The Seven Steps to Scalability:
Growing your eBay Sales
by Katie Sween
Seller and Marketplace Development

Every year I am thrilled with the exchange of ideas that takes place at eBay Live! One of the magical aspects of this annual event is eBay Staff and eBay sellers coming together to share information. eBay staff eagerly share product tips with sellers, who, in turn, tell us about their best practices for successful selling. During eBay Live! 2005, I was in the Seller Scalability booth for all three days of the event. Once again, one of the most popular educational offerings was the “7-Steps to Scalability” seller action plan. In the 7-Steps to Scalability sessions, we provide sellers with live one-on-one selling consultations conducted by Selling Specialists from eBay Customer Support.

We worked with over 4,000 sellers at the event on a one-on-one basis to review their listings and eBay Stores. In these sessions we made recommendations on areas they could optimize, and recognized the good things sellers were already doing.

In this month's Selling Edge column, I want to briefly describe the 7-Steps to Scalability process. You can adopt this to scale your own eBay business. You may find that you're already doing many things right, and only need to make small tweaks to your selling strategy. But often these small tweaks can lead to significant improvements in your selling success. 

Step 1: Setting up for success

View Seller's Other Items

In an actual face-to-face 7 Steps to Scalability success session, we start out the consultation by reviewing the seller's listings from their own View Seller's Other Items page. This page gives us many insights into a seller's selling strategy – for example, the listing formats they use, their approach to listing timing and scheduling, their preferences for accepting payment methods such as PayPal, and more.

Here are some tips from the Setting up for Success step of the 7 steps:

• To appeal to all buyers, list in a variety of listing formats such as auction-style listings (including auction-style listings with Buy it Now), Fixed Price, Store Inventory.
• Use Item Specifics when available, so that buyers can find your items more easily.
• Stagger your listing ending days and times, so you can manage them better.

Step 2: Listings that Sell
Next, we dive into the actual seller's listings. We encourage sellers to think like buyers when creating their listings, and make them easy for buyers to find.

Some of our tips for listings that sell successfully:

• Use all 55 characters allowed in your listing titles, and repeat the title in the item description.
• Choose effective keywords and search terms.
• Provide all the information a buyer would need to decide whether to buy your item on one screen. Avoid making the buyer scroll up and down on the page.

Step 3: Powerful Photos
In this step, we discuss with sellers about how great pictures can make all the difference in selling their items.

Some of our tips for including powerful pictures in listings include:

• Be sure that your picture is one of the first things the buyer sees in your listing.
• Use multiple pictures in different lights and taken at different angles, to give your buyers a better “feel” of your item.
• Take your own pictures, or get permission from the copyright owner.

Read Getting the Right Light, an article on photography, in The Chatter archives. 

Step 4: Optimizing your eBay Store

Stores Phone Support

This is where we move on from your listings to the seller's eBay Store. In this part of the consultation, we help the seller understand the customization, marketing and reporting tools available with their Store, and make sure they are taking advantage of all these options.

Some of our tips for optimizing your eBay Store include:

• Use keywords in your Store name, title and Custom Categories. Not only will this help eBay buyers find the items they want once in your Store, it will increase your Store's relevance in Natural Search (when buyers are searching the Internet using search engines like Google).
• Remember that eBay Store sellers receive free phone support, so you can call Customer Support if you have questions about your Store. You can find the number on your Manage my Store page.
• Traffic reports (included free with your Store) show you which items buyers are visiting most frequently and how they found your items.

Read about Increasing Your Store's Visibility in Internet Search Engines in The Chatter archives. You'll also find more information about Stores on the eBay Stores information page.

Step 5: Take advantage of eBay's selling tools to grow
eBay offers many selling tools suited to your specific selling needs. These tools can make you more efficient, saving you time and money! In this part of the consultation we share ideas on tools you can use to automate your selling processes and track your business performance.

Some of our tips on tools to help you grow include:

• eBay offers a full suite of listing and management tools to help make your listing and selling processes more effective. Visit the Seller Tools Recommendation page to get an idea of which tool is right for your business.
• eBay has a directory of all eBay tools as well as tools developed by third parties that are compatible with listing on eBay. Visit the eBay Solutions Directory to learn which tools and services would help you.
• Offer PayPal in your listings – listings that offer PayPal are on average 6% more likely to sell and they experience a 5% average increase in final price.*

*Information based on an internal study of listings in some of eBay's most popular categories.

Step 6: Sourcing and Marketing

Completed Item Searches

Here we dive into marketing and sourcing tips that help sellers understand what to sell and how to sell it.

Some of our tips for sourcing and marketing include:

• Use the Completed Item search to understand how other sellers are marketing and pricing the same items you are selling (Click on the Advanced Search link on the upper right corner on every eBay page, and then check the option for "Completed listings only.").
• List in multiple categories so that buyers can find your items through more channels.
• Opt-in to receive eBay's seller newsletters which have information on what's “in demand” on a monthly and quarterly basis. You can opt-in to receive newsletters from the Account Preferences section in My eBay.

Step 7: Shipping and Fulfillment
In the last part of the consultation, we share tips on shipping and fulfillment.

Some of our tips for shipping and fulfillment:

• Use eBay's Shipping Calculator to estimate the total costs of shipping your item, and use a flat -rate in your item description. Buyers find a flat-rate simple and easy to understand.
• Print and pay for shipping labels from USPS or UPS – pay for them with your PayPal account and print them on your own printer. Visit the eBay Shipping Center to learn more.
• Sell internationally – cross-border trading makes up 15% of the trading on eBay. You can find tips on selling internationally on the Global Trading information page.

eBay developed the 7-Steps to Scalability Seller Action Plan by analyzing our own Internet research, talking with many successful sellers, and working with our Preferred Solutions Providers. On eBay, every business is built differently. What works for one seller, may not work for another, because of various reasons such as choice of selling categories, scale of the selling operation, and so on. So please use these steps as a guideline for growing your business, not as hard and fast rules.

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