Grab Hold of an Increase in Online Shoppers in January

‘Black Friday’ in the United States is known around the world as a time when millions upon millions of shoppers in the U.S. flock to retail stores off and online like eBid hoping to snag some incredible deals. Black Friday is right after Thanksgiving, but the entire weekend is now almost like a holiday. While it’s a tremendous opportunity for retailers, another major boom is often overlooked, and that’s January.

Traditionally, January used to be ho-hum

For traditional retailers, January used to be a downtime of the year. Most people returned to work and had already finished with exchanges and post holiday purchases.

However, thanks to gift cards and other factors, January is becoming known as a boon to online retailers and independent sellers, though it’s easy to overlook.

According to Google, the world’s leading search engine, there are 22% more shoppers going online and looking for retailers through this search engine than during October, the leading edge of the holiday shopping season.

While most retailers benefit from this surge in online shopping, the Home & Garden industries show the greatest jump, up 39% over October numbers.

How to make this work for you

When you’re selling items online, the time of the year you post them for sale through auction sites will have an impact on your prospective audience. It’s certainly easy to assume January is a time to relax, clean up the house, and even get organized for the new year, but stats show this is the time when you want to make sure your items are listed and accessible to the highest number of prospective customers.

eBid is one of the leading auction sites around the world. That means when you list items with eBid and follow simple guidelines, your items could be uploaded and listed automatically to Google Shopping.

Just imagine how many more people will have access to your items and see your listings, especially during January.

So, while you may have been taking it easy for the months of January and February in the past, catching up on necessary chores around the house or office because you assumed these were the two slowest months of the year, think again.

It’s a ripe opportunity for you to capitalize on millions of people still hungry for great deals. In order to get your eBid listing uploaded to Google Shopping, you need to have an auction with at least 3 days remaining and the BuyNow feature available; or an auction with On First Bid and BuyNow available; or Fixed Price with at least 3 days remaining; or Fixed Price with Run Until Sold selected.

It’s not that tough to take advantage of all Google Shopping and eBid have to offer, and January could help you launch your business into another stratosphere!

News from Gazza

3,018,156 Live Listings
17,486 Categories
$1,114,154,044 Gross Listing Value

Welcome to the eBid November Newsletter.

November comes to a close, a month of reflection for us and thoughts for the families and loved ones of two long term eBidders who are sadly no longer with us.

Work has been continuing with our category reconstruction with 17,500 categories being in use now. You many find that you are unable to repost a listing if we have recently added a new subcategory below the category that your item was originally listed in. If you see a message to this effect please select one of the new subcats from the dropdown menu that best suits your item.

We are glad to welcome two new translators to our team. Adriana will be working on our Portuguese and Brazilian translations and Anna on our Norwegian translations. They have both got a hang of things very quickly and we should be seeing improved eBid sites in these languages at our next update.

A couple of our API users have had a couple of problems with the data being rejected due to it not being the correct character encoding. Please ensure all your data is posted to us using UTF8. Any other encoding could potentially cause non-standard English characters to display incorrectly. November has also seen a record amount of usage of the API. Thank you to all of those of you who are making use of it. As more and more techie eBidders get to grips with it we are seeing many more uses for it than we had first envisioned. If you are interested visit http://ebid.3scale.net for our XML and JSON documentation and sign up area.

Some eBidders who have a registered email address @btinternet.com may have run into a few problems this month. BT decided for a still unknown reason to start marking one or two of our emails as spam. When this happens we request the affected user to enter a new email address when logging in as it is normally a very temporary problem. A few of you will have been asked for this more than once this month which we understand was a little frustrating. Our apologies for that and the problem should now be fine.

Christmas is coming and peak present buying season is nearly with us again. Don't forget to list your items with barcodes and a BuyNow price whenever you can to ensure upload to Google Shopping for greater coverage. I'm always partial to a MaO (Make an Offer) when I buy things so if you feel you could possibly listen to offers on your items then feel free to use the offer system when selling, it works great and can get you some custom that could have walked away if you hadn't. Just tick the little checkbox below the BuyNow price box on the listing form. You can even add automated replies to offers that are just too low to save you the bother.

eBid Pulse News from Debbie

Early Xmas Bargains

As Black Friday passes there are still some bargains to be had from our ever resourceful eBid sellers. Take a look at some of our picks.

Sony PlayStation 4 Ps4 Pro 1TB Console
Joseph Joseph Nest 8 Mixing Bowls - Compact Preparation Set
2 Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Laptop, 7th Gen Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 1TB, 17.3" £719@JL

2004 GREASE Barbie #2 Sandy Yellow Dress Olivia Newton-John Collector Doll
1/8 Size Upright Bass with Bag,Bow,Stand,Metro Tuner
Lucky Strike Black Leather Motorcycle Jacket - All sizes!
List Your Items at a Discount

Don't forget eBid's maximum Final Value Fee is 3%. Selling on other marketplaces will cost you more on most occasions with 10-15% being the norm. For this reason don't forget to list your items at a slight discount on eBid, you'll help us out by making our marketplace attractive to buyers and you can still take home more money after fees than you would elsewhere.

A time of sad losses to the eBid Community

The eBid family are a close-knit group and this past month has been a sad one, with the loss of two well-loved eBid members/friends.

On the 12th October, we lost Margaret (Minx41) to Lung Cancer. The following words are a tribute to Margaret from one of her (many) eBid Forum friends, cornishmaid1961.

"October 12th was a sad day for the eBid community. We lost Margaret (Minx41) to Lung Cancer. She was such a lovely lady and although I never met her in person I regarded her as a real friend. She had such a wicked sense of humour and I shall remember her so fondly as naughty 'Private Minx' of the eBid army, always getting into trouble in the eBid barracks, and she certainly gave us all a good laugh. She was also a staunch supporter of the monthly eBid Your Donation Counts charity event and over the years she has helped raise thousands of pounds (dollars) for worthwhile causes. She had a heart of gold and will be missed."

As a tribute to Margaret, the featured charity for the most recent YDC charity event was The British Lung Foundation.

In our thoughts also this month has been Damian Steele (damian_steele) who sadly passed away on the 17th November. Damian will be missed by many, our condolences to his partner, Emma and his family and friends. He was a very regular participant on the eBid forums and many of the changes to our website over the years have been down to his help and persistence. He will be missed by all of us here at eBid.

"I remember Damian as one of the good guys .... he spoke his mind and I always respected him for that. He also made me laugh out loud - more times than I can count" eBid Member moonwitch

Competition Time

Last month's question :

To the nearest 1000, how many categories are there now on eBid?

a) 5000
b) 10000
c) 16000

The correct answer was (c) 16000. Congratulations go to Cornwalls150744 from Camborne, UK, for winning last months competition, your eBid Goodie Bag and iPod should be with you now.

Now for this month's question :

What's the abbreviation for eBid's bartering system that allows sellers to listen to offers for their items?

a) TwT
b) MaO
c) MaD

To enter send us :
Answer to the competition question
Your eBid username
Name and address for sending out any prizes
Incomplete entries will be automatically deleted. Closing date 10th December 2016. Email answers to competitions@ebid.net