If you know me, then you know one of my many hobbies is Gestalt Psychology. :) Here are two of the "laws" that I want to talk about today, as they relate to eBay and eBay sellers.
Law of Continuity — The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.
Law of Common Fate — Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.
I tend to lump these together as the Gestalt Theory of Good Continuation, as it was taught to me in the a university psych class. Another way of putting this might be, "The worse it gets, the worse it gets, and the better it gets, the better it gets." People see patterns, and where they don't, their mind will look to connect things to make them comfy patterns that feel right.
What does that mean. Well, I think it helps explain some of what eBay sellers are feeling. People tell me I tend to write too much, so for today, I'll leave it at that.
The show discount we offered is available through the end of Monday for those who want to jump on! The discount was for any new client signing on for at least two services by the end of June. Here are the two discounts:
$200 off anybody wishing to break up their contract into two payments (one upon contract signing, the rest when we're done).
10% off anybody who is willing to pay for the entire contract price (minus the 10%) up front in one payment, upon contract signing.
Get in touch ASAP if you are interested in jumping on this discount! :)
Hey, readers. We have a bunch of open jobs. You can check them out at http://www.aswas.com/jobs.shtml. Here are some highlights.
Creative Director - this person is like an art director and project manager. You will manage the template design process, so you need to be awesome with design, ideas, and communication.
Customer Support - this person will perform some behind-the-scenes Photoshop and HTML work for our team. You'll also answer support tickets and make the easier changes that clients need... like the person freaking out about his template because his sales tax changed. :)
Account Manager - this is like the Customer Support person, but is the seller's main contact at our company, and the centre of the long-term relationship. So it's HTML and CSS with Photoshop, but's also really knowing eBay and being able to advise people.
Artist - we're always looking for excellent artists who would like to work on our projects. We often have a hard time finding the right people since we need you to be really creative and work well in multiple styles. This is not the type of job where we tell you exactly what to put where, and you are just a robot. :)
Get to know these jobs by reading their full descriptions, and then apply today since we are ready to hire!
With so many people wondering about eBay changes and what to do, we're putting together a free webinar for 1 July at 11am west coast time. All are welcome. Questions will be taken and answered to the best of our ability!
We'll be covering recent eBay changes and announcements and what you need to do to be compliant. We'll also look at what is coming, and how to stay ahead of the game as much as possible.
Also, with the hammer being dropped on PowerSellers with lower DSRs, we'll be looking at how to raise DSRs.
There have been a lot of rumours about eBay lately. The main one tends to be variations on "eBay will become Amazon" or "eBay will become more Amazon-like."
eBay has had this technology for years. Half.com is "Amazon-like" in that there is one description, and sellers line up to be on that page as someone who has it. No description, no policies, no branding, no marketing. You're barely aware of who is sending it.
And eBay hasn't gone in that direction. I don't think they will. It makes no sense. It reminds me of what Seth Godin said about version 1 of the Microsoft Zune MP3 player. If it's not an iPod killer, why spend time to develop, manufacture, market, and sell it? If people won't throw their iPod away for a Zune, then why bother? I think the same thing about Amazon. Amazon does a good job being Amazon. It doesn't make sense to be Baby Amazon Junior Coming Late Into The Game of Being Amazon.
eBay is good at what it does. Other sites who have tried to be Baby eBay or New eBay or Better eBay have either stayed small or failed. So for what eBay is to people, it does many things right.
When it's wrong for buyers, it's often the seller who is wrong, not eBay. The guy who sent me crappy Dance Dance Revolution pads wasn't eBay... he was a seller. The guy who held my order because he didn't like that my company name was part of my confirmed address... eBay didn't do that to me. The seller did. eBay didn't ship me three faulty solar Bluetooth GPS receivers... those were from three different sellers carrying sub-standard merchandise, evidently. So as an eBay shopper and buyer, I am WAY for eBay having and upholding standards! Many sellers have given me crappy experiences, all while thinking they were GREAT sellers.
Does it make sense for eBay to bring in more catalogue descriptions of catalogue items? Yes. Does that mean they're becoming Amazon? No. eBay may change checkouts and payments. Does that make them more Amazon-like? Not necessarily. They may just be doing things that will work better for their shoppers.
When you go and get a haircut just like the one Jennifer Lopez has, chances are that you are not more JLo-like. Hopefully you got a good haircut that works for you. :)
I'm watching a lot of blogs try to predict the future. Some even say that they have information straight from an anonymous eBay top level person. One of these claims that all of these changes are coming in August. Really? So ChannelAdvisor, Vendio, and everybody else will have to fall in with changes that are coming in 5 weeks yet none of us have been told about them? We'll all have to redevelop our systems overnight? That's unlikely at this point.
