Enterprise Seller Tools for eBay and PayPal

Mercent, a leading provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the launch of catalog merchandising and order integration software for high-volume eBay sellers, integrated directly with eBay Large Merchant Services, a new set of APIs on the eBay platform currently in public beta.
Mercent now provides enterprise retailers the ability to optimize listings across eBay, and efficiently process high order and payment volumes through eBay and PayPal. Mercent is the first eBay integrator to leverage eBay’s new Large Merchant Services, designed to increase profitable, high-volume product sales for large sellers on eBay.
SmartBargains.com, a division of Retail Convergence, Inc. and ranked #100 on the 2008 Internet Retail Top 500 Guide, is Mercent’s first client to adopt the company’s eBay selling solution. Mercent’s expanded platform now offers large retailers the ability to optimize SKU-level assortment, product content (which drives search and browse visibility), merchandising offers (critical to competitive selling), performance-driven product categorization, and the complete, PayPal-integrated order and payments processing pipeline on eBay.
For years, Mercent has provided leading retailers like REI, GUESS?, PetSmart, and 1-800-Flowers with technology and services to maximize revenue, profits, and inventory turns through online marketplaces and comparison shopping engines.
“We’re extremely pleased with Mercent’s eBay seller tools,” said Mark McWeeny, EVP and GM of SmartBargains.com “It’s apparent through our partnership that Mercent has applied the best features and practices of their longstanding retail marketing platform to this exciting new channel.”
Mercent helps leading online retailers like SmartBargains.com drive revenues and profits through ecommerce shopping channels like eBay by providing consolidated feed management, reporting and optimization tools through the on-demand Mercent Retail platform. Mercent is recognized by many in the ecommerce industry as the only channel management vendor to provide a complete marketplace integration that includes automated delivery of order data from third-party marketplaces directly into the retailer’s existing inventory and fulfillment systems.
Benefits of Mercent Retail for eBay include:

– Complete product and order feed integration — ensure your product
listings are always synchronized with your back-end systems without having
to manually download order reports or upload inventory figures

– Streamlined product catalog management — quickly map your products
and categories to the best performing eBay categories. Use automated
content rules to apply content changes, such as inserting promotional text,
across definable segments of your product catalog

– Comprehensive analytics — track and report on the revenue, profits,
cost-per-order (CPO), and other key retail advertising metrics associated
with orders on eBay and other online shopping channels

– Powerful optimization features — Automatically optimize advertising
campaigns based on listing-specific and product-specific performance
parameters including stock levels, gross margin, cost-per-click (CPC),
ROAS, and CPO

“Since 2005, Mercent has been helping enterprise retailers extract maximum value from online shopping channels and shopping feeds,” said Mercent CEO Eric Best. “Using the Mercent Retail platform and Large Merchant Services on the eBay platform we can quickly integrate sellers into the eBay marketplace. For large, branded merchants looking for automated control over product merchandising across eBay, Mercent Retail is the ultimate on-demand software.”
Information regarding Mercent Retail marketplace, shopping feed and paid inclusion management technology, Mercent Performance marketing services, and the complete list of online marketing channels in the Mercent Shopping Network is available at www.mercent.com.
Information about eBay’s Large Merchant Services can be found at: http://developer.ebay.com/products/large-merchant-services/
About SmartBargains.com
SmartBargains.com is the leading online retailer for unbelievable finds for women at outrageously low prices. SmartBargains.com has given over 3,000,000 consumers unmatched bragging rights by ensuring their hit rate is higher than any other bargain shopping experience. Since 2000, SmartBargains.com has saved its customers over $1 billion. SmartBargains.com is a venture-backed, privately held company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.smartbargains.com.
About Mercent
Mercent provides online marketing technology and services to help retailers optimize performance across online marketing channels. Mercent’s on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, connects existing retail management systems with more than 50 online shopping destinations including transactional marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon.com, comparison shopping engines (CSEs) such as Shopzilla, paid inclusion programs like Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, and affiliate marketing programs such as LinkShare and Commission Junction. Mercent Retail makes it easy for merchants to increase revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right merchandising offers and placement using optimized product data feeds to these key retail channels. Mercent customers include 1-800-Flowers, Bidz.com, Bass Pro Shops, GUESS?, Levenger, L’Occitane USA, Redcats Group, REI, and other leading retailers. Mercent is an Amazon.com Certified System Integrator, Buy.com Gold Certified Partner, SHOP.COM Certified Data Feed Provider, certified Google Product Search Partner and Yahoo! Search Submit Pro certified feed provider. Mercent is a venture-funded company based in Seattle, WA. For more information, visit www.mercent.com.

View original post here:
Enterprise Seller Tools for eBay and PayPal

Share/Save/Bookmark

Beat the eBay Digital Policy Change

As we all know eBay changed their policy on selling digital products via their website quite a few months ago and the change has affected many digital sellers across the world. According to eBay this change was made to stop feedback manipulation by the ‘one cent eBook’.

