“To Sell or Not To Sell,” should not be the Dilemma for eBay Sellers

I’m well aware of the fact that most of the readers of this article are either established eBay sellers or novices looking for useful tips to improve their sales on eBay. Let me make it clear from the beginning that your familiarity with eBay doesn’t approve that you have mastered the art of selling eBay. There is always more scope for learning and harnessing your selling skills on eBay, because World Wide Web facilitates evolution, continuously. Before discussing eBay selling skills, let’s revisit the recent status of eBay as a selling platform.

The New eBay vs. The Old eBay – a Major Transition

Just two years ago, CEO of eBay Inc. John Donahoe informed Wall Street analysts about massive changes to upgrade the eBay platform. Now the so-called New eBay has come out with loads of fundamental changes to improve both selling and buying experiences of users. Changes the New eBay offers as:

Changes that eBay Reflects: 

• More relevant search result per every product search
• The website is much faster than ever before
• New Design format for web stores
• New Analytics Tool for Better Understanding of Traffic

Secured and Versatile PayPal 

• PayPal is getting into mobile and micropayments.

More Localised, More Portable and More Social

• With growing numbers of mobile users and profiles on social community websites have offered new opportunities to expand business. eBay well understands this and aptly taken a step ahead to mark its presence. This has really made the New eBay more popular and more profit making platform for sellers. Sellers now can easily pursue their business on these platforms without much worrying about extra service cost or any extra investment in any third party solutions.

With this ever growing eBay as a selling platform, how well you prepared for facing all screamed and demanding buyers from all over the globe. Mind it; your complacency can make your valued investment into buying peanuts. Thus here I can argue that there is still time left to learn new tips and tricks on eBay selling. Here follows the list of some major tips that are considered as building blocks of successful eBay selling.

Managed Storage

Storage is one of the most critical aspects of eBay business. If you are left with complete mess in your storage department, then your business won’t be benefited much. Quick shipping should be followed by an order placement. A delay may earn you a negative feedback on eBay. Properly managed storage keeps your business smooth and helps you shipping items quickly. Thus you can establish a good customer care service and make your business more professional.

Research is Always Welcome

Research is an undeniable unavoidable part of online selling, especially on eBay. The more you research about which item sales more and which are not, who are you competitors and how their items are performing on search results; better will be your understanding the market status. Thus you can improve your inventory details to have leverage on customers against your competitors. Being a successful seller on eBay can be immensely rewarding, but requires lots of research.

An Image can worth 1000 Words

Buyers love to see items before they buy. One single and poorly shot photo on each of your items is not going to help you getting a shooting star beside the feedback numbers. Make sure, ever item you sell on eBay should have multiple professionally taken photographs. This improves buyers’ confidence in making a purchase from you.

Describe your Items

Buyers are pretty these days. A single complacency or negligence of yours can easily be identified and that may help them skipping your items without a second thought. Want to be skipped frequently by buyers on eBay just because you have no item to write decent description or just ignored it? I hope you do not subscribe this idea. Writing a decent description either invokes bidders to get into a bidding war, or lures to make an instant purchase using "Buy it Now" button. A descriptive, informative short description is essential to optimise your listing above your competitors.

Write to your Customers

Customers love to receive. A hearty thank for their purchase doesn’t cost you extra, but it earns you that tiny little trust from buyers. Always communicate with the customers regarding orders. Keep the informing about the status of their order regularly. That makes them feel that you care about them. This helps you getting positive feedbacks. If you do receive some negative feedbacks, remember that you will be judged by how you respond to these negative feedbacks. Some sellers have realised improvement in sales after they responded positively to the negative feedbacks.

If you are really interested to try your luck on eBay, you should follow a strategy. The strategy should be learnt and applied properly. A proper execution of your best strategies would certainly help you bring accolades and your business will surely flourish on eBay. Keep following 247 TopSeller blog for more such useful eBay selling tips and guides. 

Till then Good Bye!

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Improve your Excel Skills to Excel in SEO

Having Knowledge and its Application in real life scenario, are two completely distinctive aspects of Professionalism. A skilled execution ensures better manifestation of knowledge. Similar theory applies to Online Marketing aka Search Engine Optimisation. Acquiring knowledge is as easy as it is difficult to implement without proper skill and expertise, which can be acquired by improving soft skills. Now you must be wondering, what kind of soft skills are required for SEO! 