It's unlikely that eBay would make giant changes that would require that third party tools make those changes too and to NOT give Certified Providers (which includes us) any heads up about these things. And the changes these blog posts and manifestos are claiming run against what eBay just announced and what I know is coming.
Rumours are rumours, people. Ask yourself if they make logical sense, and nearly 100% of the time, I find that they don't.
One of our clients just found out that the software he uses doesn't fully support all the item specifics that eBay makes available now. He emailed us saying his DSRs are all above 4.7, yet he's not showing up well in Best Match. He had no idea why, and suspected the item specifics.
He contacted his software help people, and they confirmed that they are not yet propertly supporting item specifics. Well, I'm not surprised. I remember when it took the same software system 8 months to get things like Second Chance Offers and Second eBay Category into their system. UGH!
So I suggested that he try listing a few things with Inkfrog, which our clients love. I said even without our template, just get a few things up with total item specifics, and see what happens. He said his items were now much higher in Best Match search results.
Well, there you go. That's just another reason on the pile of reasons why I can't recommend the first piece of software. And also why I give talks at the Developers Conference... evidently I need to remind developers to keep things updated!!!
There is a slide that I show when giving my marketing presentation at the Developers Conference. The whole point of that presentation is to remind Developers that the most useful tools they can build are the ones that solve seller problems. I then put up a slide of the most common seller issues that can be solved by software tools.
Without pasting the slide, it lists things like listing efficiency, shipping issues, communications issues, getting repeat buyers, having more work than staff, and the like. The point of the slide was to point out things that software developers can help.
Some angry villagers with torches have complained in another blog that I need to update that list because I am just not covering all of eBay sellers' problems. Well, I know that sellers have new complaints and issues... I'm more aware of these than most people given the number of sellers I personally deal with! But the point of my presentation was seller problems that can be solved by software and tools... not every complaint sellers have even if they can't be solved by software and tools.
eBay Developers are always looking for good ideas. If you can list seller problems that can be helped or fixed by software or tools, please respond to this post. If you are just going to complain about eBay and your sales, your response may not remain. Thanks.
Yesterday, I was teaching all day at eBay Live. Evidently, Seth Godin stopped by my booth to say HI, but I wasn't there.
So I emailed him this morning asking if he were stlil around, and it turns out he was already home. He asked if I had heard that he mentioned me in his presentation to the eBay audience. No, I hadn't heard that!
He told me he put up a picture of me (hope it was a good one) and some pictures of other people as "eBay big idea people."
Well thank you, Seth. It's an honour when one of the biggest big idea people alive today calls you a big idea person. :)
The official eBay blogger took a picture yesterday of one of my slides that I gave at the Developer Conference. He blogged about it. Someone has already responded in sheer horror that I would say these things, and she put words in my mouth, saying that I think eBay sellers are illiterate.
eBay sellers are not illiterate, and I never said that. Could people please stop putting words in my mouth?
Besides, it doesn't reflect well on you to read something and take away from it something that's not there, all while complaining that I am saying that people don't like to read and don't often understand things. I think you just proved my point!
The point of my slide and most of that presentation was to wake developers up and make sure that they are designing and creating things that are easy to use. I believe that the typical eBay seller fits what I wrote... they don't want to read something that sounds like a college or grad school text book. They think they can figure things out themselves, and they will if developers make their tools easy enough! They won't read help files and may not read instructions in general.
That's not an indictment. We're a fast-paced world now. Once upon a time, we wrote letters. We took the time to read letters we got. Now, we read 2 sentences, and we don't care about the rest. We sign contracts without reading them. We try to figure out software and things without reading help files or manuals. It's just who we are as a society. Some people will read, and some will read less than the average. But on average, we're not making time to do these things or to care.
So developers need to design and develop for the fast-moving person who wants it to be so easy, it's impossible to not figure it out.
The DevCon has been great fun! I somehow have ended up as a mini celebrity since eBay staffers were following my Twitter about my road trip from Tucson to Chicago. That trip was supposed to include a night in Coralville, IA, which I had never heard of before. The night before the IA stay, I turned on The Weather Channel in my hotel room only to find half the staff they have in Coralville, IA reporting on "historic flooding." Holy cats. Guess I'm not driving through eastern IA!
I changed the route to go through Kansas (sorry we missed Joyce) and Missouri, and made it to Chicago just before Sunday dinner. So thanks to everybody @ DevCon who is asking, but I'm fine! You can follow the drive back too. :)
My session yesterday was great. Thanks to some programmers from Auctiva for laughing at all of my jokes including some things the audience didn't know were jokes. :)
I'm doing my marketing session again today at 11:30am for those at DevCon.
