I’ve teased. I’ve whined. I’ve been talking about the follow-up to my eBay consignment book, The Trading Assistant’s Assistant, for such a long time now that I can hardly believe the day has finally come when I can reveal the result of all that work.
When eBay cancelled the TA program, I knew the book formerly known as The Trading Assistant’s Assistant (Second Edition) was going to need a complete overhaul, starting with the title. I’d already rewritten the book once and it’d been a little over a year of rewrites on this time alone (Long story short, eBay kept changing things before I could get my new edition out resulting in my having to keep writing the book over and over. Short story long, see here). I started out trying to just remove mentions of eBay’s program and ended up writing the entire book over again from scratch. The work consumed my already busy life. I spent most of the process furious at eBay for putting me in this position and forcing me to rewrite the whole thing yet again.
I realize now, however, that the end of the TA program was a good thing for my consignment business… and especially for this book. It’s better, not just for having been rewritten an extra time, but also because now it’s about selling for others on consignment across multiple channels instead of just on eBay. It appeals to a much wider audience and, most importantly, it’s as close to future proof as I could make it so it will never become obsolete and need to be rewritten again. (I hope.)
It’s called…
Sell Their Stuff by Hillary DePiano
I can’t tell you what an understatement it is to say I worked hard on this (especially since I had to write this book THREE FREAKING TIMES, thanks a lot for that, eBay) but I think it came out really well and I’m incredibly excited for you to read it. Which you’ll be able to do before the end of the year.
Stay tuned for the official release date and information on how to pre-order in the next few weeks. In the meantime, what do you think of the new title?
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I like the title! I have continued selling on eBay. I consider selling on other channels from time to time, but I can’t figure out how I would track the sales on different channels for my clients without it being manual and time consuming. Does your book have suggestions on how to best track sales etc? Thanks.
Hey Ed,
While there are tips throughout for managing multiple platforms, there isn’t really one specific section that outlines exactly that.
But I do outlining my own reporting method, which I think it more what you’re after, and I keep it simple. I just take the actual selling invoices from each site (Amazon, eBay, wherever) and copy and paste the relevant lines for each client out into a simple spreadsheet. I add a column to designate which site each entry came from but that’s it in the way of modification, I’m completely transparent in that I just give my clients exactly what the sites give me.
A few little equations to tally everything up on the top where I’ve got a row of totals and that’s it.
If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your current method of reconciliation?
I don’t mind at all. Currently I sell almost exclusively on eBay, and I use Auctiva as a third-party lister. Auctiva pulls in data from eBay and allows me to generate reports for individual clients. I can also create different commission plans for each client. The one thing it won’t do that I wish it would is allow me to separate out the shipping cost. If it did that, I would experiment more with free shipping and deduct the cost of shipping from the amount I pay my clients.
How do you track which sold items are attributed to a specific client? How much time do you think you spend a month on reconciliation to pay clients?
I used to spent a TON of time on it when I would take each line item out and put them in custom cells. Now it takes me maybe an hour at most and I only do it once at the end of the contract when I’m about to pay them… unless it’s a particularly big contract and I’m doing a partial payment midway. I’m not leaving anything out when I say I just copy and paste lines from the invoice, that’s literally all I do, and that takes hardly any time at all. The part that takes the longest is looking up the PayPal fees which I like to do manually for my own reasons but you could easily just make that auto-calculate in the spreadsheet from listed rates.
I separate each client’s items out by the highly unscientific method of item number. eBay item numbers are given out just about sequentially so items listed together have similar item numbers. I’ll list all of Bob’s items in a batch one night and then Jane’s items the next so that, in the end, when I sort my invoice by item number, all of Bob’s transactions are grouped together as are all of Jane’s. Of course, I read it over to double check it just to make sure something didn’t get mixed up and to catch outliers (like items I had to relist that are out of item number order) but that otherwise keeps them pretty well separated. When it comes to other platforms, it’s usually a small enough number of items that I can just keep track, since I usually do the biggest batches on eBay.
I have never used a third party to do this process so I really can’t speak to how that differs.
Cool-thanks!