The eBay Trading Assistant Program – Sell on Consignment or Not?
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What is an eBay Trading Assistant?
eBay Trading Assistants are online merchants who sell on consignment for people who either:
- Don’t want to deal with the hassle and time required to sell on eBay,
- Don’t have the computer skills or confidence to sell online,
- Don’t have the time required to sell on eBay,
- Know that an eBay Trading Assistant can fetch a better price (even after commissions) for their item due to experience on eBay, expertise in a particular niche, increased exposure in the search results due to Top Rated Seller status, and credibility as a seller.
The eBay Trading Assistant charges a fee (percentage of final sale price, flat rate, or some combination) to list the item (including taking the photograph and writing the description) and handle all the interaction with the buyer including answering questions, collecting payment, shipping the item, handling returns, and leaving feedback.
Why Sell on Consignment?
For many sellers the idea of becoming an eBay Trading Assistant is appealing for many reasons. Three of the biggest issues facing eBay sellers are 1) developing sources of inventory, 2) coming up with the capital required to invest in inventory, and 3) managing the risk associated purchasing inventory that may or may not sell. Selling on consignment alleviates these issues but presents several others for the seller. Read more
Proper eBay Grammar
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“eBay” is a funny word. Even when I start a sentence with “eBay,” I don’t capitalize the “e” even though I often see it printed that way in the mainstream media. I often feel a twinge of panic when the Wall Street Journal uses the upper case “E” when they begin a sentence with the name of the popular auction site — but I don’t change my ways.
Sometimes you see authors write ebaY with the upper case Y. This seems reasonable considering that’s how they spell it in their logo. However you never see it spelled that way on eBay.
I finally found the definitive guide on the Trading Assistant Program terms and conditions:
Details are important. Even the way we write the word “eBay” can help add consistency to our brand and reinforce brand attributes. That’s why in the majority of cases the name “eBay” should be written with a lower case “e” followed by an upper case “B” even when it begins a sentence.
Crises averted – we can all go about our business now!
Terapeak (read my Terapeak review) has made their “Title Builder” eBay keyword tool available free to the public. It’s pretty simple to use.
Simply start typing a keyword and the tool will automatically suggest twenty related keywords to include in your listing title. The tool details how many listings (from a sample of 100 recently closed listings) include the keyword in the title and the average, maximum, and minimum price items including these words in their title sold for.
Unlike the keyword tools provided by eBay, Terapeak’s Title Builder will provide data from eBay sites beyond eBay.com. It currently supports the UK, French, Australian, Canadian, and German sites as well as eBay Motors.
Here’s a link: http://data.terapeak.com/titlebuilder/
Download my free Best Match Book and learn the secrets to getting found in eBay’s search results.
There’s an interesting post on the eBay Tech Blog that discusses how the search engineers at eBay test their Best Match algorithms to evaluate the relevance of the search results returned for a particular query. They actually pay people to sit down to test the search engine and grade the appropriateness of the results on a four point scale. Over two million searches were evaluated in this manner so far this year. The tests help eBay “understand whether one search algorithm is better than another; second, they help [eBay] understand where a search algorithm doesn’t work and needs to be improved (for example, maybe it doesn’t work well in the collectibles category, or maybe it only works well for short one- or two-word queries); and, last, it helps [eBay] understand what users want.”
We refer to the process of gathering this data as relevance judgment, that is, collecting human judgment about the relevance of search results. The basic task goes like this: we present a judge with an eBay item, and a search engine query, and we ask the judge to assess how relevant the item is to the query on a four-point scale. For example, suppose the query is ipod nano 16Gb and the item is a brand new Apple 6th generation iPod nano 16Gb. The judge might decide that this is a “great result” (which might be, say, our top rating on the four-point scale), click on a radio button to record their vote, and move on to the next task. If the item was a car that had an iPod adapter in it, the judge might decide this result is “irrelevant” (say the lowest rating on the four point scale). If it were a Samsung mp3 player, it might be “partially relevant” (say the second-to-lowest), and if it were a used Apple iPod nano 2nd generation that’s missing its headphones, the judge might say “relevant” (it’s not perfect, but it sure is an Apple iPod).
Despite all of the criticism of Best Match, relevant search results are a worthy goal of the algorithm and I’m glad to see that eBay is taking an active vice passive approach to evaluating their work. Since impressions without sales impact an eBay item’s Listing Performance Score, sellers concerned about their Best Match rankings should cheer this effort. Now how do I get one of those jobs evaluating relevance?