Go here to see the original:
Beat the eBay Digital Policy Change

Share/Save/Bookmark

How to Find Reliable Wholesale Suppliers to Start Selling on eBay

The best way to find reliable wholesale suppliers is through an unbiased third party that offers reviews on the wholesale suppliers they have in their directories. This party buys from the suppliers themselves and gives you accounts of their purchasing experiences. How is customer service? Are the goods delivered on time? Are the goods of high quality? Is the packaging sufficient and professional? With these feedback it can give you a better understanding of who you are dealing with before you actually buy from them.

Read the original post:
How to Find Reliable Wholesale Suppliers to Start Selling on eBay

Share/Save/Bookmark

I’m back… awesome eBay webinar manana and some new stars to report

Good morning eBay Strategies readers!  Sorry for the little dry spell in posting. I always underestimate the amount of energy needed going into the holiday selling season and between some webinars we're doing, customer strategy meetings and ChannelAdvisor's big 11/8 release, (custom item specifics - hooray!). I got swamped which left little time for blogging.  I think we're through the worst of it so I'll try and catch up on some topics I owe you.  Specifically we've learned A LOT about fp30 at ChannelAdvisor and I want to share some cutting edge strategies we're seeing that give sellers a leg up on the competition which in this environment can be the difference between life and death.  That piece will be a good partner to the eBay webinar…

eBay Webinar tomorrow - 'MUST SEE' if you are serious about selling on eBay.
eBay's top seller team is hosting a webinar tomorrow (Thursday November 13th) at 1:30pm Pacific, 4:30pm Eastern.

The details are:
Meeting ID: 111308  - secret code for attendee entry: 'attend'
They have streaming audio, but personally I prefer to do the dialin as it's clearer.  The dial-in detals are: ( 866 ) 501 – 3202 / ( 706 ) 679 - 2073        Conference
ID:  72758551
eBay gave us a dry run of the presentation yesterday and I have to admit this is by far the best webinar/information session that I've seen eBay do. Period.

Here's a sneak peek at the agenda:
  • Refresher on policy changes
  • BestMatch/Search (lots of good coverage on the new fp30 here too)
  • Driving demand for the holiday season 
  • Coming soon/2009 preview  (some DSR improvements - YEAH!!!!!!)

Having listened to several town halls and other presentations on these topics, I think eBay hasn't been great at communicating many of the nuances around BestMatch and FP30.  Thus most sellers are left with the impression that eBay is learning as they go along (or doesn't understand at all) and the system is unfair/random/stinks/etc.  This is the best explanation, rational and update on how it's working that I've seen thus far. 

This webinar for the first time laid out the facts on the format (there are tons of rumors and urban legend around these two topics in the eBay community) and did a good job of explaining a topic I hacked around here with fp30 on how the fixed-price and auction-style listings work together with BestMatch.  

Bottom line: If eBay still is a material part of your business,  this is a 'must see' webinar (and I'd tell you if it wasn't).  Feel free to post in the Q+A here before/after the webinar what questions you have and I'll make sure they are anonymously forwarded and after I'll do my best to find the information.
The new eBay 'eforcity' stars

New topic.  eBay has released a couple of new stars which I think really highlight the success of one specific seller on eBay - eforcity.  Here's a handy site, sellerdome that crawls eBay and lists the sellers by feedback (note - this is not the same as GMV).

eforcity is a ChannelAdvisor customer and we're really proud that our software played a roll in their achievement of getting over 1m feedback. Also in that lofty club is jayandmarie.  While not a customer, I've known Jay and Marie for a long time and they are a great part of the eBay community.    Jay and Jack (ceo@eforcity) are two of the smartest, scrappiest entrepreneurs I've ever met and they are a great asset to the eBay and ecommerce communities.  It's great to see eBay recognize their achievements in this way.

From sellerdome, you'll notice that the top four are accstation, eforcity, itrimming and everydaysource.  These are all sub-brands for eforcity so in reality this company effectively has well over 5m total feedback.  From personal experience, I can tell you they can make some servers hum over here at ChannelAdvisor!

Lots of sellers ask me about Jack's eBay success and I'll try and wrangle him into an interview here maybe after his holiday sales calm down.

The new stars are a shooting green and a shooting silver.  I have to admit the shooting silver looks like it's worked up a sweat so someone here started already calling it the sweaty silver star.  Sue over at Tamebay had the same reaction.   Maybe it's surprised and not sweaty?  Maybe it takes a ton of hard work and sweat to get to that level…

Enjoy the webinar and congrats to eforcity and jayandmarie on their snazzy new stars.

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon

See original here:
I’m back… awesome eBay webinar manana and some new stars to report

Share/Save/Bookmark

LehighAuctions.com Revamps Online Auction Site

LehighAuctions.com provider of one of the Unique online auction opportunities, today unveiled its new person-to-person, full featured auction service. The online auction will serve as a trading platform for users to easily browse, buy or sell virtually anything online with no listing fees.

Features that set LehighAuctions.com apart from other auction sites, aside from no listing or insertion fees, are free stores, want ads, bulk lister, PayPal verification, feedback ratings, and a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to protect you and your information 24/7.

For additional information on LehighAuctions.com’s featured auctions, listing opportunities and store program, visit http://www.LehighAUctions.com

View post:
LehighAuctions.com Revamps Online Auction Site

Share/Save/Bookmark