Archive for June, 2009
June 19th, 2009
Can you say trendsetter? If you read the NY Times Style Section religiously (as I do) then you would have seen their article about preppy fashion, “The All American Back From Japan,” this morning. Coincidentally, I wrote about the 
same topic a few weeks back on the blog and of course made mention of Take Ivy. I always think preppy is in fashion which is why I constantly wear my docksiders. Like I always say, what’s old is new again.
Posted in 
June 18th, 2009
The big news at the chic CFDA gala awards last night was that Ralph Lauren was the “people’s choice.” A smiling Ralph stepped into the gala with his wife Ricky – who always looks like she just stepped out of a Polo ad 
- posed for pictures and I believe, must have known he had won the most anticipated award of this night. I, of course, using my usual mental telepathy, was wearing Ralph Lauren ( a black tuxedo jumpsuit). It’s the first time I ever wore Ralph head-to- toe or to an event.
I loved the look and felt really chic and extra. Though no one took my picture, I posed for my friends in fashion and cheerily announced what I was wearing (when they asked).
Speaking of chic, it would be cool to start using Ricky in ads. She has great appeal to the boomer generation and to that Oprah/Instyle demographic. This was the first time the CFDA had invited the public to vote on their favorite designer.
Justin Timberlake made a surprise appearance (the audience loved it) to present an award for fashion journalism to Jim Moore of GQ, who it should be noted is always a gentleman.
Other winners and stars of stage, screen and fashion that attended – in my next blog.
Photo licensed to: Photorazzi.com
June 18th, 2009
Any eBay seller can get 5 free listings each month by using the eBay Sell Your Item form
Here are the details:
Regardless of your start price, your first 5 Auction-style listings will have NO Insertion Fees when you list with eBay’s Sell Your Item form or Simple listing form.
The Final Value Fee for these 5 listings with $0.00 Insertion Fees will be 8.75% of the sales price or $20, whichever is lower. Any additional items sold during the same 30-day period will have the same Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees as they do today. Learn more.
Choose the option that works best for you, based on how you list:
- eBay’s Sell Your Item form or Simple listing form – If you’re currently using one of these forms, you can either take advantage of the 5 free Insertion Fees every 30 days, or opt out by listing your items via an eBay tool or third-party listing solution.
- eBay tool or third-party listing solution – If you’re currently using one of these tools, you can either take advantage of this new pricing structure by listing your first 5 Auction-style listings every 30 days through eBay’s Sell Your Item form or Simple listing form, or continue with your current practices at the current pricing.
The 5 listings with $0.00 Insertion Fees are especially helpful if you don’t sell a high volume, but offer the kind of unique and hard-to-find inventory buyers expect to find on eBay. I am also using it to list expensive items with a high starting price. For example, I usually use Vendio or InkFrog to launch my listings, but once each month, I go into the eBay sell your item form and list five of my firepit barbeque grills at $227 each. Not only do I save the listing fee, the final value fee is also lower than on a regular sale.
See Also
- The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath – Complete printed business manual – money back guarantee
eBay Printed training manual by a Gold PowerSeller who sells on eBay every day.
June 17th, 2009
- 3m items sold every day
- Secondary market is $500b – eBay's sweet spot
- Talked about daily deal and how they tweet the deals
- iPhone app has had 3m downloads
- Selection
- Making search easier - she talked about BestMatch some
- Value
- 28% of listings on eBay come with free shipping
- Trust
- DSRs
- 33% of sellers have 4.8+
- Sellers with 4.8+ DSRs grew at 11% y/y – faster than ecommerce
- eBay helps us sell more
- Give us a dedicated rep
- Growth in sales has been huge
- Exposure to customers wouldn't meet otherwise
- Doing 7k orders on ebay – $500k
- 99.4% positive rating
- 12,000 items listed on eBay
- Daily deal has been great for Tiger – driving lots of inventory
June 17th, 2009
I am a great fan of The Fog of War, a documentary where Robert McNamara (JFK’s Defence Secretary) gives 11 lessons from his long life. I thought I would like to try and emulate this documentary in my own small way with a series of posts where people give their lessons for life. My first subject is Will Wynne from Arena Flowers. Will is the only person I know who has a tribute twitter account as well as a real one. Take it away Will:
When Trevor asked me to write up a guest post I figured that I’d try to do something a little different. So I decided to write a list not of what we consider the most important parts of founding a business, but a list of the ten things that caught us by surprise or that we never really expected. You may think some of these are obvious, but for us they weren’t. This topic also means I avoid giving away all our trade secrets and competitive advantages. J
NB we are not a hugely venture capital funded business, more of a bootstrapped start up with limited resources, so some of our issues may not be relevant for a mega VC funded start up…
So, without further ado, here we go:
1. Everything that can go wrong probably will at some point
Bad things happen. Bright eyed start ups never expect them as that stuff happens to “other people”. If you’re lucky that might be the case, but in reality, there’s a reason that big businesses have disaster recovery plans; because they’re needed. Some examples, none of them our fault (honest!):
- Exploding three phase electricity blowing all power at Flowers HQ for 3 days (despite us rewiring the whole building before moving in);
- A 6 day internet outage in Park Royal, the biggest business park in Europe (our DSL supplier invoked “Act of God” clauses to get out their responsibilities – it was actually a man with a digger cutting all the cables);
- Death. It’s not a nice topic and no one likes to talk about it, but people do die. We never gave a moment’s thought to the possibility that if someone’s relative/partner/friend died, they would disappear at very short notice for weeks leaving our already very lean team totally overstretched;
There are many more examples of totally unpredictable disruptions we could give, but I’ll spare you. The point is the unthinkable does happen and you need to at least have thought about it, even if you enjoy doing so. We find “manage the downside and the upside will take care of itself” a useful maxim to keep our minds focused on this point.
