The Twitter Effect...except for on-line auction sites!

I recently heard about how the so-called "Twitter Effect" basically killed the movie "Bruno" with almost immediate negative reviews posted and circulated like wildfire within hours of its opening.

So I wondered...how big is Twitter with the big auction sites and on-line stores like eBay and Amazon.

Well, let's look.

Here is a quick list of some of the bigger (and lesser-known) names in the field.

Company (twitterid) #followers
Amazon (amazon) 5,278
Amazon Gold Box (amazondeals) 14,452
Amazon mp3 (amazonmp3) 816,910
eBay (ebay) 1,685
eBid - no presence
ecrater (ecrater) 180
bonanzle (bonanzle) 561
CQout (CQout) 2
blujay (blujaydotcom) 51
OnlineAuction - no presence
Atomic Mall (atomicmall) 17



I only included twitter IDs that were the "official" ones, skipping the rest (such as fan sites and personal pick sites), and I also skipped some of the more technical IDs of these sites (such as Amazon's Kindle news and updates ID).

OK, now I have to admit that the # of followers for these sites may not be a great indication of their popularity, but I think it is rather telling about the demographics of Twitter and the demographics of the sites mentioned above.

For example, can I assume from these numbers that...

1. Amazon didn't just jump the bandwagon, they have the lead float in the parade. They obviously have embraced this technology and they know that younger people + mp3's + music downloads = a potentially profitable source of sales.

2. eBay has not quite fully embraced Twitter. Griff is on twitter as well (ID: ebayjimgriffith) with a not-to-impressive 281 followers.

3. Scrappy upstarts ecrater and bonanzle are getting their presence known, but slowly.

4. The rest? I think I can assume most of their sellers, if asked about twitter, would say don't need it/it's not for me/it won't help my sales/it's just a waste of time/etc.

Agree? Disagree? Think I'm nuts for spending any time at all on this?

Let me know what you think.

Selling On Amazon at Christmas: the "warning" letter

I want to give you a little heads-up if you want to sell on Amazon at Christmas, specifically toys and games.

About mid-year, AZ sends out a letter to their sellers to give them a bit of a warning about their cut-offs. In order to provide the best customer experience for xmas buyers, AZ limits sellers of toys and games during the season. We just got ours today.

What do they do exactly? Well, there are two things they do:

1. After mid-September, AZ won't accept any new sellers for toys and games. You can be a new seller and sell just about anything else...just nothing in the toys and games categories. Why? Well, if you're new, they have no idea if you are an honest seller or not. So...better to error on the side of safety. Remember, AZ is watching out for their own reputation.

2. As of mid-November on, the sellers who passed the above screening process can sell toys and games ONLY if their seller performance meets certain criteria. The criteria isn't difficult to match, but if you don't hit the numbers they want, they can effectively block out the toys and games you have for sale at any time.

The criteria? Low defect rate (which includes negative feedback, chargeback claims, and Amazon A-to-Z claims), low late shipping rate, low rate of orders cancelled by the seller.

Get just one of these numbers a bit high, and you can't sell your GI Joe action figures or your Monopoly games.

About 95% of our xmas sales were toys and games. It's basically all we bought and all we had listed, and we sold out of a lot of it before mid-December. And we were still getting plenty of orders up to December 21st.

The lesson? If you want to sell in these categories at Christmas, keep your sales going, keep the positive feedback high, don't cancel orders on customers, ship fast and don't misrepresent your products.

Now most of that was easy for us, since we use Fulfillment by Amazon. So if someone ordered something from us, that meant that it was in stock at the time of ordering (since AZ handles the inventory for us); shipments were made fast; items were well-packed, so less chance of returns.

So FBA definitely helped us make the cut and make sales during the season. Yes, it's an expensive program, but we could not have handled the 1000+ orders we got in that short 5-week period.

The joys of waking up and checking out your Amazon sales

I sell on Amazon and only via the FBA program. Expensive, yes. But also usually advantageous.

I mentioned a while ago about the motorized Banzai bumper boats. I sent them two and sold both in about 10 days (one just sold this morning...a great thing to see first thing when you get out of bed).

Paid $20. Cleared about $75.

Now, this is the icky part: I paid close to $30 in fees, including their selling fee and the fees with them packing and shipping the bumper boat for me.

So there are two ways of looking at it:

"Dang, I could have made more if I shipped it on my own."

...or

"Excellent, I just cleared $75 and I didn't have to do squat!"

So...time? Or Money? Which is more important to you?

A note on Fulfillment By Amazon

As I mentioned in the prior post, I really like FBA. But if you are interested in it here is a little quirk about it (or pain, actually) you need to know.

I sell a lot of things, but I usually only get 5-10 of any one item. Some are big, some are small. Some are already on AZ, some not. Here's where it gets tricky.

• And some are on AZ more than once...which itself causes me problems. If there are two or more listings for the exact same item, I can still use FBA but I also need to put a label over the item's bar code so AZ can process it. Other items, I usually don't need to do this. If they need a label, they can't be shipped with items that don't need a label...hence, they need to go in a different box when I ship them to AZ.
  
• Some items are oversize (not USPS oversize, AZ's version of oversize). Oversize items need to go to a different warehouse...hence, they need to go in a different box when I ship them to AZ.

Starting to get the picture? When I pack things up to ship to Amazon, I may need to make up to 4 different "types" of shipments:

1. not oversized, and don't need a label
2. not oversized, but DO need a label
3. oversized, and don't need a label
4. oversized, but DO need a label.

How do you avoid this?

Well...you don't. Not unless you want to walk away from a good deal from some stuff that may need a bif of extra processing on your part to ship for FBA.

Yes, it can be a serious pain, but I get a lot of good stuff to sell, and it sells well and for a decent profit, so I guess I'll put up with the hassle.

Hmmm...........profit.............what a great topic for another discussion!!!!!

Just woke up...gotta pack some stuff to ship.

OK, so I really wanted to have this blog be about selling on-line. So here is at least one entry about that topic...finally.

I have about 30 things I need to pack up and ship off to Amazon. I use their Fulfillment program which is fantastic. I ship them the stuff and when it gets sold, they pack and ship it for me. Not a particularly cheap program, but it has a lot of good points:

• it saves me a lot of time by not having to pack a lot of small orders
• sales are strong since they get free shipping
• I get the coveted "Buy Box" a lot more often
• I can actually charge more than other sellers b/c of the free shipping and that Amazon ships it for them.

So even though it costs me extra to have AZ ship for me, I can charge more to easily cover the extra cost. Nice!!!

So today I have to ship some summer things off. I got motorized bumper boats for the pool which are pretty cool. They are selling on AZ for like $120 each. I got a few for $20 a pop.

I use UPS, which offers me really cheap shipping when I ship stuff to AZ. Like REAL cheap. Like a 40-pound box costs like $9 for shipping!