Our eBay Live booth is ready, so for thoes attending, please come see the team in booth 735... more on that later!
If you read my blog, you know one of my pet peeves are eBay experts who have been available for rent. You can pay them to recommend you. Or they recommend something for the affiliate money. If you are a regular reader here, then you KNOW what I'm saying!
Something really odd happened to me last week. A company who has promised me a good two-way relationship for years finally got someone there to send me a contract. :) Better late than never! We have faithfully sent them piles of referrals these last [number removed] years. They have sent us nobody. I'd like a nice two-way relationship! And here comes that contract.
Except clause 1 of the contract says that I would have to recommend them exclusively. I could no longer recommend any company they could possibly compete with on any level.
Which means they are buying me. That would be the end of our integrity. If we can only recommend them, then there goes our tradition of recommending the companies and services we think are best. How do we decide what's best? Well with integrity. :) We base it on our experience using/trying the system, what clients say, and what other eBay sellers say about it. If it's bad, we put it on the shit list, and we either don't recommend it or we recommend against it.
You can't pay me to recommend something I don't like. So far, we have been offered the largest commissions from Marketworks, and we stopped recommending them after eBay Live 2007. I could make decent money plugging the MW product, now owned by ChannelAdvisor, but I don't because I don't think it's a strong product. I think there are better ones out there like CA's old Merchant (now "Premium") and Laris (sellcenter.net).
You know what else happens when you think you want us to exclusively recommend you? You get a whole bunch of leads that are wrong for your company! There are reasons why we don't send every eBay seller to some of the biggest and most expensive services out there. The reason is that that particular client is not computer-savvy enough... or doesn't have the budget for hundreds of dollars per month and up... or doesn't want the multi-channel thing yet... or any number of reasons that they just might be better for Inkfrog. So make me sign exclusivity, and you start getting a PILE of leads that you are guaranteed to refuse to sign because they are wrong for you.
So who does that help? Who gets helped when a company I've been sending leads to wants to now contractually obligate me to only send them leads? Not the seller. They may not be right for this company, and I'd be wasting their time. Not the company who handed me the contract! I'd be wasting THEIR time by sending them people who they will never qualify. And not me since there goes my integrity once I sign exclusivity to anybody.
And you may have guessed it, but the contract they sent said nothing about sending us leads, nor did it cover how they will exclusively send design and consulting work our way. I'm sure that's just an oversight. :)
So for the people who know we keep our integrity, you're welcome. To the company who sent me this contract, please rewrite and resend. I can't sell you my integrity! That wasn't supposed to be part of the partnership deal! That's bad marketing for all of us.
Once again, I'm seeing companies throw around being "Number One" at something. Once again, it's someone saying that a company out there is the "number one eBay Store provider in the world." And funny enough, this is a different company than the LAST TIME I said someone was calling themselves number one!
Evidently, everybody is the number one eBay Store design service!
How do we measure that? Quantity? Quality? Price? How long they've been doing this? How many eBay Store awards they've won? How many of their customers then come and sign up with us? :)
I think that if anybody wants to call themselves number one (or two), they should qualify it. For example, I can think of some companies out there who could certainly say about themselves that they are:
Number one in using the same thing over and over for eBay sellers.
Number one in paying their staff just above minimum wage.
The number one eBay Store sweat shop!
Number one in delaying people and taking months to do something their website promises will be done in about a week.
Number one in lowering their prices all the time out of competitive fear. You may want to see if you can get some of your money back now that their prices are lower. :)
Number one in having no presence at any eBay events. I've never seen one of these "number one" companies at any conference.
Number one in designing things that confuse eBay sellers, who tend to hit the eBay Store home page, get confused, and leave.
Oh, I could award so many companies claiming to be experts at eBay Store design these wondering Number One awards.
As usual, my message is BUYER BEWARE. If someone makes a claim, make them stand behind it. Number One? How? Make them be more specific. It may be number one in quantity, and as someone who cares about quality and results, I think people should choose based on quality and results! The guy who fixes the most cars in your town may not be the guy who is the best mechanic in town.
it looks like not many eBay Live attendees will be hitting my How To Stop Breaking Rules class. I think we're up against a Town Hall or something quite popular.
But you guys need to know how to navigate through all of eBay's changes!
So remember that the Rules seminar will be given at our fall RocketPlace conference as well. We'll of course update it since eBay will probably change their rules between when I give my presentation this week and when I give it at RocketPlace in September!
