I have read the article below at Startup Journal by By KELLY K. SPORS, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal. It has some good points, but it doesn't mention any negative sides of selling international on eBay or on any auction / ecommerce sites such as increasing fraud credit card purchases, charge backs after receiving the shipments, and lost packages.
Even though selling international has some risks, it may be worth while for some ecommerce businesses. So, here's the article:
Companies often take advantage of the weak dollar by selling items outside the U.S. for more money than they could at home.
You can too. Internet auction sites such as eBay make it easy for sellers in the U.S. to reach global buyers, who may pay a higher price because the currency-exchange rate works in their favor. The euro, for instance, has gained about 25% against the dollar in recent years, making U.S. purchases much cheaper for Europeans.
While eBay operates separate auction sites in other countries, U.S. sellers are often better off just listing on the domestic site -- eBay.com -- since that eliminates the need to translate the listing. The key: Make sure to offer world-wide shipping so that you don't turn away international customers.
EBay says that more than half of all its 147 million registered users are now outside the U.S., and that its U.S. site is drawing more and more buyers from around the world.
Some items, especially those hard to find in other countries, can fetch a high price abroad, says Jim Cockrum, who makes a living by offering advice on online auctions. Mr. Cockrum, who lives in Indianapolis, says he once sold a pair of used Nike Air Jordan sneakers to a collector in China for about $700.
International shipping, however, can be tricky. Each country carries its own shipping rules, including weight and size restrictions, and some ban the import of items like perfume. So check with your shipper to see whether your product is allowed to be sent internationally.
Also, it's usually bettter to specify in your listing that the buyer pays for shipping and then figure out the shipping charge with the winning bidder. A calculator on eBay can help buyers estimate this amount.
What is E-Business ?
Many confuse the difference between e-commerce and e-business. Electronic commerce, B2C, or E-commerce refers to online sales. On the other hand, Electronic Business or E-Business refers to more than just selling online.
E-Business is about utilizing internet technologies, such as simple email, online banking solutions, websites and more sophisticated applications such as web based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Solutions, web based inventory management.
Major goal of E-Business is to increase sales, business eficiency, productivity, streamline business processes and decrease costs.
Here's a definiton of E-Business at darwinmag.com :
What does e-business really mean?
The most basic definition of e-business is simply this: using the internet to connect with customers, partners, and suppliers. But the term also implies the transformation of existing business processes to make them more efficient. To engage in e-business, companies need to be able to unlock data in their back-end computer systems, so they can share information and conduct electronic transactions with customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. And for some companies, engaging in e-business means adopting new web-enabled business models—auctioning off surplus goods, selling products directly to consumers, or joining in online purchasing cooperatives with their competitors. Without a doubt, embarking on an e-business effort requires as much thinking about business strategy as it does about technology.
The Benefits of E-Business
The Internet and related technologies can change the way you develop and conduct your business processes, making them more time and cost efficient. They can diversify your marketing channels and, ultimately, help you increase your business revenue.
The Internet levels the playing field for small businesses. That is, it allows small business operators to compete on equal footing with larger businesses in the same industry.
Through the Internet, your small business can distribute information online to a global audience, immediately, with little out of pocket expense. This means you’ll reach more clients or customers in a shorter period of time. It gives you the ability to interact with your clients and customers in new ways, putting power in the hands of the buyer, giving your clients or customers more choice than they’ve ever had before.
And finally, the Internet gives you, the seller, the ability to readily assess your online business practices and modify them on the fly to ensure they meet the needs of your clients/customers.
In short, you can use the Internet to:
• Collect vital business information related to your customers and competitors. The Internet is a valuable research tool and, as a readily accessible information medium, its ability to allow you to remain competitive in your industry should not be underestimated.
• Increase awareness about your company. Even if you are not considering selling online, having a website that promotes your business, provides contact information, and outlines your unique value proposition – that is, the unique collection of benefits attributed to your product or service that creates value for your customers or clients – will simply increase your reach and value in the marketplace, and make it easier for your potential clients/customers to find you.
• Streamline communications and improve customer service. Email communications, website FAQs and auto-responders are examples of simple and cost effective electronic techniques that can help improve communications between you and your clients/customers.
• Improve productivity and reduce costs. Simply by streamlining communications using Internet technologies, you can improve your business productivity. And, out-of-pocket costs can be reduced further by implementing a readily updatable website, instead of printed materials that have a short shelf-life, to relay pertinent information to your customer base.
