Auction Box

So on eBay , for those of you who haven’t been on eBay before that’s me, this is the internal mechanism for my eBay site. So on here you can see that I’ve had 352 people write to me in the last 30 days and tell me that the transaction worked ok, I had 6 saying yeah not too bad and 1 person that didn’t like me.

eBay’s buyers rely on these numbers here so my score has grown to 2,240 since August 2006, and I am tracking it at 99.3% happiness between all of the clients. Most people that are buying in Australia are relying on this number here but there are some secrets to that number that eBay don’t teach you and that other seller’s don’t teach you, Is that when the numbers grow large enough.

I can still piss someone off and it doesn’t affect my rating. When a person writes to me and says “Your customer service has been terrible”, ”I’m going to destroy your business”, I worked out some time ago on the maths, that if their rating is 10, and I give them a reciprocal negative feedback their rating can go from 100% to 82%, but now that I am at 2,200 I have a critical mass, so when somebody gives me 1 point negative, I might go from 99.3% to 99.2% and it doesn’t affect me anymore, so now I can be a bit more blasé, not that I want to have negative feedbacks, but eBay customers are very, very time consuming customers, they pay for it today, they want it tonight, and if they don’t get it tonight you’ve got all these new people that are signing up that are unfamiliar with the internet and they are scared that when they put their transactions through that maybe their gonna get ripped off. But as soon as I worked out that formula there, of how to guard my reputation and my rating I could increase my sales dramatically by selling a far broader product range rather than just trying to be a specialist at one, Now, I’m a master of none, and I’ve found that I haven’t pigeonholed myself and now my ratings jumping by 300 points every month and that’s continuing to grow. For everyone that is in business, one of the hardest things to do is to score yourself accurately on a daily or a monthly or a per annum basis, fortunately some of the eBay system is that it does it for you by the minute.

So I at any one point in time never have to tally anything, ever. It will do my BAS statement contributions for me, runs the entire process for me by the click of a mouse. So I don’t need to have internal people doing any accounts. I can see here this snapshot was taken this morning, that from my last 24 hrs my sales figure was exactly that, my last 7 days it was exactly this, my last 30 days it was exactly that and it’s available to you every hour or every minute of the day.

So those things enable you to concentrate on other elements of your business, so it’s quite a good handy scoring mechanism. And there’s a lot of other pieces in behind there, but these are some of the key ingredients that eBay will enable you if you subscribe to their top tier programs of the data that they’ll provide you I think it’s like $20 or $30 a month to be in that particular program and to have your stuff on there.

The hardest part with eBay is what do you sell? You can either look at doing your existing stock or you can go researching on there, and this is the single, biggest problem that we have on eBay today, is that there’s 50 of everything.

It’s that difficult on there, and everyone is having a price war. So researching ideas you’ve got to continually try and, that’s my job at the moment on a daily basis, is always looking for where can I get more stock. If I can find more stock it will sell on eBay no question at all, the hard part is can I find stock that’s got margin, can I find stock that I’m not competing against 10 other people, can I find stock that I’m not competing against eBay sellers in Hong Kong, There’s a full time process in place for us to get our strategies right. Part of our stock process that we use, is that the stock can’t be seasonal, I don’t want to be in and out of flavour and I buy 100 sets of bikinis or beach towels and then I’m stuck with them if I haven’t sold them all by the end of January so that category is off for us.

Where possible we don’t want to touch anything at all on eBay if it’s not making us at least $20 of profit regardless of the sale price, we don’t want to be busy just rats and micing things. Predominantly we’re sports related products, and that started to pigeon hole us and now we’re going further and further in our product range just to keep expanding things so I’m not just reliant on selling tandem bikes on a monthly basis, because in winter they do slow down a bit.

Some of the things that eBay does is it brings you surprises, and some of the surprises that I’ve had so far is that last year some of my research, from when I started dealing with mountain bikes just bringing in a container of brand new mountain bikes, was that an alloy gold mountain bike would sell for less than a red steel mountain bike. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t ask it for too long but the first container of gold bikes were gone at a loss and now we only stock red bikes.

I’ve got no idea why, and they are a lower quality and I make more margin on a lower quality red bike than I could on a higher quality gold aluminium bike, but there’s some of the crazy things with eBay, but it’s the largest data base of buyers.

The things that have happened for us since is I bring in tandem bikes now from over in China and I get them made by the container load, blind people buy tandem bikes. Never ever for a moment did I ever consider that blind people would become my largest customer of tandem bikes, they’ve all got relatives that want to go for a bike ride and they can sit on the back in safety, so we’re in the process of trying to cut a deal, we’re probably stage 2 of stage 9 with Vision Australia who are now the Royal Institute of the Blind and Royal Institute of Sydney and so forth. You can’t go to a bike shop today in Australia and buy a tandem bike for under $1000, they’re only for like the steroid couple that want to ride from here to Sydney, and are crazy enough to do that for 4 days. Other than that you can’t buy a tandem bike, they’re all $1000, $2000, $3000. I’m bringing them in and landing them in Australia for $195 and selling them for $350 week in week out, and no-one else has bothered to tap into that market. It may happen but a lot of eBay sellers that are out there as potential competition.