Just a note that today is the day I drive away from Tucson, Arizona to head for Chicago. I'll be staying on top of As Was things and work as best I can. But if I seem slow to respond, please don't take it personally! It's a long drive and I'm the only driver.
It also means that I may not have much (time) to drop here until I start live blogging from the events.
If I write to you, I expect a reply unless I'm saying something that brings closure to the topic.
If I write you back asking where is the package you were supposed to ship to me, I expect you to write back telling me when I can expect to see my package.
If you write to me to apply for one of our jobs, and I write back that I'd need to see more of your work, I expect you to write back with more of your work. You are not making a very good showing by NOT writing me back... or as I've had in one case, writing me back weeks later, and still not showing me more of your work.
If I email your company from your website, I want to hear back.
I know these things seem obvious, but why does it feel like pulling teeth to get somebody to reply?
We found out something quite odd yesterday while on the phone with a new client and assessing his eBay listing strategies.
Items where he was paying for Featured Plus were not coming up Featured. I couldn't make sense of it. I couldn't imagine that eBay would take your $20 per item, and then not feature you.
I pinged someone I knew at eBay with the situation. She explained to me that anybody who is being disadvantaged in Best Match will end up on a certain page of search results. So for this guy's item, which has a lot of competition, and what we searched for, he was ending up on page 8 of search results.
However, he was at the TOP of page 8 in a "Featured Items" section. So evidently, if you pay for Featured, but Best Match is kicking your butt, you will end up at the top of the page where Best Match is dumping you.
For those of you being disadvantaged in Best Match, please stop using Featured Plus as it's probably not worth the $20! OK, it's $19.95, but I'm calling it $20.
The story starts last year. I'm in my car listening to Sparks' 1974 album, Propaganda, for maybe the 40,000th time. I'm singing my heart out to my fave song of all time, "At Home, At Work, At Play." And it suddenly hits me. I'll never hear that song live. It wasn't a single. Sparks is unlikely to do it at any of their concerts.
And I felt sad.
And what felt like a few days later, a friend asked me if I'll be coming to England for any of Sparks' then-upcoming concerts. Huh? Sparks concerts? I then found out about the Sparks Spectacular, also known as 21x21. What's that, you ask, and why is a concert by a band you never heard of important or special?
Sparks decided to play their new album (their 21st), Exotic Creatures of the Deep, from start to finish, live, on 13 June 2008 in London. Nothing new for Sparks. I flew to London in October 2002 to hear them do their 19th album, Li'l Beethoven, live start to finish. Yeah, so they do that. Well, they decided that they should really celebrate their career... so they added 20 more concerts before the new album premiere.
Each night, they would play an album start to finish. Just that album. Not a whole tour where they can perfect the live performance of that album. Once album a night, one chance to perform it live. And the encore will be a B-side or rarity from that time period. 21 albums in 21 nights. And that meant many things, but first things first. I was going to hear, "At Home, At Work, At Play" live. My husband and I bought concert tickets, and then assumed we'd figure out a way to get to London for the shows. Actually, we bought tickets for three nights. We also bought the very famous "Kimono My House" album show as well as the "Indiscreet" show since my fave three albums came out in a row.
We made it to London. We saw the shows. They changed my life. The performances were amazing. These people did these albums with a band who had to learn every impossible note. The singer sang every song except for one in the original key, and the songs are nearly impossible to sing. And for Indiscreet, they brought in brass, woodwinds, and strings. A few songs nearly made me cry every night.
Now that being said, I wish they had a sound engineer who actually knew the songs. This person didn't seem to know when certain instruments or people would be making sound, and often had those microphones down. We all missed Ron's one line, "Dinner for 12," on "Under The Table With Her." :(
But the audience filled in the missing bits. Lots of times you go to a concert and many people in the audience will sing along. Well, sure. The band is playing their hits and better-known songs. How many people know the "inside" songs of these albums? I don't know, but nearly the whole audience knew every song and sang mostly in tune. They even filled in background parts.
And Ron did his famous dance during the Propaganda show. We were standing one person away from the stage... I just don't have words for these things. I'm so glad my husband got to see it too, and so close up. :)
I am not sure I will ever see a concert better than these. I wish I could have afforded to stay in London for all 21 shows. Luckily, they've been webcasting the others, and rumours are swirling about selling DVDs or recordings of the shows. I sure hope they do that, and I hope they recorded from a point before what's called FOH (what the audience hears) so that everybody's mics are up, and the music just needs to be mixed.