• Sell your products online. For those considering making the leap to ecommerce, selling online can lower your upfront set-up costs and operational costs, increase your reach to a global marketplace, and allow you to be “open” 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Further, it can allow you to automate your order processing and order tracking capabilities, develop cheaper online catalogues, and update your product lists on the fly.
Ebay Feedback
Every eBay member has a profile in the Feedback Forum. A profile has basic information about the member and a list of feedback left by their trading partners from previous transactions. Learning to trust a member of the community has a lot to do with what their past customers or sellers have to say!
For each transaction, only the buyer and seller can rate each other by leaving feedback. Each feedback left consists of a positive, negative, or neutral rating, and a short comment. Leaving honest comments about a particular eBay member gives other Community members a good idea of what to expect when dealing with that member. Once it is left, the feedback becomes a permanent part of the member's profile.
Ebay Feedback Stars
Ebay Feedback Disputes
“To maintain the integrity of the feedback system, feedback left for a member becomes a permanent part of that member's record. The comments cannot be edited at a later date. “ eBay says. But how about the feedbacks you have received which believe you didn't deserve. Is there any way to get your feedback removed?
There are five different actions you can take for an unpleasant feedback received.
1. Reply to eBay feedback received:
Share your side of the story by responding to any comment that has been left for you. Your response will be shown directly below the comment left by the other eBay member. Reply to feedback you have received.
2. Follow up to eBay feedback you have left:
You can leave one follow-up comment to a comment that you have already left, to add information or clarify your earlier comment. This will appear below your original comment. Follow up to feedback you have left.
3. Mutual eBay Feedback Withdrawal:
If both you and your trading partner are able to resolve a problem after feedback has been left, you can mutually agree to withdraw the feedback. Mutually withdrawn feedback still appears in the member profile, but is no longer counted in the feedback score. Both members must agree, and feedback left by both parties will be withdrawn at the same time. Start mutual feedback withdrawal for a transaction now.
4. Mediation through SquareTrade:
eBay's preferred dispute resolution provider, SquareTrade, offers services to help users solve problems related to their eBay transactions. SquareTrade offers a service to mediate disputes over feedback. Start the process to resolve a dispute via SquareTrade.
5. Feedback Removal:
eBay will remove individual feedback comments only in very exceptional circumstances, if they violate specific policies. Some special situations where eBay will remove feedback include: getting a valid court order to do so, the feedback contains vulgar language, or contains personal contact information. See a list of situations where eBay will consider removing feedback, and how you can file for removal.
For more information about eBay Feedback, visit Feedback FAQ Page at eBay.
You may also visit Leaving Feedback on eBay post.
Free Shopping Cart Mal's Ecommerce Review
I have been reviewing some shopping carts to help internet business owners. Mal's Ecommerce is a free shopping cart which you can implement to your ecommerce site easily. I'd highly recommend Mal's Ecommerce free shopping cart service for small ecommerce sites, usually with less than 100 products.
Mal's Ecommerce also offers a paid service for $6/month lets you integrate your site with your choice of payment processor. Remember free version does not process credit cards for you, it basically stores the credit card and order details of the customers for you. But you can easily integrate the free version with PayPal, Nochex or Paymate and start processing credit cards. So if you have a PayPal account, and if you integrate Mal's Free Shopping Cart to your site with PayPal you can accept credit cards through your PayPal account from non PayPal members. This is a great way not to lose your prospective customers by only accepting payment from paypal members.
They also offer a free and paid versions of mOrders software which help you to track your orders offline.
Here's some features of mOrders:
- Download new orders with a single click
- Multiple accounts/usernames are stored in a single database
- Group by, sort and search yours orders to make them easy to find
- Powerful report generator built in. Customize your reports, print invoices.
- Export your orders to other applications; Excel, MS Access, etc.
There's a discussion about Mal's Shopping Cart at FreeAuctionScripts which you can visit here: Mals-e Cart - Comments and Suggestions
Visit the What is E-Business Article for more information about E-Business and E-Commerce.
Are you an auction seller? Or do you have a resource website for auction sellers? If your answer is yes, you will have to visit Auction Tools Directory .
On Auction Tools site, you can find eBooks for auction industry, Auction Blogs, Image Hosting Services for auction sellers, auction management systems and many more sub categories specifically for auction industry.
There are already almost 300 resource websites listed for auction industry. You can suggest your site or your favorite auction resource sites and listings are free of charge.
I had a chance to speak to the owner of the site Brad, to ask him some questions before writing this post. He sounded very enthuastic about Auction Tools Directory and told about future plans.
