165: 18 Tips To Start and Grow Your eBay Business - Mark Le Vine
Mark Le Vine is co-owner, with his wife Robin, of Bubblefast, a shipping supply eCommerce business that began by selling a single roll of bubble cushioning on eBay in 1999. As pioneers, Bubblefast has enjoyed it's involvement in the eCommerce community ever since.
Interesting Notes Bubblefast will be celebrating their 20th anniversary on May 2019. Having been a while, they have seen a few things. Back in the old days, there were no many rules. The competition was not much and shipping was less complicated. Back then, it was not easy to take good pictures so pictures were not as important as it is today. PayPal was not a thing either. There was a lot of communication, back and forth, between the buyer and the seller. Once a seller sold the product, you had to sit on it and wait for the check to come in the mail before you even ship it. With the advanced technology, eBay has come a long, long way. Now, it has its own catalogs where you can use stock photos. It has a Feedback System where a Buyer can give a review. As a seller, you can manage payment under PayPal, so you can get paid electronically. eBay is doing all the things that help the sellers make selling easier and to be better in eCommerce. Today, eBay also has better customer service. They are more dedicated to helping you answer questions and even dig into some of the details. Listing is a lot easier and much more user-friendly now than it used to be. eBay is not a cut-throat environment. Everybody sells different, unique items and are not competing for the same market share. It is so diversified that although you may sell in the same category, you are not selling the exact same products. So, sellers can still help each other, feel good about it, and still make some money. eBay keeps in mind the buyer and the seller for every decision that they have to make. It looks at the big picture and makes the decision for the vast majority. Sometimes, looking at the big picture does not sit well with the individual seller. Sometimes, the decision may not go well with the individual seller. But, eBay thinks for the best overall for the marketplace. The more people tell eBay how they feel about the items, the more changes eBay can make to try to make it as best as possible for as many buyers and sellers. But if the buyers don't come to the platform, it does not matter what you sell or for how little you sell it. Nobody is there to buy the items. So eBay has to keep in mind and make sure that there is a lot of competition in the marketplace, not just within eBay. So eBay has to do its job to make sure that buyers come to eBay as oppose to other places. The online business or eCommerce operates 24/7. It is the only business where you can go to bed at night, then wake up in the morning and find out how much money you make. Mark went to a game several years ago. He got a gold Bobblehead as a free give away from the game. He put the Bobblehead down the seat and took a picture of it on the phone. He listed it during the game and within an hour it was sold. When you are running an eBay business, you are on your own. It is stressful to some degree. You spend a lot more time on it. But all those things are yours! It is the best feeling about owning your own eCommerce business. You are not working your ass so that somebody else can make money off your sweat. Mark's business has different processes than most of the eBay sellers. It is because they sell on different marketplaces. They have one database that somebody has customized an app for them. It downloads all the orders from different marketplaces into one central database. From there they work on each order - size and weight. Then they decide what service is to use for shipping each individual products to optimize their cost and shipping speed. They don't have a pick list because the items for shipping are printed right on the label. They grab the label, then they pick and pack it up. They have different couriers - FedEx and Speedy Delivery. The post office man picks up the rest of the items not meant for the couriers. Their processes did not come and developed overnight. They made a lot of adjustments as their services change. There are challenges all the time. Mark and Robin continue to grow and try to be on top of the things as best as they can. There are new products out there - even new shipping products. So they are re-evaluating what their prices are to maintain competitive edges. They continue to learn their customers' needs so that they can customize their products. Many times, they have customized products that people eventually caught up in. And they want to keep it going and work out on the next one. If the rule changes, Mark and Robin would like to the first one to be on top of the rule. They want to supply products that fit the rule and make everybody happy. They believe that they cannot do it without keeping in touch with the eCommerce community. Advice, Tips, and Tricks eCommerce is getting...