2012-11-08-Ebay Logistics
Seminars@Hadley
The Logistics of eBay:
Getting Products to Buyers
Presented by
Rick Willison
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
November 8, 2012
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley seminar team, and I also work in Curricular Affairs at the Hadley School. Today’s seminar topic is the Logistics of eBay: Getting Products to Customer. I want to say a word before we get started that we’re doing this particular seminar as an add-on to our recently released FCE module Selling on eBay. I would certainly encourage everyone that signed up here today or that listens to this on a podcast to check into Selling on EBay. It’s an excellent new course that will give you a real good feeling about whether eBay is right for you or not.
Your presenter today is Rick Willison. Rick is the founder and president of Team Jesus Ministries and the Extreme Team. He’s also the co-owner of Quality Warehouse which is an online company that sells primarily on EBay. When I asked Rick for some comments for his biography, one of the things he put was that he was a driven and motivated blind man that would be stopped by no obstacles. And I say a hearty hurrah to that, and at this time, I’m going to turn the microphone over to Rick. He’s going to share some pointers about what happens after your auction is completed. What do you do now?
Rick Willison
Thank you Larry and good afternoon everybody. I am thrilled to be a part of this seminar to begin with and thankful for the Hadley School for the Blind to let me do this. eBay has been a great thing for my family and I. My wife actually started an eBay business back in 2004. I was kind of involved but not really sometimes, because it was just too hard for me to do it. It wasn’t accessible to me, but then Jonas Klink and his team made it completed accessible as you know and are working on that all the time. Since I went back the NFV’s training and eBay’s training about a year and a half, almost two years ago, I guess it’s been, in Baltimore and learned how to use it. We’ve had even more success.
I do this business with my wife. My wife primarily is running the business at this point as she was before, but that’s because I’m also in fulltime ministry. eBay’s been able to allow us to stay in fulltime ministry, because we saw such a huge economic drop in income to our non-profit that we had to figure out a different way to bring in money. The cool thing is that I was able to work with my Department of Services for the Blind and through other people am able to get ahold of even more product and sell it and boost our sales up a little bit. We continue to do that.
I know the topic of the day is what do we do once we sell products? The first thing I want to encourage you with is to make sure you know your technology really well, so if you’re using JAWS make sure you understand how that operates with eBay. Get in there and play with it a lot, so you can find your way around easily. Another good thing is if you’re an Apple user with the Voiceover, it works really well with eBay. I check our eBay stuff all the time from my iPhone. I’m able to see what is sold, what is awaiting payment, what’s still for sale, all that. It’s all part of the eBay app. It works really well. Plus, PayPal is accessible through the iPhone as well. There’s a lot of technology used there.
Let’s talk a little bit about what happens after something sells. You have your products listed, everything’s going good, you have people watching, you’re checking that. Let’s say you’re doing an auction, or we do mostly Buy It Now’s, and somebody buys something from you or an auction ends. At that point, it will come up into your My eBay. It’ll show it under awaiting payment first, and then it shows it once it paid under awaiting shipment. When it’s awaiting payment, you go in and communicate with the person, thank them, whatever you’re going to do there. As soon as they pay, leave feedback for them. Let them know that they were a quick payment, whatever it is. Great eBay or however it might be, but you give them their feedback. Give them good feedback as long as you’re not having a problem with them which you shouldn’t.
Once that happens, you walk through the process of shipping. When you go into the awaiting payment, you work your way down the page until you find the record numbers of that. Let’s say your record number for us would be around 12, five, 41, or something
in there. We go in and we look at that. We see what the item is; we see what they paid for it. We offer free shipping, so there’s no shipping to worry about from them, if that’s paid for, because it’s always paid for together. If you have calculated shipping, it’s going to throw it on your total. You’re going to go across, and you’re going to be able to print a shipping label. You just click on that print shipping label.
It’s going to come up with a screen that talks to you about what the shipping is. For instance, if it’s a first class small envelope. Like we’re shipping some makeup that we’re selling or a pair of socks that we’re selling, it’ll show the total is $1.64. If I sell more than one item to that person, I might have to go in there and check and make sure of the ounces. It might be set at one ounce or two ounces. If I sell three or four, it doesn’t add up correctly, because I’m figuring packaging and everything in there. I have to back that off to what it actually weighs.
Hopefully at this point, if you’re on eBay you’re already hooked up with a talking scale. They have a lot of those. They work really well. Once you figure out what the price is, say like ours is $1.64, right below the total you have a place you can cancel or pay and print. You hit pay and print, and it will pay automatically out of your PayPal account to the postal service, and it prints the label for you. It’s going to do this little calculation. It takes some time. There’s actually a little wheel spinning or a little thing with dots moving around.
When you get to the point of where it’s ready to print the label, you can print a sample label or you can print the label. When you click on print the label, it’s going to throw up your little windows box that has your different printers or your printer in it, and you hit on the one you want it to print to. You can get printer labels that will print just fine to eBay. You can get those off of eBay. Also if you’re printing FedEx, they have labels that they will give to you at no charge, so you can use those. UPS, FedEx, USPS, whatever it is, the labels all the same. We use all the same one, and we’re able to print the label and go from there.
Prior to that, and I left a step out, and I apologize. I go through and I print a packing slip or invoice for each product. Let’s say today, for instance, I have four things that have sold on eBay. I go to where it says record, and there’s a box that I can click on. It’ll select all the records of the things that have sold and paid for. All four of them will select. Then I go right back above that, and it says shipping or print shipping label. When I click on
that, it opens a box, and it gives you the opportunity to do several things.
