time around.

When I have identical items that I want to list at several different auction sites (as I do for books that I have written and published, such as The Lizard of Oz and The Name of Hero), I simply edit that inventory item to select the new auction site and time.

To enter a new auction for a similar item (e.g., a second lot of four Davy Crockett cards), I go to Inventory and click to edit the entry for that category. Then I enter the new title, edit the description, change the photo, and once again choose an auction site and time. It's a quick and easy way to post multiple similar auctions, even though, for my style of selling, it really has nothing to do with "inventory."

What other benefits do I get from this service?

Once I've used Inventory to create auctions, I can click on "My Auctions" and then on "Scheduled," "Open," "Closed," or "Archived" to get a single view of all my auctions at all three of the major auction sites.

The list of open auctions includes not just the current high bid, the number of bids so far, and the closing time, but also "Hits" based on counters which I can add to my pages or reset at any time by just selecting auctions from the list and then clicking "Add Counter" or "Reset Hit Counter". Then with a quick scan you can see where your problems and opportunities lie -- items that are getting no hits at all may be in the wrong category or have a poor description or may not be good items to sell at online auctions. And items that are getting lots of hits but no bids may have poor photos or may have a starting bid that's too high.

The whole concept of "scheduling" auctions was foreign to me -- because the auction sites themselves don't let you do it. For instance, at eBay the time of day that you enter an auction is the time of day that it must end, seven or five or whatever number of days later. AuctionRover provides a buffer zone where your auction information is stored until the time you want to start, and then it is automatically submitted to the target auction sites for you. That means that you can do your auction setup work when it's convenient for you (maybe set aside one day a month or one day a week or a few hours each day, and have the start and finish times spread out so you'll better be able to handle the work load when they finish, and so they'll start and end at optimum times for attracting bids and so your own auctions don't compete with one another. Also, I like to do all my auction-related work together -- taking photos then entering the items. In the past, that was awkward, because the lighting for taking photos is best during the day, but the best time to start collectibles auctions seems to be in the evening. Now that's no longer a problem for me.

The Image Library is also surprisingly handy. In the past, I posted my photos in my free personal Web space at Xoom. Now I post them all at AuctionRover. It find it's easier and quicker uploading images, and then I can see thumbnails of all my images, with the word-labels I gave them, so I don't have to remember file names. And when I attach a photo to a particular auction, auction visitors seem to get much faster response time, and much more reliable performance. (With Xoom, sometimes, unpredictably, the wait was so long the connection would timeout.)

After auctions close, you can use Auction Manager to send out customized automatic email messages to customers. This can be very useful if you always ship the same kind of thing with the same shipping cost. In any case, you can flexibly set the options the way you want them -- automating the kinds of communication that are repetitive, routine, and tedious, and sending by hand the kinds of messages that you use to get to know your customers better.

Your Closed Auctions page helps you keep track of all the related details -- what items have you shipped? who has paid? etc. all in a single easy-to-understand display. From here, too, you can leave feedback for one or multiple customers with a single click. (That's an important task that otherwise you might forget or might skip because of the time it takes). You can also quickly relist auctions that ended with no sales, and can move finished auctions to your Archive for recordkeeping and future reference.

So I'm now a regular user, and will be pushing the capacity of Auction Manager in future weeks, trying to see how many simultaneous auctions I can now handle comfortably. 

This article and hundreds of related items by Richard is available, in plain text, on CD ROM My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002) for $29. That same CD also includes the full text of his books The Social Web, Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and The Way of the Web. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat, where you can buy an entire library for the price of a book.

Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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