Introducing eBay Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro

eBay Selling Manager is one of eBay's official auction management tools. It's available in both basic and Pro versions; we'll discuss Selling Manager Pro later in this chapter.

The basic Selling Manager lets you keep track of current and pending auctions, as well as all your closed auctions; you can use Selling Manager to send emails to winning bidders, print invoices and shipping labels, and even leave feedback. Everything you need to do is accessed over the Web, on the eBay site, through your normal web browser. When you subscribe to Selling Manager, the All Selling page in My eBay is transformed into a Selling Manager page. From here, Selling Manager lets you manage all your post-auction activity.

To subscribe to eBay Selling Manager, go to pages.ebay.com/selling_manager/. The subscription cost for the basic version is $4.99 per month.

Tip

You can switch the My eBay Selling Manager page back to the standard All Selling page by going to the Selling Manager Active Listings page and clicking the View My eBay Selling link in the lower left-hand corner.

How Selling Manager Works

To use Selling Manager, all you have to do is go to your My eBay page and click the new Selling Manager link. As you can see in Figure 22.1, the main Selling Manager page provides an overview of all your active and closed auctions.

Figure 22.1. Access eBay Selling Manager from your My eBay page.

The Summary page divides your auctions into six major categories (some categories not shown in Figure 22.1):

• At a Glance. This is a graph of your sales for the last 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days.

• Sold. This section summarizes your recent sales activitytotal sales, sales awaiting payment, sales awaiting shipment, sales sold and shipped, and those transactions being tracked via the Dispute Console.

• Listing Activity. This section summarizes your current sales activityactive listings, scheduled listings, and ended listings.

• Cross Promotions. This section summarizes your various cross-promoted items.

• Picture Manager. A visual representation of how many pictures and how much disk space you're using to store your digital photos.

• Favorite Links. Quick links to your eBay Preferences, My Messages, Manage My Store, PayPal, and Picture Manager Tools.

"Mike Sez"

I find eBay Selling Manager an extremely useful tool if I have a moderate number of auctions running simultaneously. Running just a few auctions makes Selling Manager cost-prohibitive on a per-auction basisand if I'm managing several dozen auctions, I come to curse its lack of batch email features. Still, for many sellers, Selling Manager does a fine joband is a lot better than trying to manage post-auction activity manually.

You use the links on this Summary page to display more detailed information about the items you have for sale. For example, when you click the All link in the Sold section, you display a list of completed auctions (shown in Figure 22.2), with the customer status indicated by a series of icons. You can select an individual auction to mark it paid or shipped, or to send it to your personal archive. You can also send various email messages to the winners of your auctions, as well as print invoices and leave feedback for multiple users in bulk.

Figure 22.2. Displaying a list of your closed auctions.

For Higher-Volume Sellers: eBay Selling Manager Pro

The basic Selling Manager product isn't perfect. One of its biggest problems is that you pretty much have to manage one auction at a timeit lacks features that let you effectively manage large numbers of auctions in bulk. If you're a high-volume seller, a better solution is eBay's higher-end Selling Manager Pro, which offers better bulk management and inventory mangagement features. For $15.99 per month, Selling Manager Pro does everything the basic Selling Manager does, plus more:

• Manages individual inventory items, and issues restock alerts

• Offers free Listing Designer templates

• Generates a monthly profit and loss report, including all eBay fees and cost of goods sold

You can learn more aboutand subscribe toSelling Manager Pro at pages.ebay.com/selling_manager_pro/.