Managing Listings Over Multiple Channels - An Intro.

My apologies to anyone reading this looking for tips or information about postcards. I've been wracking my brain for things to write with little success. The website is taking a lot of time and not selling much but with the eBay fee increases I can't afford to keep as much in my eBay store anymore.






I'm using Zen Cart for my website and I really like it. The setup the second time was relatively painless. However the trouble seems to be managing many individual products across eBay and the Zen Cart.

There are services that will manage inventory across different channels although most of them seem to only support oscommerce and not Zen Cart. Some of them also seem to me to be cost prohibitive when working with low dollar items or they seem to involve a total management system.

The one thing I've found about postcard dealing is that it differs from many other types of product in that it pays to have a large inventory available to buyers. Of course this is true to some degree with every business but its more so in a field like postcards or books where people may be collecting or looking for one, sometimes obscure or highly specific, item. Some dealers have upwards of 50,000 cards. With this kind of inventory automation and simplification of everyday tasks is important.

To manage inventory across multiple channels a seller needs the ability to either:

A) have two separate inventories, which would be manageable if one had multiples of products or sells products which are interchangeable. IE. if you sold ipods and had 50 of them you could put half on the website and half in the eBay store.

B)have a way of identifying and changing aspects (revise/delete/add) of a listing easily across the multiple channels.

The way I've chosen to manage my inventory is through B. To help with this process I've been using the eBay auction numbers as model numbers in zen cart. I purchased a program called 3 Clicks from Prime 2s which imports data from eBay into an excel spread sheet. The program costs 26.99 but is worth every penny. Prime 2s also has excellent support for the program.

I believe the program is developed to simplify bookkeeping for eBay sellers (it comes packaged with a spreadsheet which with three clicks will import all sold item data from your my eBay). While it works fabulously for this purpose it also solves the problem of data import from eBay. This program is necessary because of the limitations of the other forms of data import from eBay.

There are four ways in which I know of to get data from eBay but they each have there disadvantages:

a) By hand - suitable for small volume sellers but a mind boggling task for anyone with thousands of listings

b) Turbo Lister - can be buggy when importing large amounts of data but will export it as a .csv file which can then by opened in excel. - the major flaw with TL, aside from its tendency to be unstable and stop importing after the first few thousand listings, is that it doesn't export auction numbers. Why? Who knows. You can view the auction numbers in TL but it will not export them as part of its .csv file.

c) File exchange - You need to subscribe to file exchange and it has a bit of a learning curve but its generally quite fast and easy to use for downloading data from eBay -however file exchange will not let you download certain fields such as description, picture URL. *

d) Use Three Clicks - its only downside is it costs money to buy the program (although it does have a free trial period) and the cost is really quite reasonable compared to the amount of time it saves - the program allows you to download any information you need from eBay (including both auction number and description but in the same spreadsheet!) and to choose from active, sold, unsold listings.

Now that you have the data you have to utilize it. With some finessing the data you download to eBay can be uploaded to Zen Cart as a tab delineated file using the free easy populate module. This is where auction numbers vs. model numbers become important. The auction number/model number is the key in your inventory data base. What does this mean? It means that the number is the individual identifier for each product. Products can have the same title/description or price but each one must have a unique identifying number which allows it to be easily found on either site.

By using the eBay assigned auction number (for listings which are on eBay) you can much more easily manage your inventory. By assigning the eBay auction number as the model number for any item you may have in both places you can easily end anything sold with one file upload.

For instance if I wake up one morning and find I've sold 20 postcards on eBay i can download a list of new sold items in excel using three clicks (just the auction numbers) into a spread sheet using the proper Easy Populate format, upload it through easy populate in my zen cart admin and the corresponding website listings are ended. I can do the same thing with anything sold on my website using the file exchange service provided by eBay.

This saves my oodles of time finding and manually ending the listings on either site.





*Between TL and File exchange you can get all the info you would need but this involves manipulating the date in excel to match the auction numbers from file exchange with the descriptions etc that you export from TL. A very helpful tutorial about this written by another eBay seller can be found here: http://www.boomspeed.com/sgdeals/TLFER.htm but the process is somewhat involved the first time and involves getting data from two different places on eBay which may be problematic.