Get List'd

Slate has a great article about pricing and marketing.

According to Varian, retailers who vary their prices over time—increasing them one week, then discounting the next—create the kind of price instability that encourages consumers to shop around. The end result is that shoppers visit several sites before making a purchase, which is exactly what retailers want us to do.

The article goes on to discuss why Apple iPods are never discounted, and the reasoning behind it. Overall, a very informative read.

The lessons learned here can be transferred over to an eCommerce store’s strategy at any time. Chief among them being that you should fluctuate your pricing.

BuildV1 is a blog about entrepreneurship, and a lot can be learned there for budding eMerchants. Below are 3 of his 6 ingredients for successful eCommerce:

1. Make it as easy as possible for customers to checkout. Make sure the process is clear and streamlined. Only require the information you need to process an order and don’t force customers to create an account, especially not at the beginning of the checkout process.
2. If you offer special services or promotions, such as free shipping or free return shipping, make sure that customers are aware of these offerings.
3. If products you sell logically require other products or can be complemented with other products, make sure customers are aware of each product’s complementary products.

Read the other 3 at the BuildV1 blog.

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, also known as PESA, is having it\’s Fall summit in San Francisco September 20-22.

It does look like an interesting conference with some big names in it. What I find most interesting though, is the fact that the organization grew up in and around eBay, but is looking at multi-channel selling solutions now. So, they\’re going beyond eBay.

An exerpt from the email they sent me:

PESA has brought top level executive decision makers from eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Overstock and other major marketplaces to San Francisco on Sept. 20th and 21st for two days that could very well signify an important eCommerce milestone. These two days will become known in history as a first of its kind event.

Now, I don\’t know if it will be a \”first of its kind event\”, so if you go to it you\’ll have to tell me. However, I do think it looks very interesting.

One of the discussions we’ve been having around the List’d office lately, is the fact that eBay is not the end-all be-all of eCommerce. These thoughts were born out of some research that we did into eBay trends and eCommerce statistics.

We believe that eBay is a great place to list your items, but it might make sense to think of it as a marketing channel for your eCommerce store.

It’s time to stop thinking of eBay as representative of the opportunities available within the ecommerce marketplace. Though eBay holds 14% market share in the $313 billion global ecommerce market – that only serves to highlight how much more is available.

It appears that eBay is having a demand problem – for some reason, people just aren’t buying as much.

(HT: Scott Wingo)

The Sellers’ Story
At the micro-level, there has been a growing amount of resentment towards eBay and its heavy-handed policies. What was once grudgingly accepted as the price of making a lot of money on eBay is not accepted any longer – since not as much money is being made.

Merchants are beginning to transition off of a heavy eBay diet to a multi-channel one. For many individuals and small businesses, that means opening their own web store, many times on their own domain. Most are realizing that there are other marketplaces and pushing some inventory towards those channels. Examples include Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist and Google Base. The truth is, once eBay merchants go multi-channel, the other channels are typically more profitable.

There are a growing number of sellers who see eBay more as a marketing channel than an actual sales channel. Because eBay does provide a good deal of traffic, they can keep the cash flow positive by selling on eBay. However, this comes at the cost of higher margins which are found elsewhere. Many are moving their own core inventory to their own websites and using eBay only as a marketing tool.

Summary
We believe List’d is one of the best tools you can find to list single items on eBay. If you’re strictly an off-eBay merchant, take the time to see what can happen when you sell a few items on eBay. See if it increases the number of people coming to your store – you might not have as big of a margin on that sale, but you’ll raise awareness of your store for when they decide to buy again.

eBay is set to launch it’s new ad program, eBay AdContext, that allows those who own affiliate websites to make 40 -70% off of the items that are sold via the link on the affiliate website. Reuters reports that:

The eBay Developers’ Conference is showcasing how eBay is changing from a one-stop shopping center, where everything happens on the eBay site, to a supplier of auction, payment and communications technologies that can be used on any Web site.

This move to allow small website owners to make additional revenues off of ads for eBay should do very well. After all, many of the sellers on eBay have their own stores, websites, or blogs that they could run these ads on. Who knows, maybe we’ll even run some on this blog to test them out.

Also mentioned is the opening up of the eBay feedback system to outside developers (like us). I would be interested to see what companies like Rapleaf would do if the feedback system was able to be tapped into by them.

If eBay is truly trying to open up their platform and make it a disembodied web, branded by eBay owned technologies like Skype and Paypal, then it would make sense to open the feedback area up as well. We shall see.

One of the most difficult things to find these days is a good domain name. We thought long and hard about what we wanted to call this amazingly simple product we wanted to build. We wanted a name that was as simple as the product itself.

After much contemplation, we decided that what people are doing is listing products on eBay. That’s what this does, help you to list your item easily. So, how about “Lister” or “Listed”? Well, we all know that neither of those were available (for the price they would be sold for), so we went down another route. Following in the footsteps of Flickr and Cork’d, we decided to leave the “e” out.

Thus you have List’d, and Get List’d.