AndrewMinalto.com

Welcome Back!

I’ve been in this online selling world for many many years now and as well as my own invaluable experience, I’ve also personally dealt with thousands of people who want to start their own eBay, Amazon, or ecommerce business.

So it’s safe to say I’ve pretty much seen it all…

Any mistake you can think of, I’ve either done it myself (yes, I’m the first to admit I make mistakes – how do you think I learnt everything I know and everything I teach?) or I’ve witnessed it happen first hand.

And that’s why I started this blog and created my video courses – to help others and to hopefully stop people making the same mistakes again and again. Of course I make money from selling my courses, I am a business man after all – but my primary purpose is to help others, so they can make a better life for themselves and their family by creating their own successful business.

So I hope you can understand how frustrated I get when I see people making stupid mistakes!!!

Simple, easy things that people aren’t doing that’s costing their business and them money!

What am I talking about?

Well – eBay’s Global Shipping Programme.

It seems to me like the Global Shipping Programme is taking over eBay and just becoming more and more popular by the day and I honestly can’t understand why!

For those of you who don’t know, the GSP is a program run by eBay that allows you to sell internationally without having to do any extra work compared to UK sales.

If you opt in to the GSP, then your listings will automatically be shown to international buyers at the final price they’ll need to pay and if they chose to order from you, you simply post it to a UK address and everything else is taken care of for you. [Read more…]

Welcome!

No one hates sudden eBay updates more than me.

As I also have a service/product for eBay templates – Spicy Auction Templates – and each update that alters the rules on templates means we have to redo all of the pre-made templates in our library (hundreds!) and work with clients to fix/change/update custom made templates as well.

Luckily the active content rules did NOT affect Spicy Auction Templates as we never even used active content!

There was some misconception and confusion about this. As I explained in the past, the tool that eBay provided to check for active content also checks whether your template/listing is mobile responsive.

BUT – this is STILL NOT required by eBay!

Of course, I wanted to offer the very best for my customers so we started to work on changing all templates to a mobile responsive format in ahead of eBay’s future plans.

And we basically finished the work a few weeks ago – pretty much exactly when eBay announced that links won’t be allowed in templates anymore AND contact information will also be banned from eBay in the next few months!

Bummer! We always have used a Design by SpicyAuctionTemplates.com link in the footer to give us credit for the work and to attract new clients.

But eBay’s rules meant we had to change/update all templates AGAIN and change the footer part to simply say – Design by SpicyAuctionTemplates. Without the .com part and without the link:

Also, we have removed the Contacts section from our templates as from Autumn onwards eBay will no longer allow phone numbers/emails in the listing/template so this block will basically become useless:

This means that our pre-made templates are now all 100% mobile responsive (something eBay isn’t even asking for yet) and of course they use no active content and don’t contain any links either! [Read more…]

Something very strange and unexpected happened on this blog last year… I wrote a post about an eBay update and it was pretty much all good news!

Shocking I know, as “eBay update” and “good news” usually don’t come hand in hand.

8 months on from that historic event and we have another eBay update to deal with – so will it be back to normal or is it more good news for us sellers?

Let’s find out!

We’ll delve into each one in more detail to find out exactly what the changes are and what they mean to us, but overall the Spring 2017 update can be grouped into a few main categories:

• Emphasis on buyer friendly return policies – in eBay’s own words, they’re going to be “rewarding sellers who offer buyer friendly returns policies with greater visibility to their listings”.
• Updates to seller performance standards – there are some positive changes being made to performance standards when selling abroad BUT the maximum allowed late delivery rate is being lowered for top rated sellers.
• Category changes – eBay are again making some changes to the product categories and sub-categories, which is all to do with trying to align themselves to general industry standards and make it easier for product identifiers to be used.
• Seller Hub developments – there are also some updates to Seller Hub, which I’m excited to see as I’m already pretty happy with the whole idea (though just so I don’t give eBay too much credit, they did borrow heavily from Amazon here!).
• General policy updates – nothing too important here (unless you sell custom items that require printing!) but we’ll still go over it nonetheless.
• Changes to international eBay sites – including both .com as well as the 4 major European sites – .de, .fr, .it, and .es

And that’s the overview of this eBay update, but let’s now go into each change in more detail and see whether it’s good or bad news!

Buyer Friendly Return Policies

This is the area I’m most interested in, for two reasons – firstly because I already offer a very generous returns policy in my eBay businesses and I was hoping that eBay were going to reward this with a boost in search rankings. [Read more…]