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This Weekend Is Loaded With Auctions
I woke up this morning to discover that after five months of serious work I finally crossed the finish line of a marathon. My eBay account is now certified as Top Rated. I know for most of you that are not nose down selling on eBay that won't mean much. But for me it meant upending my entire business and investing in additional hired help while jumping through hoop after hoop.
So what is the high bar and what changed? I met with an eBay growth adviser in February and we discussed the ways to grow my sales. I was pretty adamant that I did not want to play the promoted listings game paying eBay additional advertising fees. So he advised me that if I achieved the Top Rated Seller status that the algorithm would automatically give me a bump in search. In other words if I gave the best customer service eBay would recognize that and raise my visibility naturally in the category.
The biggest change five months ago was we went to doing everything with tracking. This was only possible through the newly available service called eBay Standard Envelope where for essentially the price of a stamp we could print out a label that had a minimum level of tracking. When we started this journey less than 45% of my shipments had tracking. Everything else went out with a stamp and a prayer it would get there. Since late May we have been running above 95% on a rolling 90 day count.
On eBay I have 74 live auctions running. While I'm at NOAC I think that might even dip to no active auctions as I'm kinda holding back while many of us are playing in the mountains.
So to finish the story moving to eBay Standard Envelope was not the hardest part of the puzzle. The boulder we had to roll up the mountain was having these packages scanned by the post office within 1 business day of purchase. So for example if you bought something on a Sunday we had to have it shipped on Monday and scanned by the mail carrier (not just dropped in a blue box). That headache has involved changing up SOOOO many things at the office to make shipping the priority. Many times myself or an employee had to take a tub to the walk up line at the post office to get the scan when our pick up was delayed or thrown off. Basically everyone on my team had to make shipping the primary job to get this done. But on the other side of it we have these advantages we can offer to customers: the fastest shipping time of any store paired with the largest selection of any store. All that equals convenience and a good experience for buyers.