I'm listening right now to my bootleg of the Indiscreet album show, and the audience singing along is just amazing. The energy in there. Hundreds of people, all hungry for these shows, singing every word like some giant 21-night singalong. And hundreds of people hushing to the most complete quiet you have ever heard when it looked like Ron was going to say something. Gosh, we all sure do idolise that man!
Sparks said that their 21 nights require something like 260 songs. Their first album came out in 1971, and the older of the two brothers is now in his early 60s. Can your favourite band do that?
Whoever said imitation was the sincerest form of flattery must have been the imitator. There's a company out there who we mostly pay no attention to, but when they get our attention (usually by going out of their way to get it), we notice that they're just ripping us off.
Have seen the logo we've had since 2000? Have you seen the design of our website with the big "sine wave" curve at the top? When they redid their site, they used a darn similar curve at the top.
Seen our dog character on our site? This company added a cartoon character to their site. I'm surprised it wasn't a dog.
Did you hear my session at CA's Catalyst in the US? Well, I heard from a CA staffer that the speech I gave... they took lots of it and gave it as their speech at another event that we didn't attend. Classy! This CA staffer saw both speeches at both events.
When people ask us about them, we always tell them that they're not our competitor... our companies don't do the same things. It's apples and oranges. If you want totally custom work, and especially if you want personalised consulting from eBay experts, then you'd want us. If you want their type of cookie cutter, we do the same thing over and over, any "junior designer" could pump this stuff out in his sleep, then we suggest you just download a free or cheap template from one of those download services. Why spend what they're charging for something that just isn't special and really has no value over a design your could download?
We just noticed on their website that they're hiring for a "junior designer," and they're offering £12,000 per year (£15K per year if you haven't been fired after working there 3 months). That's just over £7 per hour in a country where I just paid £4 for a hot chocolate and £2.80 for a roundtrip mass transit trip. A country where minimum wage is just under £6/hr. Ouch. So if you charge £800 for a design and your staff are paid £7/hr to reuse something that they've done before, well that's a great lot of profit for somebody!
We could do that. We could match their prices and hire sufficiently junior people. Or we could send the work to low-paid people in eastern Europe and Asia like some other companies do. We just think you deserve a lot better. Your eBay and online sales business is riding on this. Your livelihood rides on this. You need the best designs from the best designers backed by a team of experts who are going to really help your business.
So we're not impressed. And we're not flattered! We just hope that the general public sees through all their attempts to be mistaken for us. If you want what they do, you can get it for less than they charge. If you want us, you would be hiring us. :)
I was sick this past weekend, and there was truly nothing on TV, at least not with me as the target audience. I ended up wandering around Comcast's ON DEMAND service, and wandered into ShalomTV, which teaches you some Hebrew letters, sounds, words, and ideas.
The Rabbi was talking about the idea of charity, but how the root of the word came from the Hebrew word for righteousness. He talked about how in Judaism, charity is not just about giving money. It's about how you can help someone else be self-sufficient.
I guess that's where the give a man a fish/teach a man to fish thing comes from. And it really resonated with me since that's how I look at things in personal and business. In business, my team and I teach people as much as we can... we don't just give advice, but we show how we came up with that advice so that sellers can be independent (if they want to be) and fine tune their strategies themselves.
OK, so maybe nobody would say I'm righteous, and that's OK. :) But I definitely understand the idea of helping people and wanting them to be self sufficient rather than reliant on anybody outside of themselves.
I was just in London, where everything felt insanely expensive because of the exchange rate. I found that when I mentioned that, people were like, "Oh, you can't think of it that way." As in people get paid in British pounds, and then they pay for their lives and bills in this currency, so these prices will make sense to them.
I'm not sure about that. I heard the country has a huge problem with people racking up credit card debt. Friends we know there can't find work, and are hoping that their next job will pay at least €23,000 per year. Their rent is £900 per month. So call the money whatever you want, this looks bad!
To me, it was worse. I was doubling every price to estimate what it meant to me in dollars. That regular size candy bar may have been 99p, and 99p doesn't sound so bad, but that's nearly $2.00. If you paid 99p for a candy bar, you spent $2.00 in the currency in which you speak!
Breakfast with friends. 3 lattes and 3 croissants. £10. That's $20.
One ride on the Tube (underground subway). £1.40. Change to the bus? Another £1. That's $4.80 to get to one place on public transport. Then you have to get back later!
Dinner out. £35 for Indian food for three people. £80 for sushi for three people. £50 for Greek food for three people. Meanwhile, here in Tucson, you can typically eat for $10 or often less per person at any meal. So it was a major shock to the financial system!
I'm not even sure NYC has prices like this, at least not last time I visited there. This just seems way out of hand, and the weak dollar isn't helping!
