Exploit your auction sales data with eBay Blackthorne

Two years ago, a friend told me she'd just paid roughly $500 a month to have her ebay store setup using then a leading auction management tool. Amidst her excitement of getting ready to run her one-of-kind shoe business online, I suggested to get the password from the vendor so she can unlock the database behind the tool. Months later, she told me she moved on to another vendor and had to restart from scratch to create all listing in the new system. Does this sound all too familiar? With eBay the only 500-lb guerrilla in auction market, vendors and strategic partners are all offering tools labeled to help sellers manage auction with features streamlining every corner of your auction business. Are sellers better off knowingly they are paying such a premium for some features that never use and still lack the basic necessity of transporting data?

I know this is going to be a tough sell among sellers that you will need this nifty eBay tool and the money you pay-$24.99/month is well worth it. eBay, for its auction business offers both desktop and web-based listing and sales management tools designed to meet the needs of medium to high volume sellers. For most small and seasonal sellers, these tool would probably be a over-kill of their money and time. There are many other free tools that you can use and still do an excellent job of managing your ebay hobby. But if you are a serious seller and want to do things right in the first place, then you need to seriously consider these paid tools or at least start the trial and see how it can fit into your business.

Managing eBay business is all about managing your data. Your data trail starts when you upload your products to create listing, your are actually feeding ebay data about the description, title, item no. of your products. In case of applying a template, the computer generate a html file with a whole bunch of tags embedded telling web browser what to display and in what format. What's more, with each order you receive, you are actually getting customer's information of billing, shipping and email so you can send the right order to the right buyer. The trail never ends with each relisting of successful or unsuccessful auction. In other word, when you are selling, your data would indefinitely explode and now you are facing the inevitable question of "What should I do with these data?", "How can I re-use them again and again?". All the answers to these questions lies in the listing tools you use and a little unknown term: database.

Wait a minute! Are you saying I have to use database to sell stuff on ebay? No, when you are using tool like "My eBay", the database already exists and stored inside eBay's server so you can reuse them again and again to relist or create a new listing. As a seasonal seller, you may not find this inconvenient at all because it does handle all your limited database well and may well exceed your expectation. The problem arises when the data grows and expand or simply you want to find ways to exploit this data beyond normal use of just listing. One example of this would be to find all top buyers from say Florida or Mississippi so you can drop them a thank you note. A simple query like this would be impossible to do inside My eBay, but with the right listing tool and a little understanding of database, the capability to exploit and query your database is literally limitless. In fact, the ability to query, store and transform your ebay data are the three most important factors that any volume seller should consider using listing tools with database attached. Many software vendor nowadays offer free listing tools to attract seller. But without offering a solid database at the backend and open up for you (owner) to exploit sales, customer, items, listing information, your ability to query the most important customer and sales information is inarguably hampered. And as your business grows, so does your data and the ways you want to exploit them.

eBay Blackthorne (formerly known as Seller Assistant Pro) is a desktop software that can expand your selling capabilities with a complete listing, tracking, and inventory management sales tool. One of the tool's greatest strength is it's Microsoft Access database sitting quietly at the backend. With this database, all your products, sales, customer, listing and shipping presets data are stored in various tables of this very database. With some knowledge of Access, user can query, bulk update, export information from the database. The other biggest advantage of using listing tool with database attached is the ability to carry your data to other listing platform and upload them at the click of the mouse. Say you want to branch out your business to overstock.com auction or yahoo auction, with the humongous job of moving or transferring your product data, it can be both troublesome and time consuming, especially if your current auction platform can't export information or does that but simply not in the right format. With a standard relationship database like Access, the task of moving your data won't be so daunting. You can export complete or portion of your data in *.csv or *.xls format and import them back to the new platform and you will be wasting no time to get the new auction up and running on the new platform.

In case you wonder what the other advantages of having a database, Here are some of the reports one can query and generate with Blackthorne Access database:

• best sellers
• Sales by customer
• Sales by products
• top buyers
• Sales by geographic regions (country, state, city, zip code etc)
• products with certain words in title or description
• Customer list
• Product list
• Average selling price
• Inventory label (with item# and title)
• Sale, no-sale ratio
• No-sale product list
• Customized picking slip and packing list
• printing of order info to forms
• Batch printing of postage labels using XML

With each installation of Blackthorne Basic or Pro version of the software, a blank Access database is added to its installed directory. When you start creating items, applying template or receiving sales data, this Access database will capture all the transaction and faithfully store the information. The use of relationship database like Access and possibly in the future SQL server, opens up the door for volume sellers to coordinate daily tasks of picking products, printing postages and distribute them among team members. As the business grows, a solid data foundation like Access will certainly pave the way for merchant to have CRM capability in their IT structure and start to offer on-demand targeted data to customers. A eBay Blackthone database is the first step.

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