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 | Include Top Home Brands in Your Titles
| Buyers in practically every category have their favorite brands. The Home category is no exception.
Review the top-searched brands for the Level 2 Home categories below. When appropriate, include these brand names in your listing titles. Your items will appear more often in buyer searches.
- Baby Gear & Furnishings: Graco, Fisher Price, BabyByorn
- Bath: Pottery Barn, Tommy Hilfiger, Croscill
- Bedding: Ralph Lauren, Pottery Barn, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger
- Furniture: Ethan Allen, Ikea, Eames, Ralph Lauren, Thomasville
- Kitchen: Williams Sonoma, KitchenAid, All Clad, Calphalon, Pfaltzgraff
- Lamps: Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Ikea
- Lawn & Garden: John Deere, Craftsman, Kohler, Toro, Briggs & Stratton
- Major Appliances: Viking, Braun, Siemens, Bosch, KitchenAid
- Tools: Craftsman, Dewalt, Milwaukee, Delta, Bosch
- Window Treatments: Pottery Barn, Ralph Lauren, Waverly, Laura Ashley
To view the top buyer search terms from the April Home newsletter, click here.
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Home Liquidation Tip
When is the best time to liquidate? This is a question business owners deal with frequently. If you are sitting on inventory that has been taking up important storage space, consider liquidating these slow movers to make room for new merchandise.
Consider the benefits:
- Reclaim Space: Make room in your warehouse or store for summer and fall inventory.
- Increase Capital: Boost cash flow for investment in holiday product.
- Generate Customers: Broaden your customer base with value-oriented shoppers.
- Enhance Brand: Reduce dated inventory that tarnishes your brand image.
- Improve Process: Introduce reliable seasonal sales and marketing strategies.
Use these eBay strategies to liquidate inventory quickly and economically:
- Open Low, No Reserve: Increase bids, turnover. Open at $1 without a reserve price.
- Buy It Now: Reduce overstock fast; get paid sooner. Let customers buy immediately.
- Fixed Price: Lower sale costs. Offer multiples of an item in a single listing at one price.
- Good 'Til Cancelled: Avoid relisting. List overstock in your Store as GTC items.
- Store Merchandising: Create a "Liquidation" category in your Store.
- Sale Titles: Build interest. Include "Special," "Blowout," "50% Off," in listing titles.
- Liquidation Listing: Protect new product. Create an off-price listing template. Compare the original MSRP to your rebated price.
You bought it, but you're not stuck with it. Liquidate to move the old and make room for the new!
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Merchandising Strategies for Home
There's a simple way to increase your Home sales. Leverage eBay's powerful Merchandising Manager, enabling you to "up-sell" and "cross-sell" additional products to your customers.
Home sellers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the Merchandising Manager. Most carry complete lines of brand name products, which can be effectively merchandised together during their auctions and at checkout for increased sales.
To get started, all you have to do is open an eBay Store, enabling you to place three additional product promotions on each of your Bid Confirmation and Checkout pages.
Consider the benefits:
- Offer additional products of equal or substantial value that compliment the item, such as a garden hose with a lawn mower.
- Offer supplementary accessories that improve an item's use, such as bed sheets with pillows or skirts with a bedspread.
- Offer supplies that protect or restore an item, such as polishes and cleaners with furniture
Upgrade to a Featured Store and you'll also be able to cross-sell products on your View Item pages.
- Showcase your item in different colors, patterns, and styles, such as quilts in classic patterns.
- Offer a more economical and premium alternative, such as a range of flatware.
For more Merchandising Manager tips and ideas, click here.
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 | usblinds (1181), U.S. Blinds
Providing a Full-Service Experience
| PowerSeller U.S. Blinds does more than just sell blinds, it gives its customers exactly what they want. It customizes its products to meet their needs and that establishes credibility.
Founded in 1985, US Blinds offers its eBay customers an incredible variety of window coverings, in all manner of colors, styles, and sizes, from faux-wood and vertical blinds to roll-up Roman Shades. After little more than a year on the site, its eBay sales account for 5% to 10% of its total business.
It also sets itself apart by offering its customers the ability to purchase made-to-order products. Besides offering finished custom blinds, built "completely from scratch" with premium cording and control mechanisms, it also sells "made-to-measure" blinds on eBay, which can be cut to the customer's specifications.
While most customers purchase the company's stock blinds, says Internet sales manager Elliot Marsh, the made-to-order program has contributed significantly to U.S. Blinds' success on eBay. It not only enables the company to serve its customers more completely, encouraging repeat business (evidenced by its feedback), but also makes a positive impression on buyers that don't even use the service, he says.
"I think it gives you credibility and tells people you're not just selling two items on eBay and that's the end of it," stresses Marsh, adding that home furnishing customers generally feel more comfortable buying from companies that have facilities for doing custom jobs.
Appearing well established and full-service oriented is particularly important to U.S. Blinds; its core eBay objective is to expand its regional business nationally. (That's one reason Marsh frequently uses the Featured Plus listing upgrade.)
Offering customization doesn't come without challenges, says Marsh. For one, it demands a well-engineered listing template, which can simply and clearly layout buyers' options. "If you don't post something people can read very easily, your sales won't turn out for you," explains Marsh.
He knows from experience. The made-to-order service didn't perform as well as they had anticipated until they updated their program template with a number of explicit price, size, color, and even feature/benefit charts.
Another program enabler: eBay's fixed-price listing format. The format allows Marsh to economically list from 50 to 100 made-to-measure blinds in a single listing, all at one convenient Buy It Now price.
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Must use Buy It Now and PayPal.