SEO is not all about submitting your website details to various web directories, writing creative articles/blogs and sharing on content portals, exchanging links in various possible ways. SEO in its true meaning is about developing a complete marketing strategy tailor-made for online users. Online users are entitled to their unique kind of behaviour. Proper assessment and understanding of this unique behaviour of online users is required to make online marketing strategies. So now you must be wondering how online marketing is more of a challenging task than simply doing some data entry type stuffs! Online marketing without proper understanding of customers’ behaviour online is pretty similar to those data entry type SEO stuffs (mentioned above). You can simply turn your regular data entry SEO type into more result-oriented marketing strategy by acquiring and mastering some soft skills. Soft skills required for SEO is nothing but learning the best reporting tool in the world: Microsoft Excel/Open Office Calc. Both Microsoft Excel and Open Office Calc are similar in look and function except certain typographical alternative that we may be consider later on this article to discuss.

Why Microsoft Excel/Open Office Calc?

Excel/Calc as a reporting tool is quite popular and no business report is complete without an Excel/Calc presentation. Its immense popularity as a reporting tool is because of its flexibility in analysing, processing and presenting data. Online marketing requires a lot of data to be analysed, processed and presented that a better marketing vision can be set in order to realise the optimisation strategies. Though it’s difficult to cover all aspects of SEO reporting through Excel/Calc broadly in this article, I’ll give it a try to discuss some more frequently used reporting techniques.

• Excel/Calc Dashboard Reporting

Excel/Calc Dashboard Reporting can be used for a summary of your SEO activities (daily/weekly/monthly). Basically, a dashboard report is a way to visually present critical data in summary form so that you can make quick and effective decisions, in much the same way that a car dashboard works.

How is this Dashboard Made?

1. The chart showing Keyword Ranking with Improvements and Back Link Details, search engine index details and 2 different charts arranged side by side showing Traffic and Sales Patterns based on data analysed as Previous and Present.
2. The Keyword Ranking section is reflecting keywords’ ranking with their present and previous positions as well as respective improvements.  
3. I have used Macro with Developer Tool, VLOOKUP formulas to process the data.

• Spreadsheet Formula to Count Words in Cell

One of the basic differences between Microsoft Excel and the OpenOffice Calc is in the use of macros and formulas. While Calc is less compatible in the use of the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language for macros, many problems can be solved by using formulas. On the other hand, Excel is the most efficient application in using both formulas and macros efficiently. You must be wondering, why I’ve chosen this formula for discussion. As an SEO export, you must have felt difficulty in selecting long tail keywords from a gross list of thousands of keywords. This formula ensures that you get the number of words in a list of key phrases in the adjacent cells. 

Formula to Count Words in a Cell for Excel or Calc

With a few minor changes, the following will work equally well in either Excel or Calc spreadsheets. Select adjacent cell of a key phrases of which you want to count the words and write the formula defined below. Change the cell number accordingly.

For Microsoft Excel

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A2))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""))+1)

For OpenOffice Calc

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A2))=0;0;LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2;" ";""))+1)

• Formula to Compile Local and Global Search Volume for Keywords

The VLOOKUP formula in MS Excel can be used to look up a table or array, and then return useful data. The function is easy to use, and needs only four items to be entered. The example used here gives a step-by-step explanation, as well as showing how to fix some of the problems often found with VLOOKUP.

Example:

Let’s take three excel files, such as:

1. Excel File #1 containing keywords list and their local search volumes.
2. Excel File #2 containing same keywords but arranged differently than Excel File #1 and their global volume.
3. Excel File #3 is the processed file where you can arrange the final list of keywords and both of their local and global search volumes are compiled.

Now write the following formula on next to the keywords list in the Excel File #3 as =VLOOKUP(A2,Excel File #1.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673,2,FALSE) ^{[for OpenOffice Calc: =VLOOKUP(A2;Excel File #1.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673;2;FALSE)]} to retrieve local search volumes.

Repeat the same formula on next to the local search volume list in the Excel File #3 to retrieve global search volume for the respective keywords from Excel File #2.
=VLOOKUP(A2,Excel File #2.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673,2,FALSE) ^{[for OpenOffice Calc: =VLOOKUP(A2;Excel File #2.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673;2;FALSE)]}

The file would look like this: 

I would like to conclude this article with these three basic Excel skills. Hope you apply these excel techniques while preparing SEO reports for your clients or selecting prospective keywords for SEO. Visit 247 TopSeller blog or subscribe to blog feed for more such intuitive pragmatic articles in future.

A big, warm and cuddly thanks to you all for reading this article. Everyday your feedbacks and comments help us devising new tricks on online selling & make us better at what we do. We are sure you feel the same about others comments. Do you like the article? Do you find it insightful? What modifications you would have made to it? Go ahead and share your ideas and tips with us. Please leave a comment.    

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