I hit print label, but when it opens that up, it gives you the opportunity as you go through JAWS, it says print. It says invoice slashing packing slip. It says things like invoice for your records. Do the invoice slash packing slip. That gives the person a packing slip with all the information of what they bought, what they paid for, all that kind of stuff. It also would have your record number on it. They haven’t made that. It might work for where it prints out in braille if that’s what you need. We just print it normal and put it in with the item.
Then I have my packing slip. I put that with the product into the envelope with the label already on the envelope whether it’s a large padded envelope, whether it’s a box. We use a lot of polyurethane envelopes. They’re called poly mailers. They’re really good for mailing stuff. Whatever it is, you can put the label right on there, and what’s cool about it is your mailman picks that right up from your front door. With our mail lady, we’ve talked to her. We put a note in the box, but she pretty much knows we have stuff going out every day. She’s excited about it. We have had mail persons who are not so excited about it. They should be, because they get paid 18 seconds for every scan that they do.
Every one of your products that you put out have a label on it that they scan. To give you an idea, our mail lady gets extra time paid to her to come to our door to pick up products. She’s hopeful that we have lots and lots of stuff to give her, because she gets paid extra for it. It goes out, and it’s done. It gets tracked and all that. It has a tracking number, so everything is watched where it goes. If somebody calls up or emails you or whatever through eBay, and I want to remind you whenever you’re dealing with a customer always do it through eBay. Don’t go outside of eBay, because you want to keep track of your records of the conversations you’ve had with them.
Let me give you an example. We mailed out a sweater to a lady, and her mom had purchased it. She lived in an apartment. She sent it to her. It happened to be a dormitory type situation, and we got an email saying they never received it. However our records showed through the tracking that it was delivered, so they had to figure out who walked off with it. We were protected by that, showing that it was shipped from us, it was tracked, it was delivered to her apartment or to that dormitory, and from there, somebody walked off with it. That keeps us from having to return money or try to defend ourselves in any way, because we did the right thing.
As you walk through this, and it’ll take some time the first time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. You’ll see that the shipping process after somebody buys from you is very simple. It walks right through with you. It gives you every opportunity of how you want
to ship it whether its first class, priority mail, flat rate mail. That’s all in the shipping part of the transaction when you’re finishing up there. It’s not difficult. Where you might run into difficulties is if you have a lot of product, you’re going to have to label very well, so you know where to find stuff, or you’re going to have to have a sighted person who can show you maybe where something is or it’s the right color or whatever.
I work with sighted people, and it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. I would hope it’s the same for you. I want you to be as independent as possible, but remember sometimes we’re going to have to interact, and that’s okay too. I just feel that we do the best we can with what we’ve got. I’m going to leave it right here, right now, because I just gave you a bunch of information. I want to make sure I’m on track to where you want to go, so Larry I’ll kind of kick off and listen and see what we need to do next.
Larry Muffett
Thanks Rick. It might be helpful if you could give a little bit, not to put you right back on the microphone but maybe a little bit of the background on how you got involved with eBay, what got you interested in it, what sort of products you sell. Give a little history and background on that.
Rick Willison
I love doing that. I just didn’t want to take too much time doing that. Here’s what happened. In 2003, we had our daughter [Rally]. At that point, I was in fulltime ministry. I traveled around the world. My Extreme Team is a team of guys that lead up this ministry out of our home. We do feats of strength, so I break bricks. I rip phone books in half. I bend steel in my teeth, and we talk about God’s power over sin. Those are all object lessons. Through that I travel extensively around the world and do a lot of humanitarian work but also just share the gospel message.
When our daughter was going to be born in 2003, we had made a decision a long time before that my wife would be a stay at home mom, so she would be there for her. We started out that way, and my wife had a friend who was selling stuff on eBay, sold something for us, and she said I want to try it. She got some nurses outfits from her moms
garage sale for free and brought them home, and we started an eBay account. She put them on. She listed them. She made money, so she started going to garage sales where we lived.
In the area we lived, there were a lot of PhD people in the tri-cities in Washington State, and so there’s a lot of good clothes out there for cheap at garage sales. She started buying children’s clothes, and then we started going to Goodwill and the Goodwill Outlets and started picking through that stuff. It wasn’t until 2010 that I really got involved with it at all. My wife was doing stuff, and I would help her with shipping. We’d buy from liquidators starting about 2008. Every store out there has shelf pulls. They have overstocked items. They have returns, and that goes somewhere and gets sold to somebody who then sells it to the public at a lesser rate. A lot of times it’s at flea markets or online or other places.
She researched that and found a couple of places where we could buy things from, and its things like QVC, they sell online. I think one time in 2008 or 2009, we bought 1,000 bras and put those up and sold them and made money at that. What we turned to there was whatever we could find that would make money on eBay. We don’t just grab anything. We look and do the research. When we say, “I wonder how that would sell,” like maybe some socks that we’re selling now.
We go on eBay. We look at what’s going on, on eBay. We look up the product, and we don’t just look at what’s up for sale, but we look at the finish listings, the ones that have already completed, the completed listings to see what it actually sold for. We can say okay if we buy it for this, sell them for that with the fees and everything, how much money do we make? We always try to at least net double our money. If we buy something for $2.00, we want to make $2.00 on it after all our fees and all our costs and everything like that.