Some great insights by Jessica Jin from JoerLister about how you can increase your sales with multi-channel selling.
JoeLister’s automatic inventory management, pre-populated listings, and smart pricing tools make expanding your FBA business to eBay a sweet, sweet cakewalk.
What’s going on?
If your Amazon inventory has been moving slower than a herd of turtles lately, you’ve probably wondered by now what measures you might take to brush the dust off your shipping volume. You know that an entirely different set of consumers prefer eBay for their shopping, but cracking into that market is a whole lot of work. Do you recoil at the thought of listing all of your products again on another site, item after item, uploading photo after photo, typing every detail and measurement back in like an entry-level work horse? Does the thought of juggling inventory across platforms incite the need to breathe slowly in and out of a brown paper bag? We feel the same way.
That’s why we created JoeLister. It has flung the eBay doors wide open for thousands of our Amazon FBA and FBM sellers. Your products deserve more time in the sun, eBay is a very sunny place, and getting your stuff there is no longer a daunting task. In just 5 minutes, JoeLister will have you well on your way to throwing your Amazon items onto eBay as easily as throwing pancakes onto your plate at Sunday brunch.
eBay vs. Amazon: users and marketplace comparisons
In 2015, there were about 159 million active eBay users, and 270 million active Amazon users. The demographics, culture, and buying behavior of users on each site are rather unique, and this creates an advantage for sellers who list their wares on both.
eBay has been slowly creeping up on Amazon to compete in fixed-price sales as of late. While the average Amazon user is a little more affluent and willing to pay a higher fixed price, eBay has been redirecting an increasing number of habitual auction-bidders to fixed-price shopping. This is good news for FBA sellers. Listing your items on eBay will give you unprecedented reach into a pool of buyers who don’t hang out much on Amazon.
In the past, the ease of creating product listings with Amazon’s aggregate product page put eBay to shame. The single product page used for all sellers relieved them of the burden of taking their own photos and writing their own product descriptions, potentially losing out to competitors for silly listing quality differences. It also kept sellers from struggling with the minutiae of manually inputting every detail for every product. eBay on the other hand, has traditionally made sellers do all of this themselves. It’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
JoeLister has solved this problem. We’ll pull photos and information from manufacturers and automatically populate eBay listings. A seller’s only responsibilities will be to give listings a final look-over, and then plan what they’ll do with all the time they’ll save by letting JoeLister do their work for them.
How JoeLister Works
When you sign up with JoeLister, it takes just a few minutes to connect your accounts. We then automatically pull all of your active Amazon products into our system along with images and product descriptions. All you have to do is select an item you want to list, tweak pricing if you wish, and then give the go-ahead for us to create a beautiful listing for you. We’ve even built you a sweet calculator tool that will help compare the money you’d make off selling a product on each platform so that you can adjust your eBay pricing accordingly.
JoeLister will always keep quantity in sync:
One of the biggest worries for multi-channel sellers is double-selling. JoeLister keeps accurate tabs on inventory quantities so that both Amazon and eBay know when not to sell an item you’ve already sold. Our system also protects you from recurrent insertion fees. And when you sell out, we’ll keep your listing up so that you can continue to build on existing SEO.
Pre-populated, beautiful listings:
Once your Amazon inventory has been loaded into JoeLister, you can open an item up to find automatically-generated, editable product details and information for your products, and a preview of what your listing will look like on eBay.
Smart Pricing:
Every platform has a different set of fees, and keeping track of them can be mind boggling. This alone often scares sellers away from multi-channel operations. Nobody has the time to do the math for every item to make sure that prices on each platform bring the same yields across the board. JoeLister’s Smart Pricing tool makes it incredibly simple to create prices that already take into account all of your fees– Amazon’s, eBay’s, and PayPal’s.
Our default settings ensure that you earn exactly the same amount of money per sale on eBay as you would if that item sold on Amazon.
You can also set your own rules for Smart Pricing so that your eBay prices differ from Amazon prices by a set percentage or fixed dollar amount margin. If you want to get extra fancy, you can customize your own equation. Our goal is to give you full transparency and control in setting prices on eBay. Translating your pricing model over to eBay has never been so snappy. You can kiss number crunching goodbye.
Sounds too good to be true? Because it is, sort of.
While we’re continuously working our behinds off to make JoeLister as awesome as possible for sellers, eBay has built a few walls designed to protect the integrity of their marketplace, and to make your life a little harder. Here are some hiccups that folks frequently worry about, and JoeLister’s pro-tips on how to get around them:
Listing limits: If you are using a freshly minted eBay account without a solid selling history, you might need to wine and dine eBay a bit to earn their love and trust. eBay sometimes imposes limits on the number of listings you can make until you’ve sold enough to prove that you’re not a thief in the night. Good news is that JoeLister has secured a partnership at eBay that you can apply for which allows certain sellers to have their insertion fees waived and listing limits increased. Giving eBay a call and bringing proof of your success on Amazon will also sometimes help you circumvent listing limits. And if all else fails, we offer special pricing plans where we don’t charge monthly fees, and only ask for a small percentage of revenue once something sells. We figured it would be a no-pressure way for sellers to slowly build rapport with eBay; we don’t get paid unless you get paid.
International selling: Why not offer your wares to the world? Amazon currently offers “FBA Export,” a program that helps you ship items to users of your home country’s marketplace if they’re shopping abroad. You can also create separate accounts on foreign Amazon marketplaces to make your items available to them locally.
eBay also has global reach, and FBA sellers can tap into this without having to make the aforementioned arrangements with Amazon. This eliminates the headache of detangling the international shipping setups of multiple programs. JoeLister can direct Amazon to ship packages to a local eBay fulfillment center, and eBay will run the last leg of the delivery abroad. All you have to do to enable eBay’s Global Shipping Program is to switch it on in your account preferences:
And yes, there’s so much more. We also take care of automatic buyer feedback, tracking uploads, and we’re improving and building new features every single day. To learn more, browse our frequently asked questions: support.joelister.com
In conclusion:
So you’ve just acquired a boatload of treasure from 888Lots.
Joelister is the most pain-free way to get your booty in front of as many eyes as possible. Visit us at www.joelister.com to take us for a spin with 10 free listings.
Disclaimer: The information and views presented in this blog post are the opinions of the guest author, and not necessarily those of 888 Lots.