2. Legals
Everyone knows this stuff crops up and I nodded absentmindedly when told “take care of the legals” as I’d said this myself before in my days working in venture capital. Let’s be honest, legals are really boring. But get them wrong and you’ll pay the price. At some point most business will have a disagreement with one or all of a supplier, an investor, a competitor, an employee, the government, a plagiarist or just a random nutter (we picked up a weird stalker/troll just recently).
The “gentleman’s agreement” – ie a deal that isn’t properly written down and documented is a prime culprit here, as it leaves room for different interpretations through being too unspecific. At the very least, get things spelled out in a clear and detailed email that can be referred back to reliably. NB legals don’t necessarily require lawyers. They just need doing.
This is also an interesting article from the Harvard Business School on the top ten legal mistakes made by entrepreneurs.
3. The stress is massive, but not in the way you expect
When I talked about the stress to friends, they would typically look sort sympathetic but are clearly thinking “good, it shouldn’t be too easy”. Our senior team members have all run teams before, but previously it wasn’t, ultimately, our fault if the overall business went wrong. Now, if it does, it is. Wasn’t easy in the early days when we had no money in the bank and I would meet one of our driver’s newborn sons and try to smile in a calm way and say “Ah, isn’t he cute” when actually I was thinking “I hope we don’t screw this up and have to lay off your Father”. Such thoughts don’t make for restful sleep!
My father runs businesses in the Congo and I remember when I explained this feeling of mild panic and terror to him he said “Finally. Someone else in the family knows how it feels.” He then added, don’t worry, just be calm, logical and do what’s right. Sound advice.
Nonetheless, I’m very glad that the mania and mild terror of the early days has at least receded if not disappeared entirely. I have lost half my hair as a result though. L
4. Buy this snake oil! NO!
There are a flabbergasting number of people out there selling absolutely nothing for stupid amounts of money. Such businesses feel very parasitical and probably have a lot of success tapping into the budgets of large businesses that don’t measure the ROI on their spend. “Only £2k for a ¼ page advert!” in some zero circulation magazine that will never be read. One lady started shouting at me when I’d politely declined “HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET ANY CUSTOMERS IF YOU DON’T BUY ADSPACE IN [celebrity home makeover man's] MAGAZINE?! YOUR BUSINESS IS DOOMED!”. Erm. Okay. Thanks for that.
I no longer answer any calls to my mobile from numbers not already in my phone book, for fear of a sales call or other random caller. All calls to the office are screened and our CS team revels in winkling out sly salesmen (salesmen have ways of evading the “So, is this a sales call?” question that would make politicians blush). Standard answer from CS: “Send [team member] an email”.
Spinvox is also handy, as it turns all voicemails into texts so you don’t waste time calling up to listen to them and you can read them during a meeting without seeming too rude. Though I didn’t take Spinvox with me when I got an iPhone as the iPhone visual voicemail system is pretty good, though slightly different.
5. Never ever be dependent on one supplier – they WILL try and abuse that relationship
12th February 2008. Two days before Valentine’s Day. Phone call from one of our courier partners (a market leading name). “Hi. There’s a problem with your packaging; it’s leaking. I’m afraid we’ll have to manually process all your orders. That will mean a £5.00 surcharge [on top of a similar normal charge per unit].” Given we were set to send about 4000 orders through that partner that week, this would effectively have cost us £20k. Nothing had changed in our process for 6 months. We had asked them to confirm everything was fine weeks before. They didn’t. Then their last minute bombshell.
