Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay
store
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.
Last week we talked about how you can use AuctionRover's Auction Manager to post and keep track of all your auctions at eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo. What other benefits can you get from this service?
Before I started using Auction Manager, 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.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
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Buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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