He is in a process of moving the database from Access to MSSQL, and he is working on improving the site.
You can rate and write reviews for your favorite auction related sites. You can also join the Mailing List for updates and news about auction industry.
I've decided to register for Coop Advertising Network couple of months ago. It's a free service offered by Digitalpoint . Since joining the Coop Advertising Network , I've seen dramatic increases with my search engine results. I'd highly recommend using Coop Advertising Network to any website owners. Below is an FAQ from Digitalpoint website.
Coop Advertising Network FAQ
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What is this?
- The ad network is a network of site owners that offer ad space to the network. In return, the ads they define are displayed across the entire network. You can learn more about the goals and history over here.
- How much does this cost?
- 100% free.
- Why did you make this?
- Because there is a ton of unused advertising space out there on the Internet, and I have not seen anyone else doing anything like this. It's easy to put 50,000 of your own ads on your own site, but there is much more value if you put your ad 50 times on 1,000 sites.
- What types of sites do you currently support?
- vBulletin 2.x and vBulletin 3.x forums, phpBB 2.x forums, Movable Type blogs, Blogger based blogs and any site that supports PHP (there are how-to instructions for each).
Blogger Note: Blogger blogs have some special requirements at this point. They must be published via FTP/SFTP (rather than xxxx.blogspot.com) and must be running on an Apache web server that allows mod_rewrite with PHP installed.
- I can't seem to get the ads to work on my site, can you help me?
- Please visit the forum for assistance.
- What types of ads can be served?
- Currently the system can serve 468x60 graphic banners, 468x60 text based banners or a simple text based ad. For the text banners, you can control the background color of the banner.
- Are there any unacceptable ads?
- Gambling, adult, political and pharmaceutical related ads will not be accepted for the ad network. All ads are reviewed before they become live on the network. There are also detailed ad guidelines.
- What Character Set Is Used For Ads?
- Ads are served as Unicode (UTF-8), so ads in any languages are supported. If your site's charset is not UTF-8, you may want to consider changing it so unicode ads show properly.
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9. How exactly does it work?
- Ads are served in realtime on the backend from a dedicated ad server.
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First an active coop ad user is selected randomly based on weight (the more value/ad space you bring to the network, the more impressions/weight you will get across the network).
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Once the user has been selected, it pulls a random ad that they created to display.
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The ad server serves that advertisement for that ad request.
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You can see a sample of a raw text link integration by clicking here (text links in the footer).
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How do you prevent sites from joining the network and then removing the ads from their site?
Site are automatically revalidated daily, and accounts will be deactivated automatically if the ad network ads are missing from their site.
If I offer more ad space to the network do I get my ads displayed more on the network?
Yes, users are assigned a weight factor that determines the chances one of their ads will be served. The weighting system is a formula based on a variety of things, including popularity of the site, how many pages you offer to the ad network for space, how many other ads you run on your pages, etc.
Is there any incentive to refer people to the ad network?
Yes, there is a referral system where you receive a 10% weight bonus when you refer someone (the weight being based on the new user). In simple terms, the more people you refer, the more your ads are displayed across the network.
Can I buy my way into the network if I don't have any ad space to offer?
Sorry, no (this is not a money making venture on our end).
Why is there no cost if you run a dedicated server to serve ads? Doesn't it take server resources and bandwidth?
Yes it does, but at this point it's not much. If the ad network grows very large, there may be real costs incurred on our end to run it. If that ever becomes the case, we may sell a very small portion of the ad space to companies outside the ad network. There are no plans to do it at this point, and only enough ad space would be sold to break even on the bandwidth costs. But again, at this point there are no plans to do so, but it is left as an option to make it viable if it grows large.
Become a Coop Advertising Network member for free.
eBay has been improving customization for eBay Stores. eBay store owners do not have the flexibility of an independent ecommerce store, but they can still customize their eBay stores for good search engine traffic.
Remember on page optimization is only a part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and another very important part is off page optimization. You can read more about this at Daily SEO Blog On Page and Off Page Optimization article.
eBay Discussion Board has a very informative topic for eBay Stores Search Engine Optimization . Many experienced eBay store owners share their experiences about optimizing their ebay stores. Also one of the authority forums in auction industry FreeAuctionScripts has an SEO section for auction sellers and ecommerce sites called SEO Tutorials, Articles, Tips and Tools . You can ask your questions about optimizing your eBay Stores.
If you had a chance to read the “On Page and Off Page Optimization” article at Daily SEO, you will understand the importance of getting backlinks to your eBay store. Every backlink with the right anchor text will increase your rankings in search engine result pages.
e.g.
