As you may have heard, Trademe are upgrading their multiple-quantity buynow functionality.
Read the Trademe help on this here: http://www.trademe.co.nz/help/737/multiple-quantity-listings–faqs
NOTE FOR UPDATING AUCTIONS:
Trademe will not allow you to change a regular single item auction or buynow into a Multiple quantity buynow or vice versa. If you change a product rule setup in such a way and then try to update , there will be no effect, until the item re-lists.
What we recommend:
1. Revise your listings, especially items that are populate and sell often, it might be beneficial to list these may help as multiple quantity.
It may be worth considering Feature listing with 10 day auto extend for some low value items that are very popular might that you might have never considered before. Ff you can make 5 sales on average from a 10 single day feature combo listings its only 0.74c per sale, this with this in consideration could be viable for a very popular $10 item where previously a small total profit made feature uneconomical. This could have a very powerful effect in categories where the items are predominantly low value generally discouraging the use of feature, putting your feature constantly at the top page one of that category. Remember feature is expensive and if it is not selling you could be losing money check always go back and check the fee summary reports, turn off feature if you are not making money.
2. Remember there are limitations, multiple quantity listings are also called “buynow only”, bids cannot be placed, unauthenticated members cannot buy, a low reserve cannot be set, a low start cannot be set. Don’t forget tried and tested methods such as setting a higher buynow and offering “free shipping with buynow”. Don’t abandon something that is working well for a certain product, try both styles and stick with the one that gives the best results.
3. Don’t commit too much stock to a single auction, you should set a quantity that is a reasonable quantity that someone might want to buy at once of the auction setting all your stock on one auction will not help you. If you have 100 in stock an commit 100 to a single trade-me auction, you will not have stock available for your other channels (website / sella / other auctions on Trademe such as $1 reserves). If the most anyone really buys at a time is 2 or 3 there is no need to set the auction above 5, if someone buys 3, within a few mins OMIINS will automatically change the quantity on Trademe back to 5 after because you sill have 97 in stock.
– Pressure to buy If a potential customer finds your product, it seems like a great deal at a great price, your a top seller with good feedback. And you have 500 items in stock. that tells the customer come back any time. I’ll still have these at the same price whenever you are ready. If you only appear to 5, they might all be sold out by tomorrow, the customer has take the deal as soon as possible or risk loosing it. The benefit with OMINS is you can have 500 in stock and rely on omins to constantly maintain a more encouraging stock level of 5 on Trade me for you.
4. Ensure you and your staff no longer ask customers to use a “auction number” as the reference, the word is “reference number” the new reference number from Trademe starts with a P, if you talk about auction numbers in terms of references to use when depositing money you may confuse your customers. If you do list a multiple quantity auction and there are multiple purchases that auction, they will typically all be for the same amount. You may find it becomes very difficult to match the payment to the correct purchase if your customer uses the auction number, you could find one auction number brings up 5 orders to 5 different customers all for the same amount.
5. OMINS has always tried to give the internal OMINS invoice number in automatic emails as default, Unless you have changed these to advise “auction number” there is nothing you need to change,
The OMINS invoice is the best reference your customer can use as this accounts allows one reference for combined of sales from trademe. However if your customer use the purchase id that is fine, you can search on that and it will be recognized when processing bank statements, think of it as the “new auction number” in terms of matching payments to invoices.
Here we will explain how this affects OMINS and Easylister.
Listing
Both OMINS and Easylister have supported listing in multiple quantities since 2011.
The way to list a multiple quantity buynow remains the same and the way we handle stock and update the quantites will also remain the same. Read about how to list a multiple quantity buynow and how it deals with stock here:
http://www.guides.snipesoft.net.nz/?p=1408
Recent changes:
There are a range of sublte changes to our systems that have been made recently in order to support the introduction of the new PurcahseId trademe will introduce to allow you to identify multiple sales of a single auction. We have listed these below.
Easylister changes
Products
You can now find products by Purcahse ID.
Sales history
There is a new column called purcahse ID. You can also search by purchase ID.
OMINS Changes:
Invoices
Printed comments previously displayed
[{auctionid}] $5.99 Courierpost Signature Nationwide
Now they will display
[{auctionid}:P{purcahseid}] $5.99 Courierpost Signature Nationwide
– On the invoice general search, entering a new TradeMe purchase ID will bring up the invoice.
– There is a specific purchase ID field to search on the invoices search page.
We are unsure weather purchase ID should play a more prominent role on invoices. We will await the response we get from you, our clients, regarding whether or not you feel it will be useful to add purchase ID column to the invoice search/report and/or give it a prominent display field on invoices themselves (rather than just in the comments).
Bank statment
When importing a bank statement, Purchase IDs will be recognized and the appropriate invoice selected.
Expired TradeMe/Sella auctions search/report
– There is a new column called purchaseid.
– You can now search by purcahseid.
Expired Listings Report behavior:
We treat the new sales in the same we have treated offers.
For instance if you have an auction end with no buyer but the offer is accepted you would see:
1 unsold entry for the auction
1 new sold entry for the offer created after the auction when it was accepted
If you list a multiple quantity buynow auction of say quantity 5, during the time it is listed there are 2 buyers each buying one each .
You will see 3 entries.
1 entry for the original auction as unsold.
2 new sold entries with different purchase ids created before the auction ended when the buynow was used.
If you have a multiple quantity buynow with a quantity of 3 and a single buyer buys all 3 you will see:
A single sold entry for that auction number, with a quantity of 3.
We consider the original listing sold if there is a buyer at the same time that it ends. I.e A reserve met bid or buynow on a regular auction, for a multiple quantity buynow if someone buys all the stock and ends the auction.
The reason for this is it goes in step with how OMINS has always treated offers, if an offer is accepted in omins there is always one unsold entry for the auction and one new sold entry was created for the offer which always occurred after the auction ended.
Likewise you will see new entries created for these multiple buynow sales created before the auction ends, the original entry will only appear as sold if it has a buyer who buys all the stock an causing the auction to end at the same time as the purchase.
Just as with offers new “purchase” entries count as are counted when calculating the number of sold items, however they are not counted when counting the number of auctions.
e.g for a sell though percentage calculation: (total offers + total purchase sales + total auctions sold)/ total Auctions (does not include offers/purchase sales) * 100.
If the above makes little sense to you don’t worry. The main point is the way we were already handling fixed price offers was appropriate and compatible to allow us to easily integrate the new buynow mulipule purchase sales.
TradeMe feedback search/report
– There is a new column called purcahseid.
– You can now search on purcahseid.
TradeMe transactions search/report
TradeMe will update this soon thanks to our request, so we will also give:
– Purchase ID column
– Purchase if search
Other reports:
Sales and profit reports that give statistics on auctions will treat the new sales in the same way they treat have previously treated offers, they count as an additional sale,( e.g it will count when calculating totals sales, average per sale sell through rates), but they do not count an an additional auction. (e.g it wont count towards total current auctions, total auctions listed etc)