They were simply taking the mickey thinking they could get away with it and help themselves to an extra £20k from our pocket. Charming. Sadly for them, we’d recognised this as a risk in December and had just completed an integration with another courier, unbeknownst to the original partner. We discussed the call, agreed that the original partner was behaving appallingly, and switched ALL our orders to the new partner. The old partner suddenly began groveling and toad eating for Britain but to no avail; they are now our reserve partner but lost several hundred thousand pounds a year of business by trying to be cute.
We could give a number of similar examples. Simply, if you depend on one partner, you’re over a barrel and they can do what they want. And they’ll probably try it. We now ensure we have a back up supplier for every key part of our operation, to spare greedy suppliers such temptations. PS obviously, this is also important for disaster recovery planning too.
6. Suppliers can be bigger “investors” than, erm, investors
Pre credit crunch at least, even a new business didn’t find it that hard to get credit from suppliers. There is a lot of focus put on raising equity from angels, friends, family and so on. But a lot of funding requirement can in fact come through credit from suppliers. One of our suppliers pointed out this out to us once: “How come you owe me more than your investors put together and I own none of the business?”. Cue awkward silence, shuffling of papers and then saying briskly “Anyway, moving on…!”
It’s not the lowest risk approach ever and not the way to finance a business long term, but it can given extra liquidity that was never expected.
7. Product Product Product
Business advice talks a lot about SEO, market size, scalability, teamwork, web design, business development, networking, fund raising, financial controls. All important things. But all totally useless if you don’t have a decent product. If you are in a business that gets £1 off people once, then this point is less important. But if you want repeat business then unless your product is actually any good, then it doesn’t matter how good you are at all the other stuff. It’s only a matter of time til your demise.
We make as sure as we can that, within constraints of making money, that we provide an outstanding product. That’s not to say we don’t make mistakes, and, as with all businesses, we can’t please all the people all the time, but, 99% of the time, we our product will delight the customer (and recipient) and be better than that of our competitors. That’s a good foundation on which to build a business. If you don’t try to deliver the best possible product for your customers then you don’t really deserve to succeed.
8. Nothing ventured, nothing gained + BONUS: you can rewrite history after the event (if your idea works)
Our conservative instincts tend to make us want to be careful and risk averse. Mine certainly did. But a number of times we’ve just said “Ah, let’s just go for it!” and seen where it’s taken us. For instance, our European expansion could be reframed as a stroke of tactical genius; hindsight is a marvelous thing. Actually, there was some inspiration, some detailed analysis and strategising but, mostly, there was a large chunk of “Yeah, sounds good. Let’s do it.” luck. We can now talk wisely about rolling out our operation abroad to cover Europe and develop the brand’s international reach. At the time it wasn’t nearly so clear cut. Realising that not everything can be worked out in PowerPoint or in a spreadsheet is a great freedom and lot of fun. Just be prepared for it not to work.
9. Turns out that stuff about team work is actually true
If you’re like me, you’ll probably have always thought that all the “teamwork is great” and “I’m a team player” chat on CVs was interesting but a bit “yeah yeah, whatever, no one really cares about that”. And in larger companies, in my experience, it was less necessary and sometimes felt somewhat forced. A fun thing about working at Arena is that there are lots of different types of people: techies, award-winning florists, linguists, operations gurus, flower buying experts, finance bods and so on. The key is to getting all the different parts to work together and understand the overall business’s priorities because everyone has to muck in to different areas. If you don’t get on, the business won’t succeed.
One other thing is that you can set the attitudinal weather in a small business around the leadership team’s values. In our case, we absolutely don’t allow is any petty politicking, childish bickering or any “it’s not my problem, guvnor” rubbish, nor do we blame people for making mistakes (at least not the first time J). The aim is to deliver the best service for our customers as efficiently as possible. Childish spoilt brat behaviour have no place in that process.
10. It feels good!
“What’s it like to be your own boss? Do you enjoy it? Is it all it’s cracked up to be?” I get asked that a lot. The answer is “Absolutely!”. At least once you’ve got through the pain and the horror of the start. Once you’ve broken the back and moved from “start up” to “established [but still young] business” the scales lift from your eyes and you remember what it’s like to be human. And you don’t have a Board sending down instructions and messing you about on HR reviews or telling you what to do and what to think daily. It’s an incredibly uplifting feeling and I hope never to have to go back.
Seeing teams build and relationships develop and reading emails from elated customers is a great thing when you were part of the team that built it from absolutely nowhere. One of my favourite things is when people write emails saying “Thanks, Arena!”. I can still remember the day we sat down and worked out what to call the business; it’s great to hear it taking on a life of its own.
have you got some lessons from life you want to share. If so please contact me.
June 17th, 2009
Speaking of Variations, our UK team is hosting a great (free!) webinar with eBay to help answer seller questions about Variation Style Listings.