Anchor Text: eBay Store Name
URL : http://stores.ebay.com/eBayStoreName/
Try to submit your ebay store URL to as many directories as possible with using your keywords in your “Anchor Text”.
Here's a list of directories where you can submit your eBay Store. It's categorized and for free directories category, you don't need to provide a reciprocal link.
With the increasing power of search engines, SEO is a must for an ecommerce business. Good luck with your search engine optimization practices.
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After posting the Yahoo Blogs news, I have received some emails asking if I have a Yahoo Blog Invitation . Here's what you should do to get a Yahoo Blog Invitation .
Go to Yahoo Blog Invitation Page and enter your email address. Your email will be entered to the beta list and you will be receiving a Yahoo Blog Invitation soon.
If Yahoo starts sending invitations like Gmail, I will be offering them here for our visitors, but for now I haven't received an invitation yet :)
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Feedback on eBay is the reputation of buyers and sellers. It's more important for sellers to have a high feedback rating. In order to become a powerseller on eBay, you have to have at least 98% positive feedback rating. But some surveys show that many buyers prefer to buy from sellers with 99% or more feedback rating.
Let's start with basics. If you are new to eBay, you should start with reading another post I made about eBay Feedback to learn the basics of eBay Feedback System.
How to leave feedback on eBay?
- Click on the My eBay button at the top of any eBay page.
- Click on the "Feedback" link under "My Account" on the left-hand side of the page.
- Click on the Leave Feedback button.
From this page, you will be able to leave feedback for other members you've had a transaction with during the past 90 days, as well as visit your Member Profile page where you can review and respond to feedback left about you.
If you need to leave eBay feedback for a transaction that is more than 90 days old, you may do so using the "single transaction form" link located on the Leave Feedback page. Remember, eBay only commits to items being available for 90 days, so if it is greater than 90 days you may not be able to leave feedback.
Why Leaving Feedback on eBay is so important?
Every sellers has its own way of leaving feedback on eBay. Some leave a positive feedback after receiving the payment, and some wait till the buyer leaves one.
As a buyer, maybe you don't care about leaving or receiving a feedback. But remember every feedback is important for sellers.
Contact the seller before leaving a negative or neutral feedback
It is very important to understand that a negative or neutral feedback can hurt the seller's business for good. Almost all sellers are willing to work with you and help with the problems occured during the transaction. Remember everybody can make mistakes, and there are some mistakes and problems which sellers are not responsible. But if you are not happy with the whole transaction, first contact the seller, wait for an answer, then decide leaving a neutral or negative feedback. This is a common problem especially with new buyers to eBay.
You may also be interested in eBay Search Engine Optimization article, or eBay Feedback Information Page.
While I was doing a research for my new XML project, I have come up with a list of Free XML Tutorials. I will make a list of the Free XML Tutorials, so if somebody needs those, it would be a clean list of valuable XML Tutorials sites.
FREE XML TUTORIALS :
I will add more Free XML Tutorials, and also I will create a list of Free XSL Tutorials. Please send me your Free XML XSL Tutorials to be added on this list.
What is XML ?:
XML is the Extensible Markup Language. It is designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information identification.
It is called extensible because it is not a fixed format like HTML (a single, predefined markup language). Instead, XML is actually a `metalanguage' —a language for describing other languages—which lets you design your own customized markup languages for limitless different types of documents. XML can do this because it's written in SGML, the international standard metalanguage for text markup systems (ISO 8879).
What is XML for ?:
XML is intended `to make it easy and straightforward to use SGML on the Web: easy to define document types, easy to author and manage SGML-defined documents, and easy to transmit and share them across the Web.'
It defines `an extremely simple dialect of SGML which is completely described in the XML Specification. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.'
`For this reason, XML has been designed for ease of implementation, and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML'
XML is not just for Web pages: it can be used to store any kind of structured information, and to enclose or encapsulate information in order to pass it between different computing systems which would otherwise be unable to communicate.
Why is XML such an important development ?:
It removes two constraints which were holding back Web developments:
- dependence on a single, inflexible document type (HTML) which was being much abused for tasks it was never designed for;
- the complexity of full SGML, whose syntax allows many powerful but hard-to-program options.
XML allows the flexible development of user-defined document types. It provides a robust, non-proprietary, persistent, and verifiable file format for the storage and transmission of text and data both on and off the Web; and it removes the more complex options of SGML, making it easier to program for.
Reference: http://www.ucc.ie/xml/