Question
It seems to me that as you expand to other channels for selling your goods, you need a way to manage those sales as well. If you have a web store, what software do you use to manage those sales? Is it integrated with your auction manager? If you sell on other auction sites, how do you manage/process those orders?
I would not expect enough sales initially to justify an automation tool, but it is a concern to factor in as I look to expand into other sites.
Answer
tekgems,
I use auctionsage. I have an ebay store, an oscommerce store and an ioffer store.
I can use auctionsage to manage all sales because you can create a non ebay invoice and also add non ebay items to an ebay invoice. however it has to be done manually unlike the automated ebay sales (but so far they are so little that it's not been exactly a strain!).
in auctionsage, you have a database where you create your inventory and then list it from there in whatever format you want. You can download your inventory in a csv file and I use that to bulk upload to ioffer and my oscommerce store.
I have to do some tweaking to that csv but the tweaking takes the same amount of time for one item as it does for 1000. I have to rename the fields to what oscommerce wants (and to what ioffer wants), remove quotes, remove any references to ebay from my description field, remove tabs, remove carriage returns, etc. That kind of thing. and that's it. I can do it in about the time it would take me to type it out.
I duplicate all my listings as I sell unique one of a kind items. once they go through auction once and don't sell, they get listed in my ebay store, my ioffer store and my webstore. oscommerce and ioffer have a search field that searches the title. if I sell an item from anyplace, I just have to go into there and search by some part of the title and then click a button to make it inactive on oscommerce (I go in every once in a while and delete them but this is the fastest way since I am on dialup). with ioffer I just click there end button, say yes I really want to and done. to end an ebay store listing, I just highlight the one I want to end in auctionsage and click end this item now (can highlight multiple items).
this is the only reason I expanded into an ioffer store, because of the bulk upload feature they offer. and the only reason I spend time maintaining my webstore for the same reason, bulk upload. I won't try any other new site unless they offer that, I just can't justify the time spent duplicating listings.
I've worked hard on developing a system that works for me and would be more than happy to share the exact details of converting for ioffer or oscommerce. with this system in place, any other places like ioffer that have bulk upload AND don't charge unless an item sells I can be on in a heartbeat.
My next outlet may be yahoo. I sold on there years ago but need to research costs to lists and my items to see if they even sell. I also may look into amazon but will only consider either place if they have a bulk upload feature I can use.
Thank god for auctionsage! oops thundering, have to go before proof reading!
Answer
Mel - thank you for the detailed response. Same here, I only will try out a site if they have a bulk upload or an import from eBay feature. Computers should work for us, not make us a slave to it.
How do you handle categories? I often struggle with figuring out a way to map the eBay categories to the other site's category structure.
Answer
tekgems,
for my webstore, I use some miscellaneous fields auctionsage provides and input my category and subcategory names in there.
for ioffer, they have a pretty limited category selection for what i am listing on there right now (just two types of ephemera). I think I have all of three choices so it's pretty easy to copy and paste what is needed by sorting on my category first.
I think I'll have to learn more what open office can do in terms of manipulating an entire spreadsheet. i would think there would be a way to have it compare to a database you create of ebay category number/word and your database to replace it with the correct one depending on what site you are loading it on.
auctionsage will download into the csv the ebay category and second category and also your store category if you want. maybe a database of this ebay category equals this yahoo category, etc. I haven't dug into it enough to see what it can do, I know it's supposed to be a clone of excel so anything I've wanted to do with it so far I've searched on the net to find how you do that in excel.
if someone knows how to do this, I'm all ears if it were a database it compared to, you could add categories as you need them and only when you need them and have a chart for every site you list in.