A lot of them are mums and dads that may not be cashed up, there might be mums and dads that are conservative about risk, so for them to want to take me on in that one product range they have to spend $40,000 to bring in a container of tandem bikes. So I know it’s only the big guys that might compete against me, and that I don’t think it’s big enough as a stand alone product for the big enough guys to be bothered with so I’m finding that a year later I’m still in there completely protected selling tandem bikes. But what’s starting to happen is people in New Zealand also can’t buy tandem bikes, so they’re coming to me through eBay, then writing to me personally saying can I buy 60 of your tandem bikes, we have a bike hire business in Auckland.

So I could never put an ad in the paper, I could never ever market enough to find that person in Auckland who wanted to buy my bikes, so these things are continually coming up. In researching ideas, some of the things that you can do in eBay is that you can actually go and look at everything that’s ended and sold and didn’t sell for the day or the week or the month, you can put in any search that you want to put in there, So I’ve gone and done a search for us today just to show you how oddball eBay can be but where the profits are in the oddball stuff. I’ve searched in eBay for air compressors, like I doubt that every house in Australia wants to have a heavy duty air compressor so I did like a pretty ugly sort of a search.

Hello everyone I’ll give you the short version a little bit of my background, some of you might have heard of Gorilla marketing or Gorilla group before, that’s me, I stopped doing that many years ago when I was making too much money for other people and not enough for myself so I concentrated more on Property Development in the last 5 years and continued to do Property Development fulltime. Last year I sensed a further downturn coming for the industry including myself and also for some of my projects that I was involved in. At the end of February last year I had 7 units sitting up in the northern part of Queensland that either weren’t selling or weren’t renting, someone told me about eBay and said Why don’t you whack them on eBay”, I’d never really, I mean I’d heard of it and looked at it but never really bothered too much about it all seemed to hard, I put a pride of the development finish, I went and whacked a plunge pool in one of the units just to make it suitable for holiday letting. I whacked it on eBay and I thought I’ll see what happens, I’ll auction off some holiday accommodation and it went berserk, it went absolutely berserk. I have a background of copywriting and marketing so eBay seemed to be a fairly good glove for me to put on and have a go at.

Within about a month of putting our property on there, that’s still on there now that just auctions day in and day out, we have nearly 100% occupancy in the holiday letting market up there, Within about a month of letting I just sat there and just watched and watched what eBay was doing and I analyzed and I scored and I check and I sticky beaked and I learnt more and more about it.

Within a month I was on a plane and I went to China and filled up a container and came back to Australia and whacked it all on eBay and it sold, so I went back to China and filled up another container and it sold and the process just continued on and the third trip back there, I headhunted a person who was working at the bicycle factory where I was getting sporting goods from, he now works fulltime for me in my own office over there in China coordinating all the process.

And today’s presentation is just about that. What can a person who’s got business skills, a bit of an entrepreneurial flair, understands money and risk and understands customer service and what can they and can’t they do with eBay and now it’s like, it’s certainly not it’s probably about just that much of my business, but it’s a $25,000 a month cash flow that I never had before, you know we’re starting to take it a bit more seriously today. Our first container arrived last August and we have another container that arrives, well it’s here Saturday, But I’ll be down there being the laborer unfortunately unpacking that on Tuesday or Wednesday and there’s some of the downsides with bringing in containers but if you don’t unpack it yourself you don’t know what’s there like what you think you’re going to get, you ask for red, you get blue, So you’ve just got to learn in business to tolerate a lot of those sorts of things.

This is this morning, this is before I came here, this is factual information, today between 8.48am and 8.54am 200 items passed through the eBay machine and in that 6 minute interval 69 of them sold, so they’ve got a 34% conversion rate before 9.00am this morning so while everybody is still driving to work the eBay machine is up and running fast out of those 69 sales they turned over $2,600 for an average of $38 per item sold across the board, I don’t know who the seller’s where, I didn’t bother to look at what the products where, I just tallied it for you just to show what’s going on every second of the day, it’s the most amazing, dynamic market I’ve ever seen.

eBay’ s fees, just for putting it on there, out of the 200 items, 31 didn’t sell, eBay still got paid, the seller still pays to put there advertisement on eBay, beyond that the eBay fees, the commission that they charged on what sold this morning, eBay made $133 profit or fees in that 6 minute interval, if we times that by 10, like an hour, an hour on eBay, they’re turning over $3,330 an hour in fees, based on a before 9.00am sales pattern, And I would reckon that that would be one of the worst parts of the week, certainly Monday night Tuesday night the ticket items will clearly go higher, so I’ll try and give you some bad figures just to paint a bit of a picture for those of you who are out here, who have currently got a business and have never considered putting your existing products on eBay just to see what happens. It’s the world’s biggest data base of buyer’s. If we continue to go along with this figure here the $3,330 times it by 24 hours, $80,000 a day, anybody happy with that sort of revenue?

For good or for bad, eBay makes all of their information about absolutely every single seller on there, public information.

So if you want to go on there tonight and see what I am doing you can do it, If you want to see what my conversion rate is you can check it, if you want to see what I sold and for how much, everything on there is checkable, whether you agree with it or you disagree with it, it’s there and everyone can do it to each other so we’re all on a level playing field at least. But that’s the size of the eBay machine this month as a cash cow just in fees for Australia.