June 17th, 2009
- Supporting Variations – this is a guide to get your inventory setup correctly.
- Using Variations – Once you have your inventory properly configured you are ready to launch variation listings to eBay.
- Men's mythical shoe size 7 red
- Men's mythical shoe size 7 blue
- Men's mythical shoe size 7 green
- Men's mythical shoe size 8 red.
- find the make/model/color you like
- check to see if it's in your size
- purchase
- What happens if I don't adopt VSL?
- What's the difference between an item specific and a variations? When do I use which?
- How will VSL work with BestMatch, Recent Sales and eBay's search engine in general?
- What will I do with my open listings?
- If you use the eBay tools (TurboLister, Blackthorne, SellerManager, etc.) what is the impact?
- How can I leverage VSL to win business over my competitors?
June 17th, 2009
As some of you already know, I will be attending the eBay & PayPal Developers Conference starting tomorrow morning at 9am PT. In addition to the keynotes, there are multiple presentations happening simultaneously throughout the day. Given the conflicts, I thought I’d let you know what the schedule looks like and which presentations I have chosen to cover for you (bolded). If folks strongly disagree with my choices I can switch, but I felt that the selections I’ve made will get you the most comprehensive breakdown of the 48 hour event if you’re not able to attend.
I have also included links to the presentations for each session (when available) so I hope that helps too.
I will be tweeting live from the conference @ebayinkblog and you can follow all the discussions coming out of the conference by referring to the #ebaydevcon hashtag. (A breakdown of hashtags and their usage on Twitter can be found here).
Wednesday, June 17 (all times PT)
* Keynote 9:30 – 11am
* eBay Product Roadmap 11:30am – 12:20pm
(other options are: “It’s All About the Money;” “Improving the Profitability of eBay Retailers;” and “Hosted Buttons and the Button Manager API“)* The eBay Selling Manager Application Opportunity 1:30 – 2:20pm
(other options are: “Large Merchant Services;” “PayPal Platform: The Next Generation;” and “SEO 101: Tips and Tricks for Search Engine Optimization“)* Embracing the Economy of Open 3:30 – 4:20pm
(other options are: “Driving Business with PayPal;” “Building compelling applications using the new eBay services;” “Data Powered Selling Manager Applications“)
Thursday, June 18
* Keynote 9:00 – 10:30am
* Search and Best Match – What’s Coming in 2009 11:00 – 11:50am
(other options are: “The Future of Securing the eBay Marketplace;” “Embracing the Economy of Open;” “Feedback Forum: eBay Selling Manager Applications”)* Feedback Forum: eBay & PayPal Trust and Safety 12:30 – 1:20pm
(other options are: “Improving seller efficiencies on eBay;” “eBay Product Roadmap;” “When Creativity isn’t enough, try murder“)* Supporting Multi-Variation Fixed-Price Listings in Your Application 1:30 – 2:20pm
(other options are: “Determining Demand and Managing your Tools;” “Best Practices for PayPal Integration;” “Feedback Forum: Developers Program Business and Product”
Cheers,
RBH
June 17th, 2009
The 4th, 100 Best book from Lynn Dralle, the Queen of Auctions, is hot off the presses!
Lynn is an old friend and an experience eBay PowerSeller who regularly sells over $100,000 a year on eBay. Drawing from tens of thousands of eBay sales, a decade of eBay experience, and the wisdom of a beloved grandmother, Lynn puts together a roster of stories that will teach, inspire, and entertain her readers! You will learn dozens of eBay tips and tricks from this highly fun and easy to read book.
Sound good? Well, it gets even better…
For the next 48 hours ONLY, purchase Lynn’s new book "Home Run" and you will also receive more than $534 in downloadable resources from ten of the most successful, well-respected entrepreneurs in the eBay community. All free of charge – no gimmicks, no catches and no hidden fees.
Click here to purchase right now: http://budurl.com/ajrc
This is a great book and every seller can learn from it. and the bonus items (including one from me) are easily worth far more than the cost of the book.
Skip McGrath
Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Skip_McGrath
See Also
- The Complete eBay Marketing System Updated for 2009 with all the latest eBay changes
Learn how to sell on eBay with the best-selling training course by an eBay PowerSeller who sells on eBay every day
June 17th, 2009
eBay listings rise from 27.8 million in January to 31.5 million through May 15th 2009.
Here is a look at the auction count chart from Medved –a service that tracks eBay listings. As you can see the number of listings has been climbing steadily since the beginning of the year although the rate of growth slowed a bit in the past few weeks. That may be due to the normal summer slowdown on eBay.
We won’t know if these listings are translating to sales until eBay comes out with the sales numbers for the second quarter ending a couple of weeks from now on June 30th. The results typically come out a few weeks later.